Raising the Roof

We are working on a new project at Casa Flamingo. We have some attic space that shares one wall with our master bathroom and one wall with our master bedroom that until last weekend was inaccessible unless you were a rat. Our laundry room downstairs is in an awkward spot -- by awkward, I mean that it is downstairs and all the dirty clothes are upstairs. It's current location is also preventing us from removing the wall that hides it to open up the den and breakfast room into one large space so that more than three people can watch TV at one time. Our house is large if you count square feet, but it's chopped up into lots of small spaces. So if we move the laundry room upstairs, we can open up the kitchen, den and breakfast room into one large space.

Two weekends ago, Flamingo Joe cut a hole in the wall in the bathroom so that we could start turning the attic space into a laundry room. I'm very excited about this project because it means I won't have to carry baskets of laundry up and down the stairs and I might even have a place to put my sewing machine. I'm so excited, in fact, that two weekends ago when the project commenced, I actually tried to help Joe as much as he needed me. When Joe and I bought our first house about 2 years after we married, we spent a great deal of time working on the house together. We put in hardwood floors in the den, laid a brick patio in the backyard, fenced our rather large backyard, and re-did at least one bathroom. After I finished law school, we bought our first house in Tampa and did a lot of work there, as well.

Once Casey was born, however, Flamingo Joe lost his assistant. I couldn't keep track of Casey and hold 12 foot sheets of drywall over my head at the same time. About the time Casey could start keeping track of himself, leaving me free to help Joe, Mace came along and we were back to Joe getting irritated because he was doing all the work by himself.

But now, Casey is eight, old enough to put to work; and Mace is almost four, old enough to use his Handy Manny tools and pretend to work alongside us. I'm pretty sure this is why God gave us boys -- He knew we would forever be working on houses and wanted to provide us with some additional labor.

Two weekends ago may have not been the very best opportunity for me to jump back in as Joe's assistant. His first assignment for us was to remove all of the old insulation out of the attic space. The insulation in that space is of the shredded newspaper variety and whenever you move it around, it creates an impenetrable dust cloud. I swept, scooped, and dumped pulverized newspaper for what seemed like a couple of hours, but could have been much less. After fifteen or twenty minutes, Joe checked on us and then sent his mom down stairs to the workshop under the house to fetch facemasks. That was about the time Casey quit helping and Mace stepped in:

Someone is going to report us to DCF after this post for sure. Mace really was just the right size, though, for slipping underneath the rafters with his kid-sized rake and pushing all the insulation toward the door. And we did give him the heavy duty mask. He was fine. Really.

After it was all done, I looked like this:

Mmmm . . . pretty . . . nice triple chin.

But my future laundry/sewing/somewhere-to-sleep-when-Joe-is-snoring room looked like this:

It was a good morning's work.

So this weekend -- nay, even as I type this post, there are four men (I have no idea how we ended up with two extra workers, but I suspect they aren't here out of the goodness of their hearts and are expecting to be paid), including Flamingo Joe, up in my future laundry room working away. Yesterday, Jamie and Joe tore off the roof (it had to be raised -whoop whoop):

And today . . . voila!

There's a room where there once was none. Every time Mace goes in there, he points to a corner and says, "Daddy, you can put my bed right there." I'm not sure why he thinks he's moving into that room. That's my room -- I'm going to paint it pink, put in plush shag carpeting and line three walls with bookshelves to house my collection of quilting books. I'm going to blog in there and continue to ignore all those scrapbooking supplies I bought a few years ago before I figured out how to blog.

If you don't mind, let's just keep this between us for now . . . I wouldn't want Flamingo Joe to lose his motivation.