Day One-eighty-one: cleaning house

Before getting to the big stuff, here's a small update on a problem mentioned the other day. We had our plumber return to replace an outside faucet that was broken and leaking in the wall whenever we turned it on. Here are the old and new faucets. One lesson is that "frost free" faucets can crack like any other.

Six months into owning the house we're getting to projects that we thought we might tackle at the six month mark. (Of course, we thought we'd have all the month 1, month 2, etc. projects done by now.) Behind the sizable garage is a 12x12 metal shed. Both previous owners used the garage for working, so that may have necessitated the shed for things that you might otherwise have kept in the garage (e.g. garbage cans). Worse, though, was the bounty of firewood that surrounded the shed on three sides and used to feed the iron beast that lived in the basement and heated the house for decades. The previous owner was famous for taking fallen trees off the hands of neighbors, firewood almost literally falling into his hands.

So here's what the shed/woodpile looked like at 8am on Saturday. The crud you see inside the shed was mostly of our doing, the detritus of our demolition projects in the basement and efforts to clean out the garage attic (the light, weightlifting bench, and fan you can see).

Two and sometimes four people from a local haul-away company spent the next nine hours hauling away all this trash. The firewood alone filled 2.5 trucks and all the other junk filled another truck. Fortunately we all saved some dump fees when a neighbor across the street asked if he could have some of the wood. He got one truck's worth of the better (newer) wood. Buried deep was wood so rotten it fell apart in people's hands. Buried even deeper was a more unpleasant surprise--a nest of a dozen baby rats. Let's just say that we declined the offer by one of the more tender-hearted people to keep and raise the rats. By the end of the day all that remained was the metal from the shed that they'll take away today.

We took advantage of the haul-away guys being around to clean out the garage. It's a little hard to see from this dated photo, but one side was lined with shelves and a huge drawer/cabinet piece took up the whole back. 

The garage is pretty large so we didn't need to remove these items for additional storage, but the smell of musty mold/mildew coming off these things was pretty overpowering. With the position of the garage and studio, any time the garage opened it flooded the house with this odor. No longer. We did most of this with our trusty toolbox tools, but the haul-away guys were nice enough to let us borrow a sledgehammer and pry bar to tackle a couple of the bigger tasks.