Just a quick check in

Here's a photo of my adorable niece who is coming to visit along with my sister next week. Unfortunately no pictures of the house because I have not been there a single time this week! I'm kind of sad about it, but it's good that I'm studying.

Michael on the other hand has been working on the house almost constantly. The plumbing is almost entirely done - for the whole house! Of course the finishing still needs to be done, but there are pipes running everywhere they need to be, and they have mostly filled in the big ditch that was in our yard - or so he says, I have no way of verifying this of course as I'm stranded at my parents without a car in the middle of nowhere all day. Maybe tonight I'll take a little break and go back there with Michael if he feels like doing some more work this evening. Michael also completed most of the electricity for the bathroom, and mostly installed our new fan/light fixture. I'm excited to see the progress, and can't wait until we are actually putting the bathroom back together!

Tomorrow I have scheduled time off to go to a demolition derby at one of the local county fairs - we have been promised much redneck entertainment.

11 more days until the bar exam, and then I can get back to working on the house. Of course I just about had a heart attack writing "11 more days", but in a small way I'm glad it's soon because that means it will soon be over.

Oh and here is a picture of our front porch that I don't think I posted before - I love the porch and the swing, not so much the carpet that Michael tore out in May and decided to leave there.

The Bar Exam does NOT leave alot of time for house fun :(

I can't believe it's been two weeks since I posted last.

Unfortunately there hasn't been too much progress. Whereas we were originally just going to replace what was visible as far as plumbing in the bathroom, everytime we do one thing, something else comes up that needs to be replaced. The joys of an old house. So Michael has spent the last couple of weeks replacing almost all of the plumbing in the house, and running a new line to the water main - which is all the way at the front of our .78 acre yard. Here are a couple of photos of Michael's work - it looks like a mutant groundhog came through the yard - and Michael's plumbing progress in the bathroom!






We both took some time off (me from studying & Michael from the house) to celebrate our second anniversary. We went up to Louisville for the night and had an awesome dinner at a local restaurant called 610 Magnolia. It was supposed to be the best in Louisville - it was really fabulous, and the service was excellent.


Only 19 days left until the bar exam, and then hopefully Michael and I can really make some progress working together. It would be great if we could have the bathroom done by the end of the month and finally move in! Oh, and our tub fixtures came in and they look awesome - now if we could only decide on the sink faucets, who knew it could be so hard!

Let the Plumbing Begin!

I haven't been much help to Michael lately because of my studying, but he seems to be doing pretty well on his own. We have been brainstorming and figuring out things together, so at least I'm still some help.

We are developing our plan for plumbing and electricity. We have managed to completely disconnect the bathroom from the old wiring, so it will be all new when we are done. It was somewhat more complicated than you might expect since one breaker in the panel went to 3 other rooms and the attic on top of supplying the bathroom! I'm just glad we're doing as much new wiring as possible!

But for now, Michael has decided to attack the plumbing first. We will have all new pipes from where the main enters the house, new hot water supplies, but will leave the waste pipes and vent alone. At least the waste pipes have been redone somewhat recently as they are pvc. We managed to add a lot of extra work to our plate by planning out where the bathroom would be upstairs if or when we get around to finishing the attic. We wanted to run all the supply and wastes up to the attic while we have everything open in the bathroom. So it's a lot more now, but hopefully we really pay off down the road.

A little explanation of the photo of Michael. We had a bit of an adventure at the local plumbing store today, which was way better than going to a big box store by the way. Anyway, Michael has invented a device for testing his copper soldering with air, it's pretty cool. I think he should patent it :)

I've also posted a pic of our new combo bathroom ceiling light/exhaust fan. It should go with whatever type of fixtures we end up putting in - we're leaning towards matte nickel, but it's a lot more expensive than chrome, so we'll see. And the faux marble isn't nearly as yellow as it looks in this picture, it's pretty much white.



I also had a question about the shower enclosure in my last post - I'm pretty sure we're going with vintagetub.com. Their site seems really good, and I've seen some good comments about them - but we're still looking around if anyone has some input. And I saw that someone was checking out our blog looking for info about insulating old bathroom walls. Having the walls torn out is obviously going to make it pretty easy for us, but in the rest of the house where we're not gutting it we're going to try to do the blown in insulation from the outside.

Well, I guess that's enough rambling for now!