Diary Entry No. 3: Priorities

It's Winter: I HATE Winter and wonder why we aren't moving somewhere warm instead of down the street.

We have no deadline to meet or anything but still, the cold is throwing a monkey wrench into our priorities for restoring the Old House.

The number one priority has to wait until Spring and until a real-live mason (i.e., a bricklayer not the guys who have secret rites in a temple) is available. The house has a large bedroom half of which sits on the front porch, supported by four brick columns. Two of the columns, if you look closely, are bowing out...and the room above has dropped about an inch. The room needs to be jacked up (very slowly) over a period of weeks and new brick columns built....a scary job and with consequences including cracked plaster and who knows what else. I have two potential contractors...neither of which appear on Angie's List but both seem to know what they're doing....even though one comes with a disclaimer that would allow him to drive a tank through the house. But I certainly don't want to stand under a room being jacked up over my head all by my lonesome!

Priority Number Two is to repair the termite damage in the "right" parlor...several beams are eaten away and floor is "bouncy." I'll describe this repair in some detail next time.

Priority Number 3 is a fence because good fences make good neighbors. Alas, that has to wait until Spring also but I have applied for a building permit with the town as the rear fence needs to be eight feet due to the elevation of the railroad track behind our house.

Ah, the railroad; the house was built facing the railroad tracks, not the road, the only one like it in our town. We like the trains, and plan on a railroad theme for most of the house, except one room which is to remind Joyce of her time living in Florida.

Priority Number 4 is the kitchen...which is just slightly to small for every scenario we have tried. After several quotes for new cabinets to the tune of $10,000; we settled on $800 worth of cabinets from Craig's List (slightly damaging one cabinet door which flew off into the road during transit). The cabinets will fit with one compromise: the refrigerator has to go in the pantry but I will replace the pantry door with a larger archway.

<==== Old kitchen Cabinets

Priority Number 5 is the new laundry closet in the hallway upstairs and the new shower stall in the adjacent bathroom which involves displacing a nest of squirrels and dismantling old tube and loop wiring...which looks vaguely like electric barbed wire fencing from Stalag 13.

More tomorrow!!