Week One - Saturday

Day one! We're VERY EXCITED. We have 2 big projects today. Firstly, we're having our back yard cleared and graded, and simultaneously we'll start demo on the bathroom. And then tonight there is a Blue Grass festival in Oakhurst Village, about a mile from our house, which we're planning to go to. Gotta make time for a little fun!!

We'd planned on getting up and meeting Zack, the guy who was going to grade the yard. Then, Trip 1 (of many more to come) to Home Depot. Then start the bathroom demo. Zack was a little late, so Chuck started examining the demo area.



I ran out to grab breakfast and stuff for lunch, and when I got home, Chuck had already taken down the first wall.



So we started hacking away at the drywall. All was going swimmingly, until we ran into this:



What appears to be innocuous old lady wallpaper is actually covering up a brick wall, which used to be part of the exterior of our house.

On the other side of the wall, under the drywall, was this:



The dreaded Plaster & Lath wall, which I hoped to never encounter again. Experience dictated that the green paint on the plaster was probably lead paint, so that halted the great progress we were making on the demo. We're gonna have to figure that out later.

We spent the rest of the afternoon doing cleanup - the WORST part of demo! Chuck gets a gold star for his thrifty idea - to put all of our demo rubble into Zack's dump truck. Zack kindly made room, and saved us multiple pain-in-the-ass trips to the dump. YAY ZACK!

Here's a before, during, and after of the yard. We are FINALLY going to have a backyard, instead of a weed infested clay pit. I can't tell you how happy that makes me!!!!







By the time all of this was finished, it was 7pm. We still have to go to Home Depot to buy supplies for a small fence we are building in the morning, and we need to pick up Chuck's mom's truck to get the stuff home. We decided to divide and conquer - Chuck drove the 40 minute round trip to pick up the truck, while I did the Home D shopping. It saved us about an hour, which is good because we were TIRED. Blue Grass Festival? Not so much. We got home around 8pm, and while I cooked dinner, Chuck sunk the post for the fence. A glass of wine each and a big ibuprofen later, we fell into bed.

House renovation is fun!! Right.