Mudroom

I have been slowly working on the floor of the mudroom since I first demoed the small bathroom that sits right off of it. During Demo I pulled up the 80's linoleum floor to find some much older linoleum tiles(from the 40's or 50's, individual hard tiles). I started pulling these up and found some really nice wood under the thick tar paper stuff that was holding the old tiles on. For a proof of concept I got all the tar paper up (using the grinder and 24 and 36 grit sandpaper) and do a quick sanding of the floor in that bathroom. It ended up looking good.

7 months later I start the rest of the mudroom :).

The tiles were the hardest thing to get up so in the advice of my 4 year old daughter (who watched an infomercial on day when we were at Hardwicks) we bought a multimaster. Yes it does what they say (the tile came up in about 5 hours). The picture is of the barren alien landscape that the tar paper creates when you rip the tile up. Oh yeah, it smells bad when warm.

However the Multimaster really not meant for room size jobs so out comes the trusty grinder. 2 days later 1/2 the floor is totally smooth wood with no markings. (picture coming) and I have 2 sets of clothes saturated with sawdust and old tar papers bits. I also bought a warm red oil based floor paint thats way to pink in the test, so it may have to go back and get tinted up.

Once the floor is done I have to get the trim up on the doors and around the baseboards, and then all that should be left is some painting.

upstairs bathroom, a history in pictures

There are no pictures of the upstairs bathroom, pre-renovation. It was that bad. Then Aunt Cherie came, and before you know it we were burning the last stained floorboard in our fireplace and cheering. But then Aunt Cherie had to go home without seeing the bathroom come back together, and months have gone by without my posting any pictures of it. Until now!

Dress rehearsal:



Here's Matt's feet, and various things on the floor. In any significant home improvement project, floor detritus must always include a number of plastic bags from Home Depot, and a chop saw on an extension cord.



The G.C. did the tiling in a couple of marathon days during a week when Matt was out of town, and installed some towel bars that I had chosen but didn't end up liking. I took them down and later Matt put up new ones. The medicine cabinet still has no door, or rather it has a twenty-pound door that we're afraid to hang:



But otherwise we are pretty much done, except for trim and some other details:




Thank you, Aunt Cherie - we really couldn't have done this without you!

Well.

In the past few months we've:

1. Hired a real estate attorney to advise us on the sewer thing. He told us that our real estate agent was negligent, and wrote a demand letter to her and her broker asking them to reimburse us for the cost of the repair. They in turn hired their own lawyer and made it clear that if we wanted to pursue it, we'd have to take them to court.
   
2. Watched the city arrive, guns a-blazing, seven months late, to ... fix the sewer? They set up a trailer-office-thingy, brought a huge backhoe, and got to work:
   Then they noticed the patch in the street, knocked on the door and asked me if we had recently had some work done on our sewer. Why, yes. The guy I spoke with claimed that it must have been a miscommunication at the city, and they were all out there by mistake, about to replace a section of the main sewer line in front of our house. (You have to wait until the line fails, apparently. The city does not do proactive maintenance.) They packed up and left, but not before sending another camera down to take a look -- and what did they see but a fresh sheet of roots hanging down at the spot where our side sewer connects to the stub.
3. Called the guy who managed our sewer repair project, to ask him about the new sheet of roots in our new side sewer. Over two weeks, I've called his office, his cell phone. Called his manager. Sent email. I'm practially stalking the guy. He hasn't responded.
   
4. Reported the inept concrete contractor to the Better Business Bureau. The BBB then contacted him to attempt a resolution. His semi-coherent response included accusations against our other contractors, threats to "turn her in" [meaning me], and something about a loophole. Loophole, indeed. Note for next time: Check references.
   
5. Verified that the gas line to the house is leaking, has been leaking for years, probably, into the soil underneath the front yard. This is why all the plants in the front yard are doing so poorly: Natural gas contaminates the soil with methane and other yuck. Fixed.
6. Patched the wall of the fishy-smelling room, tore down the remaining two closet walls and ceiling, and drywalled it. Matt did most of this, though I did tape and mud the wall. It all looks pretty damn good, and the fish smell is gone. During this work we hammered out the concept of varying levels of done-ness, or perfection: According to one of his coworkers, Matt is an 80% guy. Whereas I'm happy to pore over the last few percents. Go team!
   
