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Tuesday, August 4, 2009

Tear Outs and Plumbing and New Tricks, Oh My!

It's been quite the week for us here in Champaign. We've been working for the past couple weeks on tearing out the two rooms upstairs, and we're making good progress on that front. We aren't back in an actual bed upstairs yet, but we're close. The plan was to be back in there by Sunday or Monday night, but as usual, life intervened.

When my parents were here a few weeks ago, we discovered a leak in the ceiling of the pantry. Luckily, our homeowner's warranty that the sellers bought for us when we got the house covers plumbing leaks, so we had a plumber out to look at it. It turned out that there was a leak in the drain pipe coming out of the bathroom, and whenever we used the sink or toilet it let water into the ceiling. He told us that he could fix the problem, but it would take all day, so he arranged to come by last Wednesday to get it taken care of. Well, it turned out to be a bigger project than he had anticipated because when the house was built, all of the plumbing was put in the subfloor, so it's kind of hard to get to without ripping out the whole floor. He was able to fix the problem by diverting the drain into an unused drain pipe in the kitchen. So it was a messy, hard work day, but we thought it was taken care of.

Before:
Plumbing Before

During:
Plumbing During

After:
Plumbing After

So that worked for a couple of days, until we gave Abby a bath on Sunday night. Monday morning we woke up to a basement full of water. Okay, maybe "full" is a bit of an overstatement, but we clearly had a pretty big leak that left water in huge puddles all over the laundry room and bathroom down there. The logical assumption was that it had something to do with the plumbing we had just fixed, so Adam spent Monday and Tuesday nights trying to find where the leak was coming from. He had the plumber come back today, and they eventually found the problem.

The Problem:
A Drain to Nowhere

The kitchen sink was originally along the same wall as the pantry, and it had used the drain pipe that we diverted the bathroom drainage into. But when whoever moved the sink moved it, they didn't cap off the sink drain, so when we pushed a large amount of water at once, like from draining a bath, it came shooting straight out of that pipe and into the wall. So Adam's at Home Depot right now getting a cap to cover that, and then hopefully our plumbing problems will be over. Keep your fingers crossed for us!

On the Abby front, she's picked up lots of new tricks lately. We didn't get any pictures of this, but one of her new favorite things is to blow her nose. She'll hold a tissue or napkin up to her face and blow out her nose, then run over to her stuffed animals, or Lucy, or Adam or me, and hold it up to our face and blow out her nose. Jenn, you'd better learn how to blow your nose pretty soon. Your one year old niece is one up on you.

Abby's also decided that either walking or crawling backwards is just hilarious, so she'll get into a mood and just walk backwards all around the house. I think it must be in her genes - she's a little tour guide in training! She does pretty well with it. She's not as fast as when she walks forward, but she hardly ever runs into anything or falls down.





She's also a big fan of giving her stuffed animals rides on any of our furniture that moves. So she'll push them back and forth on the ottoman, or spin them around on the patio chairs. The other day I was sitting in the chair, and she decided to give me a ride, too.



She's a big fan of that porch. She likes to play peek-a-boo around the door when you're out on the porch and she's inside.

Peekaboo!

She also likes to play under the table that we have out there. It's a good size for a little one to get underneath and poke all the little parts that stick out!

UnderTable

Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Demolition

Since we have the dumpster anyway from replacing the garage roof we decided to go ahead and tear out two rooms upstairs that we'd like to remodel. One will be Abby's room when Astronaut arrives and the other is our room.

It's been a huge mess but we have just about all the plaster knocked down, and we're getting close cleaning it all up. We still need to take down the lath, and potentially remove the carpet. Since Wednesday is our last day with the dumpster we've been working several hours a night to finish up.

We uncovered some water damage in the ceiling of Abby's new room that clearly had been covered very recently. At least the previous owners were the type of people who did things right. We also discovered, perhaps not surprisingly, that our exterior walls are completely un-insulated. Maybe now we can start to make a little dent in those winter heating bills.


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Sunday, July 26, 2009

Tickle Tickle!

Abby loves to be tickled, and recently she's decided that her stuffed animals like it too.

Wednesday, July 22, 2009

A Fun Week

Abby got to see all of her grandparents this past week, so she had lots of fun with all the extra attention. My parents spent a week in Springfield for their vacation and stopped by our house on their way back home. They brought Abby a souvenier - Pig-a-Boo! - a farmyard peek-a-boo book that she LOVES. Every page has a different animal hiding under a flap that you lift up and say "neigh-a-boo" or "baa-a-boo" or whatever that animal's noise is, plus it's a touch and feel book, so she has lots of fun touching all the different animals. We probably spend at least 20 minutes every morning reading it, and she comes back to it throughout the day. It's her new favorite!

We also took a picnic lunch to Allerton Park. I think Dad has more pictures of it, but I didn't take too many so here's what we have. Mom met some people up in the gazebo in the Fu Dog Garden (where we got married!) who told her a ghost story associated with that garden. Apparently Robert Allerton had been married twice, and when his second wife found out that she was number two, she went up to the top of the gazebo and threw herself off. Now her ghost haunts the gazebo. I don't think she showed up in any of our wedding pictures, but we'll have to go back and check.

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On Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, Adam and his dad tore off, repaired, and replaced the roof on our garage. It ended up being a lot more work than they had originally thought, since there were 4 or 5 layers of shingles and some termite damage that had to be repaired, but by noon on Sunday they were completely finished! Of course, there was still a lot of clean up to do. So many shingles!

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We also took some pictures of Abby standing next to Joshua Giraffe. We had a little bit of trouble, since one of her favorite things to do with Joshua is push him down and yell "Boom!" You can see me trying to keep her from pushing him over long enough to get a picture.

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