Happy Holidays! Quite a bit went on around here, house-related and non-house related, so I figured I’d end the year with one last post about the final two weeks. In the non-house related department, I am very proud and excited to say that last week, we went down to philly to watch Amarynth graduate from Temple! Yessss! So that was super duper awesome.  Last week we did a fun music thing too! We played a really great Christmas-Ish Show at the Mauch Chunk Opera House as a Mauch Chunk Community Foundation fundraiser for the Valor Clinic. I believe we raised over $2000! Tin Bird Choir was incredible, and Joe Hiatt’s stories are always my favorite. It was festive for sure, and had just the right amount of people to make it feel like a party, but everyone was spread out enough to feel safe. For Christmas itself, all the kids came home, so we had a fun christmas eve campout in our apartment. But you don’t want to know about what we got for Christmas, right? You want to know about the house! So let’s get back to it! 

The house stuff really hit some big milestones! The most prominent one was the outbuilding coming down! This two story timber frame outbuilding was most likely very beautiful. It was original to the house, so it is from 1860. When the right side of the building was the first dry goods and hardware store in all of East Mauch Chunk, this would have been the back storage room where either the inventory was kept, or there were additional shelves of items for sale. Unfortunately, we’ll never really know. What we do know is that it formerly had two stories, and the walls were plaster. 

Unfortunately, the roof had deteriorated so much that the second story had come down. The entire thing was being held together with a series of cables and scaffolding. It was tricky to determine exactly how to safely take it down, but eventually Kevin and Max got a good start with removing quite a bit of the roof. The next day, Kevin and Guy went at it with a ladder, a sawzall, and some strategic cuts and pulls. It took all day, but right before sunset, they managed to get both the front and the east side down. On the third day, it took about 10 minutes to get the final west wall down, and Guy and Zach have been on clean-up and clear-out duty ever since, saving as much as the valuable old wood as possible. The planks are impressive-some of them are almost two feet wide! I’m super glad they are able to save some.  Amazing difference, right!?

Guy also sealed up the house doors that led to the outbuilding for now, and he and Kevin both took turns replacing some broken windows. Troy came back and helped to further seal up the new dormers in a few places where rain was sneaking in, and so I am happy to report we are down to only one final leak! Once the roof on the two story bay/bump-out on the east side gets replaced, we will be DRY! Hooray! 

Speaking of the roof:  Man oh man, am I excited to reveal the plans we came up with for that!!  But a lady needs her secrets, so you’ll just have to wait and see how freaking cool it looks in the coming months! But here’s a hint: it comes from a quarry.

For me, the inside work had some major breakthroughs as well, even quite literally! Ethan and I managed to pop the lock on the back door to our apartment, so we now have two entrances and exits. Yay! We even got to try to kick the door down. It didn’t work, but I have to admit, it was fun to feel like a bunch of tough guys. Eventually the crow bar was the thing that got us through, with extremely minimal damage, too! Hooray for that!

But the most exciting house-related thing to happen for me personally? I GOT RID OF THE FURNITURE!! Turns out, the easiest and most effective method is to put it on the curb with a free sign. No muss, no fuss! Whew! Now that it’s out of the way, I could finally start sorting through the rest of the stuff! I got a pretty good headstart on putting the items that we’re keeping together, but there is still plenty to sort. It’s looking pretty sharp in there though!

The other satisfying job I had was removing all the remaining drop ceilings from the second floor. They were nasty, and it already feels way better in those rooms! The only really weird part was when an old hatched pigeon egg fell out at me, which is a really freaky kind of thing to happen when you’re on the second floor of a three story building, but all is well. I kept expecting a dead bird to fall down on me, and none did, so that’s good at least! I think we’ve finally run out of those! And in case you’re wondering? Yes, that’s a common thing around here. We didn’t call it Pigeon Manor for nothing! I think the total stands at 8 dead pigeons. We found two mummified voles as well. If the count was higher than that, I could have named the place Vole-halla! I’m still kind of sad I didn’t, but I already own pigeonmanor.com, so it may as well stay Pigeon Manor. 

Well that’s it for the end of year dispatch! I hope your year wraps up with at least most of the things you wanted accomplished completed, and I hope next year is even better for you!