Teaser

It's been a while. Clearly, I'm neither a Real Blogger nor a person who keeps her New Years' resolutions.

Work continues on the house. This week, I'm really excited to be THISCLOSE to moving into my master bedroom. I have to do a second sealing of the bathroom grout tonight and then I can actually start using it and the bedroom.

Here's a little then-and-now comparison of the bedroom:

There's still work to be done (for instance: an overhead light would be nice) but not so terribly much! I'll be posting more comparison photos soon! Stay tuned.

Eats

I basted an egg this morning! I always had a vague idea of what basting means, and I always order my eggs basted, because I like a runny yolk but a cooked white. I finally figured out how to do it at home... and it's ridiculously easy. Here's how it's done:

1. Heat a small fry pan on medium-high heat, and then add a bit of fat. I used bacon fat, which I saved the last time I made bacon, but you can also use butter.

2. Crack an egg into the pan. I included some shell... but that's prolly not the best way to do it.

3. Sprinkle the egg with salt and cracked pepper.

4. Once the white starts to firm up and turn bright, pour in 3 tablespoons of basting liquid. I used water, which is totally fine, but you can also use something more flavorful, like chicken broth.

5. Shake the pan a little to distribute the water, and then clamp a lid over the whole thing. Adding the water to the hot fat will cause the fat to spit like crazy--plus, the water will steam cook the egg.

6. Wait, I don't know, a minute and a half? Two minutes? Take the egg off the heat when it's done how you like it.

7. Eaaaat it.

I made a little breakfast sandwich with the egg and these whole wheat rounds I bought at Costco. And some shredded cheddar. Aaaaand some bacon. Mmm!

Yeaaaahhhh buddy.

For dinner, I used the whole wheat rounds again and made little toaster oven pizzas: pizza sauce, goat cheese (also a Costco purchase), mushrooms, and some chopped-up Kalamata olives I had in my fridge. Before:

After (I added a little more pizza sauce on top between the photos):

Delicious, low-cal dinner that was totally satisfying without making me feel overly full and gross.

Rebel hair

I just pulled a hair out that was gray at the end, brown in the middle, and what at the root. What the?! It just changed its mind?

I hate that I'm getting gray hairs. They're almost too numerous to continue pulling out--I'm going to have to start coloring my hair sometime in the far near future. And... that makes me really sad. I love my natural color (minus the gray), and I want to keep it. I've played around with color many times before, and I've never had anything that I like as much as my natural shade(s).

Some people rock their grays... not me. They look scraggly and unkempt, not distinguished, on me.

Boo aging.

This and that

I'm not doing so great on the whole "I'll blog every day" thing, huh?

I'm still struggling with getting a routine going--which means I'm still struggling with not sleeping in and not watching TV all day... I haven't gotten a war room set up yet, and I think that's a big part of my failures to stay on task. I have all of these bedrooms, and I planned to make one of them into a treadmill/craft room/office, but I realized yesterday that it's in the half of the house that is only 55 degrees, so the likelihood of my spending lots of time back there, doing work, is... nil. The room I'm using as my living room has a big area that's not being used right now, so I'm going to set up my table there so I can be warm (ish--I still only have the heat at 65), be near the dog, have TV on if I want to, and yet still be working. It'll make the living room less homey and cozy, but maybe it'll encourage me to keep the desk neat...

So I have an old, shitty sliding glass door leaning up against my house:

I'm afraid it's going to break in a big storm--plus, it looks so good--so I want to get rid of it, but I don't know what to do with it. I would donate it to Habitat for Humanit, but (a) it really is a shitty door, and (b) I don't have a truck. Any ideas? Craigslist? ???

Peeping

On deck for tomorrow: installing a peephole in my front door.

I'm sitting here on my couch, minding my own business, and suddenly, the doorbell rang. Twice. Now, not a single one of my friends would just stop by my house at night and ring the doorbell, and I sure wasn't expecting someone, sooooo WTF. As I was standing up from the couch, slowly, wondering who the EFF was at my door, the person started jiggling the door knob, trying to open the door. That's when I dialed 911 and poised my lil' finger over "dial".

The person rang the bell again, and, since I don't have a peep hole in my front door, I just yelled through the door, "WHO IS IT?"

"Marcus"

"WHO'S MARCUS?"

Turns out that Marcus is a friend of the shady former residents. But he didn't know they haven't lived here in a year and a half?

