An Act of God (with photos) Part 1

Depleted · Sep 21, 2017

(This is a three-parter because we can only put up but so many photos in a post -- and less than I think too, so have to rework this even now. lol So bear with me while I work on the three posts, and sorry that it will go from last to first by the time I'm done.)

I've never hid who I am on this site. Hubby and I have been saved since before we met each other and we're coming up to our 37th anniversary. The Lord has been chiseling us for a long time. We were both healthy when we married. We even bought the house in a middle-class neighborhood 26 years ago.

And then 17 years ago, I became disabled. And 14-15 years ago, he became disabled. With both of our abilities hindered, we lost church and friends along the way. No grudges. It's just that if the couple can't go out for more than 90 minutes and can't keep up with the housework to have people over, where can those relationships go?

Someone was listening and being nudged by the Lord. PennEd. Yeah, our PennEd! (If you haven't met him yet, he's a good'n on this site.)

Last spring, Ed PM'd me to ask me if he and his merry band of Men's Group Guys could help us. I doubt he remembers this part, but he also said he wasn't very handy with tools, so he was the gofer/grunt of the operation.

17 years since the last time this house was truly organized and cleaned. We jumped at the opportunity, thinking he meant they'd help us get rid of stuff we can't do ourselves. We had become involuntary hoarders, with a little voluntary lumped in.

So, he and his friend Rich came over one night after work. (No small thing, even there, since they live in the burbs and we live in Philly.) I wasn't being shy about the mess I hoped they could clear out.

Here's what our study (third bedroom) looked like.

No kidding! That's a whole day of heavy labor, right? Not enough for Rich though. He wanted to know what we would like fixed. The first thing that came to my mind was our front windows. But it was the front windows specifically because I thought it would cost too much money to buy new windows, and the old ones were falling apart when we bought the house. (The rot was hidden by paint, so we didn't know for a couple of years. And the cost for new windows was about the same as buying a small new car, so we had to save for it.) No way was I going to mention that one! It's too much to ask anyone else to do.

Here is the bad window. (There is very little bottom ledge to it.)

This is the good window for reference.

So, nope. Wasn't going to mention that at all. But I did remember one of the disadvantages to having very little ceiling left in our bathroom. We had started remodeling it ourselves back in the 90's. We, (and by "we" I mean I was manual labor, and John was skilled tradesman) had already put in new walls, but the ceiling was a problem we didn't know how to fix. And then it became "we couldn't fix." A false ceiling hid the real lack-of-ceiling. So, the weatherproofing, (if there was any to begin with), or dust of 100 years was falling down at any given moment.

The wide part of our bathroom ceiling. (That bright spot is the skylight.)

The hard part of the ceiling. (I think you can tell that's a skylight here.)

Rich seemed interested in that job. Why? I'll never know other than, must have been the Lord.

And when I showed them the mess in the basement, we passed our kitchen. He wanted to know if we'd like to do anything about the light in the kitchen. At least, that's how I heard it.

Light in kitchen.

Have you ever become so used to something that you don't even see anything wrong with it? We had a transparent covering for that light that made the kitchen look descent. It's a delicate operation, and the fluorescent tube went bad, so John changed the tube, and felt too weak to put the cover back on. I tried pulling it out to show Rich, but it fell apart. That's how long it had been. So, I thought if he could put a couple of ceiling tiles up there, it would be cool. (Mind you -- so far, they had only seen one hoarding room and I was taking them to the second. How much could four or five guys do in a day? And, honestly, I didn't see anything wrong with it.) I saw the cogs in Rich's brains whirling. And Ed was smiling as if he had seen those cogs whirling before.

Next came the basement.

The second hoarding room.

Seriously? Between the study and that room, can't you see a full day of sweaty labor? I'm not being easy on them. But, oh no! Rich's cogs are still clicking.

Rich is talking reinstalling light fixtures again. (Some fell down over the years, but we couldn't reach them.) Doable, if they can get the junk out. Deal!