7. Given up on getting the layers of wallpaper off the walls downstairs, and hired JJ to cover the whole mess with quarter-inch drywall. It's an 80% solution: far from perfect, but much easier. Matt had to go from room to room pulling forward and securing the electrical outlets and switches (which were no longer even with the wall surface). The baseboards, also, are no longer even with the walls: it didn't occur to anyone to pull them off beforehand. But it's done, and we've even painted some walls, which is a hallmark of civilization, is it not?
8. During a heavy rainstorm, discovered a leak in the attic, water dribbling down the side of a chimney. Jason climbed up there and sealed up some cracks around the flashing and pronounced it sound.
9. During same rainstorm, discovered a leak under the basement apartment's door. Also sealed and sound.
   
10. Added towel bars to the upstairs bathroom.
11. Done a lot of landscaping. Our garden is going to be awesome. I am going to live there.
    
12. Beta is tired of all this.

ghosts

Last Friday night I was in the kitchen washing dishes when I heard Audrey call out a friendly "Hello!" This was totally alarming, as there was nobody else in the house. I ran out; she was looking expectantly up the stairs. "Who are you saying hello to?" I asked, and she said, "the workers, upstairs. I heard them sweeping. Then I heard a thump." Matt was on a business trip so we called Julianne and Oliver and they came over immediately, armed with a flashlight. We walked all through the house, top to bottom. We found nothing.

I can't say we believe in ghosts. But Audrey has seen and heard things in this house before: A face looking in the front window, voices. She's always matter-of-fact, interested, cheerful, never alarmed. I haven't seen or heard anything; in fact, I've been surprised by how quiet and peaceful the house is. But I have smelled things: Cigarette smoke, alcohol, sweat, cologne, all very localized and brief. It occurs to me that maybe this house was originally a brothel? Perhaps — Olive's brothel?

And then there's the fishy smell in the south-facing bedroom. That has not been brief. It smells fishy and rotten and is worse when it rains. When I Googled "fish smell" and "old house," one post suggested that it was evidence of a ghost. Specifically, the ghost of someone who worked with fish. Perhaps Olive's brothel catered to fishermen?

In more boring everyday news, the bathroom is 95% finished and we are 95% happy with it, but I'm pretty sure that last 5% is going to follow me to my grave, at which point I can become a ghost and come back here and taunt the new owners. Downstairs, the apartment's stacked washer and dryer are strapped to floor bolts so the washer can't wander around anymore, but now it tends to throw the dryer across the room during its spin cycle. The plan is to build a shelf for the dryer to sit on, where the washer can't reach it. This, and some painting, curtains, and lots of cleaning, tomorrow. Renter arrives Friday.

insanity and mortality

On Wednesday of last week, the G.C. finished tiling the upstairs bathroom. It looked about 7,000% better than before, but stark without any of the normal bathroom fixtures, just bare white tile. Oliver put his finger on it when he said "It reminds me of my days in the mental hospital." (Working, not committed.) This was not the ambiance we were aiming for, but appropriate in a way. Restoring this house could make a person insane.

And the mortality part: There was an article in the local paper recently about a man who died when a trench he was working in caved in on him. From the article:

People who get caught in the "collapse of soil are at very high risk for being either killed or seriously injured," said Elaine Fischer, a spokeswoman for Labor and Industries. "Soil weighs between 2,000 to 3,000 pounds per cubic yard."

Tragic on its own, and horrifying in light of the work Matt undertook on our sewer, eight feet underground. It was an insane risk that neither of us were aware of when Matt decided to do that work himself. The "what if" paralyzes me.

comfort height

Since we seem to be discussing bathrooms, I will also tell you something you may not know: There are two kinds of toilets, regular and "comfort height." A "comfort height" toilet is four inches taller than a normal toilet. Towering. You might want to own one of these when your arthritic knees no longer bend at all, because it might be more "comfortable" for you. I tell you this as a favor, as it is something you might someday want to know about.

Sometimes, however, a person accidentally comes to own a "comfort height" toilet when, oh, let's say Home Depot were to get her order wrong and slip her one, unmarked and incognito. And if this were to happen, she might unknowingly take it home and install it, and perch upon it as if it were a tall, tall barstool, and say to herself, hmm, this feels wrong. And her child might be unable to hoist her little bottom up onto the seat. And her husband might tease her for buying a geriatric toilet, and her aunt Cherie might confirm that it is in fact a geriatric toilet. And while she might pretend to laugh along with them, it actually perhaps makes her want to cry, because her cute little corner sink now looks disproportionately tiny and stupid, and she really liked that sink.