So yes. Tomorrow, I install a peephole.

Pro tip: keep your doors locked even when you're inside! This is not the first time strangers have tried to get into my house while I'm five feet away inside.

Managing Monotony

It's remarkable how lonely unemployment is. My mom and grandma left about two hours ago, and already I feel depressed and isolated! Now that they're gone, though, I can set my mind to creating a daily and weekly routine to help me manage these feelings of isolation and aimlessness, be productive, and (fingers crossed!) keep this period of unemployment short and sweet.

My ideas for daily and weekly routines include:

Daily:
- Morning coffee
- Exercise
- Shower and have breakfast
- Check my list of job sites
- Write cover letters, apply for positions, make calls, etc.
- Walk the dog
- Clean and pick up around house
- Blog
- Craft / creativity time
- Social interaction

A few times a week:
- Some sort of education, skills development, and/or volunteering component
- Home improvement tasks
- Couponing

What ideas or suggestions do you have for my daily and weekly routines? What daily activities help keep you focused?

What are your favorite websites to help you with some of these activities? One of my favorite crafting sites is Cathie Filian's blog. She has great ideas and products, and she's a wonderful person, to boot. Working with Cathie and her husband Eddie in Los Angeles was one of the highlights of my life!

Pee Hustler

Now that I'm unemployed, I can do all these crazy things during the day... Like schlep my dog's pee to the vet.

A Bedroom With a Toilet But No Window

Good gravy, I'm behind already and it's only the 4th. My mom and grandma have been here for the last couple of days for our belated Christmas celebration, so I've had my hands full with last-minute present-buying, taking mom's car to the shop, wrapping presents, cooking, opening presents, and falling asleep on the couch.

Puck wanted to help wrap presents.

Slippers for everyone!

This is one of the windows in my master bedroom. It was boarded up when I bought the house in April, and the contractor I hired for my bathrooms assured me that he'd order a window for me and install it. I emphasized that I wanted to have a new window in before cold weather hit, because there was an inch of daylight all around the window, and I didn't want to lose all of that heat. My contractor told me he had ordered the window and that it would be in in a couple weeks. Then, a couple months later, he told me that he was getting some quotes for a window. And that was the last I heard. (Needless to say, I would not hire this contractor again... but that is another story for another post.) Then it got cold. (Which is why there are plastic bags stuffed around the window. Nothing but classy solutions for this girl!)

So in mid-November, my mom ordered a window from Lowe's to replace this one. Of course, it's an odd size, so it was a custom-order window. The sales guy came out to the house, measured the opening, and saw the other bedroom window that should match the new window. Mom paid for the window at that time. At the end of November, the installer came and measured the opening, and then he ordered the window. I spent a week after the window came in in mid-December trying to get ahold of the installer--Mom gave the salesperson her cell phone number, and apparently Lowe's can only enter one phone number into their system, so Lowe's would call her and she would call me and everything was getting messed up and even though four people said they put my number into the system, still no one called me. ANYWAY. Fast-forward to today. The installation was scheduled for yesterday, but one of the installers smashed his thumb yesterday and they got off schedule, so they rescheduled for today. The installer shows up, looks at the bedroom, and... tells me that, even though I ordered a double-hung window, the factory sent a window that slides side to side. Sooooo he'll have to have the correct window re-ordered, and we'll have to schedule another installation. Par for the course with this house, but ok, what can I do except wait another month.

About 10 minutes after the installer left, Lowe's Installation Services calls me. The woman is kinda shitty with me and says that the installer just called and said that I wanted a slider window even though I ordered a double-hung so I'd sent him away. I said, no, I ordered and want a double-hung, but the installer said that the factory sent a slider, so it has to be re-ordered. She argues with me and tells me, no, the installed said I want a slider, but my paperwork says that I ordered a double-hung. I get a little testy and say, LISTEN, I haven't seen the window--all I know is what the installer said, and HE said that the window that arrived is a SLIDER, but I ORDERED and WANT a DOUBLE-HUNG. With an attitude like I am jerking her around, she says, well, I'll just have to send the installer back and we'll see what's going on.

Are you fucking kidding me? You're getting shitty with me? You've had two people out to measure and get this window ordered, and you're getting shitty with ME?