So, they're still asking me what else I'd like. I don't know if they ever understood this, but gaining two rooms again for us is huge!!! I'm trying not to cry just over that.

Still asking, as we go on the front porch. So, since we’re right there, I remember the forsythia. Years ago, I bought a bare-root forsythia online, a 25-gallon container, the soil to fill it, and placed it next to our steps. Have you ever noticed the size forsythias can get? Let's just say that wasn't one of my better ideas. I had been cutting it back when Ed and Rich arrived. I've been cutting it back every year, since I bought it. I have to, or else it falls over at the slightest breeze. It still falls over in storms. 25 gallons of soil! It's like lifting up a 250cc dirt bike! I can do it, but it kills me the next few days.

But, I'm fully aware plants are living things, and I can't intentionally kill it either. (I often have the same problem with weeds.) I've asked many businesses if they'd like it. And they would, if I brought it to them. :? So, I asked Ed if he could move it to a pocket garden up the street from us. (It's a median strip between two lanes of the same street, but it's wide enough that it's lined with ginkgo trees on both sides and lawn. In between each set of ginkgo trees, the city added decorative plants -- some flowering bushes in a circle. Those are "pocket-gardens.")

I have no idea, but Rich notices that "good window," and thinks it's the bad window. He's talking painting those windows. I'm trying to explain that I fear if the paint comes off, it's the only thing holding up the windows. (Not kidding. I have been steadily praying those windows don't fall out in a gust of window for over 20 years. If they fall out, our house would be condemned. I truly believe God's grace kept the windows in place.) He's poking at the good window, and saying they might have to remove a piece of wood here and there, but they can make those windows look good.

We're dumbfounded. (Picture this. Me! Unable to complete a sentence. Also a miracle, right? lol) Ed's beaming, Rich is still thinking overtime, and they leave.

I think we experienced something of what it must be like to win a million dollars. Quite a bit like it. What's the first thing you'd do if you saw the winning lottery numbers on your ticket? Me? I'm questioning if I read them right, and I'm pretty sure I didn't.

John is stuck on "Wow!" I keep asking if he thinks it's possible. He keeps saying, "He sounds like he knows what he's doing." And, then I reread the ticket and remember the extra number -- the bad window. The reason you couldn't see that bad window clearly is because stacks of storm windows covered it up.

I'm quickly PMing Ed why they can't merely fix the windows, but that's okay. The rest is great. We're still blown away.

Next: Part Two -- The Big Fix!

Depleted · Sep 21, 2017

Duh! Just dawned on me I ca post more if I just use the reply part here.

Part Two -- The Big Fix!

Ed does tell Rich the problem with the windows. Rich comes back and does his whirling-brain-cog thing again. (You really can see it in his face when he's thinking hard and fast. lol) This time with picture taking with his phone. He's mostly focusing on the bathroom ceiling, so I'm thinking that's the big project he wanted. (And, I'm right. It was. He would have been good company for Job.)

But he's still looking at the front.

Before shot of our front.

The photo doesn't do it justice. The paint was peeling off so badly that it looked like those fake icicles people decorate their homes with at Christmas time, except no one puts them that close together. They ranged from half an inch to three inches in length too. There's a reason people put trash in front of our house. We're still in as middle-class neighborhood, and we're the embarrassing house on the street.

He tells me they'll be coming in a few weeks.

In those weeks, Ed tells me Rich got Home Depot to donate gift cards for the project. Great, because I really didn't want them to spend money on us. (No idea how I thought they wouldn't. lol)

Now, we were gifted in two ways back when we went to church. We were often the people doing the work for someone else, and we like to eat. I call this "the gift of food." John can cook meals that were big enough to feed up to 25 guys. Also delicious and nutritious. (No salt too.) I'm the dessert maker. Ed and Rich told us that they'd be working in the kitchen, but it didn't matter. Most of the monster-meals we made were going to potlucks after church or to Christmas parties where he worked and neither had kitchens. (Crockpots. Really big crockpots. And then make dessert early and freeze.) So, all we needed was a rough idea how many were coming.