Can you believe that this very thing happened to us? In the little bathroom off the mudroom.

But all of these events led up to one very astounding plot twist. I think that here in this blog Matt or I may have mentioned that I really hate Home Depot. With, like, blinding rage. Their screws and fasteners aisle particularly gets to me. Which is a digression. So last week, I went to talk to the store's customer service people about this comfort height fiasco, and they said "bring it back." Simple as that.

It had not occured to me that we could pry up a toilet that we had installed and used and bring it back for a full refund, but there you go. Matt got it out of the bathroom and into the car, and then Audrey and I drove it to Home Depot, loaded it into a cart and trundled it in, boxless and dismantled, a used toilet, and we exchanged it for a regular-sized toilet, and the people at the customer service desk gave Audrey a little Home Depot apron and invited her back the next day to make a butterfly house, maybe to compensate, I don't know. And all of a sudden, Home Depot is okay with me.

upstairs bathroom demolition

Apparently we have been understating the situation here at chez Isadora, because when Matt's aunt Cherie walked in the front door two weeks ago, she seemed to think that there might not be anything left for her to do. Ha!

Cherie flew across the country primarily to help us work on the house. She's a veteran home-improver, not afraid of anything (but not fond of rats), and she has perfect timing, since we've now burned through our two home equity loans. She brought us some momentum and perspective on the house. And some investigational holes in walls. And last but definitely not least, a completely demolished upstairs bathroom. Remember this bathroom, the one where the toilet had been leaking into the floor underneath it, probably for years? Seventeen kinds of smelly? Gone!

When you live in a house that needs as much work as ours does, it is a rare gift when a person is willing to stay in your house with you for more than a few hours, and even rarer when the person is willing to focus on your house as intensely as you do. Cherie did this, and it was awesome — inspiring, entertaining, and an overall sanity check. Also educational. Here is some of what I've learned:

1. That bathroom was truly bad, bad, bad. It was not just my imagination. It had to go.
2. What I've been affectionately calling "construction dust" — the dust and dirt that you get when you do demolition — in a 100-year-old house is way dirtier than the construction dust in a newer house. Our house has exceptionally dirty dirt. This was also not just my imagination.
3. If you need to pee in the middle of the night and you don't have a bathroom, a bucket is an acceptable alternative.
   
4. People use power tools because power tools make projects go faster, not solely because they are noisy and dangerous.
5. It might be wise to limit the number of days per week that we work on (or worry about) the house to something less than seven.
   
6. It might be possible to separate all the people of the world into two categories: Those who enjoy demolition but rarely complete a project, and those who enjoy finish work but find demolition deeply disturbing.
   
7. In his teens, Matt was the white sheep of his extended family.
8. In a previous life, Olive was a gold rush–era prostitute.
9. People who live in the Midwest build big fires:
   
   
   

Found under the northeast corner of the bathroom floor: one (1) nest, containing one (1) rat skeleton, one (1) mouse skeleton. Possibly friends. The rat skeleton is one long, long spine with skull and ribs and a few legs, prehistoric-looking and ferocious. Audrey believes it is a dinosaur rat.

Now that Cherie has gone home, we are having the gentlemen contractors in one last time to put together the bathroom, because otherwise it would take us weeks, or months, and that is too long to go without a bathroom, even though we do have a bucket. We're using 1" white and blue hexagon tiles on the floor, white subway tiles 6' up the walls with a blue line around the top, and we have a clawfoot tub, pedestal sink, and toilet ready to go in.

on our floor today

... and we're back

Oh my gosh, whose blog is this?? Someone needs to tell these people who run this blog to lighten up already.

Okay.

First: We're back in our house, which smells better than many bad-smelling things.

Second, because who doesn't like a bit of neighborhood gossip: At the end of October our neighbor Land Rover apparently filed complaint with the city regarding one section of Matt's finely crafted retaining wall. (This is the section that sticks out into the street to avoid harming the roots of an old, old apricot tree.) And the folks at the DOT who handled the complaint said, ah, yes, we see why you did it that way, how very clever, but technically you may not put a wall in the right of way, so please take the wall away and leave just the vertical wall of dirt that is behind the wall, and perhaps plant some ground cover or shrubs in a doomed attempt to keep it all from eroding into the street. Which is an okay resolution, considering. But then today our other neighbor, Architecta, informed us that she herself has filed sort of an anticomplaint, asking the city to let the wall stay, because it looks great and serves a purpose and was generally a fine and functional idea. Isn't that nice?

