As some of you know, we have had to have a lot of work done on our home. It all started with spring storms in Texas and water damage from our sprinkler system.
Due to a leak in a pipe in one of our bathrooms, we had to have walls taken out, a new floor put in and cabinets rebuilt to remedy the challenge.
Once that was taken care of, they started in the kitchen and dining room. They had to remove all of our large glass windows in the kitchen and replace all of the wood around them due to water damage. That was a MAJOR job.
Once that was finished, they started tearing out our wooden floors which also had water damage. They were unable to match the wood planks, so they had to replace all of the floors in both the kitchen and the dining room due to the fact that they are adjoining rooms.
This also meant moving all of the furniture out of both rooms and draping everything else in plastic in that part of the house.
No matter how careful you are, there is no way to escape the dust. There's no way to escape the mess either, but the people working here were very careful. As they would tear out sections of the old floor, they would carry the broken pieces out to their truck.
When they were finished we had beautiful new floors in both of the rooms. What a treat. I didn't even want anyone to walk on them, including myself!
Even though the kitchen windows are on the North side of the house, the constant indirect light had caused things to fade over the years, so we decided to have the windows tinted. One of the advantages of our kitchen is that you feel as though you are outside, but you don't have to suffer the consequences of the elements. My favorite time of year to be in there is in the winter when it's cold. We might even have a little skiff of snow on the ground. It's delightful to be nice and toasty inside and watch the blowing snow just on the other side of the window pane.
I watched them put the protective coating on the windows and it was a fascinating process.
They were able to do the job in several hours and now we will have 87% of the damaging light eliminated and the room will also be much cooler and energy efficient. The film is transparent, so we can still see both out and in without any problem, but we will not have the problem of heat and colors fading. We have to have a 3 ton air-conditioner just for that one room because the Texas summers can be do grueling.
We thought we were through with all of the interior challenges, so we thoroughly cleaned the inside of the house to eliminate any construction dust that had occurred. We were wrong.
Three days after the work was completed, I heard water running when I walked down one of the halls. It sounded as if the pool water was on or our drip system outside was working, but it was the wrong time of day for that.
As it turned out, we had a slab leak, so we had to have plumbers out immediately. Fortunately there had been no actual water damage ... YET!
Once they found the leak we had to move all of the furniture out ... AGAIN ... and start making more messes. We also had to take all the crystal down from the bar because the vibration from the jackhammer might cause the shelves to fall and break and we didn't want that to happen.
As it turned out, the leak was under one of the etigere's in the den, so we had to completely dismantle it so they could take out some of the carpet and start digging through the foundation to get to the leak. We also had to drape things with plastic sheets because we knew that this was really going to make a major mess.
I won't use the words here that I thought when I saw the dreaded weapon come into our home. All I could think of was "We just cleaned all of this and got things back in order and here we go again!
After many buckets of dirt, much LOUD noise and even more digging, they finally got to the trouble .... a pipe with a crimp in it.
If you look closely, you can see both the crimp and the water coming out of the hole. Apparently the pipe had a crimp when the built out house over 50 years ago and it finally broke through due to the pressure from the water over all the years. All I can say is that we were truly blessed that this happened while we were in town. It could have been a total disaster if we'd been gone on one of our lengthy trips! After a 3 day nightmare, we were finally back to normal again.
We had to have our carpet cleaned and stretched because it had gotten pretty grubby through all of this and it looked as though we were back in business again.
My good friend and designer, Kay Ashton and her husband dropped by to see how the house was coming along and also to share a little of the Russian Vodka that we had brought back from our trip.
She's always such a dear and she brought these lovely roses for the table to celebrate the completion of the work in the kitchen.
We asked her about a painter for the outside of the house and while I was serving up the plates for dinner, she said that I also needed to have my microwave raised. We had bought a new one a few months ago as the old one had died, and since this one was larger, I had trouble getting large stock pots on the back burners. You can see the difference in these before and after photographs. We eliminated the cabinets about the stove top, raised the microwave and installed shelves for some of my cookbooks. Now I can use my huge stock pots until my heart's content!
You can tell by where the handle is on the tea kettle how little room we had before and how much room we have now. It's glorious!
Kay gave us the name of a painter and we decided to wait to have him start until after they had put the new roof on the house. When we were in New Mexico this summer, we had a dreadful hail storm and all the houses in the neighborhood, including ours, have new roofs.
Santiago and his crew arrived week before last on a Tuesday morning and were here for over a week. They scraped off all of the old paint, replaced any wood that was suspicious looking, sanded everything and then began to paint.
They removed all the windows, screen doors, shutters, etc, and really did a superior job.
If anyone in our area needs to know a good painter, give me a call. We've never had anyone who was more conscientious about their work. They were wonderful and very thorough and I might add .. they were also very reasonable.
Once the outside was finished, I decided that we needed to clean the inside from top to bottom again because of all the drilling from the jackhammers and as always, I got carried away. I also cleaned all of the closets and drawers and donated 17 bags of my clothing plus household items to the Salvation Army and Mission Arlington.
During this cleaning period, I ran across these old paintings. The caricatures of Frank and me were painted in New Orleans
in 1969
and the portrait of me was painted in 1973.
They were all done by street artists. It's always fun to look back at these things. They always evoke a lot of fond memories.
As I said in the beginning of this lengthy blog, it's time for a celebration. We have an almost new 56 year old house (at least it looks like new after the "face lift" that it just received) and closets and drawers are straight AGAIN.
Have a Happy Halloween and you'll be hearing from me again soon.
CHEERS!!!
XOXO, Pcasso
No comments:
Post a Comment