Wall to Wall Work

As expected, we had a very busy weekend this week with the new carpet coming into my dad’s house. The work actually got in to full swing while I was still at my paying job on Friday. Two of my sisters, Karen Lutz, Pam Sirrire and my nieces Jacki Keenan and Cat Densley were able along with Valerie to get started on moving thing around earlier in the afternoon.

By the time I got there later in the evening, they had already done an incredible amount of work, in clearing out a lot of the things that they could really only leaving me and some of the other late-arriving men with some of the larger pieces of furniture to move.

It was a struggle to find places to put things, especially with the possibility of rain that night. We did end up putting a lot of stuff on the back deck of the house and covering it with tarps. Thankfully, the rains never came so we didn’t have to test how things would hold up.

On Saturday morning, the carpet layers did arrive as expected and got to the work of ripping out the old and installing the new. This took several hours and we queued up ready to get busy the moment they left.

They finished their work at about 1:30 in the afternoon and the new carpeting looked great. It is amazing what a coat of paint and new carpeting can do for a house. I just love that new-carpet smell too. Must be the benzene.

After that, there was really a ton of work to be done. It took a very long time to do some of the reassembly and other work that needed to be done.

I decided to paint one more of the bedrooms since it looked a little shabby now that the furniture was out and the walls were bare. Daughter Sarah and I knocked that out pretty quickly. She did a lot of the trim and detail work while I painted some of the bigger areas. It is great to have kids that are old enough to do real work.

After that, my main focus was on electronics. Dad has satelite TV with three TVs on the system, Cable Internet with a couple of computers and VoIP telephone service. Combine that with the fact that in over 30 years in this house, several different cable systems etc. had been in and out. Suffice to say that there were cables EVERYWHERE. Nobody had really paid attention to what was plugged into where when it was all pulled out.

I was left with bins of cables that looked like plates of spaghetti and really no idea where they all went. To complicate things further, Dad’s office was being moved to a different room to give him more space to work. I spent quite literally several hours piecing things back together and running cables through walls to the new rooms where things were to be installed.

I almost had a nervous breakdown several times out of exhaustion and out of experimenting with different connections trying to get things to work. I ended up on tech support with Comcast once and with Dish Network twice.

I don’t know how this happened, but at one point I managed to set off the burglar alarm on a past defunct alarm system. I’m sure it had something to do with some cable I had removed somewhere. I ended up shutting off the electricity to the house twice at the fuse box to try to kill it but it must be on some type of battery backup that never dies. It being a defunct system, the control box for the system is dark so there was nothing we could do there.

It seemed the alarm was coming from the attic crawl space of the house. After a couple of hours of listening to the alarm, Jacki Lutz had had enough. She shimied up to the crawl space with noteable agility and used a pair of improvised wire cutters (i.e. scissors) to shut the sucker down. There was much rejoicing. Jacki is awesome.

Speaking of rejoicing, I did much of my own when by very late in the evening, the things that make dad happy were back in place again. Computers were working, ballgames were on TV and the telephone was functional as well. Whew. There were a fairly disburbing amount of spare parts left over but I credit that to my efficiency... and humility.

Who lit the torch lamp!?

One more thing to mention is that the younger kids were really good through this whole thing. The picture of Ben shows a neglected two-year-old sound asleep on a recliner with the clock showing 11:01 PM. They put up without a lot of attention from their parents this weekend. We’ll make sure we have some fun with them in the next couple of days to make up for it.

As I have mentioned a lot already, there was a lot of work to be done this weekend but it is a pleasure to be able to do something for dad who spent most of his life doing things for us. The bulk of the work was done by “the usual suspects” in the family who I love working side-by-side with and make me proud to be a part of core of the VanderHoeven Machine. I know who I can count on when there is work to be done. The Walsh division of the family had an excused absence on this one but on the bright side, the downstairs is still left to be done so there are still opportunities.

Now before anyone comments and says “sounds fun, wish I could have been there” – It wasn’t and you were invited.