Now that you've seen our basement, understand that's the bulk of the dimensions of our house. Sixteen feet wide, which includes the space needed for stairs, and a chimney. (No fireplace, but still need a chimney to vent heater and plumbing.) And about 35 feet long. And in that space is our living room, kitchen and what used to be dining room. (Now it's John's computer area -- bookcase, computer stand/desk, and overflow space for what doesn't fit in our 10 X 10 kitchen. Kitchen is smaller because we need an outside drain for our cement yard, so something like a little covey there.)

About 16 people came!

Eating wise, not a problem. Fitting wise? Still don't know how they all fit, except some hung out by the front windows. Sneaky too. One of the guys is a professional cleaner and got two of his workers to come. Ah, the memories of when I used to do that. But what I never had to do was work when construction work was going on all around me. (No idea how they did that. They even vacuumed the steps, and all while bathroom ceilings were going upstairs and that room full of junk was coming downstairs. They even cleaned the fronts of our kitchen cabinets while an electrician installed the new ceiling and lights.)

Remember the one fluorescent light sort of sitting in a hole in the ceiling that I didn't notice wasn't lovely?

New kitchen ceiling.

We both did notice it was hard to wash dishes at night. Can't really see how dirty dishes are if the only light is behind you. We've come up with ideas on how to deal with that, but couldn't figure out how to install lights bright enough. Now that we can see out there, we're seeing stuff that needs cleaning after all these years. That's good, because we've gather the oomph needed to work on it a little at a time. (One wall completely clean. Two more walls to go.)

Remember the hoarding rooms?

Hoarding room upstairs is back to being a study.

So much room in the basement that I've taken to doing my impression of Julie Andrews on a mountaintop when walking through to get laundry.

Poor Rich! He was able to cover the ceiling with wallboard. But there was a pretty ceiling that covered it that just didn't want to. Personally, I like purple and I'm happy not to have dark fuzzy things fall in front of me or on me. So I thought this was pretty.

He planned to come back and finish it though.

And the front windows?

A bit frightening to walk out to the front of your house at noon and notice a huge hole in it!

But we had windows by the end of the day.

Did you know windows open and close? We had our windows painted years ago (to avoid any more rotting underneath), and the painters painted the windows shut. Since we knew the paint protected the wood from rotting more, we never opened them again. Somewhere in my head, I know windows open and close, but it's been so longer that we could do that, I truly forgot windows do that. I've been opening and closing those windows at least once a day since then.

Somewhere in all the flurry of activity, we couldn't get anyone to slow down long enough to eat, but we did get some to "eat a little something." (Many had to leave for one reason or another throughout the day.)

One of my favorite moments was when I asked two of the guys installing windows, if they'd like some dessert. They smiled, one said they were both diabetics, so "no sugar."

I laughed and said, "No sugar."

They thought I was astonished that someone couldn't eat dessert, so I clarified. "We're both diabetics, so, yeah. No sugar." I suspect they don't get dessert often when they're out, but that day they had dessert.

Since one of the cleaners was also "Mom," it was late in the day when she left, we gave her enough to feed her family that night.

Ed did put the forsythia in the park. It wouldn't fit in the pocket garden, so here it is all by itself. It looks small now but give it a couple of years and it will make the bushes next to it look small.

As for the windows?

Here we are in front of our "new house."

Next: Part Three -- And then there was more!

Depleted · Sep 21, 2017

Part Three -- And then there was more!

Poor Rich! He took it in stride that day, but that bathroom ceiling he planned wouldn't stay up.

He planned to come back a couple of weeks later. I admit to being worried about that plan. They all came in the beginning of June. The chances of it not being hot in June were slim. The Lord is sovereign so he bypassed chance. We didn't need air-conditioning that day. Really good, since we only have window units, and since hot air rises, and we have no a/c in the bathroom, the ceiling in the bathroom is exactly where all heat goes to. (Skylight is as high as heat can get in this house.) It gets hotter in the summertime.

