No People Under the Stairs

It was Africa hot here the other day.
Temperatures were in the upper 90s.
(I moved away from Florida to get away from this crap!)
Apparently it was a freak occurance. Nobody was ready for it.
Tina and I decided we had to go get an AC unit so that we could leave the dogs in the house while we were at work.

In this beautiful house of ours we have no insulation in either the attic or in the crawlspace. This is a problem. We are also unable to insulate either attic or crawlspace because we have some exposed knob and tube wiring. Once the wiring has been replaced, we can insulate.
Not only do we have no insulation, we also had ancient wood shingling with no plywood or tarpaper beneath.
So basically there's no way to keep the heat out, and once it gets in it likes to stay.

We ran around all over (about 5 different places) until we found the only AC unit we could find that would fit our 27" windows - a tiny AC unit rated for 100 Sq Ft. We popped it into the window of our 600 Sq Ft living/dining room/office area and crossed our fingers.
It fired up and is actually enough to take the edge off of the heat!
For this we were very thankful.

Now the previous owner left us a lot of stuff, not all of it documented here yet.
When it got hot, we discovered another thing that she left us - a helluva flea problem.
As a result, we have decided that tearing up the carpet is now priority.

We decided to look around and see if we could find some inexpensive laminate beause we want to get the carpet up but don't want to damage the floors we found beneath. So we went out the other day and went to Jerry's (Which is like Home Depot but less expensive, they carry nicer stuff and their employees know the difference between a ball peen hammer and their pensu) and found some laminate on sale for $.99 a Sq Ft.
It's not the best in the world, but for that price you're lucky to get any at all.
Tina likes it quite a lot, I'm not so sold on it. It's honey oak. I would have preferred something darker and more reddish, but you choose your battles, and I recognize that the carpet has to go.

We borrowed the neighbor's pickup and went and picked up 29 boxes of this stuff.
It's odd that our neighbors here are so willing to lend us their Ford F150. It's not a junker and we've only lived here for a month now. I would be reluctant to let people I've known for YEARS borrow my car, and they just do it in the interests of being neighborly. They literally just handed us the keys and told us to get it back to them whenever.
Have I mentioned that I love Oregon, especially Brownsville?

We lugged the laminate back to the house and to a big pile in the living room.
While I was lugging laminate, Tina was finishing up with the tearing out of the carpet and pad and weird rubbery vapor barrier crap.
So we currently have a room waiting to be floored once we get home.
We are also going to do the living room as soon as possible. We just need to get all of our crap out of there, tear up the carpet and get all of the laminate laid down. We bought more than enough and even over-estimated the amount we need, just like they say to in all of the books! We're such good little renovators.

While Tina was pulling up stuff she happened across a spot beneath the stairway which has been converted into a closet. There was a board blocking what would have been the last 4 steps or so. Over the board is carpeting. Yes, they carpeted the underside of the steps in the closet. Because I am a big burly guy, it is my job to investigate anything potentially creepy, spider infested or otherwise disagreeable to Tina's delicate sensibilities. ;)
So I crawled into the closet and yanked out the board and the ton of weird "plain brown wrapper" type paper that seems to be behind every surface of the house we have opened up. I hoped to find something neat. I hoped someone had either left something under there on purpose like a time capsule, or at least on accident like the over-the-kitchen shoe fairy from earlier.
I ripped off the paper and what did I see? Mouse turds and an old oil can that someone flattened and used to patch a hole or something on the wall.

No gateway to the world between the walls where the bad kids live. No gimp suit and shotgun for me.

I do have to leave something there when I seal it back up. I'm just trying to figure out what.



In other news, while all of this was going on, we also had 2 guys crawling through filth and scum and gravel and Odin knows what else under our house. They were replacing a beam that runs across the front of the house under the bay windows.
While they were there, they also replaced another beam and fixed a plumbing problem we had, basically just because they're good guys.

They are Cascade Construction, both the nephews of the guy who was contracted to do the work which he subbed out to other people.
They were both born and raised in Brownsville and shared some interesting stories and factoids about various things about the town.
They had good attitudes and senses of humor, despite the incredible heat and general unpleasantness of the work they were there to do.
They may get more work from us in the future.

The other group that was subbed the remainder of the work was High Mountain Cedar Roofing.
The team at our place was a ton of Mexican guys and one white guy. All day long we had Mexican guys on our roof, listening to salsa music and going bugshit with nailguns.
It was almost like we were back in Florida!
Those guys busted their asses and have gotten a lot done in a little time. They have also been INCREDIBLE about cleaning up everything as they work. We made sure and let them know we needed them to clean at the end of the day while they were working because we need to be able to let the dogs run in the yard once we get home.
I couldn't imagine that they would actually keep it as clean as they did. This is not something I've ever seen out of any roofing team in FL.

I've been very impressed with all of the guys working on the house. Based on what I've seen in a lot of other houseblogs, I'd say we've been extremely lucky.


Next post should be about the town's star historian coming to check out our place, and some of the weird shit she told us!

posted by Unknown @ Thursday, June 29, 2006