Karl and Angela Rees

As may be expected, we spent a lot of time fixing the house last week.  Especially Angela—not that she did a lot of manual labor, but she had to plan and arrange things.  Karl tried to get a 40 hour work week in, but he was back and forth between work and the house a lot as well.  Poor Thomas.  We think he’s felt a bit neglected lately (resulting in many tantrums).  And to top things off, he keeps asking where Paela is.  We hope the Madsen’s are doing well in Boston.

But Thomas did get a nice surprise on Friday, when we drove to pick up Grandpa Rees from the San Francisco airport.  He loves playing with Grandpa, and fortunately Grandpa seems to enjoy playing with Thomas.  Karl’s dad will be here for the next week or so helping with the house, especially helping Karl figure out the electrical work (good thing—it’s a mess).

The big house project this week was repiping.  They repiped and put in new drains for the entire house, including a tankless water heater.  We have very mixed reviews of the people we worked with.  Let’s say they earned an F on scheduling, A+ for getting all of the work done twice as fast as they promised because of the scheduling mishap, and C- for communicating with us about inspection/permit happenings.  Anyway, hopefully it should all be sorted out tomorrow morning.

We hired a young man in our ward to help us do a lot of miscellaneous work this weekend (remove old flooring, paneling, shelves, baseboards, vanity, toilet, etc.).  He did a very good job, and with the help of Karl and Karl’s dad and Paul, they all tore down the unpermitted patio room yesterday—removed every last brick of it.  (Ironically, we had to get a permit to demolish the room, for which a permit had been pulled in 1981, but they had never got it anywhere close enough to code to actually execute the permit).  The place looks so much better and more open now.  It’s nice to have a big patio.

We also hired someone to remove all of our acoustic ceilings, reframe the converted garage roof and walls, and retexture the walls and ceilings.  He did the first part of this last week.  It’s amazing the difference all of these jobs are having.  The house is probably less ready for habitation now than when we first bought it, but it looks so much nicer.

We have actually met a few of our neighbors already.  (Funny sense we never really met some of our neighbors in Orem and we lived there for almost 2 years).  The neighborhood is great.  Friendly people walking in the mornings and the evenings, many with dogs.  Probably helps to be on a corner lot near a park.

For Mother’s Day, Karl and Thomas “surprised” Angela with breakfast in bed.  It’s hard for it to be a surprise though when Karl had to drive off to the grocery store late last night because we were out of eggs.  Angela’s real Mother’s Day present will be a fixed up house (the house itself was our anniversary present to each other).

Oh, and Thomas wants hot dog with mustard, and a PB&J sandwich everyday for lunch.  Angela struggles to get him to eat something else.  She will give in to the PB&J sometimes, but refuses to give him hotdogs more than twice a week.