July 29, 2008

Keep a knockin' but you can't come in

What do you get when you mix a 2-year-old's non-stop penchant for getting into things with a 1920's era door lock? Nothing but trouble! My nephew is at that age where he can't seem to be satisfied until he's fiddled with every last little item in the house, including this:

You see those two little buttons on the top? A 2-year-old fiddler's dream! Push one button the other pops out - how much fun is that?! Repeating that 20 times - even more fun! Not paying attention to the last button pushed - not so much fun. When we came back from our walk this morning we couldn't get into the house, and I knew why instantly. Fortunately, there's always the back door.

Once said nephew was down for a nap my 4-year-old niece and I decided to figure out how to get the door unlocked. "Use the key!", she said. Well, that might work if we had one. So we went with the next best thing, a screwdriver. The lock wouldn't budge. So I tried taking off the inside door knob and plate. Really? What did I think that would accomplish? So I went to the computer and started searching. My niece went to her books and started searching. Halfway through Curious George she found a solution. "Really?" I asked. "Yep!", she said. I told her we might need a few more solutions and we should both keep looking. About 10 minutes later I was feeling hopeless and my niece wanted a popsicle. So we consoled ourselves with frozen treats.

Eventually 5 o'clock rolled around and my sister arrived to pick up the kids. I asked if she had any bright ideas. "Do you have a wire coat hanger?", she asked. Yep! And with one quick push our door was once again open. Omigosh, I cannot believe I hadn't thought of that! What kind of policeman's daughter am I? Needless to say I was quite relieved. And guess who snuck right in and started pushing buttons again? Dude! You are so lucky you're so darn cute!

July 24, 2008

Meanwhile, back in the bathroom ...

Wow! I can't believe how long it's been since we lasted posted. Never meant to take that long of a break. But, like many of you out there, we've had quite a busy summer. Of course, very little of that busy-ness has to do with our home. So, for lack of new content I'll wander back to one of our previous posts - the bathroom renovation!

Let's see, when last we left our little bath we were just beginning the deconstruction phase. It looked a little something like this:


And then we started doing this:


Which brought us to this:

That would be the old laundry chute you see above. The useless laundry chute. Useless because it deposits our laundry directly on top of the basement shower. So we ripped that puppy out of there!

Oh, and look at what else we found:


Our house once had a gravity furnace (or at least that's what we suspect). We can only thank our lucky stars we never had to deal with that! I did have a short-lived dream that we could use the existing hole as a possible location for the new laundry chute but we plan on expanding the basement bathroom sometime in the future, so there went that plan. If you take a close look at the wall you can see the original "faux" tile lines underneath all that mastic. Lovely! And why that mastic is even there we'll never know, unless one of the PO's ripped down a different tile job before putting up the existing drywall/tile.

At this point in the deconstruction phase we had high hopes for our first-timer skills. The wall tile came down so easily (granted, when you remove it drywall and all it is quite a breeze). But that was before we attempted to tackle the floor tile. Which I'm not quite ready to talk about....stay tuned!