I waited 20 minutes without hearing anything, so I called Installed Sales back and spoke to the woman again. This time she was much nicer. Apparently, the installer flip-flopped the measurements when he ordered the window, so the window IS a double hung window... but it's the wrong size. So it could go into the opening but would then open by sliding. So now I'm waiting to hear back from the Installed Sales manager, who is waiting to hear from the installer, who will be responsible for paying for the window and ordering a new one...

So here it is, early January, and I not only have a toilet sitting in my master bedroom but I still have no window! GRUMBLE.

v2012.365

2011 was an unending shitshow of hassles, disappointments, and minor disasters. I hope that 2012 brings happier days, but either way, I'm going to write about it.

I've realized that I tend to tune out of the details of my life when everything seems fine, until suddenly it's not fine anymore, and I discover that I'm lost and I don't know how I got there. I also know that I find my days more interesting and funny when I'm actually paying attention. Maybe that seems pretty obvious, but it's starting to dawn on me how little attention I think I've been paying, and it's scary.

So today I begin my 365 project. Each day of 2012, I will take at least one photo--which shouldn't be hard, given the 4,024 photos that I've taken in the last 11 months--AND I'll also post the photo and write a blog post. I've been telling myself for years that I need to write more, and somehow I never do. I have some time on my hands since I recently lost my job, and I desperately need to find some shades of me that I lost somewhere along the way, so I hope my project will inspire me to reimagine my present and my future.

I built a fire in my fireplace for the first time tonight. It was beautiful for about 5 minutes, until all of the kindling burned up and the wet firewood I'd just purchased burped out a bunch of smoke and fizzled out. Tomorrow, I will try again.

I blinked!

I went to the house last night to see what progress the guys made on Monday, and....

The tub in the guest bathroom is in! They put up cement board around the tub and green board about halfway up the walls--so there's a little more privacy to use the lonely toilet in the master bath. However, they also turned the water off, so please DON'T use the lonely toilet.

They also did something with the drains... apparently they were all full of junk? I don't know.

Thankfully I'm not living in the house--Joe and his crew started at 6 a.m. today. I guess the plan is to get the bathrooms ready for tile TODAY. Holy smokes! I still need to pick out the tile, and then wait for it to come in if it's not in stock, and then... and then they'll finish up the bathrooms. So fast! I can't WAIT.

Tearing down to build back up...

Oooo-eee I have been naughty and lazy about updating! Long story short: I had many contractors come out and give me quotes. Some of the them didn't actually give me quotes until after I chose someone, but! I chose someone!

I took advantage of Lowe's Memorial Day paint sale to save $140 on painting supplies. I still spent $600... and haven't yet purchased paint for 3 bedrooms, either bathroom, or the laundry room. It's insane how quickly the costs add up.

Here are a few of the color choices I tested:

This is the dining room. The paint was still wet here--when it dried, the left sample is a dustier blue, and the right sample is a really light, bright blue. I chose the dusty blue. I'm removing the paneling--which Grandma thinks is really nice, despite the fact that (a) it's not, and (b) it's buckling out from the wall. I'll probably slap up a chair rail.

And now the kitchen choices! By the way, Grandma haaaaates these. "Dark. Dark! So dark! That's really dark. Ew, so dark." I really wanted a charcoal gray, and I chose the bottom sample. The top one was kinda bleh with the light birch cabinets, but the bottom one had some pizazz.

These are the top two choices of the samples I got for the living room. I was worried the top one would be too mustard-y, but the bottom one was too close to baby poo. The paint is still wet in this picture, too--once it dried, there was more of a contrast, and the yellow is even prettier. (I chose the top sample, obvs.)

All ceilings will be a flat white. They're white now, but the paint has some gloss, and it's awful. The trim, doors, and windows will all be the same clean white.

The "fun room" walls will be a medium mushroom-y gray brown, with one accent wall of blue with a touch of green. The hallways will be one shade lighter on the sample strip. At this point, I'm planning on pulling the naaaaasty carpet in the fun room and painting the concrete, rather than putting down laminate and carpet. I ran out of money! So I'll paint the floors a shade darker than the walls, hopefully with a high-gloss finish. Then I plan to pick out some song lyrics that I love and stencil them on the floor, around the room along the edge of the wall. Add the inexpensive but pretty IKEA rug I recently bought, plus some inexpensive carpet-rugs, and that will have to be good enough for now.

