cinder block wall extravaganza!

so, there was a portion of our back yard fence that was a couple of pieces of plywood nailed together. rotten plywood. it fell down a couple of weeks ago, and after a half-hearted attempt at trying to prop it back up, thabo tore the rest of it out (and threw his back out). we decided to cinder block the gap, since the rest of the wall is cinder block.

so, cindy and i googled 'how to lay cinder block,' and two days later, this is what we got. it's a wall, it's not straight, but it's better than rotten wood. i like to think it has character.

he came from outer space...

more work on the brick wall.

last week (i think?) we did this work to that brick wall from the earlier post. we had to patch a big chunk of it that had been badly patched previously, because the bricks were literally falling out of the wall.

cindy and i bought bricks and mortar and mortar dye, and tried our hand at laying brick and regrouting the wall. it went pretty well, all things told. a lot of work, though. thabo spent an afternoon scrubbing the wall down with a cleanser, and it's looking pretty good.

these are the people we live with.

exposing a brick wall in the kitchen.

this past saturday, we cleaned out what was melissa and thabo's office/closet, and started the process of converting it to the kitchen. first things first, we dug into the plaster in front of the chimney, in the hopes that it was in good enough shape to expose it. it was....basically. you can see from the pics that at one point the center of the chimney was torn up and then badly patched. but, we think we can make it look pretty nice by the time we're done. as i write this, thabo is working on chiseling out the mortar and cement that we didn't finish up. he told me his wrists are pretty sore... next step is to clean off the brick as much as possible, then regrout, then seal the whole thing so it doesn't rain dirt on the kitchen counter. onward!

wash your face!

so, here's what cindy looks like after tearing down the hallway ceiling. at least she's still smiling...

happy halloween!