Out With the Old; In With the New

The bathrooms in our apartment are beautiful, dark colors, spacious,beautiful tile work, cool looking toilets.

Those toilets are horrible!!!

 They are dual flush which means you have to decide if you need a little or a lot of water to flush. The buttons you push are on the top of the tank and you have to hold them for a count of 5 for the flush to happen. That's a bother and inconvenience for us but, we could live with it. The grandkids are another matter, they are standing there with their faces inches from the bowl because they had to reach over for the buttons and Mallory isn't as tall as the tank. You would hear us shout, close the lid before flushing!

The previous owner seems to have bought everything in the apartment online and possibly from China. Oh, that's a tacky remark but so true. There are no brand names on anything so we have no idea how to find parts to see if we can fix this problem. So off to the stores to find new toilets. Shopped for toilets for two days. We can tell that we are antsy since nothing else seems to be happening with the house and I made this a much bigger production than it needed to be.I wanted Bone or Biscuit not White for the toilet since the tile and walls are brown. I found some beautiful ones, only $800-1,000 each and we need two! Nope, not going to happen; I will go with White. I actually called my friend, Karen, while at the store for her advice. I knew I was making this a bigger decision than it needed to be but I just needed someone to say "It's a toilet it doesn't matter."

 My decision was; go with Bone traditional two piece toilet or go with the one piece toilet in White; so it is easier to clean. I am all about low maintenance.

 This is the old wax ring. When you set a toilet you should build up the wax ring so that when the toilet is set it squishes out to give you a good watertight seal. Sometimes, you need to add more rings. As you can see the previous owner did not do this the ring doesn't appear to have had anything even sat on it. It is extremely fortunate that there has never been a problem with seepage. That would really have been gross.

This is the beautiful new toilets. White and you can see the back goes almost all the way to the wall so there is no sweeping behind the toilet. And the sides are flat so no dusting the toilet ever again except the top of the tank.

They are Comfort Height which was important to us. This means ADA approved. The seats are higher for ease of getting off when you are older. They are almost too high for me, but at least my legs do not dangle and my tippy toes reach the floor.

Today's toilets have what they call "Ever Clean". The porcelain has been clear coated two times instead of just once. So the bowl is smoother and minerals will not cling to the sides. When you are on well water that is an important consideration.

No more counting to flush. If you need more water you simply hold the lever down for an extra micro second.

Love our new toilets!

The Great Hunter

Bill, loves to hunt and the last 8 y ears there hasn't been time for him to go on any big hunts. I think he misses that a lot.

We have gophers, we have a lot of gopher holes. The previous tenant told us they were mole hills so that is what we have been fighting but he was wrong about one more thing; they are gophers. You get rid of gophers differently than you get rid of moles.

 This is just one portion of the yard with all the dirt mounds.

Bill's mission has become to hunt down these critters and eradicate them from our yard.

Here is one of his traps set and baited.

He finds the tunnel, puts in the trap which is almost like a mouse trap and then baits it with Cyanide. If I should die of Cyanide poisoning remember he bought it.

After setting the traps and baiting he has a whole system of flags. One flag with loose string so he can see if the string becomes taut. That means he has bagged one. If there are two flags it means he is watching the mound to see if it is revisited.

Then when a gopher has taken the bait or become caught in the trap he leaves the flag at half mast. As a hunter you always honor the animal who has given up his life for you.

He can't wait for it to get light in the morning to check his traps and he takes off in the middle of the day to see if anything has happened. Oh, we so need to get him on a big game hunt. At least he hasn't asked to have one mounted for his trophy room.

Getting Anxious

Still waiting for the garage to be framed so we can get started on everything else. This week all our doors and windows were delivered. We bought them from Lowe's and their truck wasn't tall enough for our front door to fit. They had to rent a truck from Hertz to bring it out to us. Since we have a commercial account with them delivery is only $20. That truck cost them more than $20 to rent. Plus they sent another truck out with guys to move it all. So 4 guys and two trucks for $20.

Bill will never be put in charge of pictures again. Explicit instruction were; get a picture of the full truck and the guys moving our doors and windows. With pictures of each before they are stacked and I can't see them. He got excited and forgot to pick up the camera until they were completely unloaded so here is a picture of the empty truck.

This is my reading window. We are putting in a window seat at the front of the house and this is the window for me to look out of at our view while reading. Reading is my favorite thing to do. I can't wait to curl up with a good book and a cup of coffee and look out my window. I will upholster the seat and back wall to lean against.

Here are the front door and transom, the kitchen windows, the third bedroom window (we don't know if there will actually be an outside wall for it or not but we will use it somewhere), the family room french doors and side lights. The West Wing french doors are over there. We got everything ordered so we are able to use the energy tax credit for 2013 taxes. The parking area is getting filled with stuff if they don't get started on the garage soon there may not be room for our cars.

One of a Kind Holders

SBR is next to Bill's Trophy room and it looks as if things may flow from one area to the other. Went into SBR because Bill was very excited that he had hung his hangers for his saws and extension cords.

