This cOld House 21

The lid arrived yesterday. It came stacked on a truck and a big crane loaded it off the truck into the yard and then worked placing the slabs in order from the south side to the north. Unfortunately, I had a baby sitter scheduled so I could do some errands and while I was able to see them put the first piece in place, by the time I got home it was done! There are 7 slabs of pre-cast concrete spanning 24 feet and weighing about 3 tons each. Next we need to weld and anchor it in place, (as if the 6000 pound slabs are going anywhere,) and then pour a 2 inch slurry of concrete on top.




Here's something (finally) we did right! We've put that shrink-wrap plastic up over the windows in the girls' room and thank goodness we did. All of a sudden this week we found a yellow jacket in the girls room. We knew that there had been a few last fall, but as the week wore on, all of a sudden there was a flurry of activity from the nest in the wall and we now have over 50 of them in various stages of demise trapped behind the plastic. Stefan, (the exterminator with whom I am now on a first name basis,) said there's nothing we can do until we can pinpoint the entry/exit from the outside. With the ground still covered in icy snow, he couldn't get his ladder out to do that. But we are first on his list once we get a good thaw.

Dan says it annoys him when I do posts with no pictures so I have added some pics to my last post. I'll endeavor to put at least one in from now on.


I've discovered Tommie's new 'office'. (As you may recall, when the walls were open in the girls' bath, he would climb into the eaves and crawl under the floorboards, staying all day long, emerging covered in dust and dirt around supper time.) We closed up the bathroom wall this week. Coincidentally, the cat has been waking me up at night wanting to party and so at night I've been putting him in the back half of the house (kitchen, with access to his litter box down in the laundry room,) where he promptly found another ingress to the bowels of the house. He went down this morning and I haven't seen him for the past 6 hours. There is a large opening in the laundry room wall for what used to be the ducting for the original coal fired furnace. We found it when we tore out the rotten root cellar shelving after the last flood. I was doing laundry this morning when Tommie skulked in and jumped into the hole.