...End Intermission

So we've had the "technical difficulties" post up for the past couple of months, but we really can't blame all of our inactivity on that.  I wish I could say that we've just been doing so much on the house that we've been too exhausted to post, but that has not been the case.   In reality, we just haven't gotten very much done - so there hasn't been much to tell.  There have been a number of reasons for this - beginning with one crazy Memorial Day weekend (the week before our old laptop kicked the bucket).

We made a little discovery on Memorial Day -  we have wallpaper in the dining room and parlor.  How did we discover this?  - you might ask...by removing the switch-plates in preparation for painting, naturally.  Tom unscrewed the switch-plate in the dining room and, instead of popping off, it ripped off with a three-foot long section of wallpaper.  That is how the day that Tom and I were finally going to start priming the downstairs of our house with our good friend Dave turned into a day of scraping wallpaper instead.  Queue intermission music (and put it on repeat).

The silver lining to finding the wallpaper is that the 'roman bathouse' look that part of the first floor of our house has taken is a decided improvement over brown paint.  That is, in addition to the reality that peeling 80-ish year old wallpaper off can be remarkably satisfying (sometimes).  Unfortunately, this peeling project is still underway over three months later (it's only two rooms - it shouldn't take this long).  Thankfully, it has picked up in the last month.

What you can see here is about a third of what we got scraped over the course of three months:

There were some things that slowed us down, though.  A big one was the heat.  The week surrounding the 4th of July was when the first heat wave hit and, coincidentally, when we got our first major house guests - our sister-in-law and three rambunctious boys - and two much smaller, furry longer term guests - their cats Jack and Maya.  As you can see below, we had a great time with them...

(This is the intermission in the blog post that is probably properly proportioned to the one we took this summer from working on our house)

We soaked up the air conditioning at the Franklin Institute while Andrew was still here (unfortunately, I don't have any pictures).

We hit up the local kiddie pool (free - at the park right around the corner - awesome!):

I had to put this in because it is so stinking cute.

We went to the playground:

and, on the 4th, we joined in the festivities at our local fire station around the corner.  We joined the parade for about twenty feet,

then pulled over to watch all of the fire trucks from the nearby townships go by.  This is just a few of them, there had to have been 15-20 trucks and ambulances.  After our parade, all but a couple from our own fire house drove on to the next town over for the next parade.

After the parade, we hung out at the fire house and munched on soft pretzels, popcorn, hot dogs and other Philly delicacies.  The big finish for our neighborhood 4th of July celebration was this:

First came the candy,

then peanuts

They handed out candy and peanuts to the little kids to keep them from getting pelted (or trampled).

It was a fun morning, but it did get really hot.  When we got back, Tom took care of that (at least for the little guys).

(end intermission)

..... but those were the fun parts between sitting in our un-air conditioned house trying to move as little as possible because it was still 90 degrees and some insane percentage of humidity inside.  So, anyway, our first obstacle in getting very little done one our house this summer was the heat.

The other big thing that slowed us down for a while was my sheer exhaustion brought on by the little kiddo we have heading our way.  I knew I was really tired at the time, but it wasn't until I rolled into the second trimester and my energy came back over a one week period that I realized just how useless I had been.  We are extraordinarily excited about the little one who will be joining our family at the end of January - we just have a lot more work to do before then.

Sweaty, tired and happy the night we found out...

We have gotten more done since my energy returned, but we've had other things like a 2 week vacation, visits to and from family, a concert in Central Park to go to and fall weekend work commitments that have slowed us down (okay - most of those were our own doing and lots of fun).

We are on the verge, though. Serious progress is right around the corner (and this time, it's for real) : )