Weekend Warriors

Well, it's our first real weekend at The Box House. Last weekend doesn't really count because we spent it moving in. To celebrate, we went to Lowe's to spend a 10% off coupon we had. We bought cabinets for Mom's sewing room, a radon detection kit, a CO/propane/natural gas detector for the basement (where Ted and I are setting up our offices), cable for stringing Internet across the building, a small rake for scraping up the cat poo we found under the stairs to the basement (more on that in the future), and a few other miscellaneous items. Then we each tackled a task or two:

Mom worked on building her cabinets and filling them with quilt fabric. It wasn't until we began bringing over her fabric collection from the other house and putting it in one pile that she realized just how much quilt fabric she had. She had been storing it in every nook and cranny, and now she'll try to cram the bulk of it into one room. She can quilt every day for the next hundred years and not make it through all that fabric.

Ted fixed a clog in the kitchen sink, which was pretty far down beyond the trap. The water had been draining slowly from day one, and yesterday began backing up into the sink. He's also working on hardwiring Mom's computer to the Internet; she had been using a wireless connection, but the signal is not as strong as we'd like. And he spent some spare moments playing house detective and examining how our 2-flat was put together. By removing a ceiling panel in the basement, he was able to reveal our sub floors, which look like tongue and groove construction. This photo shows the underside of Mom's dining room:

I had decided to give up on the Soy Gel made by Franmar, which hasn't really managed to strip paint off of anything but metal. I found a quart of Peel Away at Lowe's, and with high hopes for its effectiveness, coated the back of the door to my mom's medicine cabinet. I'll check on it in a few days, although some house bloggers have indicated they've left it on for up to a week. It is very, very low odor and easy to work with. I just used a paint brush to apply it. This variety of the product, Peel Away 6, did not come with the peel away paper and Lowe's didn't stock it. The instructions on the can didn't mention using the paper, but the online instructions did. So I improvised with press and seal saran wrap. That should keep it from drying out too fast.

As for Maggie? She spent some time debating how best to clean this mirror, another treasure left behind by the previous owners.