Make Sure The Last One Out Turns Off The Water

Remember how we were going to get the duplex all done and rented by June 15?  We had a small gigantic setback when a water line was accidently left open during the new plumbing work and poured water into the house all night, turning the basement into a swimming pool.  Our renter from the other side called at 5 am last Sunday to invite Stan to come over and practice his backstroke.  I have no pictures of the clean-up; it was simply too depressing.  I'm excited to get that water bill! However, we finally drowned all those pesky basement spiders and got the basement cleaned out of all of the stuff the last 18 renters left behind.  Stan used our trusty truck to make several visits to our city dump, adding valuable mileage deductions to next year's taxes.  Fortunately, our renter wasn't ready to move in either and we've pushed the move-in date back by a couple of weeks.

After the fun was over, Stan got back to work.  He is covering the old asbestos popcorn ceiling in the new bathroom with new sheet rock, making sure to breath deeply to keep flakes (kernels?) of popcorn from falling to the ground.

Stan also repositioned the light to the center of the room and added a vent.

Stan installed the corner shower doors this week.

Do we trust Stan to stand on a ladder?

Here is Stan's patent-pending ceiling dry wall holder-upper-until-it-can-be-screwed-in-place gadget.

Stan is particularly proud of the way he recycled the best of the old kitchen cabinets into a workspace in the duplex garage this week.

The counter top is an old door that was in the basement when we bought the place. It didn't match the doors in the duplex; it's obviously seen a lot of use, but we don't know where it came from. Fortunately, Megan and I brought it up from the basement before the flood. Megan and I were going to put it out with the garbage. What were we thinking?

And to top things all off, there is room to the left of the cabinets for either an upright freezer or a city-size garbage can.

Here are the next several to-do projects: the toilet and window for the new bathroom, and a dishwasher belonging to our new renter-the new renter will install it, and put the one year-old dishwasher he pulls out into the other side for us. That side has a harvest gold 40 year-old leaky bucket of a dishwasher.

While Stan was standing around today

I went home to do the difficult work of picking the first radishes

and, um, disposing of them.

I checked out the lupine growing among the violas and green onions,

sniffed the first peony blossom,

weeded the zinnias,

and discovered the first three early blooming clematis (clematises? clematisi?) vines: pinkish purple

purple purple

and unpurple.

I wondered again why someone named this almost-in-bloom plant "spiderwort"- such an unglamorous name for a flower, then I

 spotted the first azalea bloom.

I thought this house had finches in it. Female wrens and chickadees are both brown and small, but it's a chickadee--you can just see the daddy sitting on the fence on the left, checking to make sure no one is looking 

before he quickly darts into the house.

You may think this is just a tree, but if you look closer

you can see this newly out of the nest robin carefully camouflaged among the leaves.

I watched the mom bring worm after worm after worm. How many worms does one little robin need?

Robin is never going to fly with all those worms weighing him down.

In a completely unrelated note, Stan's business is coming along nicely.  He just passed his goal for number of clients he hoped would move with him-and he's not done.  He is so happy to be an appreciated Stiefel man instead of a harassed other company guy.

I'm sure there will be a few more duplex blogs as we wrap things up---I know, for example, that Megan will beg me to take dozens of pictures of her this week as she paints, weeds, sweeps, mops, and cleans. Just between you and I, I'm looking forward to moving on to other projects, no matter how much Megan wants to spend her last summer working over there.