Out with the Old...

This week has been extremely crazy. Since coming home from Disneyland a week and a half ago our house has been infested with sickness. The only ones to avoid it were Madisyn and Tyler. (Lets hope it stays that way). Daryl and I came down with it Sunday evening. Unfortunately we were unable to rest much at the beginning of the illness. Before we left for Disneyland we ordered new countertops and set an appointment to have them installed the day after Presidents Day.
Pictures of old countertops. Probably thinking "they don't look too disgusting" and wondering why we put this priority above getting a sprinkling system, because Amy spends her whole summer trying to keep her yard alive by hand moving the hose. (At the end of the past three summers this has been my top priority for the following year and always gets pushed out of the running. I always look at the positive side, many of my neighbors have had sink holes because of broken water pipes from sprinklers, this has fortunately not been an issue for us, just a dead back yard). Onto exhibits C and D.

The sink. Since moving into our house 2 1/2 years ago this has been a problem of embarrassment for us. The first day we started moving in, a good portion of the sink near the sprayer was pure black. My dad tried everything and finally found toilet bowl cleaner did the best job of getting rid of the black. After 40 minutes of scrubbing it finally looked better. We even bought a new faucet to replace the eroded one, but it was too fancy for the ugly sink and warped formica, so it got sent to the garage to wait. We even talked about just replacing the countertop with another formica countertop, but it always came back to the same issue, we really wanted an undermount sink.

Back to the story. So after a few hours of being miserable with fevers, the ibuprofen finally kicked in and we were forced to get to work. We had countertops and a sink to rip out. We had actually done a lot of the work on Saturday (or so we thought) and took off the tile backsplash and loosened the countertops so all we had to do was lift them off. So Monday we thought our job shouldn't be too tough. We were wrong. As the countertops came off, the mold problem was revealed.

We had suspected it since we moved in, because there was a gap between the formica and the backsplash, and the formica was a bit warped. Part of the countertop was completely rotted and the mold had gone into the sheetrock. Daryl had to cut some of the sheetrock out and replace it, and scrub the plastic on the insulation with mildew remover. (Fortunately the mold was not in the insulation.

Now the second problem, mouse droppings. We caught two mice for the first time this fall since moving in 2 1/2 years ago. There really wasn't much evidence of them in the lazy Susan where they were caught. Who knew how bad the problem was on the other side of the cupboards where no one had been able to look for 10 years. Quite the party had been going on back there.

We sat forever trying to figure out how to solve the problem. Two sick people really not wanting to do anything, but knowing the new countertops were arriving the next morning bright and early. So the brave wife tried to put on her well face and left the house to adventure to Ace Hardware to purchase cute masks to wear while cleaning the aftermath of the mouse "party".
We finally finished at 10:30.

Stay tuned to Part 2.