 Deer antler's will hold just about anything. He has always used them in the garage to hold his stuff and I thought in this house he was going to put them in the trophy room. He said he just couldn't bring himself to not have them in his work area.

Identity Crisis

We only moved one mile north and four and a half miles east; and boy have things changed. We are no longer in Edmond, our post office address is Arcadia; but, we are in not in the town we are Oklahoma county. We are under Guthrie 911 service. I don't know where they would take us in case of emergency, the Guthrie hospital or Edmond. The Edmond hospitals are closer but I don't know and hopefully we will never have to find out. A volunteer fire department, Woodcrest, will be our heroes in case of a fire. The fire station is just two miles straight north of us. Don't know if it is manned at all hours or if the firefighters have to come in off of their tractors. We do not have city trash service even though we are just 2 miles from people who do, which means we have no way of recycling which is very difficult for us. We can accept not having natural gas and having to use propane. We are researching building our own wind turbine to supplement our electricity.

Yesterday in the mail box was the latest change of identity.

Lincoln county phone book. This covers everything from us to Stroud. to the east. Stroud is a long ways away from us. A short move in miles and huge move in who we are.

Nothing Like a Roaring Fire

We love a roaring fire any time of the day, any time of the year. We have been known to have a fire in July if it is cool out. Our apartment doesn't have a fireplace we knew this would be a disappointment on cool days. Just didn't realize how much we would miss a fireplace. Santa Claus to the rescue, under the tree he put a wonderful little space heater with a fake flame. It's not like the real thing but we get the look, the heat, and when the fan is running even a bit of a sound with our dancing flames.

Had to redo the furniture in the family room because I couldn't see the fire over our coffee table. It is in a really nice cabinet and it should help with our propane bills this winter.Governor Fallin had to sign an act letting propane trucks bringing into the state be overloaded because of a propane shortage so it will be expensive this winter. Thanks Santa, you made me smile.

Another New Toy

The previous owner left his scissor lift for us to use while we are building. Really nice of the guy and we have used it a couple of times now. They are used for moving things around and lifting materials up to ceiling height. Well, his family have decided they want to sell it so it is now gone. Ugh, that means us lifting drywall sheets up ladders to the 14 foot ceilings, us taking ceiling joists up and down ladders. Oh we are way too old for all this, may need to rethink us doing the framing and sheet rock during the building process.

Oh, wait, lets look on Craigslist. Hm-m-m we could buy one here and then after the house is built sell it again. Okay, let's think about this. For a laugh let's go on EBay. Going, going, gone! We now own a scissor lift. It was delivered last night to the rock yard and today goes to its new home.

 Loading it onto our delivery truck.

It's called a scissor lift because the bottom extends up in a scissor fashion. So it goes straight up with you and your building materials on it. Two steps of just you getting on to it; not the 20 steps of you and material going up and down, up and down the ladder all day.

The big tractor tire is finally on its way home also. This wss one of my Daddy's old tractor tires that he spent hours cutting the center hole larger for our girls to have a cool sandbox and now the grandkids play in it. It took him so long to cut the hole in it 33 years ago is because it's a radial tire so there is steel running through it. Great sandbox, thanks Daddy.

Dangling Wires

We are getting to the time in the West Wing to start moving electricity. Which means we have dangling wires from the walls.

These switches for SBR will be in the garage when it is built. The double doors will go here and open into the room. The switches for the lights go in the garage and there will be light when you walk in. We haven't decided if we are putting a window into SBR or not so it could be very dark.

 These switches were on the other side of the door.You can see the brown metal where they were. That is a steel beam that supports the front wall which can't be moved. The previous owner had the switches stuck on that beam but we don't want the switches to be sticking 3 inches into the room. They will be attached to the wall once the doors come out and we have the place to put them. They have to be moved now so we can finish the hallway.

Sound Proof

Now that the walls have gone up and insulation added the Storage/Workroom has become very quiet. We think we have decided to call this room SBR. That stands for Smithbuilt Residential since almost everything in there is connected with that company in some way. Bill's work radio has always been plugged into the Trophy Room and has now had to be moved to SBR so he can hear it. See the little clock above the white cabinets, he has had that clock in his garage for the last 37 years. It was the first thing that went up when the wall went up.

 Look how organized it  is becoming. The white cabinets came from another room in the West Wing. The opening will be closed off once the garage is built and the door will be from the garage into SBR. There's the furnace hanging from the ceiling that was emitting Carbon Monoxide; but works perfect now. The chest in the middle of the room is right beside his table saw so he will always have a base for the wood as it comes off the saw.

I didn't get all the insulation finished between the trophy room and SBR. The grand kids spent New Years Eve with us and we were way too busy playing for us to do much work. Sutton, the 6 year old, drove the Ruff and Tuff with a 8 foot trailer behind it, loaded it with tree branches and moved it all to the burn pile for me. The other two spent the day on the Go Kart. He had as much fun as Wyatt and Mallory and got a lot of clean up done for me. Wyatt says they worked also because they followed the trailer to be sure none of the branches fell off.