A couple weeks later, it was that kind of hot. Fortunately, whomever he had plans on coming with him couldn't make it, so they postponed until August. August, traditionally, is the hottest month. Not this year. We set records for coldest August in history of weather keeping, often in the 70s.

That's when they could come back.

We did have new windows, so I thought we could afford to have someone paint the rest. (I had planned on hiring someone after summer, because summer is too hot. lol) Nope. Not with Rich. They weren't done with the front.

Not as many descended this time, but they thought it would be a half day of work, so we didn't make lunch. (I made some cherry sweet bread, but they brought donuts.

)

Rich spent more time expected on the ceiling, and when it came time to put back our bathroom sink, (I didn't know they took it out), the drain chose that moment to rot. (Just had plumbers fix the trap under the sink because it rotted, so they should have known to replace the drain too.)

C.J., Rich's helper, working on that uncooperative ceiling.

Like I said, Rich would have been good company for Job. Everything went wrong, but he didn't even get a little out of shape over it.

Meanwhile, out front, the guys removed two pieces of wood on the sides of the windows that were in bad shape. (Never noticed.) Then they scrapped and repainted everything, including our decorative sunburst above the windows. This house is 97 years old, and those sunburst were part of the décor back when this street was new. So we just went fancy-retro. (I used to do stained-glass, so I'm quite fond of them too.)

Added bonus, a neighbor down the street came along to talk and that's how I found out the significance of those sunbursts. His name is Gus. Gus prayed with us as we gathered afterward.

And, last year we had two new doors put in. It was twice as much as I expected to pay, and I assumed "new door" meant "door frames" too, since what's the use of putting doors in on rotting frame? Apparently, I should have brought that up before signing the contract, because we got two doors on rotting frames. Back door and front door!

I had no idea they planned on painting and calking both door frames. (I would have had a before picture of the back door, had I known.) But I did notice the backdoor was surrounded by gaps that would cause rot. They caulked all that and painted the door frames.

Backdoor all prettied.

And since they didn't have time last time to put up a light in the basement, they did that too. Good thing. They were pulling down some false ceiling to do that. (In case you don't know this stuff either, there is no electricity in false ceiling panels or tracks.) When one of the tracks hit a wire in the ceiling, a light switch next to me sparked. They were in the basement. I was on the first floor. That's not supposed to happen. (I asked because I don't know this stuff. lol)

So after they got that light in, they checked that switch. Ends up it had a short in it. Gone unnoticed, some time in our future, it would have caused an electrical fire, and we'd have no house.

Here's everyone who came the second day in front of our pretty house. (Rich is the guy on the right.)

We have a little problem now. Did you happen to notice our neighbor's houses? They put up new fronts for their houses before we moved in. We live on the far end of a one-way street, so we try to find parking spots near our house. Seems reasonable, right? We can't find our house! It looks too new and pretty to be our house. lol

I am ever so thankful for Ed, Rich and massive gang helping us this much. We are no longer the embarrassing house in the neighborhood!

And I am so thankful the Lord kept windows in that shouldn't have lasted that long.

One last picture -- our new/old front porch ready to sit in once again.

Depleted · Sep 21, 2017

Okay, I messed up. (Oh! That's different. lol)

Forgot to show the new home for our forsythia.

That's the tiny bush in the middle there. Hard to see it this far back, but wanted you to see it next to, not in, the pocket gardens.

Here's a close up, and it has survived it's first summer in the ground, so it has made it. (Might look a little dry, but it hasn't rained in a while, and it's about time for it to lose it's leaves anyway.)

And I picked the picture that doesn't show our front porch too, so here's our front porch.

Angela53510 · Sep 22, 2017

What an awesome story! Thanks so much for sharing, and all the pictures, too!

And a big shout out to PennEd and his friends!! A couple days work, with no pay, and they have made your lives so much better!

