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ladymysla at 05:41pm on 14/02/2012
ladymysla at 05:41pm on 14/02/2012Checking the time stamp I've had this page open for an entire hour with only the subject field filled in. Woops.
On the medical side I'm still in the hospital, and it's been 21 days of antibiotics. We will keep with the antibiotics until Friday and then quit, but instead of going home I'll be staying here and seeing if location is a factor in my recurrent exacerbations. I'm quite content to be doing rehab again as I had to quit while the infection was, in my own terms, "raging". The fevers have stopped and I'm stable medically speaking so I'm enjoying this time the best I can.
In more fun things, while I have been hospitalized Davy has used it as a great opportunity to renovate the house as it's a lot easier to make stuff dusty when the one who is pneumologically* impaired happens to be in a sterile** room.
A couple things before I start:
1. I am incredibly easily amused. You'd think the amount of amusement increases with age, but for the last few years I'm located on the amusement scale between "cat just found the new box you brought in the house" and "baby discovers toes".
2. I hate change, especially abundant changes at short intervals.
This essentially makes renovation a love/hate situation where I loathe all the change but oh my goober my house is transforming into this amazing thing and I didn't even lift a finger! (I might also then get really sad that I did indeed not lift a damn finger.) Like I said, love/hate.
So from the beginning.
The most exciting thing (outside of central heating that we didn't get right away when we moved in) was Davy removing some of the absolutely hideous wallpaper from our makeshift bedroom. Our bedroom upstairs was pretty amazing with the parquet floor and the light switch string that I could pull above my head to make everything dark but it's main disadvantage was that it was upstairs. Upstairs is surprisingly hard to get to when you have only 20-30% lung function. So we moved our bedroom downstairs into the nook beside our living room. As I was saying the most exciting thing ever that had happened in the history of our house (to me) was the removal of the wallpaper only to discover that it had been painted orange underneath. Orange was better than the wallpaper. I took a picture to document the moment:
You have to understand, after almost 2 years of doing "nothing" (solely my words, Davy has done things that I have not appreciated because they were not done for purely cosmetic reasons) there was actually something being done! Not only was the wallpaper going to be gone but one day I would get to paint the walls white and then another shade of white and then maybe hang some pictures. This is how my mind works: "You put in a beam that was so heavy 3 people needed to move it but our house will no longer collapse with us trapped inside to face a horrible death? Ok." "YOU REMOVED THE WALLPAPER SO NOW I WILL HAVE PRETTY WALLS????? THIS IS SO COOL LET ME GET MY CAMERA". My logical (ethical/moral) compass probably got turned around in one of those 9000+ scans I've had.
Right so back to the cool stuff. So I thought removing wallpaper was cool.. until Davy started KNOCKING DOWN WALLS and REMOVING CEILINGS. One day there is a blue wall staring at me as I play my computer games and the next day ITS GONE. I tried to find before pictures (because Davy was nice enough to get afters but forgot about befores) but most of them were posed pictures of me so do try and take your eyes off of me and focus on the structural workings of our house.
Here you can see our front room, also know as the living room (and soon to be kitchen). The wood panelling is everywhere, the ceiling for some random reason is slanted and as we found out recently the tiles that I am standing on have NO FOUNDATION beneath them. No foundation you may ask, means that the person tiled on top of dirt. Yes, dirt. The wall that the computers are up against is an outside wall which means it's lacking an actual inside wall, so that is what Davy and the gang spent a few days doing.
They started by removing the ceiling and with that the floor of the room above. One might not call it a "floor" exactly as Davy had walked there before and actually fallen through the house, but for now we'll call it the "floor".
Here you can see Davy's father Gerard between the top and the bottom floors. If we take the exact positioning of where I am in the before picture, I would be located where the small stepladder is.
They placed beams across to create flooring for the top floor of the house which you can see here:
I think this above picture is one of my favourites, probably because it shows you how much ceiling space we gained after we moved that slanted wood panelling.
Gerard is one of the coolest guys I know, eternally thankful for all the help Davy's family has given us.
So now we have a foundation for the hardwood flooring we'll put upstairs and a newly built structure for our new ceiling which coincidently will not consist of wood panelling.
After building the ceiling/floor upstairs the next step was to remove the flimsy covering over the outer wall (the wall that connected us to the house next door) and adding an inner wall (including insulation)
They first dug a trench to fill with concrete, and then they started building the wall
Up up up goes the wall!
Well that's quite an update on the house so I think I'll end it here and try and start on the next one, as I doubt I'll get it up today as well. Hope everyone is doing well!
