Ugh.

It was a slow weekend, forcefully reminding me that certain things in life take time to complete. Blah. To put it nicely, I did NOT like this weekend.

We were supposed to go on Saturday and put in a full day of work, but I'd been experiencing such crippling jaw pain from the wisdom tooth surgery on Monday that I could barely function. The painkillers weren't getting rid of all the pain, so I was pretty miserable. Daniel made me curl up on the couch for the day while he went in search of an all natural remedy that I'd read about - clove oil. Let me tell you, that stuff is heaven sent. My mouth tasted like an old fashioned Christmas, but it killed the pain.

Moving on...

We were able to spend Sunday afternoon working in the farmhouse, but we were not able to finish up all of the destruction as we had hoped. Bryan and Daniel worked on taking out the living room chimney, which turned out to be an all-day ordeal. There was a support post at every corner of the chimney. Once the plaster was removed, they had to chip through another layer of cement-like rock to even get to the chimney.

From there it was take the bricks out one by one. We're keeping all of the bricks that are still in one piece and disposing of the rest; we'd like to make a fire pit or BBQ out of them someday and we thought that it would be neat if we could use the original fireplace bricks.

One down, one to go...

The men weren't able to completely destroy the dining room fireplace before we had to wrap up for the day, but it is almost gone. There was a ridiculous amount of dust and dirt and loose brick in this one. I'm really glad that we didn't want to keep this fireplace because it would have needed to be completely redone.

On a side note, once this fireplace is gone, we plan on putting a picture window on this wall. The dining room currently has one window that looks out on the porch and down the road, but it doesn't let in enough light to suit my taste. The picture window would look out over the backyard, which is one of the best features of this place, and I want to display it!

My absolute favorite part of the day was the three hours that I got to spend in the attic sucking out the remaining insulation with a shop vac. I couldn't stand up straight, I kept hitting my head on the nails sticking out of the roof and to put the cherry on the ice cream sundae that was my afternoon, the darn shop vac kept plugging up. Every few minutes I would have to climb out of the attic, down a ladder, pull the 40 feet of vacuum hose down and try to figure out where it was blocked. Words that I would normally never say kept coming out of my mouth. I wasn't even able to finish the vary back section, but at that point, I really didn't care one bit. We'll put some plywood over the rafters to make a floor up there and use it for storage. No one will care whether or not I was able to get the rest of it out or not.

We have some exciting stuff happening this week while we're in Pittsburgh. We've got someone coming with an excavator to pull up the concrete sidewalk that has broken and shifted over the years. They are also going to pull out the stump of the tree that grew into the side of the barn so that we will be able to fix the foundation. Another guy is coming to give us a quote on putting up all of the drywall in the house, AND he will be starting on our downstairs bathroom! Dad sent us a picture last night of the work that had been done so far with the bathroom.

It's being build right off of the living room. It's small, so we probably won't make it a full bathroom, but it will be awesome anyway. After growing up in a family of six people that all shared one bathroom, I'm just happy that we'll have another!