Followup

It's a week later, and we're still embroiled in the saga of plumbing, although progress has indeed been made. The pipe hasn't leaked since the plumbers put the clamp on it, but they'll be coming back tomorrow to replace a sizable portion of the plumbing in our house with stuff that's not 74 year old galvanized steel. To make it easier for them (and so that we didn't have to pay two plumbers to do the work), I spent yesterday at home tearing out a 9' x 8' chunk (both drywall and plaster) of our living room ceiling. Of course, what made it a challenge was that we have checked and confirmed that, yes, some of the older paint in the house is lead-based, so we had to take a lot of precautions to try to prevent the spread of dust. It's quite bad for babymagoo, and since he's still partially on breast milk, that means mrsdrmagoo can't be involved in any of the work, either. So I put up a bunch of plastic around the area, wore masks (I couldn't find the right kind of mask, so hopefully two of almost the right kind of mask will be good enough), and then washed the whole area down with Trisodium Phosphate, which is what we were told to use to clean up the dust. That...was fun.

As a side note, has anyone else ever noticed the slots in old medicine cabinets for used razor blades? The blades go somewhere, of course, which is into the walls of the house. Until renovation is started, in which case they fall on your head.

Tomorrow, the plumbers will be back, and when I get home from work at 6:30 or so, I'll clean up any mess they make (in case they need to make access holes to the downstairs bath) and then let Beth know it's safe to bring the boy back home. Then, we will try to find a drywall contractor to come in and replace the drywall and make the seams as clean as possible. Whee!

On the plus side, the trip out to WV went well. My family is doing pretty well (actually, the economy hasn't hurt us that much....yet), and everyone loves spending time with babymagoo. On the way back, we stopped for a tour of the Woodford Reserve distillery. That was pretty cool, and it's in a gorgeous part of Kentucky, right outside of Lexington (the whole area just screams Kentucky, with rolling hills and horse farms). The beverage they produce is pretty dang good, too.

This weekend, we'll be up in the city for our annual pilgrimage to the Christkindlmarkt for German food and freezing.