Brr . . . It's Cold Outside

Currently it is -3 degrees Fahrenheit in North Manchester, Indiana. Pretty darn cold by Indiana standards. We are celebrating this evening because we finally have electricity to our house after 3 days of not having it.

Friday morning we woke up to an ice covered world. We had electricity when we got out of bed around 5:45 AM but by 8:00 AM ice and strong winds had knocked lines down, and we were in the dark. The photos we are posting tonight were taken that morning before the power went out. We braved falling ice and branches to go outside to check on our chickens, and turkeys, and take a couple of pictures. We were drove back inside quickly by a fierce shifting wind, and THUNDER! As the next band of freezing rain came through we were treated to a very rare lightening and thunderstorm in December, followed by another set of flashes from transformers shorting out in Liberty Mills.

All in all, we are very lucky, and the only damage we have to deal with so far is fallen tree branches. We are looking forward to warmer temperature later in the week to melt the ice skating rink that is our yard.

As The Dust Settles

This weekend, we finished the demolition part of our living room redo, with the help of Sarah's Dad and Mom. Ryan and Dad took down all of the plaster and blueboard on the west wall of our living room to reveal the tongue-and-groove oak sheeting. As you can see from the spotted photos, it was a very dusty process.

After they got the plaster down, and removed all the nails related to the blueboard and plaster, we tried various ways of cleaning up the oak. We tried a palm sander and a wire wheel brush on the drill to try to clean up the surface of the boards without getting rid of the original saw marks. We found that the wire wheel brush on a drill did the best job of cleaning things up, and is fairly quick. After the holidays we hope to get that done to the whole wall, and clean up the plaster on the rest of the walls to get ready to do some finish work. Dad cleaned up and lightly sanded an part of the wall, and then applied polyurethane to give us some inspiration to work from.

Today, we worked on cleaning up the room, and putting our can't live without it stuff back in the living room (i.e. couch, tv, lamps, etc.). We really like the existing tongue-and-groove oak floors, except that they are a pain in the neck to clean because of all the cracks. We are looking forward to the smoothness of a laminate floor, but will miss the old look of the original floor. But hey, it will always be there under the laminate floor, and maybe 25 years down the road when it's time to redecorate again, we'll have more time, money and patience to revive that old floor :)

After we got everything cleaned up and put back, we put up our Christmas tree that we bought last weekend. It's pretty small, only 5 foot, but more than adequate for a room in transition. We hope to decorate it in the next couple of days.