dead now

Story

Our neighbor Sarah stopped me tonight as I was bringing in groceries. She had a story to tell me.

I guess, last week sometime, Sarah heard a fight on the street. She looked out the window and saw two girls arguing. Then, suddenly, one ran up on to our front porch. She grabbed our wood Ikea plant stand and ran off our porch.

She then started to beat the other girl with it!

Sarah called the police. She started with the assault that was happening outside of our house. The police were not concerned.

Then she mentioned the stolen plant stand. The police were much more interested in that. Nice priorities.

Well, the plant stand is gone, I'm sure we will never see it again. Of course, I have three more of them, so I'm okay with that. I just wish I could have seen someone being beaten by it...

Update

So, I just spoke with the cops. They were checking out the semi cab parked across the street. I went out and let them know that they guy who was in the cab went walking across the street. I also said that I had just called the cops on the yelling guy. They said they had picked him up a couple blocks down.

I guess calling the cops is okay.

Why Do I Even Care?

I'm sitting in my upstairs window watching the man I called the cops on 15 minutes ago continue to scream and pound on the bus shelter glass.

He screams, "OOOHHHH!!!" And "WOOAAAH!" And "F*****CK!" He then pounds on the glass of the bus shelter. Or the garbage can. Or the bus stop sign.

Sometimes he goes into the street and does a "come and get me cops" type pose.

Sometimes he fake humps the ground.

I took pictures, but they didn't turn out. I didn't exactly want to draw attention to myself with a flash, and it is dark.

This guy is obviously screwed up. I don't know if he has a behavioral health difficulty. Or a chemical health difficulty, but he is messed up.

A COP JUST DROVE BY!!! Didn't they get my call? We live 2 freakin' blocks from a cop shop.

Ooooh, looks like he might be packing up. He just put a backpack on. He's across the street in the parking lot of the convenience store. In he goes.

He sat and yelled and pounded and yelled for a half an hour, and nothing. I hope something happens inside the store.

Nothing inside the store. He came out, crossed the street to the bus stop, hit the garbage and kept walking. He hasn't made it far, I can hear him still yelling.

Why do I call the cops? No one has stopped. It has been half an hour. They don't care.

Oh, and I accidentally gave the police my wrong number. It just came out wrong. Weird. I've had the same number for years.

out of trouble...

My good friend Wyatt came over to the house this afternoon and bailed me out. Kassie had pretty much gotten used to the ugly wall where the mantel had been, but I promised that it would be in good shape by Thursday night. When Wyatt arrived, we discussed our options. The first thing we wanted to do was check to see what the brick wall and the chimney look like behind the sheetrock. If it looked decent, we thought we might expose it.


Here we see Wyatt cutting a hole that only he can see through, since he's 6'3" or whatever.

At some point, the chimney had been repaired. It was all ugly grey cinder block, so we decided to leave the wall up and replace the drywall around the brick.





We cleaned up the edges of the drywall with metal sheetrock corner. Then we threw down some tape, slopped on some goop and called it a day.



It needs to be cleaned up a bit, but it already looks much better. Tomorrow I'll sand it, then prime it, I guess.

You've already seen what Kassie did to the room. That won't look good by Thursday. heh.

Who Lived Here?

Who thought it was a good idea to paint over wallpaper? Who thought it was a good idea to wallpaper over wallpaper?

On one of the walls in the living room there was wallpaper coming off the wall at a seam. It had been painted over. I started to pull on it. Well, an hour later, it looked like this:


Here's a little closer look:


See, there were about four layers of whitish paint on top of a layer of wallpaper on top of a layer of wallpaper.

The white is the paint, the tan in the upper right is the first layer of wallpaper, the greenish lines are the second layer of wallpaper, the brown is as far down as I have gotten.

I really don't care if that is the bottom of the layers or not, the wall is going. We need to take it down, and possibly some others. I'm not peeling this wall, it would take forever, plus we want to open it up to the stairwell/entry way.

Stripping walls sucks.

in trouble...

Well, I'm not the most popular guy in the house right now, but I did get the wood off the wall.



It took some drilling, some sawing, some prying and some pounding. Much of the problem was that the screws were anchored into something really tough- the brick, we assume. I ended up breaking most of them off.

The question now seems to be what to do with the area around the brick. The drywall job is pretty shoddy. Since a mantel was going in, it didn't matter, I suppose. It's not obvious in this picture, but the brick and the drywall are not aligned, so they aren't flush on this side.



I'm in favor of a thin wood border, essentially a frame, painted the same color as the wall, but Kassie's not going for it. I haven't given it a lot of thought, and I'm open to other ideas, of course. How hard would it be to fill in and clean up the edges with more drywall?

Priorities

So, after yesterday's adventure, you know, the one where I was directed to this blog to find out that I no longer have a mantle on my fireplace, we met with the final window company.

We have decided to go with Window Outfitters. You can read about them here through the Better Business Bureau and on Angie's List if you are member. Their bid wasn't the cheapest, but it was the most complete. He (Bob the owner) really took the time to explain stuff to us and we trust him, he is a lot like my dad.

So, windows, still our first priority, will be done in the next month or so. Due to what my new husband did yesterday, the living room has become priority number 2.

Of course, after tonight, with temps in the 20s, I have a feeling this weekend's priority will be winterizing the house.

the mantel

We did not like our mantel. It was cheap, ugly and poorly painted.



I think it's fair to say that I didn't just dislike it; I hated it. Despite the fact that I have about 30 other things I should be doing today, I decided that I didn't want to look at that mantel any longer.



There's a problem. The lumber is held up by several screws that look like this.



I can't budge most of them. Kassie's power drill doesn't have enough torque and my screwdriver slips and strips before anything moves. Is there an industrial-strength solution to this problem? Pricier/better power drill? Bigger screwdriver? Stronger arms?