Work Weeks 14 & 15: Two for Twosday

Hey, I’m back! My weekly post turned into a fortnightly post this time around. It’s because my amazing and incredible father passed away after a long, valiant battle with cancer. Man, do I hate cancer. I’ve been struggling a lot with what to say on here, and how much to say, but I’m going to try not to overthink it. I will tell you that my dad was awesome and he used to joke that Kevin and I started with “a couple of backpacks” and he was proud of how far we’ve come, and he thought the name Pigeon Manor was hilarious and I will miss him forever and ever. 

With all that going on, the progress here is a bit of a blur to me, to be honest. There has been lots of progress though! It’s mostly the invisible kind, like wiring and plumbing. Wall studs are finally going back up, so a finish date of April for our apartment is actually looking achievable! Here are some highlights.

Remember how there was a giant safe and the outbuilding was taken down around it because we couldn’t move it because it weighed 8 million pounds and was positioned on a rotting floor over a basement hovering directly above where our septic line goes? No? Oh, well I do. It was a whole thing. That first beautiful day last week, Dennis showed up with this crazy fire-shooting saw, and straight up just ripped the sucker up! Boom! No problem, no more safe (honestly, the fact that it was literally a safe was the only safe thing happening!), and they were able to finally cover the rotting floor with a tarp so it stops snowing and raining directly into the basement. Now we’re down to more of a slow, seeping kind of basement flooding. Thanks, Dennis!

Then there was this other time where a bat woke up in the basement and freaked out and wound up in a bucket for a while, and then I took him to the Carbon County Environmental Center where they re-hydrated him and released him. I learned he is a Big Brown Bat, and that you should never ever touch a bat because they could be rabid, and also they gave me a whole lovely informational packet on them, but my nephew was interested in it, so I left it with him and I will learn more about bats another time. But anytime it’s over 40 degrees, it is warm enough for bats to wake up from hibernation and eat bugs! And bats are awesome and lots are endangered, so don’t hurt them. Here our bat is, all sad and thirsty, before he was happy and hydrated and free!

And finally, here is my personal most exciting project of the week. I got to refinish the bathtub we brought down from the third floor! It was manufactured in 1916, and I got to thinking about a talk I had with Dan Finsel this summer. He was telling me about how the military used to paint boats with optical illusions, so I finally looked it up and learned all about the incredible world of World War I dazzle camouflage, and how all the ships were painted crazy to help confuse German U-Boats so their torpedoes would miss. It’s a really bonkers world to learn about! Here is the wikipedia page as an introduction.

Naturally, it made me decide I needed my very own dazzleship tub. So I played around and came up with this design, based on a painting by Edward Wadsworth called “Dazzle-ships in Dry Dock at Liverpool”. Fun fact: I had to sketch and paint it upside-down. I scrubbed and spray painted the clawfeet too. It was really exciting to see it right side up! Amazing to think that a design like this could be historically accurate, right? Here are some before and afters:

I’m thrilled with how it turned out, and I’m looking forward to incorporating more into the bathroom, once it has walls and stuff! Well that’s it for now, I look forward to having more to share with you next week. Bon voyage!