Updates and Such

Somebody took me to task for not blogging recently. Imagine that. Being taken to task for not blogging. Anyway, in the interest of not being glared at meanly, here is an update of what’s been going on lately.

First, we’re deep in the throes of getting this house ready for re-habitation. Since a week before the great flood, we’ve been staying at my in-laws while we had the hardwoods done, did flood cleanup, lead abatement (in the form of covering it all up since actual removal would be a horrid nightmare), and painting. We’ve still got a lot of work to do in the painting department but we’ve finished all of the nasty wall repair and prep work and we’re mostly down to priming and painting. In fact, two of the rooms are fully primed and the ceilings are painted leaving just wall color and trim work. So, we expect to whip through what’s left so that we can get new area rugs, move the furniture back in and be ready for Thanksgiving when we’re having a large number of family members over. When we painted our living room in Virginia, we gave ourselves a week and managed to finish everything the day of our annual holiday party.

Second, we’re debating what to do about the floors. When we started working on the baseboards, we found that putting down blue painters tape and immediately pulling it back up to reseat it pulled up the polyurethane. We’ve also noticed that it’s blistering/bubbling up in the cracks between floor boards. Clearly, something has gone horribly wrong. Perhaps the flooring people did something wrong or perhaps it is the result of the incredible humidity the week they put it down (they did the three coats the week it rained non-stop). We were hoping to have them back in to do some spot repair and talk about it before thanksgiving but it’s clear that we won’t have time. So, we’ll put down rugs, move in furniture and accept the fact that we may have to reverse back out if they need to do any large-scale fixes. Or maybe we’ll just decide to not care about anything except what’s out and visible (ie, where there’s no furniture or rugs). I figure that with a five year old, the floors will age rapidly anyway…

Third, I’ve been heading up to Boston a fair amount. Went to a mini-reunion of current and former WebCT folks, a birthday party, and various lunch meetings and interviews. I nearly forgot how much I love Boston and it’s been great to visit it. Good thing too, odds are that any job I find will be up there as that’s where the jobs appear to be. I’ve done the commute via train a number of times and already know that I am going to like it very much. Much nicer than the bus/subway combo I had to do in VA since I can stretch out and actually use my laptop.

Fourth, I took Jack to the zoo today. It was much fun. I love seeing the world through the eyes of a five year old. So refreshing. And exhausting.

So, that’s an update.

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The Flood

IMG_2851.JPGLast week we had our hardwoods done upstairs. We moved everything out of the living room, family room, office, and stairway into the garage, kitchen, and basement. In the basement we set up a makeshift living room and office so we could actually live and get some work done (especially important as my in-laws, where we slept) has no wi-fi). After the floors were done, it rained all week so we were not able to begin work on painting the rooms as we had planned. We needed to wait while the smell of polyurethane stopped giving us massive headaches and chased us out of the house.

After 10 days of light to moderate rain, all hell broke loose. The final night of rain, last Friday night, we got 7 inches of rain in less than 12 hours. After a week of rain, the ground was completely saturated and something had to give.

At 9:30PM Friday, I checked the basement and saw that it was dry. But a voice in my head had me worried and as a precaution, i grabbed the two most valuable pieces of art we had, a drawing of sunflowers by Ann and a painting of flowers by my sister Jen, and put them up on the couch.

When I returned the next morning, there was 5″ of rain in the basement.

I could go into lurid detail about the next three days and the cleanup but after Katrina and after what happened to some people in New England with that same rain, it would be more whining than anything else. We lost a lot of stuff but we came out of this far better off than a lot of people so we’re thankful for that. In the end, aside from some old books, linens, games, pillows, a tv, a computer monitor, and various and sundry other random objects, we came out of this just fine.

But it wasn’t a lot of fun and I certainly don’t recommend the experience to anyone. And if you keep stuff in your basement, for goodness sakes, put it in plastic or get it up off the floor. You never know!

You can see more pictures of our basement in this flickr set.

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