Snow Day!

Ever wonder what your pets do when you're not home? We came home to this evidence on Monday night after spending our evening at the new house and not with the kittens. When the cats are away, the mice will play...

Demolition is still the number 1 chore and tonight we moved into the basement. This whole event was a bit tricky since it snowed about 8 inches in Seattle and the streets were in bad shape. Justin put chains on his car and we made our way, albeit slowly, over to Beacon Hill for our chance to fill up the dumpster (again!). Tomorrow is a big day for our project: bid day. Weather permitting, we'll have about a dozen contractors from various trades coming to walk through our house and give us an estimate of what it will take to do our projects. Justin is taking the day off of work to lead them through. We xeroxed a bunch of copies of our drawings and marked up the drawings to annotate our electrical outlet desires for the contractors to use in preparing their estimates. Justin has been diligently developing scopes of work for the bidders so we should be in good shape to get comprehensive quotes.

So the progress for tonight: we tore off the drywall (yeah! it's not plaster in the basement) in the front room and found a few surprises. First off, the person that "finished" the room used masking tape to finish the seams on the drywall. Second, we found a secret room. This is our first big find in the house if you don't count the dirty boy's underwear that was stashed in the attic.

Here's the front room with no drywall:

Here are some shots of the secret room, under the porch. Yes, that's more underwear you see. There are at least 2 women's slips down there, a bunch of scrap wood, some old, old boxes, a large basket, and a bunch of other things that I'll term as garbage.

A shot from the other direction:



And here's a less exciting photo of demolition in the back room. Amazingly, we found some insulation. This is it for the whole house and whomever installed it didn't do a first rate job. We found a 24" stud cavity with a 20" batt.

And, in other good news, we got our STFI Construction Permit on Wednesday. So, after we finish our demo, we're free to start construction!