Things have mostly consisted of this routine lately:

Joe pulls down walls. My Mom pulls trim off the walls and de-nails it, then stores it upstairs. Joe/Mom/Wonderful friends fill dumpster. I get a phone call from Joe with that day’s surprises.

Today isn’t really any exception. Today’s surprise? A front window is smashed and laying on the living room floor. Oh geez. Hopefully we can get new glass and repair it ourselves. Professional repair isn’t exactly in the budget right now.

Just Thursday we settled on insulation. It’s going to be fantastic I think, but boy howdy did it blow our budget! Since we have exterior siding, studs, and (used to have, will hopefully have again soon) drywall or plaster and nothing else, our insulation options were limited. We couldn’t get anything that moisture could harm, mold would grow in, bugs would crawl through, or rodents would nest in. Oh, and fire retarding properties would be quite nice in our all-wooden house. Especially since we’re about to rip out the fire sprinkler system. So, we found Air Krete. It’s basically Magnesium based cement (as opposed to portland cement) that hardens around lots of tiny bubbles. It seems pretty perfect for our application. It’s also rather eco-friendly since there isn’t anything in the way of VOC’s to worry about. It’s also very durable, and has a high R value of 3.9 per inch. Magnesium mostly exists in Asia, so the embedded energy of that part of the product is high, but that seems to be the only big downside on the eco-front. It gets installed a week from Monday, so photos and more info to come then!

In other good house news, our kitchen is now bigger and I LOVE it! A random room with no obvious purpose off our hallway of a kitchen has been incorporated into the space, and we’ll eventually move most of the appliances into the area. It’s going to be a long project, but it’s neat to see the wall down and the bigger space. It wasn’t neat to find out that the wall was built with 2 x 4’s sideways and essentially just dangling from a top rail. High quality construction I tell ya. Oh well, it’s history now!

Finally, we can get to the back door and nursery without going through our bedroom now! What a concept! Joe knocked down more walls and converted closets into a great hallway, leading from just off the kitchen to the back of the house. The flow of the house is so much better, and it feels more and more like a single family home and less like an office every day.