The contractor came by again yesterday and this time brought his planner/engineer guy with him. This other guy said what we want done is definitely doable and he is going to get back to us with an estimate on coming up with “preliminary plans”. Once you have the preliminary plans you can then get an estimate for the whole job. Who knew it would cost a few hundred dollars just to find out how much it will cost to do the job? Once you approve the preliminary plans, they will draw up the final plans and do all the structural/sesmic required studies. They will also take care of getting all the city approvals, which apparently is no easy task. Just getting to that point where the city says it’s okay to start the project will likely cost around $1000. (Plus however much the city charges for permits!)
The floor is done!
They did manage to get the entire floor finished and the bed put back up last night. We moved the bed so that it is by the window. It think I’m going to like it a lot better there. My next task will be to get my closet cleaned out and donate all the clothes in there I haven’t worn in years. Then I can move Dan’s clothes to my closet and we can start moving the scrapbooking business stuff to our bedroom. That has to be done before we can start on the bonus room expansion project.
New floor in our bedroom
Dan, his dad and sister are working hard today to put in a wooden floor in our bedroom. We’ve had the wood for it sitting in our room for over a year now! It sure will be nice to have it all done. Then we can start to tackle our next project – the bonus room expansion. That is going to be a huge project and will take months to complete.
The Saga of the Slab
The slab of our house is wet and has been since July of last year. We have had three plumbers come out and say we have no pipe leaks and have been at a loss as to what to do about this problem. It is a problem because it caused my wood floor to buckle and you can see water stains in the edges of some of the planks. I don’t want to fix it till I solve the problem.
Well, I was chattiing with a neighbor (three houses up) and it turns out that she has a huge pond in her back yard that looses a foot of water each day. Her DH fills it back up each day and it looses all that water again. Add to that, my next door neighbor (one house up) has a spa that also leaks. We are getting inundated with water from these two peoples leaky pond and spa! I am almost 100% certain that is what is causing our problem. We are going to see if we can put some sort of barrier and drainage in on that side of the house.
Is it just me, or wouldn’t you fix it if you had a pond or spa that was leaking like that????
A Quick Update
I am feeling much better now. I am pretty much convinced that I did have 5th disease. All the blood tests came back fine, expect that my iron is a bit low.
We seemed to have finally solved our ant problem! How did we do it you ask? Round-up! Yes, that’s right, the weed killer Round-Up. Dan sprayed it around the house to kill the grass growing up against the house to then later go and spray insecticide in that area. We haven’t seen an ant since he sprayed the Round-Up. I gues sit is even more toxic than insecticide!
My parents came for a visit over Easter. The girls were out of school this week as well. We all had a really nice time.
My new sticker sheets have been printed and are being shipped! Yeah! I can’t wait to see how they turned out.
I Hate Ants!
For the past few weeks, our house has been plagued by ants. This isn’t just your occasionally ants found invading the kitchen infestation. It has reached full scale invasion status. There are ants in every room of my house. They seem to have moved into the walls. Short of tearing down falls in search of their nest, I don’t know what else we can try to get rid of them. We have tried everything from borax laced sugar to full scale chemical attacks. Nevertheless, I find myself vacuuming up ants from the kitchen counter, the floor and the walls on a daily basis. If there is one single teeny tiny crumb around, they will find it. I’m sure you can imagine how hard it is to keep every single crumb picked up with five kids, especially from the twins and my 3 year old. I vacuum multiple times a day, but the crumb makers are always one dropped crumb ahead of my vacuuming. I am beginning to wonder if we will ever get rid of them. I think it is time to call in the professional exterminators. DH is against doing that, but I may just call them anyway.