The master bedroom will be a light gray, but more of a light dove gray than a brownish-gray, and one accent wall will be a deep, plummy purple. Grandma picked out a light green for her bedroom. From the smudge on top of the can, it looks a little more pastel than I anticipated... so we'll see. Mom still has to pick out a color for her room, but she wants a buttery yellow with brown, sheer curtains.

I may paint the laundry room the blue I did not choose for the dining room. The room gets lot of light, and I think it'd be pretty. I still have to choose paint for the back two bedrooms, too, but I am pondering some ideas. I'm planning to pull the carpets and paint the floors in there for now, too. It's gonna be chilly in the back of the house!

So my contractor, Joe Emmert with Bathrooms by Design, got most of the tear-out done this weekend. Hurrah! But because the dumpster isn't being delivered until today sometime, he had to pile all of the junk in the fun room. Voila:

I may try to salvage the bathroom vanities for the laundry room. Maybe I can slap an inexpensive countertop on them to make a folding table. Yes? Yes.

Here is the guest bathroom, which was already partially torn out. I took the picture from the door. Notice that you can see into the master bath... Using the toilet will be a little tricky for a little while. Peekaboo!

And the master bath, which looks soooo much bigger with the little half wall removed!

I'm really excited about the master bath. It's getting a tiled shower--which is where I was standing when I took this picture--and a glass pivot door and wall and a pretty long vanity with two sinks....

I'm so excited to see some real movement. We've done a lot of cleaning, but it's hard to really see much progress with that, especially when there is still so much to be done. But the back two bedrooms and hallway are nearly ready for paint--I just need to sand one more spackle spot and wipe everything down with a tack cloth, and then paint can go on! Grandma's room is about read for paint, and Mom's is about 3/4 of the way there. I'm hoping to pull the paneling in the dining room (three half walls) and the master bedroom (one whole wall) this weekend and get the walls sanded down. Then I can clean, spackle, sand, and wipe those two rooms, and they'll be ready for paint, too. Mom and Grandma are planning to come down for some good stretches of time, so hopefully the ball will really get rolling now.

I'm packing in the evenings at my apartment.... and I hate packing so. much. Hate.

Oh! Mom talked to the neighbor this weekend, and he found paint cans for the living room and kitchen, which is awesome--there's enough paint for the touch-ups I'll need in the kitchen, and there's a good start for the living room, where I need to re-paint a chocolate brown accent wall. And obviously now I know the formulas, so I can actually get a match on the paint colors. Maybe I'll get that deposit back after all.

Lessons in home ownership/renovation/common sense

I spent about 12 hours at the house today--well, some of that was at lunch and at Lowe's. Whatever.

I learned a few things:

1. Don't dismount a ladder that is near the corner of a windowsill without paying good attention to your surroundings. Take it from me--or from my butt, which now bears an unsightly, oddly shaped bruise--and spare yourself the painful lesson.

2. If you ever need to scrub blood off your textured ceilings, use a spray bottle to spray the ceiling with a TSP mixture before you scrub. I don't know why it took me so long to realize that, but it's GENIUS. I finished the last of the blood today in about 1/5 the time it took me before. Hurrah! Bloodbegone!

3. Drinking beers while you work all day will make you very, very, very sleepy in the afternoon. You might even fall asleep in a chair.

4. I would rather clean someone's blood off the wall than someone's hair from anywhere. Oh man, hair is disgusting.

5. Louvered doors are a fucking bitch to clean. Seriously. Fuck those doors. They can go straight to hell.

6. 93.9 literally, truly, honestly plays the same five songs over and over and over again.

7. I could do without EVER hearing that commercial for the Speedy Beverage Club again. So. So. Bad.

8. I really need a contractor to start working. Like, now. Yesterday. THREE WEEKS AGO.

I also had a really amazing, touching encounter with a dude from Craigslist. (No not THAT DUDE. Hahaaaahahaha.) I hired this guy to pick up a washer and dryer from a friend and deliver it to my place. He charged me $30 (for the 25ish mile one-way trip), and I was planning to give him $10 extra. Then it turned out that my friend added in a patio table and a couple of chairs, and we didn't have any burly help on either end of the trip, so it was just us girls helping the Craigslist guy load/unload the stuff. So, I figured I'd throw in another $10. But then the bank only gave me twenties, so, meh, ok, I'll give him $60. So the guy showed up and was super nice and friendly and helpful. I handed him the cash and thanked him, and he looked at it, and sorta confused, asked, "Do I owe you some change here?" I told him no and thanked him for being so helpful. And he paused for a minute and then said, in a really sincere, totally not obsequious way, "Well, thank you, very much. That's an answer to a prayer. We weren't sure how we were going to make it this week. Thank you." He left just after that, and I went inside and cried. I can't quite verbalize all the reasons why, but it was just really touching. I really appreciated the opportunity to meet and have that encounter with him.

