Update

So it's been awhile since I have posted any info about the house project. As you can imagine, after living in one place for 30 years, there's a _lot_ of stuff to pack/toss/recycle -- and most of it involves making a decision about which route to take. In addition to that, getting ready for the house demolition itself -- moving plants around the place we want to save, salvaging what we can (lighting fixtures, kitchen cabinet hardware, etc.) has taken a lot of time. Then there's setting up our new digs where we will stay for about 6 months while the new house goes up. So there's some whining I am done with. Oh, yeah -- just to keep things even more 'interesting', I've also caught a nice summer cold.

So here are some photos and a few captions to explain things. Call this the "best of" sequence...



OK, this may not look like much. It show where one of our outside sconces was --there were two on each side of the front entry. The dark spot in the center is where the mounting screw went. Notice anything else? Right -- no power. Those things had been there for at least 30 years, and never had any power to them. I thought the electricals weren't hooked up, but they always were just eye candy....



I call this photo "first load". At least of the big stuff -- we had been moving boxes over to Lisa's rental awhile before this went over. I used the tarp because it looked like it might rain (it didn't).


Here is a photo of Lisa sitting next to the temporary power pole that was just installed. Power to the house is slated to be cut on Monday the 26'th.


"Mark and cats". They don't know that they are going to be moving soon. The tiger stripe at my feet is named Rosco, and the Siamese at shoulder height is Nibbles. That's not a name we gave her -- it came from her previous owners. But it is appropriate, given her habit of tasting everything in sight.


Here's a photo of Rosco after his relocation. He doesn't look too upset.

This shows the gas company getting ready to remove the old gas line. There was a bit of confusion on this part of the job. The excavators noted that the gas line was pretty close to the neighbor's water meter, which had not been Located. Our water line was located OK, and the gas line was. So they had to delay the job until the locating service came back out to mark the other water meter. I was inside our house working on stuff when I saw the locator working near our water meter -- apparently, he was just repeating the locate that had been done before. So I went out and told him that he needed to do a locate on the other water meter. It wasn't his fault -- the gas folks gave him OUR address, so what else was he going to do. I'm glad that I was there to straighten things out. Hopefully, this kind of thing won't happen very often during the project....


Asbestos. What a pain. As part of the demolition, we had to get the house evaluated for asbestos. Guess what -- an old house has asbestos flooring in it. Naturally, there is a whole industry devoted to removing it, and it's rife with all kinds of environmental requirements. What you see here is the exhaust side of a high-efficiency HEPA filter. The interior rooms that have the asbestos have been sealed off, and the workers are in bunny suits and respirators. The HEPA filter is used to capture any asbestos dust that is released during the procedure. And this is stuff we walked on for 30 years. In its un-broken form, the flooring is supposed to be OK. Oh, and get this: Asbestos is still used in lots of products. So we have an interesting circular relationship between the installers and removers, many of which do both (maybe on alternate days).


Here's a photo of the "decon" chamber they put over the back entrance to the house. Our bedroom is on the right, and the utility room is straight ahead through the door. Both areas had the old square viny tiles, you know, the kind that were made with asbestos....

That's all the photos for now. More later.