Last post: April? Seriously?

Wow, sorry, blog peeps. Even sorrier that I don't have a ton to report. I am still stripping wallpaper...seemingly endlessly.

Most of my spare time, though, has been transitioned to triathlon training. Think of me the last weekend in August and say a little prayer to your deity of choice that I survive the swim! :)

RIP, fridge :(

I do believe my fridge is no more. That stinks.

...and the chimney, she went a'flying.

We had a hellacious windstorm last night. Worse, I think, than the storm we had in September because of Ike. That was one steady strong wind...sure, it took down a tree and I was without power for almost exactly a week, but a lot of things stayed up!

This time it was GUST......nothing....GUST GUST GUST GUST.....nothing.....GUST GUST GUST.....nothing and so on. I was finally drifting off to sleep as the house shook (I kid you not), and all of a sudden I hear CRAAAAAACCCCCCCK and then clonk clonk clonk clonk. Didn't take me long to figure out I was listening to the sounds of bricks rolling/sliding down my slate roof.

When I surveyed the damage this morning I found that about half the chimney appears to have crumbled down. The cap was about 50 feet away from the house and was embedded into the ground by a good 8-9 inches. Glad no one was standing in front of it--that sucker flew!

Snow, ice, snow, snow, snow, snow

It is only January and I am ready for spring, much more so than in other years. I. am. tired. of. snow.

That's all for today.

I should have known it couldn't last

All those plaster walls, all in lovely (lovely!!) condition. It was too good to last. The walls in the office are going to require some MAJOR patching. I can do it, but it is going to take a while. I believe it is still salvageable; time will tell as I start to notch it out and find out how far down it is unsound, or how widely spread the unsoundness is.

Wish me luck!

The protector

Meet Winnie--the bestest dog around, as long as you don't mess with me or her house. She is as much of a guard dog as she needs to be. She's a pound rescue, a mix of GSD, Doberman, greyhound, and who knows what else? All I know is that I saw that face and knew she was coming home with me.

Begone, foul carpet strip!!

Many old house bloggers probably already know and use some iteration of this method, but I figured I'd post it for all my non-home-improvement-fanatic peeps.

My house is now blissfully, gloriously carpet-free. However, I was faced with tack strip that appeared to have been laid by someone who went a little crazy with the nail gun. Pulling the strip up the old-fashioned way (with thin crowbar) was tearing my floor up in a big way. To compound the pain, my tack strip is old and totally dried out, so in many areas it would splinter rather than pull up. Ugh. I needed a better method, so I experimented until I came up with one!

I filed one of my metal scrapers so it would be nice and thin. Then I grabbed it, my trusty flathead screwdriver, and my hammer. Wham bam thank you ma'am the carpet strip gave up the ghost SO easily!

Here's how I do mine. The tools of war:

I carefully drive the scraper underneath the tack strip using the hammer. Try to do this near a nail so you will get the full effect.

After the scraper is fully under the tack strip (I drive it under until I can see it peeking out the other side), I piggyback the flathead screwdriver onto the scraper and drive it under, too. You can see that this basically just pops the nail right out of the floor. Success! I keep doing this until I've got a clean piece of tack strip that has just been pulled right out of my beautiful floor. Then I sweep up and I'm d-o-n-e!!

It is finally happening!!!

Lookie! I am so very happy to have this duck-free spot of wall. You have no idea!

And...I literally have seen the writing on the wall! Of course, I can't read half of it. Sigh. Looks like a possible date of February 1904, but I don't know what that'd refer to. The house is far older than that, and the wallpaper is newer. How much newer I don't have the foggiest!