HAPPY HALLOWEEN!!!

We had a very Happy Halloween greeting our MANY trick-or-treaters

We went through 8 bags of candy, and for 7 of them we were only giving out ONE PIECE! Early on a neighbor came by with his kids and chatted with us and said, "you have A LOT of candy, right? It gets a little crazy." I said, "yeah, we have 9 bags." To which he replied, "Last year we went through 20." HOLY CRAP!!!! So we quickly switched to one piece each (we were giving two), and called it a night at 8:30 when we only had one bag left and were VERY tired of the constant ringing for 2 1/2 hours (the doorbell would ring pretty much before you sat back down). But, I did have a lot of fun! Moral of the story: buy a LOT of candy at Costco next year.

Before our costumed visitors, we did not have a very cheerful day however.

We started back to work on the art room and anticipated simply replacing this window and then moving on to the electrical

The window was another thing the previous owners installed wrong, so we wanted to get it right before the rainy season. We knew EVENTUALLY we would have to replace this window as well

There is a lot of paint missing (the water sealed layer to keep the rain away from the framing) and the sill didn't look too good

But it wasn't a super big priority, so we figured in a year or two we would get around to that and deal with what rot was there THEN. Well, by the end of the day, this is what the back of the house looked like

Yes, that's right, there is NO SUPPORT in the corner of the house! It was COMPLETELY rotten, so the back corner of the house is basically cantilevered at this point (we're making sure NOT TO WALK in that corner of the art room).

I won't summarize everything in words, but here is our slow discovery of ALL THE ROT in pictures

(chunk of stucco we broke off)


It's actually not NEARLY as bad of either of us anticipated when we started really busting up the stucco and opening up the house. But still, it's not a fun project, and certainly one we didn't think we'd be doing this weekend. But, we knew we would have to do the other window eventually, so in the long run, it probably saves us time doing both of them at the same time.

So here's what we'll be working on for the next few days (I made sure to check the weather, 9 days of nothing but sunshine, phew!!!)