We had an extremely productive weekend at the Sullivan house. Our friend Eric Ryder came to help and we got two solid days of work done. A lot of progress was made on the basement (with still a ton left to do), the kitchen was stripped down the rest of the way, all four floors of the back staircase was cleaned, we replaced the security floodlights in the backyard, and more.

Another friend Ryan Perry came by to help Saturday, and together we engineered a way to get the two broken 400-pound radiators down to the first floor. It required a a 10 foot 2×8 board, a 4 foot 4×4 board, and a lot of grunting, but we got them down with only trivial damage to the front staircase and a pinched finger. That no one broken a bone or tore anything is a miracle.

We got a second electric radiator and put it in the dining room and got the temperature up several degrees in there by closing the doors. Unfortunately we can’t have two in the room – it blows the circuit.

We figured out the configuration for the rest of the kitchen cabinets awaiting installation, and started thinking about counter tops. This of course exposes my fatal weakness: designing how finished rooms will look. I just have too much in my head to get the house together without deciding how it’s going to look. The very thought of deciding how to light a room or combing thru cabinet hardware exhausts me. This would be fine if I wasn’t so cursedly opinionated about it and didn’t want to just cede all decision-making about it. My solution for now is to delay decisions (it works better than you might think).

As we were measuring cabinets, I thought about the gap required for the dishwasher and went to measure it… and realized it was gone. It turns out that’s what they were after in the second burglary that befuddled us so badly (they opened both front doors to leave but we couldn’t identify anything that was taken). Because we’d stopped using the dishwasher as a doorstop, it basically became “invisible” to us since it was useless at the moment.

Brian and I were both dumbfounded neither of us noticed until that moment. Needless to say, our feelings of empathy dissolved. This was an organized heist that happened right out our front door that no one noticed. So far, our new prevention methods have kept anyone else out. This week we’re reinforcing and repairing the rest of the exterior doors.

Last week, we found out that code requires considerably more clearance beside the toilet than we currently have in the half-finished full bathroom. Whoever designed the layout of that room was a lazy twit. Our best option, from my perspective, is to move the toilet to the other side of the room.

Unfortunately, the additional plumbing required for that will not be fun (the waste pipe must traverse two floor studs and several lines must be moved). The tub will still need to be moved a few inches as well so the drain doesn’t sit directly over a stud. I’m waiting to see how much head-shaking Andy does when I run this idea by him; definitely not looking forward to the costs this will add, but this is definitely a do-it-now-or-forever-be-silent fix.

Overall, it was a positive weekend. The setbacks of the past week were small by comparison. We filled a fourth Bagster with garbage and are well on our way to filling the fifth. Onward and upward, as our date for move-in draws just a little closer.