Yard Sale

On June 7th and 8th we will be have a giant YARD SALE at Toad Hall. But not your average sale. We will start with the architectural salvage and antiques that the prior owner had stored inside the Horner House. Added to that will be some additional architectural salvage, antiques, and other high end items. 

As we get closer to the date we'll have more details and more and better pictures. For now here's a brief look at what's in store:

The picture is a bit blurry, but we have a number of radiators and they are engraved.

 The arched window is a storm window for Toad Hall and will not be sold, but the rest of the panes of glass are all going to be available.  

A lovely claw foot tub!

 This is an old stove. We have stoves of several ages.

We hope to see you all on the 7th & 8th!

To Mow or Not to Mow...

When I was a child we called our parents Mom and Dad. But we were lucky children whose parents read to them often, and one of my favorites was the Bernstein Bears. Because of that I took to calling my own father Papa Bear which I have done, on occasion, all of my life. Then, when my niece came along, she chose Papa as the designator for my Dad, and I began calling him Papa more often than not.

Well, Papa came over yesterday with his lovely big Dixie Chopper to mow my yards for me. Eric and I are very grateful to him for bringing it over every other week all summer long and keeping our yards mowed for us. Unfortunately, his lovely Chopper had a bit of a mishap and broke a belt. Now the yard looks like it has half a Mohawk, but hey, we’re not winning any beauty pageants any time soon anyway.

From this angle it is hard to see, but the yard in front of the Bungalow is done and there are a couple of stripes on the utility strip clean, but most of the yard is still overgrown.

On another note, we had to have Lee’s Complete Drain Service back out. The main line backed up again, just a week after the first experience. They came out on a Saturday morning, early and got us working again. Our current water use is extremely low and there is some problem with the main line where it runs under the house. So, since Lee’s doesn’t have a camera to see what the exact issue is we have to increase our water use.

Spring has hit with and we are back to long days and longer to do lists. More soon!

-Amanda 

Well, I had to leave to meet someone to do some work at the BG house before I could upload the picture and post this. And while I was gone Papa fixed his Chopper and snuck in and mowed. So at least that part is done! The trimming still needs to be done, but with the spotty weather this week it might be a few days before we we get completely cleaned up.

   

Crazy Days

Things always seem to be a bit crazy around here, I guess we really can't expect anything less than that with the having our own business and owning multiple houses. But sometimes the crazy ramps up to new heights. A few weeks ago the doctors changed several of my medicines again and they will continue to change dosage for another few weeks. This wouldn't even be worth mentioning, but there have been a lot of side effects that are adding to my "crazy" and taking away whole days that would be better spent rehabbing Toad Hall. 

But as far as just packing it in the complications go, I think today stands out highly memorable. First,we had Lee's Complete Drain Service pay us a visit. He did a good job and charged less than the last time we had one of the larger National companies out to our house in Beech Grove. What was the problem? The main line (drain line that runs out to the sewer) was clogged. This wasn't a huge surprise as when we got the house the drain was running slow. Dad ran a snake down it then and got it running normally, but we knew that it could possibly clog in the future. Well, the future was today. Or rather, late last night.

 If you look very closely, you can see the animal on the eave of the house.

We also had another company pay us a visit today. That was Admiral Wildlife Services. They came to because I want to evict Bandit. Who's Bandit? The raccoon that's taken up residence in the eave of porch. Kirk checked out the attic to make sure that Bandit has been getting in, and there is no evidence that he has, so that was good news. Now we have a trap waiting for him, lined with marshmallows, covering his eviction papers, and once he's caught Kirk will find him a nice new home.

Meet Bandit. A very unwelcome guest.

Then, the real work begins. We will need to rip off the broken vinyl soffit, put up a plywood layer and then put up a new layer of vinyl. This will keep any of Bandit's friends from taking over his old home. And there are several other spots where the soffit is missing or broken that need to be repaired in the same manner. We were also told that we need to get a chimney cap and a cover over the attic vent as there is evidence in the attic that squirrels have gotten in through the vent before and we've had prior experience (very costly birds) with not having a chimney cap.

Bandit's new temporary home.

So today was a bit wild and stinky and registered very high on the crazy meter, but hey, the houses are still standing and the only animals inside tonight are supposed to be here.