Third: I have a carful of plants! For the yard! Front, and back! In the car there are four bareroot roses, three kinds of peony, two kinds of hosta, some dahlias, some daylilies, some regular lilies, some ferns and some other stuff I can't even remember because I am so overwhelmed with gratitude to my mother, who wheeled her granddaughter all over Costco in an entertaining fashion while I singlemindedly dug through all of those wonderful bagged bulbs and rhizomes that Costco stocks in the early, early spring, i.e. winter. And the roses, oh, wow, I could bore you to streaming tears talking about roses. So I will not. I will only say that our garden will be awesome, and the retaining wall will or won't be present, and the sweet smell of flowers will waft through the house and brace us for whatever the next thing may be.

backyard rolling

Sometimes it's easier to sleep through some of this stuff.

basement floor setback

We're displaced again, staying at my parents' again. The concrete contractor we hired used an exterior-only sealer on our basement floor (claimed it would be an "epoxy topcoat" but it was, like, driveway sealant) and the house smells poisonous. Can't go in w/o gagging. It's many VOCs so hopefully they'll all evaporate and float away soon.

Crazy miserable. And very very tired.

heating the neighboorhood

We got our first gas bill last week. The only thing we currently use gas for is the furnace. It was the most insane gas bill I have ever seen or heard of. It was big. Like really big. godzilla big.

Ever since we got it I have been looking at our external lathe and plaster walls in a much different light. All of them need to be demoed, and insulation added. So last night I was able to demo the wall surrounding the french doors, and I added insulation to that wall, and to the downstairs bathroom walls. I think I understand why people will demo a house down to the studs, as it would have meant a much smaller first gas bill, and less long term dust. And the wiring and plumbing would have been way easier for the GC.

next house I guess.

2,000 lbs of porch

This past week 2,000 lbs of back porch went to the dump. We should have done a neighborhood lottery: Guess the weight of our porch! Win forty feet of broken clay sewer pipe! You haul!


The (late) porch was enclosed and had housed the washer and dryer. It had a strange rotting-fish smell that the dryer seemed to concentrate into our laundry, so we were happy to see it go. There was one day, though, where it was just half-gone, and it looked a lot like what it had originally been, an open porch, and it was actually quite lovely.



But to reach the basement door you had to limbo under the edge of the porch. So, it went. Maybe our fond memories of that one day of loveliness will inspire us to create another porch outside the new french doors off the mudroom-to-be.

Formerly known as the "refrigerator room," the mudroom is the space between the kitchen, dining room, and downstairs bathroom. Most of the linoleum has been removed; Matt has found a pretty nice hardwood floor underneath. French doors are in and look great. Some walls seem to be missing. We need to insulate and drywall the bathroom, put in a sink and toilet, and figure out what finish is needed on a wood floor in a bathroom.



Meanwhile our nice new water-saving washer and energy-saving dryer live in our tiny little square of basement, buried under tools and gear (ours and theirs). Laundry, we bring to my parents' house on the weekend, like the teenagers we are.

Audrey's room is mostly done. Walls are patched and painted a color called Raffia (a warm pale beige-green), floor washed, curtains half up. There's some touching up to do on the walls and the closet still needs painting. Can't quite figure out our ancient lath and plaster walls: the drywall screws we had around didn't quite stay in. Walls too crumbly. Maybe longer drywall screws? Please advise.



In one spot the just-painted old wallpaper peeled off, revealing the official seal of the U.S. Department of Wallpaper:



Matt rented the backhoe again and filled in the front yard section of trench; the rest, who knows. Maybe rain and wind and gravity will do the trick, over time. We wash our hands of it. Peh.

3 updates.

I stayed home from work yesterday and enjoyed some quality work time with the GC. Kwaku asked if Heather had gotten any gifts for MLK day. So most of the day I had visions of Dr. King in a Santa suit. He would have made a nice Santa, I think.

Kwaku and I finished off the re-piping of the sewer. It was mostly Kwaku, while I cheered him on, got him tools, and made fun of how dirty he got in the sewer pit. The final piece we took out was a 4" to 6" clay pipe that had a number of cracks and large roots going into it. This was another area that the city and most of the plumbers were hitting. It did look like a potted plant, beacuse in essence it was; clay pots, plant roots, plenty of "dirt". Ill try and get a picture of it some time this week.

