Rehabber’s Rehab

It has been a cold winter here in Chi-town, but things have been warming up quite a bit the past few days.  The snow that has been on the ground since the end of December is finally starting to melt.  The giant, and quite impressive snow fort down the block has melted to a foot high ring.  As a child who grew up in Texas, where on the few occasions it snowed you were happy to be able to gather all of the snow up in the yard into one basketball sized half grass half snow-ball, I was particularly amazed by this 5 foot high fort with foot inch thick walls all the way around.  I am sad to see it go, although the relief I feel at finally having a break from the bitter cold, is tempered by the fact that the snow that is remaining is over a month old, and thus disgustingly dirty.  It has also revealed a ton of trash that has been hidden behind snow banks for the past month, and is now littering the streets.  Our back yard in particular is no exception.

For the past month we had been able to delude ourselves into thinking that it was not that bad.  We had forgotten about all of the construction debri that was hidden underneath.  The yard is now slowly being revealed as things slowly warm up, and all of the garbage is starting to come to light again.  What a mess.

The house was dark when I came in tonight, but that was no surprise since Thor was out working.  I turn on the kitchen light, and nothing happens.  Maybe I flipped the wrong switch?  I’m still not used to even having light switches that turn things on.  Nope, the other switch doesn’t work either.  Now I start to worry.  I walk through the house trying to turn on every thing I can, and each time am met with the same result: nothing.  There is no power anywhere to anything, and the house is incredibly cold.

This is more than a blown fuse.  Did we even have fuses any more?  I call Thor, and he has no idea, but suggests maybe ComEd came and switched our service.  I go outside, and sure enough, the meter had been removed and the original power lines that fed into the house had been cut.

We were pretty hesitant to try and turn the new electrical panel on ourselves.  We vaguely recalled being warned about messing with “something” that if touched could basically blow the house up.  So what followed was a series of phone tag between myself, Thor, Matt, the head electrician, and then the guy who has been working on our house, and a few frantic calls to the power company’s various voice mails.  The result was me sitting in the dark and cold in-between running out to the car to keep my phone charged up wondering why in the hell the electric company hadn’t let us know that they were going to switch our power.

The electrician finally showed up (he had been dragged from his sick bed by his boss), it turned out to be a pretty simple matter of first checking to make sure the connection to the old box was off so the house didn’t blow up.  Then as he flipped the on switch to the new panel I could hear the furnace rumble to life, and the rest of the house turn itself back on.

In the past months things have been happening that have lifted my spirits and made my life better.  The shower is wonderful, and I love looking at the tile I painstakingly cleaned off for hours.  I don’t think anyone else will ever enjoy that bath as much as I do.  Then I wander into the kitchen where I have CABINETS with stuff in them.  Tuesday night was spent joyfully, finally unwrapping our wedding presents and getting to put everything in its proper place.  We just kept everything stored in their boxes waiting for the day we would have a place to put it all in.  It was like Christmas all over again.

In honor of this wonderful progress, we finally updated our Projects sidebar.  The backyard got an extra percent because one of the horrible pine bushes we were going to take down fell on its own under all of the snow this winter.  We argued about the rest of them, Thor wanted to represent everything as a little more done, but I say that he doesn’t factor in the details enough.  I am afraid this is a sign that they will never get done because they don’t “count”.

It is freezing cold here in Chi-town, so Thor spent the evening trying to insulate the attic a little more.  I am huddled under a mound of blankets as I write this because it is 59 degrees in our house.  Our ancient heater just can’t seem to keep up with the -11 degree temperatures outside.  We just hope it makes it through the winter and gives us a little more breathing room before having to buy another big ticket item.  The new windows are doing great, though, at helping to keep the cold out.  The main chinks in our armor are the uninsulated area where the new back door is supposed to go, the entryway to the basement, and the attic door.  I do think this will help me win the argument about tiling the sunroom with a heated floor.  The floor right now is enough to freeze your toes off.  We will see.

This holiday season was filled with fun and sadness, and between the two, and the house, I am worn out. However, we have started to turn a corner. It had seemed like everything that had happened until now was progressively making my life worse and worse. Everything was dirty all of the time, the dust had spiraled completely out of control. We lost electricity in half of the house, there was no shower, the only toilet was in the stinky make-shirt bathroom in the basement. To top it all off, it was cold. Really, really, cold. all of the insulation had been removed from the back of the house in re-doing the sunroom, and it was making winter in Chicago pretty unbearable.

So we retreated to my mom’s for a month, but now we’re back.  The cabinets in the kitchen and bathroom are in, the floors look awsome, and there is consistent electricity, including overhead lighting in the living room (a rarity in Oak Park), and now, we finally have the refrigerator actually in the kitchen.

This past weekend was spent on a few miscellaneous projects.  We got the the window trim all put back up, in the dining room and main bedroom and it looks great.  The new continuous window sil blends in beautifully with the rest of the original trim.  Matt and Thor also got the refridgerator put into it’s built-in cabinet.  And it works, too.  Probably the biggest task was getting the giant bathroom linen closet cabinet in.  A good 2 hours was spent with Thor and Matt locked in the bathroom as they tried to lift the cabinet in and maneuver it into place with about a 2 in area of wiggle room.  They got it in, and trimmed out.  We just need to finish drywalling in the top area around it.  Meanwhile I worked on stripping the door to the basement in hopes that putting that back up will help keep the house warm.  We will get there.