  

Another Kitchen Surprise

The kitchen in the Bungalow has been an ongoing project. Our current goal is an interim state that will allow us to change our focus to the upstairs and come back to the finish work on the kitchen once we are fully moved. Between catching colds, the snow complicating outdoor work for the business, and having to clean the kitchen out before each time we work in there, it has been a slow process. (No matter how hard I try to keep it clean and empty, things like the coffee marker, bottles of cooking oil, and dog pans all tend to migrate back in there.) We are finally to the cabinet painting stage and so I started in on the old upper cabinets, the only ones that we kept, a couple of weeks ago.

The first thing that needed to be done was to remove the contact paper from the shelves. I had been avoiding starting on this because I had expected it to be an epic battle, but I was very pleasantly surprised to find that the glue was old and not holding very well. Then came the shock. As I was removing the paper from the bottom shelf of the center cabinet I found that it was stuck to a piece of cardboard. What in the world were these people thinking? So after yelling at the cabinet for a few minutes and getting Eric’s attention, he came over to see what the problem was.

That was when he pointed out to me that the cardboard had a purpose. It had been used to cover the large hole cut in the bottom of the cabinet. What? Seriously!?! Yes. Seriously. It looks like it was possibly used for the flue of a stove or something like that at some point. In all the time that we had been dealing with the cabinets we had never noticed the hole, as it could only be seen from the underside of the cabinet.  If we had seen it, we would have just ripped out those cabinets and replaced them when we replaced all of the others.

Here is the cabinet with the cardboard pulled up.

A closer shot of the partially scraped up cardboard.

This picture is from the underside of the cabinet. It's not very good and doesn't show the entire whole in the cabinet, but you get the idea.

For now Eric is going to cut a piece of masonite to fit in the bottom of the cabinet and it will become another “live with it.” Eventually we will probably replace these cabinets so that they match everything else in the kitchen, but for now I just want the kitchen done. As long as my dishes don’t fall out of the cabinet and it’s not all that noticeable, I am going to just move on. So I keep dreaming about the day that I can create my perfect kitchen in Toad Hall, and to appreciate the hard work that has been done to make the Bungalow not just livable, but nice too, and be happy with the blessings I have been given, hole in the cabinet or not.

Snow Talk, Saved for a Rainy Sping Afternoon

January and February were a way too snowy and cold a start to our life in the Bungalow. With every move, every new home, you will have surprises, and the Bungalow has been no different. In Beech Grove we did not have a driveway, only street parking, so while we were used to having to to take care of a sidewalk when it snows, digging around a couple of cars on the street is very different than having a whole driveway.

So knowing that I'm not physically up to dealing with this and Eric has too much on his plate this winter our options were limited. At some point I will take the time to look into purchasing a snow blower, but since we no longer have a garage to store it in, this didn't seem to be the time, so I looked around and hired someone. Unfortunately he seems to have gone out of business. Which is a real shame for him considering how much snow we've had this winter. That's okay, though, I know there are a lot of really good and reputable companies out there.

So, driveways equal more work. That's not much of a surprise. What was a big surprise for me was that living on a main drag that gets plowed regularly has a down side. (I really didn't think that there could be such a thing.) When you take the time to clean your driveway and the plow driver then plows the street, he piles snow at the end of your freshly cleared driveway. But see, I learned the hard way that this can be a real problem.

When you are home, you have to go to the end of the drive and shovel all of that away BEFORE you try and leave. Or you will get stuck half in and half out of the drive. When you live on Emerson Avenue and it is rush hour this is a bad thing. Fortunately there are very kind people that live in my neighborhood (I don't know if they were from Christan Park or Irvington) who stopped to dig me out of a very embarrassing and  somewhat dangerous situation. I didn't get their names, but I am still so very thankful to them!

I took this picture in the back yard when they day before the first polar vortex.

And then there is the other, harder to solve problem, of when the plows come by while you are gone. Eric did okay in the 4x4, but I didn't fair so well in the Taurus. And, yes, I did get it stuck trying to get in to the driveway as well. Fortunately Eric was home to deal with it and traffic was much lighter at that point. But I never would have thought that I'd ever say a bad word about a plow having come through. But, if that's the biggest problem that I have to solve this year, I think that we're doing pretty good.

-Amanda

Yet Another Break In

I had planned to post a new blog early last Thursday, but I got sidetracked and didn’t get it out. Eric and I had some things to do that evening, so I decided that I would post it after we got home. Unfortunately our evening got entirely hijacked. We were just over in Beech Grove when my phone rang. It was FE Moran (our alarm company) telling us that the alarm in Toad Hall had been triggered.

