Weekend 2

It's a bit hard to believe that we have only worked on the house for 4 days. We've had it for 10 but most of the work gets done on the weekends (of which we've had 2). Every day that we work though, we get 1 day closer to it being occupant ready.

This past weekend was spent doing some additional pickup of junk that was left in the house. Bulk trash time has started, so this is saving us a bit of money in that we don't have to rent a big dumpster. The city of Phoenix allows us to have an "SUV" sized pile of trash that they will come pick up. We have pretty much already used it.



Erin spent time doing demo on the bathroom this weekend. It's dirty, dirty work. It's pretty nasty behind all of the tile. We are going to have to replace the framing around the bathtub area. Water got behind the tile and damaged the wood pretty heavily. Erin's grandfather made a surprise visit and offered some advice.

A man named Bob also stopped by. He was apparently the owner of the house in the 70's. We invited him in to have a look around, and he pointed out everything that he had done to the house back then. He had done all sorts of lovely things like adding the stained glass doors to the partition in the kitchen, building the outdoor patio cover, and installing the bathroom tile that Erin's grandfather remarked "Could make a maggot gag".


Erin's Grandfather scopes out the bathroom


Mid Demo

I (along with a little help) spent the weekend tackling the remaining tile on the floors. A $60 rental of an electric floor scraper was easily worth the money. I did 3 times the work in 1/8 the time. This thing pulled up the linoleum tiles like a hot knife through butter. Once the tile was up, we used a soy based mastic remover to get up all the glue in the master bedroom. It was applied to the floors with a paint roller, and then we used a combination of squeegee, mop and bucket, and scrubby pads to remove the greasy slippery mess. I think the bedroom looks pretty damn good compared to how it started. we will probably need to do a quick second pass around the edges of the room where the mastic was especially heavy.


This machine is awesome.


After the remover was applied.


clean and drying.

So I had said that I hoped that we might learn some life lessons while we go through the process of redoing the house. This weeks lesson: "Never do yourself what an engineer has designed a machine to do for you."