Matt, Kara and I Do Gross Stuff!

Today I got up at 5 and drove to Westwind's Church in Jackson where I occasionally play for services. It was a lot of fun except at around 10:30 when I couldn't stand it anymore and had to eat something. Sometimes it just hits me and I have to eat right then! Somebody found me this wafer thing and it was kind of like a child's teething biscuit, but I scarfed it down and it tided me over. Matt and Kara came to the last service at 11, and then we all headed to Greenwood. First stop, Dollar General, where we had to buy water because we still don't have running water out there - we got two big jugs but it felt terrible paying for water just for cleaning.

They brought a picnic lunch, so we had grilled chicken on a salad, some carrots and Gatorade. It was HOT! Matt set to work cutting up the tree with a chainsaw, but I didn't really get a photo because I was too scared to watch. Once I looked out and he was sitting in the running car with the a/c on because he got overheated. He always works fast and hard, so I need to make sure I keep an eye on him.

Here he is taking a breather and Kara very nicely scratched an itch for him. We're always holding up our arms and legs to each other to double check for ticks (we have yet to see even one, but we're kinda paranoid).

Here are two "before" photos of part of the roof that they found was really rotten. This is where the most extensive repairs had to be made. We're really lucky that most of the roof didn't look this bad! It's fun to look back on these pictures of the roof because it looks so nice now.

Kara was such a hard worker today! I had pulled the carpet out of the the master closet, but the padding was still in there, and yes full of cat stuff. It's kind of fun working on the house because you can walk in and literally do ANYTHING that you want to do at this point. Because we haven't sold our current house, we don't have any money to really do much to it except clean. So Kara decided she wanted to tackle that padding. She removed it all as well as the carpet strips inside:

It looks great, and more importantly SMELLS...well I was gonna say it smells great, but it's not quite there yet.

My goal was to wash the walls of the entire master bedroom. I really have it in my head that I want that room clean first, because if Matt and I can spend the night in the house it will be a) super creepy but also b) really convenient for getting two days worth of cleaning done without all the driving. I only got one wall clean. And when I say "clean" I mean that the first layer of grime has been removed. Here you can see I've cleaned the wall to the left of the window, but not the right for comparison:

Here's the Before:

And After:

You can see in the above photo how I couldn't reach all the way to the top because my ladder was too short. I really want to do the ceilings as well in there. I wish I could have done the whole room but it was SO hot, we all just ran out of steam after awhile. After this I wiped down the kitchen and swept the whole house as well as vacuumed under the stairs. The weird/gross thing about wiping down surfaces is that I often come upon a "spatter" of unknown origin. Really gross. But a great feeling when it's gone!

The front porch was all full of leaves until Kara swept it all out, and then decided to wipe down the walls out there. She's pretty sure she wiped off a lot of paint? But whatever, at least it's cleaner now! She has the befores and afters of the porch and if she sends them to me I'll post them.

After I vacuumed as much as I could under the stairs, Kara decided to rip up the carpet with her bare hands!  No not really, she found some good work gloves but still!  It was a super gross job because, you guessed it, I think that was the cats' second home after the master closet. It smelled so bad. We think that the little amounts of carpet that we're finding are really holding the odors in - especially as the weather gets warmer. This under-stair area is going to be a tiny half-bath.

It's really hot and sweaty work, so I was really impressed, she did a great job! We threw the carpet into the trash and set it out by the road, we'll see what happens to it.

Next, Kara went out to drag the branches of the tree that fell over off into a burn pile -- Matt cut lots of logs that we hope somebody will take, but the branches needed to be cleared out. I was inside cleaning and I heard Kara yell, "Mom!" so I ran out to find her standing under the apple tree. She couldn't move because her hair got caught in it. Even the trees are haunted here!! She was very good natured about getting grabbed by the tree though and I only had to pull out a little of her hair to get her unstuck. Below she just looks like she's standing there but she is totally stuck:

The last thing I'll mention is that I was standing in the bedroom and one of the windows just fell in and crashed to the floor. It was weird and spooky! Kara cleaned it up for me.

It's a good thing the new windows have been delivered!

It's gonna be awhile before these are installed, but it's really fun to see them!