We started the weekend with help from Coty (aka Notorious D.I.E) – she and I both retired from the Texas Rollergirls this year and even though she’s broken (from her last derby practice of the year) she has been so generous with her time in helping us try to get this house ready for us to move in!

DIE likes to clean… I credit that to a proper mid-western upbringing, so she and I set out to tackle the fireplace.
BEFORE & AFTER:


Nothing that five or six passes of a scrub brush, simple green, clorox bleach cleaner, water rinse, and a grinder couldn’t handle. That afternoon I had committed to skate in a for-fun derby scrimmage so I left my broken ex-teammate to go play while she stayed and kept cleaning the fireplace… Yes I felt incredibly guilty, but, that feeling dissipated and turned to astonishment and gratitude for that mid-western commitment to a clean house when I returned to find the fireplace in it’s AFTER state. I mean – seriously – that girl is AMAZING!

While Coty was cleaning up the place, Marc put on his Hazmat suit and made a mess. He cut holes into the ceiling for recessed lights and AC vents which is great for the long term, but, bad in the short, as it results in piles of blown-in insulation, gecko eggs, and 50 years of dust falling from the sky. (Yes, that’s right gecko eggs, hundreds and hundreds of hatched gecko eggs. But, that’s a story for another time.)

Throughout the weekend Marc taped and sanded and mudded and sanded and mudded some more then textured the sheetrock walls in the master bedroom. And by the time I got back from my derby scrimmage it was ready for me to PAINT!


A thing of beauty.
After all of that master bedroom progress we headed to our local Mexican place for some food and research on how to run electrical for installing recessed lights over Negra Modelos.

Thanks again internets… it worked:

We woke up exhausted Sunday morning, but knowing that we needed to press on, we went to the house, coffee in hand and headed back to the master to install the floor… but, of course it wasn’t that easy.
The clean-up of the floor in prep for laying the bamboo revealed more of the STINK. We isolated the smell to a few spots of soft concrete filler. (sidebar for a bit of a rant – seriously people, how on earth can you be a local celebrity lending your face to the public campaign for a pet organization and allow your own animals to live like this!? ARGH!!!!!) So, Marc and I worked on chiseling all of the cement filler out of the floor.

So much gross. This website really should come with a warning.
So the floor had now been cleaned and etched and mopped and scraped and chiseled and swept and mopped again. It was the end of the day on Sunday and time to start laying some floor boards.

Marc did this much without me Sunday night, as I had promised to put our kid to bed at least once that week. Marc is pretty rad.