Attack of the attic!

As many of you know, I am quite the accident-prone clutz. Always managing to hurt myself in the most unlikely of ways has become the norm for me. However, after almost 4 years of marriage, I think I'm starting to rub off on Ben. :)

Yesterday we were at his brother's house and they were working up in the attic, trying to re-route some cables. Ben is quite tall, and the attic is quite low... guess what happened? Yup, he stood up too fast and in a not-so-roomy part of the attic and bonked his head on a beam. This is what he has to show for it.

Being the manly-man that he is, he refused to be taken to the ER, despite the copious amount of blood dripping down his face. After 2 hours, however, I wore him down and pretty much dragged him kicking and screaming to the inevitable. Five staples and a tetanus shot later we were home again and Ben went to bed with a spliting headache... no pun intended. Next time he goes up there, I'm making him wear a helmet!

Boo on Mondays...

After a terrible weekend resulting from a particularly torturous PT appointment, its is now Monday and I'm still in pain and not a bit closer to being ready for our trip than I was 3 days ago. Oh and did I mention that we have a busted sink in the kitchen that caused us to shut our water off for a while? Yeah... so hopefully today those plumbers will come and fix that so we can once again use our water and get everything ready and packed for our trip! How I wish I had a house elf...
Oh, by the way... everyone see the newly updated and revamped countdown ticker? :)

Here it is!

Ok, so here are some pictures of this whole ordeal... First, we have the hole... there it is in all its smoldering glory!
And here we are pulling up the carpet... that foamy insulation thing was SUCH a pain to rip up because it had been glued down to the floorboard...

Once all the stuff was ripped up and the floorboards scraped cleaned, we proceeded to lay down a layer of mortar and then over that went these cement backerboards. At the seams more mortar was applied and they were secured with some special screws.

Here Ben is skillfully laying down the mortar with his trusty trowel. My job was to place those little white spacers!

Yay for cleaning nasty grout off tiles until 2am!!! Despite my smile, I was really not enjoying this step...
And after all that hard work and so many sleepless night... TADA!!! Here is the finished product!!! That wood floor transition/ trim was cut and stained by Ben as well. Also featured in this picture is Sirius's lovely butt!

Step 4: Make An Even Bigger Mess!

Wow, I thought mortar was messy? Watch out for grout! We started shmearing the stuff all over the tiles last night and what was supposed to be the easiest part turned out to be the hugest pain ever! It doesn't help that it stinks too! Kind of reminded me of the smell of the stuff dentists fill cavities with. Basically you spread it all over and into the spaces between the tiles and then you have to clean it all up (but careful not to wipe off TOO much b/c then it won't fill the gaps right) before it dries and hardens. Man, it was awful... but its done now and curing so we should be able to give it one last clean and then Saturday morning we seal. If all goes well, we'll have our living room back in order by Sunday evening!

Step 3: Stay Up All Night

Ok, so laying tile takes a while... a long while. See, tiles are square but the area you're tiling isn't always that same shape. This creates problems...big problems. Especially when you have to start cutting them into very odd shapes and sizes to fit around a fireplace! Oh , and lets not even get into the noise that a tile-cutter makes as it is scoring through the ceramic... very much like nails scraping down a chalkboard...*cringe* This part took forever.
The next part was actually fun. Ben had to mix up a new batch of mortar (again he neglected to mind his wife and it got all over the walls) and then we started shlopping it down on the backerboard and placing the tiles on top of it. Thankfully someone invented these cool little spacers that you put in between the tiles to keep the grout space even. I had fun putting those down. We worked into the wee hours of the morning though... what a night. Now we have to wait for it to dry and tonight we get started on the grout... I can't wait!

Step 2: Make a Mess

Mortar is messy... very, very messy. Word to the wise, NEVER mix it indoors! I suggested this to Ben, but did he listen? Of course not... so we ended up cleaning nasty sticky grey stuff off many a surface... including pants and shoes. Once that was under control, the fun began. During the day he busied himself measuring and cutting something called backerboard, which is cement gunk held together by this meshy tape stuff. Last night we got to mortar it down to the plywood floor and reinforce with screws and more mortar and that meshy tape. Very exciting, I tell you. It didn't take us very long and then began the long and arduous wait... I think thats the hardest part because we're on a roll and want to keep working, you know? But things have to dry and set, yadda, yadda, yadda. So we wait... but tiling begins TODAY! Too bad I'm here at work while Ben is having all the fun at home. Hmm... maybe I can do some of the grout tomorrow!

Step 1: Destroy Everything!

Who would have guessed that ripping up carpet would be so much fun? If you ever get the chance, you should try it... very entertaining! Thats what we did last night... Ben pulled out this nifty little contraption called a "chalk line" that does just that... draws a line with chalk! You fill it with colored chalk (ours was blue), shake it up, pull the chalk covered string out across the surface you want marked, then SNAP! You pluck it and the chalk line appears on your carpet! Pretty darn tootin' cool, if you ask me. After that, we cut along the line and started ripping it all up! Good way to take out any anger, if there is any hiding in there, by the way...After a bunch of other stuff (that will take too long describe) was done, we were left with a bare plywood floor that would be today's canvas! Ahh, but that's tomorrow's blog! Stay tuned for more details.

DOH! (Part 2)

Oh if you could only see me right now... you can't so I'll take a moment to describe what is transpiring in this moment of utter shame. Remember that lady driving and smacking herself in the head? Yeah, thats me right now! *Smack!* Well, I guess it's been a while since I've come to check on my own blog. My excuse was that my life has been pretty boring as of late... well, until about 4 days ago when we almost burned down the house, but we'll get to that later. So yes, guilty as charged... I , Alex, have been neglectful and caused some major upheaval in the wonderful world of blogs. I will take this moment to publically appologize to my loyal fans (all 2 of them) for keeping them waiting and forcing them to sink as low as commenting on eachother's comments in order to provide some semblance of entertaining quality to my poor blog. (Wow, Clark you should get Suzanne to diagram that atrocity of a run-on sentence!)
Ok, so onto the juicy juiciness... WE ALMOST BURNED OUR HOUSE DOWN! Yah, see thats what I get for complaining about my life being boring and not having anything to blog about! A few days ago we had a big snowstorm and so we were making lots of fires in our lovely fireplace... Well, due to inclement weather, we were too lazy to take our ash bucket outside to dump it and began collecting our ashes in black trash bags... the NOT so Hefty kind... I know you are all shaking your heads here... yeah, that was oh-so-stupid of us, wasn't it? Well, of course one of those times the ashes were not all the way cooled off and were still, in fact, partly embers that had not cooled off entirely. The said ash/embers were placed in the bag and set on the hearth rug (fireproof my behind!) where they slowly but steadily began to melt everything they came in contact with... including the bag, the rug, and our carpet.
Hours later we noticed a distinct stench in the air... Upon further investigation we discovered to our dismay a very big HOLE. Yup, singed all the way down to the subfloor. Not a pretty site! (I'd post a picture but I can't yet... more on that later.)
What now? Well... we play "lets remodel!" We had always wanted to tile the area around the fireplace (for some reason having carpet by the fireplace always struck us as... hmm, unsafe?) and looks like we get to now! Ben is currently cutting and ripping up carpet in preperation for our tiling escapade 2 days from now. It's a long drawn out process it is... and guess what? Since I've been so neglectful, you all get to hear about it all... every step of the way! It will take me a few days to get the pictures up since the computer had to be disconnected and moved, but never fear... in the meanwhile you will be regailed with my descriptions of whats taking place each and every day. Are we excited???