It was a good day today.

Contractor woes, to-do lists, and small victories

CONTRACTOR WOES
As you may remember, I planned to have General Contractor Greg do the remodeling work on my bathrooms. We talked on the phone a few weeks ago, and he said he was in Florida but would be back in a couple days and would call me then. Well, a couple days passed, and he didn't call. On the day after he said he would call, his wife called and said that he'd been really sick in bed, but he asked her to let me know that he hadn't forgotten me and that he'd call me as soon as he got out of bed.

Two weeks later, I still hadn't heard from him. I wasn't sure whether to be worried about him or pissed that he hadn't called me. Plus, I was two weeks behind schedule--I'd hoped to have the bathrooms nearly done at that point! Anyway, I called and left a voicemail for him after two and a half weeks, and I sent him an email, too, because my realtor told me that he thought GC Greg was pretty good about his email. Three days (from the voicemail) passed and I hadn't heard anything, so I got the name of another guy from a partner at work, and I called him.

He responded right away--yay!--and said that he was definitely interested in talking to me about the project and that it sounded right up his alley. BUT.... he also said that his mom had passed away that weekend, so he would need to touch base with me later in the week. I mean, what can you say to that? So I said ok.

And then the next day, GC Greg finally contacted me. Turns out he'd had some melanoma spots return and had to have them removed. But now he's ready to move forward!

So now I'm in a pickle. I guess I'll just get quotes/bids from both guys and go from there. But in the meantime... I STILL DON'T HAVE A CONTRACTOR.

Sigh.

TO-DO LISTS
Anyone who knows me well knows that I like to plan things and make lists. Listmaking is soothing... usually. I've never really had a situation where making a good, detailed list didn't immediately make me feel better, where committing my little falling-asleep-oh-no-i-must-remember-to-do-XYZs to paper didn't make me feel more in control and able to figure out the details of whatever project I was wrestling. But this house... I... I'm overwhelmed with lists. Or, at least, there are so many things to do that I just can't think about all of them or I will go crazy. I have to rock some good, old-fashioned Scarlett O'Hara denial just so I can get through the day. And although that makes me feel better, I also worry that I will forget something major. WHAT IF I FORGET TO BUY A STOVE?! (Oh actually I do need to go do that.) WHAT IF I FORGET TO PACK MY APARTMENT UP? WHAT IF I FORGET TO... whatever.

But I generally know that the cleaning has to be done before painting, and painting comes before new flooring, and ripping up existing flooring comes before new flooring, and getting the bathrooms done comes before new flooring, and kitchen drywall comes before painting the kitchen, and kitchen drywall comes before the kitchen's new flooring, and new flooring comes before kitchen install, and... oh man I have a lot to do before July 1.

SMALL VICTORIES
I will take them where I can get them! I bought a new remote for my garage door opener, because no remote came with the house, and who knows how many there were and who had them. Given the blood-splashing, I don't want to eff around someone maybe still having a remote to my garage and hidden access to my house. So, a new remote!

I crawled up on a ladder to figure out how to make the remote and the opener "talk", opened the cover, and found....

a remote inside the cover. All righty.

Anyway, I managed to get the remote and the opener to "talk" so now I have a working remote! Holla!

Yeah. Like I said, SMALL victories.

Gas line troubles....

I had an insurance walk-through on Monday, during which I opened the exterior furnace closet and noticed that it smelled gassy. I ended up calling the gas company, which sent out a technician right away. He tested a whole bunch of stuff and determined that I had a gas leak somewhere in my house lines... greaaaat. So he turned off the gas.

I called a place that he mentioned--and that's highly rated on Angie's List--and they came out the next day to assess the situation. When they got up in the attic, they pointed out that the addition to the house was essentially built around the second furnace.... so you can't get to some of the fittings unless you, you know, TEAR DOWN THE CEILING AND WALL. Cool. But luckily, they eventually determined that the pipes and fittings were fine, so we didn't need to do that. They re-piped the exterior closet, wrapped the pipe that enters through the brick wall, stuff like that. I didn't really understand it all, but I understand the $625 that I paid them. YEESH. But it needed to be done, and now it's done.

