This turned out to be a much busier weekend than we expected. On Saturday we drove to my old townhouse to check on things and see if there was any remaining cleanup to do. It turned out we’d somehow left a bunch of empty boxes and old computer equipment in one of the spare bedrooms, so we ended up making 2 trips to the dump/recycling center. Then we discovered that 2 of the toilets had stopped working. I was able to fix one with a bit of joggling things around, but the other one broke completely as soon as Jag started poking at the innards, not very surprising since all 3 toilets are probably original to the 30-year-old house. It’s very clear from looking things over that the 2 full bathrooms are going to have to be completely redone before I can even think of selling: new tubs, toilets, and sink/vanity and floor replacements.

We stopped by Home Depot afterwards to get a feel for how much a redo would cost, and the parts themselves for nice basic replacements aren’t too bad, it’s just the labor that’s going to be a killer. If anyone knows of a good contractor who redoes bathrooms, let me know. I’m not looking to do anything fancy. With the Bean arriving in 4 months, there’s no way we’re going to try tackling this kind of renovation ourselves. If I can recoup the costs and break even when I sell, I’ll be happy.

When we got home, we found that Jag’s garage door refused to open. It turned out that the big spring on the door had broken (yet another nasty repair that we didn’t want to deal with ourselves). We found a likely-looking web site and Jag used their online form to request a repair quote. A mere twenty minutes later, someone had called and we’d set up an appointment for Sunday. The place we used was http://www.garagedoorspecialist.net/ and we would definitely recommend them! We still can’t believe they called us back on a Saturday afternoon and showed up on Sunday for a totally non-emergency call.

The garage repairman showed up today to replace the spring, which led to the exciting discovery that the doorbell was broken. After the repairman left, Jag ran out to Lowe’s to get a replacement and did the swap with our pal Frankenstein looking on in amazement.

The weekend wasn’t all doom and breakage.

I spun some more of the merino-bamboo on the new drop spindle. Jag suggested winding it onto one of my spinning wheel bobbins in case I wanted to ply it. I think I’ll end up leaving it as singles, but it’ll be much easier to skein it up this way.

I also worked on my Dad Secret Project. Dad should not click on this link.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/hsarik/4087869650/in/photostream/

Let’s see…we found what is possibly the world’s awesomest candleholder last week. It’s gnometastic! Jag told me he’d still have married me even if he had known we’d be buying this less than 2 weeks after the wedding. That’s love for you.

Jag tried to get some reading done, but the couch was taken.

He ended up settling for the love seat, even though it was a little on the small side.

Of course, within about 10 minutes he had to share that, too.

Last but not least, I made a big tray of chicken pot pie with herbed biscuits on top. It was deeelish, especially since we got pretty hungry while waiting 45 minutes to eat it due to some excitement going on at Jag’s work. Yay for working in IT.