Phase One of Operation Knotty Pine

It was part success, part failure.

Today, my father-in-law and I removed the ceiling tiles from the empty upstairs bedroom, which we’re tackling first. They came off pretty easy, but the insulation, not so much. The older stuff pretty much just crumbled when you touched it, even though it was faced, leaving a huge mess on the floor. This exposed the rafters. We wound up leaving the furring strips, because I’m not sure we can raise the ceiling from 7 feet to 8 feet, and we can just put the drywall up on the strips of wood.

Found a never-given Christmas gift — it rained down on us from the ceiling. It was an envelope with two crisp 10-dollar bills — with 1950 print dates on them. The envelope was addressed to the previous owner’s two sons, and said that the money was for them to add to their stamp and coin collections. My thinking is that the Christmas gifts were stashed up in the newly-discovered attic space above the crawl space we already knew about.

The worst part was that once we were finished cleaning up, I realized I lost one of my earrings. MAJOR FAIL. They were only small round diamonds (1/3 carat total) set in white gold, but they were the first and only piece of “real” jewelry I’ve ever bought myself — $400 bucks. Can’t just wear one, so it’s useless. I’m going to see if I can sell the remaining hoop for scrap and put that money toward new earrings — it’s one of the few luxuries I will allow myself nowadays. I’m really annoyed and upset about this. But I’ll hold off in the event that the earring miraculously appears. Who knows, maybe our cat will wind up batting it out of a hiding spot sometime in the next week or two.

On Friday, we’ll be taking down the knotty pine walls and seeing what lies underneath. The project will take a few weeks, because we need to check the electrical and install new, 3-prong outlets (they’re only two-prong right now) before we put up the sheetrock.