I Forgot....

I seem to say that a lot these days.

After I finished posting yesterday I headed off into town to do what I said I was going to do.... Only I forgot the camera. Which means no pics as promised...  I can only tell you a little background leading up to the little/big renovation.  When my parents moved to this community after retiring they had had one bad experience after another with housing and buying and selling.... they always bought high and sold low for one reason or another mostly due to unforeseen circumstances.  So my Dad dug in and insisted that they would rent... which is difficult in a town where transients are coming and going all the time.  Friends of ours were selling and old mobile home and so we... Teapot and I... bought the mobile home so that my Mom and Dad had somewhere to live.We knew that the mobile home was old... but the price was right and we felt with a little work it could be fixed up. Mostly we have done superficial work... like painting the salmon pink kitchen cabinets white, putting up wall paper over the horrid turquoise wall board. Covering up the patchy flooring with new lino, and tearing out the carpet in the living room and laying new flooring there.  Two years ago the old front veranday was starting to rot away and so we tore that off and jacked up the front porch addition and put new supports under it and new steps/veranda on the front and new skirting around the whole thing. We freshened it all up with a coat of paint and made it look better.  We have over the year put in a new and more efficient furnace too. Finally this last year there started to be some problems with leaks forming in the bathroom. At first they were small leaks but they got more difficult to fix... now the bathroom has always been a bit of a problem... from the linoleum tub surround (yes you read that right... there was flooring on the walls) to the old tub painted brown on the outside, clearly something needed to be done.  Then the floor went squishy near the toilet... that was in January and a bad time to be renovating a bathroom... we made some minor repairs in an effort to be a stop gap till summer when renovating the bathroom would be more feasible. About two weeks ago we discovered another leak which was clearly the last straw as suddenly we realized that water had been leaking for sometime and was draining further than we would like... (that's an understatement by the way).  So I called a carpenter who worked on our house renovation a few years ago who we had been happy with and had him take a look.... He agreed to the job which was a great relief to me.

It was only after the walls were opened up what a great fiasco we were embarking on. The floor was fully rotten but luckily not the joists... but all the insulation had to go.  Thee exterior wall too was nothing but a load of rot and mold. Basically the carpenter had to strip the whole room down to just the casing and at one point there was nothing but the bare metal siding between the inside and the outside.  It was quite dramatic. 

I just love our carpenter/contractor... he is a gem... truly. He with fortitude, has dug us out of what really could easily have been a condemned building and has patched his way into fixing up what I swear I should have paid someone to light a stick of dynamite under.  He has framed in a new exterior wall... He has built up the floor again. He has vapour barriered everything. He has put up barker board. And he is now, this morning starting to put in the new large shower complete with medical grab bars for my Dad who needs them and a new higher than standard toilet, with a new vanity and sink. There will be a new ventilation system which hasn't worked in about twenty years from the look of it. There will be a new face for the door going in and there will be all new wall coverings and new subfloor and flooring.  I am so happy to know that Mom and Dad will have a bathroom that they can enter safely. He has replaced a lot of the old plumbing too which is great. Because of course that was the source of the problem in the first place. the only thing that worries me is that the electrical is quite old and while it met the requirements of the 1970s it surely does not meet code now... but there is nothing we can do about that... without tearing the whole thing apart... kitchen, bedrooms, living room, etc... and like I said I was more likely to take a stick of dynamite to it than do that.  But alls well that ends well... and hopefully in a few days the reno will be complete and it should outlast my parents... who after all, are well up in their 70s. 

So if only I can get the few things done around my house to finish our reno... I will be a very happy gal.... if a little forgetful.  I'm off to go check on the proceedings at the parent's place and maybe just maybe I might get a little time for some spinning today... I'm plying some alpaca for that logwood dyeing.... oh yeah and picking rhubarb leaves to stew up some oxalic acid.