Snowballs in April

Well, I'd like to say that the title of this post is just a play on words, but it did actually snow yesterday. So I"m going to use my typical form of dealing with the Wisconsin winters that just won't end - denial - and write this post like that little white blip on the radar never happened. Ready? Here we go...

No, I'm not talking about the weather, I'm talking about our little bedroom project that's turned into a LARGE bedroom project. Not without good reason. I mean, when you already have a 4 x 8 hole in the ceiling, you might as well have a plumber out to look at it (no worries, all is well with the old plumbing). And, since the room is only about 14 x 8 ft anyway, and has no lights and the only switch for the current fan is outside the room, you might as well just rip out all the drywall, put in lights and move the switch, right? Yep, that's what we though too.

So we moved everything out (our living room now  looks like a furniture refugee camp):

And went to work taking down the rest of the drywall

We even found a little friend

Don't worry, he was very old and very dead. RIP little guy.

Then, we had to clean up all the debris.

Shake out the tarps and lay them again so Mark could come over to help us run some wire

We went up through the floor by the closet door (Leroy checked it out, all looks well)

And then put in 5 can lights around the room

While the boys were doing that, (big shout out to Mark for making it possible) I decided to make some progress on the bathroom.

First I got rid of the ugly, plastic magazine rack that we never use

And then I set my sights on the frilly curtain and the plastic "leaded glass" window tint.

And put up some much nicer rice paper

It didn't go to bad, but there are still a few bubbles I couldn't get rid of. Since Matt and I are planning on replacing the window anyway, I just decided to let it go even though the (mostly buried) perfectionist in me wanted to keep redoing it.

Then, in my zeal to keep going while the boys were still running wire, I did something a little silly. I decided I would take the front of the heater off and just take a look and see what was behind it. You know, that way I could clean the grate and maybe even give it a facelift with some heat resistant paint we bought. What I didn't realize was that the grate was actually attached to the entire heating unit. And since I didn't think that was the case, I didn't trip the breaker before trying to pull it off. You can guess where this is going... I dropped the unit, severed a wire, sparks flew and I tripped a breaker. 

On the upside, that heater was a serious fire hazard, check out what was behind that grate

 See all that brown fuzz? Yeah, that's burnt dust, years and years of it. Oh, and instead of insulation around the box, whoever installed it used, that's right, cloth. Can you say flammable?

Wheew, and that was just what we did Sat. Next up, Sunday funday!