Sweet Home

I have been a home-owner (or HOMO-ner, as brother 2 puts it) for a couple of weeks now, and the house is beginning to reveal its secrets. OK, maybe not so much "revealed" as pried out. MacGyver has the demolition of the bathroom well under way. He's done such a good job that you probably wouldn't think that it was ever a bathroom.

The first secret he discovered is the bathroom is nine years younger than the house, evidenced by the dates scrawled onto a board in the wall he tore out. Another wall came down, and he found 13 inches of dead space. An inspection of what remained revealed that the windows in the mud room are load-bearing. My favorite bit is when he found an 8'x8'x14' cistern under the floor, half full of water. He's going to install a pump and we can water the FutureGarden with it.

Also? There's a railroad spike under the basement stairs holding them level, there's a screw jack where some foundation should be, the stove hits three junction boxes before it meets the breaker box, there's asbestos tile under two layers of linoleum in the kitchen, and some of the walls had thousands of mouse bones inside. Lovely!

With luck, we will move in before November, when our five bedroom house has a toilet.