If I'd Known it would be this much work...

...I wouldn't have bought it. No fooling.

Well, I think I covered the Work Sucks and I'm Lazy in the list of my flaws, so I'll move on to the work we've been doing on Hickory Cluster.

Here's a list of dates and tasks, for my own information and your possible entertainment. If you're not too demanding of your entertainment, that is.

• 1-September-2000
  
  Attempted to strip wallpaper in bathroom. Tino began some window and house cleaning outside before it got dark. This was a miserable job, and even thought the wallpaper stripping also sucked rocks and re-activated my RSI in my wrist, I wouldn't trade.

  2-September-2000
  

  It is now Saturday, and Tino is available. The author of this page came by and noticed that, praise &diety, someone was trying to clean that house! Turns out there are community ladders available. This really helped Tino who was working on cleaning the outside of the house.[1] I took a break from the wallpaper stripping (in total frustration, really) and started covering the orange paint in the kitchen. He did require some ladder holding and other assistance, so I spent some time on that.

  3-September-2000
  

  Tino continued to clean the exterior of the house including the partially-gelatinated three years worth of leaves on our lovely flat roof. There's a drain up there that's been clogged so long that some of the window frames have rotted from rain spillage over the sides. I took a crack at the wallpaper again and got a chunk of it off, but the exposed wallboard was in horrendous condition. I shifted to painting the living room to cover up the mustard paint. At this point, we were still thinking we'd need to refinish the floors. I had called my friend Kelly in NC (and old friend from Chicago) to see if he'd come up and work for me for three days. He agreed and he arrived this night.

  4-September-2000
  

  Labor Day. Off to Home Depot for supplies for Kelly. It was a zoo and he needed a lot of miscellaneous stuff to fix all the little problems at the old house to prepare it for rental. This generally involved replacing or adding mouldings where they were missing or otherwise fucked up. I think we sat around at Barrel Cooper while Kelly planed the french doors that haven't fit right since we put in nice carpet downstairs.

  5-September-2000
  

  Off we went to work. Kelly worked on the Barrel Cooper place. In the evening, I believe I painted my office, but I may have done that on Labor Day. I'm not sure. As the dehumidifier continued to do it's work, the downstairs floor looked better and better. We decided not to sand and refinish it, opting instead for a hands and knees cleaning and a fresh coat of wax.

  6-September-2000
  

  Off we go to work again. Kelly disassembled the bathroom at Hickory and began the drywall. Kelly hates doing drywall. I have no idea why it's worse than the prospect of sanding 450sf of parquet on your hands and knees with a palm sander (which is really the only way to do that floor), but apparently it is. At some point, Tino and I started stripping the window trims in his future office. They needed to be repainted, but they were so lumpy that he wanted to remove the old paint. They look good now anyway.

  7-September-2000
  

  Kelly finished the drywall, and I refused to do any work over there owing to bad attitude, fatigue and the immenent(sp?) destruction of the usefulness of my right wrist.

  8-September-2000
  

  I went over there early and sanded the drywall mud a bit and applied some primer to the drywall. Tino showed up eventually and sanded his window frames. I believe there was a trip to Home Depot for floor cleaning and waxing supplies and to return the $120 worth of poly we had bought for the floors.
  

  I started cleaning and waxing the floor while Tino painted window frames. Oh, I did all the masking for the painting. That has become exclusively my job -- he says he can't do it. I'm not sure why -- it might be a lack of patience with the precision necessary for the tape. S'OK anyway -- I kind of like it. After Tino painted the frames, he came down and started cleaning the floor from the kitchen side. This made it go MUCH faster. We then waxed the whole thing and left for the day.

  9-September-2000
  

  IKEA Trip! We bought some furniture and a rug. We bought only one item that was really a duplicate -- a kitchen/dining table. Since I really liked it and it only cost $79 ($179 FOR ALL FIVE PIECES! And the chairs were a nightmare to assemble, but they are much, much more comfy than the Ivar chairs that cost more. They are all Tinius, if you're curious.), I refuse to feel bad about it. The Seagrass or Sisal rug (not sure which) was the single most pricey item we bought, but it looks SO good in there. We were in desperate need of lighting, so we bought two table lamps that match our Skyar floor lamps (these involve handmade paper column like shades and remind me of the art of Eva Hesse...so I really like them). We also bought some birch plywood box type thingies. We felt that our birch full-height bookshelves just wouldn't work in there. We will have no problem using them elsewhere. We failed to find a king size bed. All the new ones suck rocks. All two that they have available in a king.
  

  We came back and started assembling IKEA furniture. This took hours, of course.

  10-September-2000
  

  Since this was just Sunday, you'd think I'd remember what we did...but I don't. Oh! I biscuitized the bathroom (that's the paint color) and did a completely horseshit job painting the ceiling. The heat lamp was implicated -- it's the only light in there and it kept blinding me everytime I tried to see what I was doing with the ceiling. The shitty Behr one-coat (NOT) paint is also implicated. The paint on the walls looked both too dark and too pink, but after it dried, it look pretty good.
  

  Tino cleaned up the downstairs, reorganized the utility room, attached some of the nifty kitchen rail thingies we'd bought the previous day and reattached the utility room shelf that collapsed the previous night. He then flattened boxes. I drug them to the curb. We went home as it was now both dark and Sunday night.

  11-September-2000
  

  I'm not sure that we did anything on Monday at HC. I think I demanded another day off for the sake of my sanity and my wrist.

  12-September-2000
  

  I masked off Tino's freshly painted window frames in preparation for painting the walls. They weren't an ugly color. Like my office, they had spackled and then touch-up painted with glossy paint instead of the paint actually used on the walls in the first place. Dorks. Tino attempted to reassemble the bathroom. The toilet went according to plan, but not the sink. The additional 3/8" of drywall thickness caused the p-trap to not fit. Off to Home Depot. I bought more floor cleaning supplies for my office and the hallway. The amount of gunge on there required a tougher pad for the pole thingy, becuase I was not doing anymore on my hands and knees.
  Eventually, the bathroom was reassembled (have I mentioned that I love that Tino can do this sort of thing? I'm pretty clever, but I don't know shit about plumbing and I don't want to). I completed the floor cleaning in my office, but the floor is so dull that I think I'll have to quick mop it with some oil soap to get the finish back up. And Tino also put in a new light fixture in the bath. We're keeping the original Presco fixture around since it's custom for those houses and can't be replaced, but it's kinda ugly. We went with a track on the wall. We now need 50W bulbs because the 35Ws are too dim, and we just realized that there is not a single electrical outlet in the bathroom. The only one was in the old light fixture.

  13-September-2000
  

  Scheduled for tonight is the painting of Tino's office and the cleaning of the floors in the other two bedrooms (which should be pretty easy, actually). Are we done then? Yes, I think we are. Are we hiring movers? You bet. I really can't afford it, but I also can't afford our typical recovery time for a move. The plan is to get the movers to take all the furniture and most of the boxes (ie, everything we manage to get packed before they show up). I think this will take a 1/2 day, tops. A Front Royal run will be needed when we close on that house, and I know that will cost some big bucks, so we might come up with some other way to do that.

Now do you see why I'm just shocked at the amount of work? This has been our whole lives for two solid weeks including a holiday weekend. By the time we get moved in to the Front Royal place, I'll need a week off to recover! Thank god for that house, because due to the two house downpayments and my CBP[2] due to the IRS on 15-January, we won't be going anywhere until possibly next spring. And that includes the holidays barring my parents buying us plane tickets.