B is town this weekend to help me scrub and pick out paint and what not... she's so wonderful.

So, I still haven't heard back from General Contractor Greg. Either he's realllly sick or I got punked.

And... some "after"

I quickly discovered that washing the ceiling with a rag was not gonna cut it, because the texture tore the rag out of my hands. So I had to switch to a scrub brush... which makes lots of spatters. I protected my eyes reasonably well, but I am just pretending that I did not spend two hours with spatters of old blood and TSP (trisodium phospate) all over my face. LET ME HAVE MY ILLUSIONS.

All geared up to scrub blood off the textured ceiling...

The end result is SO satisfying, though. I have a blood-free ceiling!!!

More "before"

Ok, so continuing from the previous post. Turn around from that beeeeyootiful shower/tub combo, and you see the gorgeous other side of the guest bath. Mmm.. yeah. Oh yeah.

Now step out into the hall, and look up. Oooh... pretty! And they're all through the house, yessss.

Across the hall from the bathroom, to the west: another bedroom. This one will be Grandma's room. The carpet here is salvagable, phew. Dontcha love that lightswitch?

Exciting shot from a little deeper inside the room:

Grams announced that (a) the room doesn't need to be painted, (b) she doesn't want curtains but only wants blinds, aaaaaaaaand (c) she likes these closet doors. Hi!

Ok, moving north down the hallway, again to the west side, is bedroom #4. The carpet was pretty dirty, but it has cleaned up pretty well so far. I need to clean it a couple more times, until the water is coming out a little less squidocaustic.

The closet doors are off-track and busted up.

And there's no door handle! Look how nice and clean that door is. ....Not.

Aaaand here's what happens when you open the windows on a breezy day and one of your doors is doorknobless. Needless to say, there's no assembly left in that hole now. (TWSS.)

Almost every room needs some sort of drywall patch... this is an especially big one.

There's a linen closet at the northernmost end of the hallway. Again, no shelving.

Now to your right (east) is the lovely paneled master bedroom, with its not-hardwired ceiling fan and its boarded-up window. Ooooh, jealous??

These closet doors are also off-track and busted up.

And here's the master bath (the navy walls are a lighting trick). This bathroom is going to be gutted to the studs, too. We're also going to close off an exterior closet that houses a furnace (one of two) and the water heater, insulate the hell out of the closet, and put an interior access door to it in the master bath. The door (to the outside of the house) didn't even have a lock on it before closing. I can't believe the water heater is still there!

The vanity is outdated but doesn't seem to be in terrible shape... until you look inside. Lotsa water damage. Vanities ain't cheap, people!

There's a hole cut into the wall behind the toilet. Someone was nice enough to stash a plastic bag and a water bottle in there for me. Thanks!

Linen/overflow clothes closet in the bathroom:

Tub and shower combo. Apparently I neglected to get a shot of the end of the tub where the lip that's supposed to go behind the shower surround is instead in front of it.

Looking south down the hall towards the kitchen:

Another shot of the wood-burning fireplace in the living room:

There are three windows in the living room, and each one of them has some sort of paper wasp nest(s). We found one guy in action:

(He's dead now.)

At the south end of the living room (which is on the east side of the hallway, not the west, as I said in the previous post), the "before" shot of the carpet grunge:

And a "during" shot:

I've already cleaned this carpet twice (these shots show the first time) and will probably do it at least twice more. The water was still coming out dark brown on the second round. Ew. But it looks decent enough that I'm not going to put laminate down here--I'm going to take that savings and put carpet in the two back bedrooms, which were worse than I remembered and which didn't clean up well.

Oh yeah... speaking of the back bedrooms....

So there was this.

What does it look like to you?

Yeah.... that's what it was.

Blooood!

All over the back hallway wall and ceiling (and on the lightswitch and fuse box), on the wall and carpet in bedroom #1, and on the wall, ceiling, and carpet of bedroom #2. Really, really gross. And sad.

Moving on to more nonsensical things... more black Xs, on every single panel of the inside of the garage door. Ok....

It's not for sale anymore!

Me in front of the house:

So, there's lots (and lots and lots) of work to do, but I'm so excited to keep working and see progress.