March 2021

First, March is the month of Emily's birthday! She turned 13 this year, which is wild. She's not so little anymore. In fact, she's almost as tall as me, which is annoying for Rose who is now the shortest person in the house. Emily's friends came over to help her celebrate:

Make a wish!

Happy Birthday, Emily!

OK, we got some stuff DONE in March. With the help of my friend Curtis (who really did almost all the work), we replaced all the plumbing in the house. No more rusty galvanized steel plumbing with low water pressure. Good riddance. But to access the old pipes, I had to open up one wall in the pantry, a section of wall in the upstairs linen closet, then gut the entire upstairs bathroom, exposing studs and floor joists. Then we replaced the whole works with AquaPEX and PVC. It was a ton of work, but a suitable pandemic-era home improvement project.

Starting off, a few before pictures:

After tearing off the plastic tile veneer stuff from the walls and pulling up the lumpy linoleum:

This weird "razor deposit" slot in the back of the medicine cabinet was always intriguing and we joked that the wall was probably full of discarded razors. Well guess what, it really was full of old razors. A LOT of old razors which came pouring out all over the place as soon as I broke out the plaster wall.

We kept the bathroom functioning until the last minute when we were ready to replace all the pipes.

The walls around the tub and shower opened up, before and after:

A work in progress. The city brought out a new water meter and then Curtis installed 3/4" copper tap for both cold and hot and then stepped it down to 1/2" before connecting to each fixture. AquaPEX is colorful stuff:

The first cement board wall section (on the right) installed after putting in the new shower valve:

You can see the new pipes behind the sink and toilet near the floor. The old iron pipes are wastewater vents and are still functional and up to code, so we left them in:

Installing the cement board:

New medicine cabinet installed! It's a little bigger than the old one so we can fit more crap in it:

All of the cement board installed on the walls and on top of the subfloor planks, with thinset mortar sealing up all the gaps. Cynthia is putting down the slate hex floor tiles:

The slate tiles are cool, but a pain to work with:

You can only work on one small section at a time because you have to clean up the excess epoxy grout before it dries and it dries fast. That makes for slow progress:

Two coats of Red Guard on the cement board and then we began installing the 16" subway tile in the shower. The Red Guard is a thick epoxy that waterproofs the walls and prevents mold if water ever does get through the tiles:

Installing the subway tile was tedious, but we borrowed a laser level from the Von Thuns and that was a life saver because it made keeping the tiles straight an easy task. I mounted the laser level on a camera tripod and that way I could easily adjust the height to precisely where I needed it to be. It was a lot faster than measuring each row as we put them up. I still measured stuff, tho:

Cynthia is applying grout using a float. It looks like a mess, but fortunately this type of grout is easy to clean up:

To avoid having to cut tiles lengthwise to fit when we reached the ceiling we put in a row of mosaic tile and made it the exact height that it needed to be to fit the tiles above it. The grout hasn't been applied to the subway tile yet here:

Once the shower tile was done, we moved out into the rest of the bathroom:

After the tiles were up I had to scrape the crappy ceiling paint that was flaking off. That sucked enormously, but it had to be done:

Then we did a bunch of finishing stuff that took forever and then it was DONE. Painted walls, new hardware, new bathroom. We got new towels and put up a picture from our Pensacola trip:

We had a guy come out and refinish the iron tub, too. I like the look of the art deco design on the side and also it's IRON. No way we're gonna try to get that beast out of there to replace it:

When we weren't working on the bathroom, we were keeping warm around a fire as we burned an endless supply of derecho tree debris:

February 2021

We made it to February! Everyone is still alive, so that's good news. Cynthia put together a shelter-in-place Valentine's Day dinner. We had steak and streamed a video of Pensacola Beach on the TV. It was pretty rad:

 

Cynthia made a LOT of masks for people at PCI. A LOT of masks:

And here's a random sunset shot. The sky had such weird colors this evening:

Watch Lily battle her worst winter enemy: static

January 2021

As cold and foreboding as January often is, there are still plenty of ways to make the most of it. Sledding, going for walks when it isn't too cold, watching movies, reading, and planning home improvement projects are all ways to make good use of time.

Lily chooses to burrow under blankets and sleep through it: 

Rose turned 16! She had all her friends over for her party and later that night they went on a scavenger hunt downtown. Dressed like that:

Cynthia made a fancy cake, cuz that's what she does:

Blowing out the candles!

And after the scavenger hunt Rose opened her presents while everybody thawed out. Some of her friends are wearing her clothes in an effort to warm up, ha:

Sledding! The steep hill behind Roosevelt is a great spot:

You can pick up some serious speed on that hill. The fast (and bumpy) ride down makes it worth the trek back up again each time:

See? January wasn't so bad.

December 2020

It was a weird December and a weird Christmas. As Covid numbers went up and we began discovering just how fast the virus spreads, a lot of people made the choice to shelter in place for Christmas and try to ride it out until a vaccine becomes available. That's what we did. As several people we knew caught the virus and experienced firsthand how dangerous it can be (including Cynthia's cousin Danny who was hospitalized and died from the Coronavirus), it became clear that we needed to forgo any holiday get togethers. So we spent a lot of time hanging out as a family this December.

Lily loves spending time with us (not so much):

The snow on our front bushes melted and refroze, creating this trippy display of colors and shapes:

Cynthia and I went on a lot of walks to get out since we couldn't really go anywhere. One morning as we walked around downtown I took some pictures of the hoar frost:

On December 21st we walked up the hill from our house to Mt Mercy to watch the conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter, which only occurs once every 20 years. When they align it appears as one really bright star, but in Iowa it is only visible momentarily right at sunset, which makes it a little difficult to spot. We found it with our binoculars, though. There were a cluster of people with us up on the hill watching the event take place. The sky was very cool:

Cynthia caught a good shot of a sundog as we were driving one morning:

These people got together and took their annual picture in front of the "no sledding" sign where they often, you know, go sledding:

Christmas Day!

Lily is going to hide until this whole ridiculous thing is over:

Emily got a new baja hoodie:

And Rose got some stuff:

The aftermath:

Rose decided to do Emily's makeup afterward:

Later that afternoon we did had a zoom call with my family and later with the Conrads. It felt really weird to be so distant, but hopefully by this time next year we can have a normal Christmas again:

I hit a parked car! Dangit, that is the first time I've ever been at fault in an accident. Luckily it was a slow-motion collision and no one was hurt. We were sliding slowly down a hill and couldn't avoid the car parked at the bottom. Ah well, time for a new bumper I guess:

It was definitely an unusual December, but at least we are healthy.