Depleted · Sep 23, 2017

Okay, fire me from the photo-essayist job. (As if my ability to take photos would have ever gotten me the job in the first place. lol) I absolutely forgot to show the new bathroom ceiling Rich put in.

Overall affect.

A better view of the details. (Still prettier than this, and white, but I can't get it that clear.)

oldethennew · Sep 25, 2017

Depleted said:

Duh! Just dawned on me I ca post more if I just use the reply part here.

Part Two -- The Big Fix!

Ed does tell Rich the problem with the windows. Rich comes back and does his whirling-brain-cog thing again. (You really can see it in his face when he's thinking hard and fast. lol) This time with picture taking with his phone. He's mostly focusing on the bathroom ceiling, so I'm thinking that's the big project he wanted. (And, I'm right. It was. He would have been good company for Job.)

But he's still looking at the front.

Before shot of our front.

View attachment 174552

The photo doesn't do it justice. The paint was peeling off so badly that it looked like those fake icicles people decorate their homes with at Christmas time, except no one puts them that close together. They ranged from half an inch to three inches in length too. There's a reason people put trash in front of our house. We're still in as middle-class neighborhood, and we're the embarrassing house on the street.

He tells me they'll be coming in a few weeks.

In those weeks, Ed tells me Rich got Home Depot to donate gift cards for the project. Great, because I really didn't want them to spend money on us. (No idea how I thought they wouldn't. lol)

Now, we were gifted in two ways back when we went to church. We were often the people doing the work for someone else, and we like to eat. I call this "the gift of food." John can cook meals that were big enough to feed up to 25 guys. Also delicious and nutritious. (No salt too.) I'm the dessert maker. Ed and Rich told us that they'd be working in the kitchen, but it didn't matter. Most of the monster-meals we made were going to potlucks after church or to Christmas parties where he worked and neither had kitchens. (Crockpots. Really big crockpots. And then make dessert early and freeze.) So, all we needed was a rough idea how many were coming.

Now that you've seen our basement, understand that's the bulk of the dimensions of our house. Sixteen feet wide, which includes the space needed for stairs, and a chimney. (No fireplace, but still need a chimney to vent heater and plumbing.) And about 35 feet long. And in that space is our living room, kitchen and what used to be dining room. (Now it's John's computer area -- bookcase, computer stand/desk, and overflow space for what doesn't fit in our 10 X 10 kitchen. Kitchen is smaller because we need an outside drain for our cement yard, so something like a little covey there.)

About 16 people came!

Eating wise, not a problem. Fitting wise? Still don't know how they all fit, except some hung out by the front windows. Sneaky too. One of the guys is a professional cleaner and got two of his workers to come. Ah, the memories of when I used to do that. But what I never had to do was work when construction work was going on all around me. (No idea how they did that. They even vacuumed the steps, and all while bathroom ceilings were going upstairs and that room full of junk was coming downstairs. They even cleaned the fronts of our kitchen cabinets while an electrician installed the new ceiling and lights.)

Remember the one fluorescent light sort of sitting in a hole in the ceiling that I didn't notice wasn't lovely?

New kitchen ceiling.

View attachment 174553

We both did notice it was hard to wash dishes at night. Can't really see how dirty dishes are if the only light is behind you. We've come up with ideas on how to deal with that, but couldn't figure out how to install lights bright enough. Now that we can see out there, we're seeing stuff that needs cleaning after all these years. That's good, because we've gather the oomph needed to work on it a little at a time. (One wall completely clean. Two more walls to go.)

Remember the hoarding rooms?

Hoarding room upstairs is back to being a study.

View attachment 174554

So much room in the basement that I've taken to doing my impression of Julie Andrews on a mountaintop when walking through to get laundry.

View attachment 174555

Poor Rich! He was able to cover the ceiling with wallboard. But there was a pretty ceiling that covered it that just didn't want to. Personally, I like purple and I'm happy not to have dark fuzzy things fall in front of me or on me. So I thought this was pretty.

View attachment 174556

He planned to come back and finish it though.

And the front windows?

