As I am sure most of you know, roughly two weeks ago hurricane Sandy hit the east coast. We fared better than our neighbors but we were not without damage. We lost power for about a week and a half (hence the lack of blog posts...sorry folks). Thought I would make it up to all of you by showing you some of the pictures I took of the damage. First let me give you an idea of how windy it really was. This is a picture of a stick, about an inch in diameter, that is firmly wedged in the deck.
Luckily, those types of flying missiles missed the windows, but one or two did go straight through the tarp pool cover. The only real damaged we suffered was to the back fence when our neighbors trees fell and uprooted the fence. The pictures are more impressive than my explanation:
And from another angle:
In that last picture you can see the tree resting on the neighbors house. Here is a better shot:
They lost three trees, but the other two feel along the fence, so they did not cause any more damage to either their house or our fence:
They have had the trees cut and are still waiting on stump removal before we can really put the fence back together. No worries though, Lucy has no desire to go near that part of the fence. As I mentioned before we did a lot better than some of our neighbors. Here is a shot from the house in the back cul-de-sac:
The next street over (a grouping of small ranch style homes) was much harder hit than our section. I thought it rude to take a photo, but there was one home that had a large tree fall right down the center of it, essentially crushing the one story home. Luckily, the family was able to be evacuated even after the tree had fallen.
All and in all we got really lucky. The property damage was not that bad, and frankly, the worst part was the loss of power. Even that had a silver lining, I got a surprise visit back to Pittsburgh (where we picked up a generator) and I was given a perfect chance to really clean out the fridge and freezer.
So one of the charms of this late 1960's home is that we have a bathroom in each of the awesome colors that mark that decade, pink, blue, and yellow. The master bath has the honor of being the yellow bathroom.
With the compact size and the sunny color it does remind me of a certain Beatles song about a sea faring vessel, but I think it will look much better (and bigger) once I take down the heavily patterned red wall paper. I am a lover of red, but it is not the complement to a yellow bathroom. I am actually envisioning a grey when I do get around to taking down the wall paper...it's on my list, just further down. Well, my other big complaint with this bathroom would be the icky grout:
Eww! The grout was so old that it wasn't really grout, but more like a sponge...which is gross. It made me shutter to think about it. There was no amount of bleach and tilex that was taking these spots out, and believe me I tried. So I guess I complained sufficiently for Chris to take on the task of removing all of the old grout and putting new (non-porous) grout in. Here is an action shot:
Notice, that while Chris and I often disagree, we both share a love for copious amounts of bleach...probably what makes this relationship work. He scrapped off all the old grout, bleached it, bleached it again, and then we waited for it to completely dry out:
After he was sure that it was ready for the new grout, he did it. Yay!
So fresh and so clean. It does make the shower look even more yellow, but that really can't be helped. I am just happy that the whole thing feels cleaner. This was a good week for Chris doing things around the house, which is good because with my final, I did next to nothing this week on the house. That being said, I have high hopes for this weekend as we transition from summer to fall.
So I mentioned on Monday that I was happy with the oil based primer in the Guest Bedroom, that it mostly covered Paul:
While I was debating if it, 'just needed a second coat', Chris was pulling out the big guns, SheLac based primer:
This is an even stronger primer than the oil based primer that I had used before. It uses an alcohol solvent, so it smells pretty bad and must be used in a well ventilated space (Chris and I disagree on what is worse smelling, the oil or the shelac, either way they stink!). We chose the spray can version because we weren't covering that much wall space and cleaning this out of brushes would have been a nightmare...that and it is more fun to spray paint:
Everywhere I primed with oil based paint was liberally sprayed with the shelac primer. Now, I am certain that Paul has disappeared for good...mauahhah.
So while the GB Olympics have been carrying on, they have consisted of many events of endurance: a ton of sanding, a marathon of painting, and a near-lifetime of spackling. Today's event is different. It is a challenge of ingenuity and skill. The course for today is the corner between the entry door and the closet door:
The corners of this room have generally taken a beating. There were extra nails to remove as the corners are obviously the edge of the paneling. What makes this corner all the more challenging is that in addition to the damage caused by the paneling there is additional damage from the molding that was also in this area:
It is in pretty rough shape out there today. And it looks like the hand sander will not be competing in today's event because he is too wide and there can be no damage to the door. Don't feel too bad for him because he is gearing up for this big event tomorrow. So the solution was to paint the whole strip and simply spackle it smooth:
It has not yet been sanded, but at least it can be. So while I don't think this will ever be the gold medal wall, a large portion of it will be covered with molding and the remainder makes up a corner normally covered by an open door. So today's winner is a copious amount of spackle!
