Home Project: Day 3

Wow I can't believe I have posted three days in a row. This is a new record for me. I was telling Tim last night that it has been very therapeutic to post about our projects each day as the stories become more humorous and less-stressful than at midnight when we turn in for the night. I think a good night's rest brings a lot of perspective.
So about day three. Things have gotten a little rough with operation: New House. One of our team members has decided the throw in the towel just three days into the mess. No, not Tim. He is still going strong. I am feeling surprisingly well despite the long hours and manual labor. Yes, you guessed it Kennedy is our deserter. She find the whole process boring and wants only to be held by mom. The less I hold her, the more she wants to be held. Vicious cycle. She about lost it at Lowes last night and what I believe is her first real tantrum. (shoes were thrown... repeatedly)
Despite the contention in the ranks, we are still plugging along and it looks like we will be ready to lay tile this Saturday! Wouldn't that be nice to have that major hurdle out of the way. I came over to the house yesterday and used a shop vac (thanks Melissa) to clean up the subfloor and Tim scrapped up the remaining bits of tile and linoleum. Today he is planning on filling in the edges with thin set (the top layer of the subfloor doesn't extend all the way to the walls...odd I know).
Friday he wants to lay the cement backer board and then Saturday we tile!
Now for the list of setbacks we encountered, in addition to our uncooperative toddler. First, when I arrived at the house and started to vacuum, I realized that the water tube that connects to the refrigerator ice machine was leaking. We had to disconnect it from the fridge to move it but couldn't cap it off. Tim turned off the water main the night before, but apparently it was still dripping. I headed downstairs to see if it got the carpet wet. Yup it sure did. So I rolled back the carpet to inspect the padding. Not only did I find it wet as well, but I also found lots of other stains on the carpet and padding, smelly stains. Now, for the last few days I have noticed that the basement smelled odd. Definitely not like it did when we viewed the house and did inspections. When Tim got to the house we rolled up the rest of the carpet and discovered many more stains. We believe them to be dog and cat pee. My current theory is that the prevous owners have been keeping their dog and cat in the basement for the last month while moving. I KNOW it did not smell like that before. We rolled all the carpet and padding up and tossed (ok dragged) it in the basement storage closet. Hopefully this will get rid of the bad smell. However, we are a little upset because now we have no carpet in the basement. I don't know if there is anything that we can do about it, but I am definitely going to talk to my real estate agent about this whole thing.
On the bright side, we did get the water issue under control although we still have to keep the water shut off and the pipe does leak a bit. We have it over a bucket now.
After dealing with the water and smelly carpet, Tim headed back to our apartement with a friend from the ward to move a bunch of stuff to the new house. Things like the dresser we repainted that has been sitting in my dining room for the last week and all the boxes piled up along the walls. We decided to keep them in the garage for now (the basement is out of the question until further desmellification. Boy was it nice to come back to our apartment last night (at 1 am) and have all that junk out of here. Yeah for space!
We also spent some time at Lowes yesterday to review our plans for tile, paint, etc. We have a 10% off coupon so Tim wants to buy everything for the entire house all at once. This means I have to decide on all the tile, paint colors, lawn mower, ceiling fan, EVERYTHING! By tonight at 5pm! I guess the good news is after that all my stressful decision making is pretty much over and I can stop staring at paint swatches. Wish me luck at Lowes tonight. I predict no less than 3 carts of stuff and 3+ hours of mind numbing choices. Tell ya all about it tomorrow... if I survive.

Tim hard at work removing the last of the linoleum.

Our garage/ storage unit.

The smelly carpet now tucked away in a closet. Go away smell! Go away!