What we've been busy with....

I promised to tell what we've been pre-occupied with. We treated ourselves to a VERY EXPENSIVE weekend in Indianapolis visiting friends. It was a great time. The kids had a good time playing outside with our friends. We enjoyed their company and all was well until we got the phone call asking us this question: "Do you want the good news or the bad news?" I hate loaded questions like that. I was afraid it was something about our dog, Rookie, that was at home. She has been sad ever since we lost our other dog, Buster, on April 27. As I was preparing myself for the worst, hubby said that the good news was that the water was now turned off and no longer leaking. The bad news? Well, the UPSTAIRS bathtub pipe had burst and the water leaked downstairs. Our friend who was watching Rookie for us discovered water in the kitchen. It had leaked down the shared wall of the kitchen and dining room ruining the ceiling, floor, walls, cabinets and everything in between.

Our house was built in 1917 so the water seeped through the layers of plaster and wooden lats, through the drywall, through the ORIGINAL hardwood floor...the paint peeled and bubbled. The drywall cracked. The wood trim separated from the wall. Everyday the damage seemed worse and worse as the wood swelled from the water. Of course, this all occurred during the hottest portion of the summer when we are experiencing 100+ degree temps.

I called in a company that deals with water damage restoration and they brought in 10 industrial fans and blowers and 4 huge dehumidifiers to try and dry out the walls and save us from having to replace all the walls, ceilings and floors. For 6 days, we endured the constant noise of those fans and the heat they generated. The serviceman said those fans generated heat the equivalent of a 60,000 BTU furnace inside our house. All the while, our poor air conditioners were trying to run and cool our house to no avail. It was awful hot. It was horrible. It was miserable. And the shitty part is---we endured all that for nothing. It didn't work! They finally pulled all their equipment out and our contractor moved in. Demo started this past Mon. I never thought I'd ever have to live in a house during remodeling. I've heard horror stories of the mess and chaos. Now I can write my own horror story....

This is my dining room wall that shows how the paint at the top near the ceiling was peeling over and no--that's NOT wallpaper.
This just shows the kitchen side of the shared wall where the water damage occurred. Most of the damage was covered by my refrigerator and cabinets. If you opened the cabinets, you could see the damage.
This is what those industrial blowers and fans looked like. Again, can I just say how HOT and NOISY it was while these things were running?
Just another view of the madness
We pulled the refrigerator out in the middle of my kitchen floor and there was a fan blowing behind it as well as the one sitting on top of it. As you can see, my kitchen is not very wide, so it was quite a challenge to cook or do dishes with all this going on. Why weren't kitchens made bigger in the old days if the women were in there cooking all the time?

More pictures of demo to come...