Also they demoed the back porch (I took out a couple of windows and some drywall. The roof is still there along with the suport posts, and frankly, at some point in time, it was a truly beautiful little porch. Its a little sad to have to remove it now. I'm going to try and keep the good wood for building a ilttle shed in the back this summer.

Lastly, the drywall is hung and taped in the basement, and it looks totally awesome.

I'm thinking we should live there.

just standing in my room

Here it is, well into January, and we're still writing about the sewer. It appears that people with sewer problems need a place to (vent? wallow? All of these words seem to have sewer connotations to me) and I guess this is the place. Sorry about that.

One new and great thing is that the house is now plumbed with brand-spankin-new copper pipes. Previously, we could eke hot water out of only one faucet at a time, and wait a good long time for it, too. Now, hot water on demand. A modern convenience! We're liking it a lot.

What else we're liking: the nearly finished corner bedroom. I painted the walls a warm gray (Benjamin Moore Copley Gray) and the ceiling a cream color (Devine Whip). While I was painting I realized that "Copley Gray" might also be called "drywall gray" because that is basically what it is, the color of the drywall I was painting over. Which is just fine by me, because it is nearly done, and that is a totally new thing for us, not to mention very pleasant to have a little corner of the house that looks habitable, and inhabited. And doesn't smell very much. All that's left in this room is a ceiling fixture en route from Schoolhouse Electric, and we're waiting for our painter to come back and finish the job already.

(I am also proud to say that I installed a ceiling fixture the other day, and with much less cursing than Matt.)

Priorities in an old house are always shifting, and screaming for attention, and it's hard to avoid ending up with a multitude of projects all up and spinning at once. However. Last week I walked into the dining room (which is filled with boxes rescued from the basement) and found Audrey just standing there, very still, doing nothing. Just standing. "What's up?" I asked. "I'm just standing here in my room," she said, and gestured up at the towering wall of Sterilite containers beside her—which were filled with toys from the old house.

It isn't that she doesn't have toys unpacked—she does. But there is no "Audrey's room" yet, and she has so quietly accepted this that I can't help but feel completely negligent for letting slip the interests of this little girl who is by far my greatest priority. She has adapted so amazingly well to this chaotic living arrangement, way better than I have. This weekend we've been scrambling to finish a second bedroom for her. So that she can just stand in her room.

more rain, less trench

Just yesterday I went out and took some picture of the whole trench. We are going to start replacing the sewer tommorrow and I thought it would be good to get a picture of it. Thats it on the top here.

Last night it started raining again. Very hard. I had a hard time sleeping, thinking that ever little bump or sound was the walls caving in and I would be back to square one. So the first things I do this morning is get up and go check the trench out. At first it looks pretty good, a little more water in the bottom but the walls are holding up. I figure now would be a good time to add some extra 2x4's, and really shore it up.

I jump into the trench and head towards the end (where the pictures are being taken). When I get down there I realize that at least 2 2x4's have broken through the particle board, scary #1. The next thing I notice is that as I am walking along the trench more dirt is falling out from undernesth the boards, scary #2. The last thing I notice before I yell "Fuck!", and start running towards the ladder is that the particle boards are slowly moving inwards and making theses funning creaking sounds, scary #3.

New trench from same spot as of 8:30 this morning

Moral of the story. If you are going to dig a trench in Seattle, during the winter, and you shore it up with particle board, you should really get the sewer in as quickly as you possibly can.

Things I should have done differently:
1. Used thicker particle boards and put cross peices on the 2x4 where it was holding them up.
2. Done the sewer stuff as quickly as possible after digging the hole
3. made sure plastic totally covered evry bit of dirt and yard possible around the hole.
4. Waited until summer to dig the hole.

bug tracking

I think I am going to set up a bug/ issue tracker for the house. After 10 years of software dev my mind seems to have been trained to work better that way. If/When I get it up and running Ill publish a link so people can see how geeky I am.

How much fun would it be to get an email that looked like this.

