2/2/13

The perks of do-it-yourself home remodel

Jason and the older girls headed out to Home Depot to participate in the Free Kids Workshop to build a valentines box and Amelie and I went for a run.  Jason and the girls returned with two cute wooden valentine boxes and a wet saw rented to saw the concrete before the jack hammering begins.

Jason un-hooks the plumbing, we moved the few remaining cabinets out of the kitchen space, I fetched the garden hose and Jason preps the saw.  At first Jason tries to drape a tarp over himself while sawing to see if he can contain some of the debri [insert video that I planned to take, but instead had to be the tarp mover]so he is under a large tarp while I am supposed to pull it forward because you know this sawing action through the cement is going to go really fast so I need to pull the tarp for him.

Amelie is laying on the couch, Blythe is playing in the cardboard house, and Jericho is sleeping.  The hose is turned on, the saw is powered up, and he cuts for about 2 minutes, all the time I am thinking this is REALLY REALLY loud and if I thought there was any way he could hear me I would tell him to stop so I could get some ear plugs and re-arrange the children.  Luckily he stops pretty quickly, I relocate Amelie to the bouncy seat outside and put big sister Blythe on baby duty.  It only took 2 minutes for Jason to decide that tarp wasn't containing anything and that my services would be better spent manning the shop vac to suck up the enormous amounts of water that are spraying every which way and essentially flooding the kitchen.

Round 2, no more tarp, Jason and I both have on safety goggles and ear plugs, and the awake children are outside.  We get a good 8 minutes in and all the sudden the shop vac has gone to sleep, I hold it up against my hand to see if suction is still happening, nope, and the water is getting out of hand, I finally make a large enough motion for Jason to recoginize and he turns the saw off.  Good news, its no big deal the shop vac is just full so we need to dump it and we can keep going.  We dump the shop vac and try again, but still no dice, it appears that the filter is getting bogged down, so we ditch the filter and run it without the filter, problem now is that the water shoots out the intake side of the shop vac.  We still aren't deterred, I decide I can just hold a towel over the intake hole and it can blow water into the towel.

Round 3, Jason is manning the water saw, I am manning the shop vac while holding the towel, we are going strong for a good 10 minutes and then the smoke detector goes off (did I mention it is gas powered?).  So I stop and run go open a few more windows and doors, and start again.

Round 4, at this point we are more than half-way done and Amelie and Blythe seems to be content soaking up vitamin D.  We get about 3/4 of the way done, I am sucking up water like a mad man, Jason is sawing away and then, it was just like the movies, just like Hollywood, W.A.T.E.R shoots up to the ceiling and I shout, "You forgot to turn the water off??"  Jason turns off the saw, I am desperately trying to suck up the water, Jason has his foot over the sawed water pipe and I yelled, "Where's the water turn off?"  Jason has me put my feet over the water spout and he hauls ass to the water off.  On his way he manages to do a classic cartoon face plant.  He is sprinting like his life depends on it, see's a large cardboard box and mis-judges, clips it with his foot and face plants on the sidewalk....but that doesn't stop him he continues on-ward to the water off.  I am standing over the water leak, but there is still plenty escaping, adrenaline pumping, wondering how long this water is going to keep pouring into our kitchen and whether or not we can claim it as a flood.  I have to admit that I was also thinking, darn it, I even did my hair today and now I am DRENCHED!  Jason gets back into the house and we just look at each other and laugh.  We have ourselves about 20 seconds of laughter and then turned the shop vac back on to start the water clean-up.  Jason reminded me that he couldn't turn the water off because we needed the water hose to operate the wet saw, oh.yeah.didn't think about that, just remembered us discussing turning off the water when he was jack hammering in-case he hit a pipe.

Jason says "Well I guess we have committed to the plumbing, I'll jack up the concrete and then we can call a plumber on Monday."

It's a good thing we hosted our dinner party with 8 adults and 9 children last night.  If we can pull that off with no kitchen, imagine what we can do once this project is done!

"What are you doing with your one wild and precious life?" - Mary Oliver

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