* It's not a real word but it will suffice in this situation
** I might have accidentally left my calshake unwashed for a few days.. it crawled out eventually.
On the medical side I'm still in the hospital, and it's been 21 days of antibiotics. We will keep with the antibiotics until Friday and then quit, but instead of going home I'll be staying here and seeing if location is a factor in my recurrent exacerbations. I'm quite content to be doing rehab again as I had to quit while the infection was, in my own terms, "raging". The fevers have stopped and I'm stable medically speaking so I'm enjoying this time the best I can.
In more fun things, while I have been hospitalized Davy has used it as a great opportunity to renovate the house as it's a lot easier to make stuff dusty when the one who is pneumologically* impaired happens to be in a sterile** room.
A couple things before I start:
1. I am incredibly easily amused. You'd think the amount of amusement increases with age, but for the last few years I'm located on the amusement scale between "cat just found the new box you brought in the house" and "baby discovers toes".
2. I hate change, especially abundant changes at short intervals.
This essentially makes renovation a love/hate situation where I loathe all the change but oh my goober my house is transforming into this amazing thing and I didn't even lift a finger! (I might also then get really sad that I did indeed not lift a damn finger.) Like I said, love/hate.
So from the beginning.
The most exciting thing (outside of central heating that we didn't get right away when we moved in) was Davy removing some of the absolutely hideous wallpaper from our makeshift bedroom. Our bedroom upstairs was pretty amazing with the parquet floor and the light switch string that I could pull above my head to make everything dark but it's main disadvantage was that it was upstairs. Upstairs is surprisingly hard to get to when you have only 20-30% lung function. So we moved our bedroom downstairs into the nook beside our living room. As I was saying the most exciting thing ever that had happened in the history of our house (to me) was the removal of the wallpaper only to discover that it had been painted orange underneath. Orange was better than the wallpaper. I took a picture to document the moment:
You have to understand, after almost 2 years of doing "nothing" (solely my words, Davy has done things that I have not appreciated because they were not done for purely cosmetic reasons) there was actually something being done! Not only was the wallpaper going to be gone but one day I would get to paint the walls white and then another shade of white and then maybe hang some pictures. This is how my mind works: "You put in a beam that was so heavy 3 people needed to move it but our house will no longer collapse with us trapped inside to face a horrible death? Ok." "YOU REMOVED THE WALLPAPER SO NOW I WILL HAVE PRETTY WALLS????? THIS IS SO COOL LET ME GET MY CAMERA". My logical (ethical/moral) compass probably got turned around in one of those 9000+ scans I've had.
Right so back to the cool stuff. So I thought removing wallpaper was cool.. until Davy started KNOCKING DOWN WALLS and REMOVING CEILINGS. One day there is a blue wall staring at me as I play my computer games and the next day ITS GONE. I tried to find before pictures (because Davy was nice enough to get afters but forgot about befores) but most of them were posed pictures of me so do try and take your eyes off of me and focus on the structural workings of our house.
Here you can see our front room, also know as the living room (and soon to be kitchen). The wood panelling is everywhere, the ceiling for some random reason is slanted and as we found out recently the tiles that I am standing on have NO FOUNDATION beneath them. No foundation you may ask, means that the person tiled on top of dirt. Yes, dirt. The wall that the computers are up against is an outside wall which means it's lacking an actual inside wall, so that is what Davy and the gang spent a few days doing.
They started by removing the ceiling and with that the floor of the room above. One might not call it a "floor" exactly as Davy had walked there before and actually fallen through the house, but for now we'll call it the "floor".
Here you can see Davy's father Gerard between the top and the bottom floors. If we take the exact positioning of where I am in the before picture, I would be located where the small stepladder is.
They placed beams across to create flooring for the top floor of the house which you can see here:
I think this above picture is one of my favourites, probably because it shows you how much ceiling space we gained after we moved that slanted wood panelling.
Gerard is one of the coolest guys I know, eternally thankful for all the help Davy's family has given us.
So now we have a foundation for the hardwood flooring we'll put upstairs and a newly built structure for our new ceiling which coincidently will not consist of wood panelling.
After building the ceiling/floor upstairs the next step was to remove the flimsy covering over the outer wall (the wall that connected us to the house next door) and adding an inner wall (including insulation)
They first dug a trench to fill with concrete, and then they started building the wall
Up up up goes the wall!
Well that's quite an update on the house so I think I'll end it here and try and start on the next one, as I doubt I'll get it up today as well. Hope everyone is doing well!
* It's not a real word but it will suffice in this situation
** I might have accidentally left my calshake unwashed for a few days.. it crawled out eventually.