Thanks, Rambo.

Today, dad, Brad, Ryan, Amy, Michael, and I spent a good deal of time at the HoL. While dad and Michael started working on the first floor plumbing, Ryan, Brad, Amy, and I started working on one room of the attic. (Bradley's moving in there soon, and needs a room that's clean and as dust-free as possible.)

Oh my GOD.

First thing I did was grab a rag and scrub a little circle on the gray wall. Apparently the gray wall is a WHITE wall. Honest-to-god. We took a picture of that first little circle. I about gagged. That room was so unfathomably filthy. We spent all four hours we were there cleaning it... wiping down the walls took the most time. Ryan ShopVac'd up the floor and all the crud in the windows (but relocated a bird's nest with four eggs in it because he is, and I quote, "not a heartless monster"). Brad cleaned the windows and helped with the walls.

The floors are hardwood and they were dusty as hell. Ryan and Amy took care of a lot of the dust but there's going to be a lot more cleaning required. However, at the end of the day we could breathe freely in the room-- a MAJOR step up from how we found it. I can safely let my little brother sleep there now. The changes are amazing, just in that single room.

I feel like we got a lot done but it's a little depressing that four hours later it's still not FINISHED. Not that I thought it WOULD be... but all the walls need to be washed again, especially the parts where Amy and I couldn't reach because they were too high.

Dad and Michael didn't make a lot of progress in the plumbing, but they did rip out a lot of stuff in the bathroom, so I guess that's cool. Michael had to leave early and dad went to Home Depot to get a torch and a crowbar. He also tore out some pieces of the wall in Den1, where the plumbing comes downstairs. (Underneath is an entirely new wallpaper that we've never seen! Yea.) When I left, dad was still working on the plumbing.

Ooh, also interesting in the attic room we were working on: Amy found a place where you could see the dirt lines around where a picture had obviously once hung. Not only was there a dirt square on the wall, there was also a nail and a line of dirt where the STRING had been, to hang it. Mmm.

At one point I walked near Amy and scrubbed HELP in the grime on the next wall, thinking she was watching me do it. Five minutes later I hear her scream and all of the sudden she's yelling how not-funny it was. *wince* I totally thought she saw me do it. She's so creeped out about the house. She even refuses to go into the closet in that room, for reasons that I can't quite figure out.

Today was the first time that I saw The Ceiling Fan. In Den2, there's a ceiling fan that none of us had ever really noticed before, but dad and Michael decided to flip it on a couple of nights ago. (It wasn't that we discovered the ceiling fan... no one had ever bothered to turn it on because we had lamps in the room and there's light from the foyer.) So I flip on this ceiling fan and lo and behold... it's stained glass, too. There's a bright ring of stained glass that above the blades, where the light comes from. It's red, green, and yellowish. Really killer. Dad cleaned it up really well. It works very well, too... it's expecially quiet. It doesn't do nearly enough to brighten that room, but that will come with time.

Let's see, what else happened today? When we took a break, Brad and I decided to see if we were too old to slide down the stairs on our butts. Answer: no. Somehow I'm better at it than Brad. Then Amy came down and blew us all out of the water. She brings grace to the act of sliding down stairs a la derriere. Not to be outdone, Bradley displayed how he can crawl through the bookcase, so Amy and I did so too. I have pictures of us all being idiots.

I also have pictures of the grime in the attic. Unfortunately I had to use Michael's camera (dad's was in the wrong house) so I don't have them just yet. Be patient.

Oh. In the back yard, there's one yellow flower (WEED) growing straight up. There's nothing else around it for yards. It's growing absolutely straight up, and it's about three or four feet tall. Ridiculous. Maybe it marks the horse's grave.

We had our first family meal in the HouSe today. Just lunchmeat and stuff, but mmm.

STILL TO COME:
*We need to focus on the other attic room, to get that floor ready for Bradley. It's just as filthy as the one we cleaned today. And, we moved everything from one room into the other, so we need to move it all back out. However, we left the fan on today so a lot of the attic dust should have moved out by the time we start on the other room.
*Plumbing. This is not my department, but as soon as plumbing is up and running I'm sure we'll be called in to make the bathroom... not suck.
*Pictures of what we did today.