My Old House: Reaching the Six Month Mark

Happy New Year!

Yesterday marked exactly six months since I started demo on the hoarder's house...and FINALLY, the first PRETTY thing has been installed! Behold our glorious new red oak, solid-wood, hand-planed kitchen beam!

(By the way, changing the name of the project for this new year...Season 1 was The Hoarder House, Season 2 is My Old House. You're welcome!)

It's the only pretty thing in that picture (excluding Kiki's tail, of course), but isn't it just lovely? It gave me a second wind to try knocking out the last bit of demo in preparation for the rough-in plumbing. Unfortunately, a second wind doesn't equal sufficient manpower, time or strength & skill...so I'm going to have to post-pone the plumbers into February.

Speaking of demo...

The day after Christmas, I rented what was supposed to be a ratchet soil-pipe cutter for the 4" cast iron drainage pipe. (You can check out the short video to see how I felt about it.)

Yeah, not as easy as I'd originally thought it'd be. Oh well, live and learn!

Turns out it wasn't a ratchet cutter, as I suspected when I picked it up at the tool rental supply store...I had to bust out those pipes with pure leverage! Heave, ho, heave, ho...crack...splinter...hey, it worked!!! (Cue arm flex revealing no biceps to speak of...)

So here's a gallery of the house shortly after I started working on New Year's Eve; scroll to the end for another super-short video snippet with a close-up look at the beam's beautiful color and texture.

Happy New Year to all! Lord willing, I hope to continue sharing videos of the house's progress sometime around March, as the re-build gets underway. Until then, updates will be limited to a few (if any) blog posts, due to my full-time day job responsibilities.

(Sigh. I'd rather keep playing My Old House.)

Soli deo gloria.