Monday, June 27, 2011

A little busy…

So, it’s quite obvious that I have not kept the blog up lately, like seven months, YIKES! And at this point, I don’t really know where to begin. We made it through Christmas, New Years (a really fun New Years Party actually), Spring Break, The rest of Jackson’s Kindergarten year, of which I will put together another post for this later, Mother’s Day, Jackson turning 6, Father’s Day, and now were to Summer. Through all of this there has been a larger project in the works, and that is our renovation. It has been quite an exhausting experience. Jared had come up with a great plan to keep the inconvenience to a minimum. He was going to work one room at a time, taking down the exterior walls to redo the electrical and windows in each room. When he tore the walls out of the first room we discovered that there was no insulation in the walls (add it to the list). We then decided that we wanted to move the laundry room to the tiny bathroom at the other end of the house. So, since we were already working on the room next to that bathroom, we decided to just encompass it into what we were already doing in there. So, Jared and his Dad ripped everything out of the small bathroom, and we had this.

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This is looking through the old bath doorway, through the torn out wall into what will be our bedroom. We closed off this doorway so that the laundry room opens up to the bedroom. Here is what we have so far.

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Pretty good huh? So, because we decided to do all of this moving around, and because the main goal was to get the water heater and that washer and dryer out of our living room and because of a few other old diy attempts that weren’t properly executed by previous homeowner, we were pretty much forced to go ahead and redo the plumbing. In doing so, we also upgraded to a nice, new gas tankless water heater! Now we are down to one bathroom o_0 So, in redoing the plumbing we had to rip out our one usable bathroom as well. We wanted to move the vanity, so we had to get everything out of the way for the plumbers so they could move the plumbing to the other wall. So here is what it looked like.

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And here is what it looks like so far.

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Notice the lovely “white” bathtub! I’m so glad to see that black tub no longer in existence!!!

I actually need to take a half-step back. So, between the time we had the plumber come out and give us our estimate, and the time he came out to install everything, our AC decided to take it’s last breath. We had the our AC guy come out and access the situation.

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Not that Situation!

(this is only to humor me, please do not think that I watch or will ever watch this show)

Anyway, he pretty much said that there was no quick fix, and that we would need to replace. Now, last time we had gone through this (last year), he told us that there was no replacing just the ac, we would have to replace the whole system together (furnace too). But this time he said that they were now allowed to put in “dry units” as a sort of a $2000 temporary fix until we were ready to replace everything. That seemed like a lot of money to spend for something that was temporary, so we decided to hold off until we could afford to replace the whole system. We bought some portable ac’s from a friend of ours and figured we could rough it through the summer with those. Well, that worked for about a month and a half in this Texas heat. Jared decided to take out a loan to replace the whole system because it was just too hot in the house.

Here is what that looked like.

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This is all of the old junk laying in the yard, well, most if it. They company that we went with was fantastic, but they sub-contracted out to two crews. The deal was for it to be done in one day. One crew would install the units, and the other crew would replace all of the ductwork. They finished in one day, and we had ac that night. It was better, but not right.The temp never did reach what the thermostat was set to. I was told that this might happen, so I called the company and they sent someone right over. Now this was Saturday, the day before Father’s Day. When they got here they noticed that the crew installing forgot a tiny part that was supposed to be installed in the unit. The furnace itself was also tilting. They were here for a while when they finally said that they were going to have to replace the whole unit (furnace and coil). So, Monday they came to work and while the tech was trying to take out the heavy furnace, my fancy-shmancy filter collapsed underneath it. So, a new filter too. The tech was here for most of the day, but got everything installed properly and it all works amazingly and I’m so thankful for my new AC system.

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Doesn’t the side of my house look Awesome , NOT…

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Now we’re broke!

But do you see how that little window on that front is glowing blue? That’s my fancy filter. It has UV lights in it that kill germs that pass through it. Yippy!

Well, I’m still behind but I’ll try to catch up soon… I hope that some of you still check in from time to time.