While we are always vigilant when the alarm rings, we’ve only had false alarms at Toad Hall lately (apparently due to falling plaster or the occasional visiting cat) so we try not worry too much about it, and check the exterior of Toad Hall when we return just to make sure. But for some reason this one was bothering me. Eric and I hopped in the car and headed home. When we arrived we found that the boards over the bay window on the South side of the house were all pulled up. Fortunately someone saw a car pulling out of the driveway and got a license plate number. So at the very least IMPD has a person of interest to track down. :D

And I have to say, IMPD has been great. Not only did the officer get here pretty quickly and take it very seriously, he put out a request for extra patrols near our property. And he even warned us that we shouldn’t worry if we see an officer parked in front of the house. That’s part of what they will be doing on those patrols. All I can say is that I’m really impressed with how concerned the officer was and how they are handling this.

Eric is securing the bay window opening after the break in.

So, instead of what we had planned for the evening, which included Eric doing some more painting in the Bungalow, he spent his available time securing Toad Hall. We had one window board that had been blown down that needed put back up and he had to repair the damage from the break in. 

The West Wing is in sad shape. One of boards covering a window came down, and Eric re-secured it while dealing with the break in.

 All secure and extra to get through if they try again.

But now we are secure again, and hoping that people will finally believe the alarm company signs. And... since the city won’t let us put up a six foot fence topped with razor wire I’m seriously considering erecting the largest sign they will allow. Maybe something like, “No, it’s not abandoned and it doesn’t have electricity, but thanks to modern technology we DO have an alarm. If you wish to test our honesty, please be nice to the IMPD officers as you will be spending quite a bit of time in their company.”

-Amanda

March Update

Once again time has flown by us and it’s been awhile since we have posted. There are a number of things that have contributed to this, but I’m just going to hit a few of the highlights. The first is that the Bungalow is still a work in progress and that is causing an overall daily time drain. We still don’t have a working shower and the washer and dryer are not hooked up yet. This means that we have to transport all of our laundry to either Beech Grove or the office and do the same for showering.

The kitchen is still incomplete, so that means storing everything in the dining room and having to haul it back and forth to use it. Every week it gets a little better. In the past four weeks we’ve gotten the dishwasher installed, the waterline for the ice maker run, the microwave moved over (but not hung yet), and the walls and ceiling in the kitchen painted. We still have to paint all of the cabinets and trim, hang three cabinets and the microwave, and lay a floor covering. Also, while we have put a new pane in the boarded kitchen window we found that the trim strips that held the pane in place had been glued down instead of nailed. We still need to replace all of those, as the old pieces were destroyed in the removal process.

Out of the million and one pictures that we have taken of the houses this was the only picture of what the kitchen window used to look like! The cabinets have been removed and you can see the crossbar that was used as part of the boarding up of this window.

Here is the window without a board! One step at a time...

We have made quite a bit of progress on the Bungalow and that gets us one step closer to being able to focus all of our energy on Toad Hall. But living in a construction zone causes a lot of extra work on a daily basis. Things like having to hand wash all of the dishes before the dishwasher got up and running and having to haul everything in and out of the kitchen to cook dinner. Don’t get me wrong; this isn’t a complaint. We are in love with the Bungalow and it’s all worth it. These things are just slowing us down a bit and now that we live right next door to Toad Hall, it’s really hard not to be impatient to get back to work on it!

One of the other complications has been my health. Back in late November the doctors at the Mayo Clinic ordered more tests for me to have done when I came home. That led to more tests and doctor’s appointments, and eventually to what we were thrilled to find out was an incorrect diagnosis. But we spent about a month looking at the possibility of a rather bleak future. While we don’t have any answers, and I’m still very limited in what I can do, things are currently stable, and that’s a much better place than I was at this time last year. And while I have yet more tests and appointments, I have a group of some of the best doctors in the country and they haven’t given up hope that we’ll find the answers and get me back to normal. (Or as normal as I ever was. :D)

There’s one other thing that has greatly affected our available time in the past few weeks. Last weekend my brother turned 41 and we had a pitch in dinner and bonfire to celebrate. Cleaning, cooking, moving the fire pit and grill, and rearranging for the party took up quite a bit of time. But it was really wonderful to be able to have his friends and our family all gather together. The Bungalow has tons of space and a great atmosphere. And while we would have moved in here even if it were small and unhappy, it is such a great thing that we can be right next door to Toad. The Bungalow is a great house in its own right, and even with all of the complications, it’s a joy to be here.