The in-laws arrived safe and sound on Wednesday afternoon, bearing a great deal of furniture. Well, only 2 pieces, but they are important and wonderful pieces! And thus began the work. I promise pictures of furniture and work at a later post, but first a run down of the next several days (Thursday through Sunday).
Wednesday afternoon, hubby and FIL took themselves to pick up the insulation for the attic. At the time, it consisted of 21 small rolls of pink fluffy. Thursday found the two of them in the attic, where they discovered that large swaths of the attic had NO insulation, particularly over the dining room where I spend a great deal of time working. No wonder I'm always cold in there! So, they began laying pink fluffy insulation in hard to get to places... well, my FIL laid the insulation and the rest of us encouraged him, and brought him ice water and cold beer [edit: it was non-alcoholic, as I was reminded :P]. When it got too hot to work up there, about 1030 or 11 am, they came down, cooled off a bit, and lunch was served. Friday found hubby and FIL up in the attic again, laying more pink fluffy insulation in more hard to reach places. Friday afternoon, they decided to finish off the job by blowing in the final bit of insulation. Blowing it in should be easier and about the same price. So, off the in-laws went to find a blower. Their trek proved profitable. With their suave bargaining skills, they got one store to match the price on the cellulose (the insulation stuff that gets blown in... shredded, recycled newspaper, I think), plus a 10% discount. A good deal, I must say! And back they came with a blower and 20 some odd bags of cellulose. Saturday found me in the attic doing the blowing of insulation. I was able to cover about the same area in one day as it took FIL two days... most a reflection of how much easier blowing in insulation can be, especially in tight to reach spots. It is a filthy job, for sure, requiring long sleeves, long pants, a scarf to protect my hair, a dust mask over my nose and mouth and safety glasses over my own glasses just to keep the dust off them. Finally after 3 days, the house is beautifully insulated, or as hubby says, the house has a nice warm blanket on now.
In the midst of this, we discovered that the recessed light cans aren't designed to have insulation over them, so those got changed to can that can have insulation on them. Also, we found the toilet vent from the guest bath was disconnect in spots and needed some adjustment to sit right. In fixing that, we found the bones of a small rodent in the pipes; I think its a squirrel, the poor thing. Must of drowned. In addition, since the in-laws brought the pickup truck, we borrowed a roto-tiller, and hubby roto-tilled two more 8'x4' beds for me, and we got a "scoop" of dirt (about 1 cubic yard) for raising the beds.. What took hubby 30 minutes with the rototiller took me 4 hours! I dug those first two beds by hand, using about 2 hours of back breaking for each. Anyhoo, very happy I didn't have to dig them!
I have decided to raise the beds, so Sunday afternoon I took myself down to the local hardware store and purchased a great number of landscape timbers. Today, I realized that my 3 1/2" screws should be longer to screw the fat timbers together, I took myself back down to the same store and found some 4" screws. That was the longest I found and I think it will work, it gives about a inch of screw into the second timber. Hmmmm.... if I stack them, though, to make the bed deeper, I'm going to have to angle the screws in to screw the timbers together... I'll get good pictures, for sure.
I've got more happenings going on, but the post is getting long and I'm ready to hit the sack. I promise more tomorrow (and pictures).
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