Subject: Issue #30, Toilet doesnt flush.
Opened By: Heather
Assigned to: Matt

Notes:

Our toilets are broken, please fix!


ok not that much fun. Im still doing it though.

bathroom demo: white mold

This evening I demoed the downstairs bathroom. Not really because I wanted to (I didn't) but because Jason found a pretty wicked white mold infestation. Its like a parasite in my mind, actually the more I think about it, I'm tending to associate all molds with their AD&D Monster Manual descriptions. White mold ... hmm ... I wonder if my +2 dagger can hurt it before it freezes me. But instead of a +2 dagger I used the crowbar of doom and the Vacuum of ungodly sucking to demo the entire bathroom, evil White Mold and all.



Oh yeah, and just to add icing on the mold encrusted bathroom cake, Jason, when pulling down the ceiling, found another rats nest. It wasn't as big as the one I had found, but it was "fresher". Who knew rats were so good at finding human hair?

backhoe day 7: here comes the rain again

The machine has to go back tomorrow.

We got the week rate after the polite Handy Andy man, who I guess was maybe named Andy, told me that if I wanted them to stop calling every day I should just tell them how long it was going to be. The weekly rate has an upside: 7 days for the price of 4, so really the machine was 80 bucks a day, making my soccer games cost only a measly 23 bucks a day to play.

Monday morning Seattle rings in the new year with rain. Real rain. Tropical monsoon rain. Except that it's not tropical. It's cold as fuck. It is as cold as it can get without the rain turning into a blizzard. When we start on Monday morning its about 37 degrees, and pouring rain. Oliver and I go out and take stock of the Trench. We notice a few things.

1. The walls are holding up quite well.
2. The plastic over the dirt mounds is doing great.
3. The drains are dumping water into the ditch.

Oliver and I had put up some drains on Sunday. They didn't hold. On Monday in the pouring rain we did a bunch of jerry-rigging to try and get them to hold. Drywall screws into the downspout through the plastic tubing, and a very hacked together structure to hold the tubing against the house in the wake of the 40 MPH wind gusts. So far they have held up with minimal leaking into the trench. I think we got them far enough away from the dirt piles also.

Trench digging goes great. There is very little left to do for Tuesday; the last couple of feet up to the sidewalk. Today we got all the way out to the hill of the front lawn (which is very precarious for the backhoe). I didn't want to dig on it, and Oliver mentioned that I should just dig from the sidewalk a place for the backhoe to sit level.

Genius.

I have always respected and admired Oliver. He's smart, funny, hardcore liberal, good natured, etc. But after working with him I am now in awe. After the physical setbacks digging the trench by myself, I had gotten very depressed about the house. Oliver came in and in 2 days significantly brightened my mood, offered fantastic advice, and made the trench size expand at an astounding rate.

We had a discussion in the car on the way to get diesel for the machine about the moves towards privatization of federal things, like the IRS. I know this is bad, mostly because when your main goal is money and not quality you tend to cut corners, and cutting corners with, say, health care gets people dead, and cutting corners with, say, the IRS computer systems gets a lot of money lost. However, Oliver can easily articulate why this is all bad, and give examples of its failures starting with Reagan in the 80's. So I feel like it's a bad thing and I can stumble around talking about it, and Oliver knows its a bad thing and could most likely write a Wikipedia article about it.

He is always also very upbeat and positive. Even negatives sound forward-thinking and positive coming out of his mouth. He can phrase critiques in such a way that you feel praised while being told you could do something different. And he is constantly interested in differing views of things, to expand his own, or to argue with, in a good natured get-your-learn-on sort of way.

From the excavator I watched Oliver jump in and out of our eight-foot-deep ditch yesterday, throwing dirt over the walls while explaining his shoveling technique (which of course is unstopable), for 8 hours. I watched him do the same thing today for another 8. Today I asked him how old he is. 75. I told him Kwaku is going around telling people he is 77. He is going to have words with Kwaku. Sorry Kwaku.

My grandfather died at age 75. He was pretty immobile the last couple of years, and I never saw him do that much physical labor. He had his first heart attack at 36. He is really the only gauge by which I have to measure Oliver. I do play soccer with at least one guy who may be in his 70's, and still has a wicked shot (and even more wicked elbows) but I can't visualize Finn in the trench. Without at least knocking down some more walls by swinging his elbows at them.

During the pouring rain on Tuesday, after talking about how nice it is to be in the trench protected form the wind and rain, Oliver offhandedly mentioned that he feels a lot better than he did on Monday morning and that he needs to remember that about doing a lot of physical labor. I am expecting I will need to help him dig a ditch just for fun this summer.