A bit frightening to walk out to the front of your house at noon and notice a huge hole in it!

View attachment 174557

But we had windows by the end of the day.

Did you know windows open and close? We had our windows painted years ago (to avoid any more rotting underneath), and the painters painted the windows shut. Since we knew the paint protected the wood from rotting more, we never opened them again. Somewhere in my head, I know windows open and close, but it's been so longer that we could do that, I truly forgot windows do that. I've been opening and closing those windows at least once a day since then.

Somewhere in all the flurry of activity, we couldn't get anyone to slow down long enough to eat, but we did get some to "eat a little something." (Many had to leave for one reason or another throughout the day.)

One of my favorite moments was when I asked two of the guys installing windows, if they'd like some dessert. They smiled, one said they were both diabetics, so "no sugar."

I laughed and said, "No sugar."

They thought I was astonished that someone couldn't eat dessert, so I clarified. "We're both diabetics, so, yeah. No sugar." I suspect they don't get dessert often when they're out, but that day they had dessert.

Since one of the cleaners was also "Mom," it was late in the day when she left, we gave her enough to feed her family that night.

Ed did put the forsythia in the park. It wouldn't fit in the pocket garden, so here it is all by itself. It looks small now but give it a couple of years and it will make the bushes next to it look small.

As for the windows?

Here we are in front of our "new house."

View attachment 174558

Next: Part Three -- And then there was more!

====================================================
yeah, ya'll look 'happy, handsome,, John especially, and you're still 'cute' and still
letting your wits hang-out?!?!lol...great Pic, Tanks for sharing a precious moments...

your bits hang loose...

oldethennew · Sep 25, 2017

Depleted said:

================================================

well written - shared - pictured, you are very wealthy...

Depleted · Sep 25, 2017

oldethennew said:

What's hanging out? lol

oldethennew · Sep 25, 2017

the mrs. here, maybe I'm self-projecting here...

blue_ladybug · Sep 25, 2017

Oh my goodness. This made me LOL and ROFL....

oldethennew said:

shittim · Sep 26, 2017

prayers sent for the blessing of all involved

oldethennew · Sep 26, 2017

and a big AMEN to 'post 12'!!!

student · Oct 6, 2017

Awesome & glorious! Blessed be... - student

SovereignGrace · Dec 24, 2017

You should've contacted preacher4truth. He's a carpenter by trade and even throws in, for free, a lifetime supply of termites.

Depleted · Dec 24, 2017

SovereignGrace said:

True story.

When we first bought the house, we were supposed to be negotiating on terms and prices. We bought a Saturn, in part, because we don't negotiate. We hear a price, and if we agree with it, we say yes. If we don't, we start walking away. But, we knew the first price given wasn't "the real price," so we guessed a little less.

Probably guessed too high, since the real estate guy started adding stuff we never considered. One was a termite inspection from previous owner. We said, okay, and at closing we spent four hours signing papers. One was the termite inspection.

Yup. A termite inspector came, and charged $20 for services rendered. What services? He walked all the way into the basement, (about 25-30 steps to get there, including the steps), and found it had a false ceiling so he couldn't inspect it. You see the ceiling. He could have just moved a tile.

Truthfully, I wasn't worried about termites. We have wood in this house, but the outside is brick or stone. If termites can eat through that to get to the wood inside, they deserve the wood inside. lol

blue_ladybug · Dec 24, 2017

Termites can get through stone or brick. They find tiny cracks and make their way in.. They actually fly, they look like flying ants before they shed their exo-skeleton and become a creepy crawly termite...

Isny · Dec 24, 2017

blue_ladybug said:

Blue is right. Termites are horrible pests. Damage done by them is very rarely covered by homeowners insurance. Here in the South, many houses are covered by termite pest companies with annual premiums of $150 - $200.

All a colony needs is moisture, cellulite (wood), protection from the elements like a house's basement or crawl space and a fertile queen to set up housekeeping.

oldethennew · Dec 24, 2017

we hear you Lynn,

the every day's todays that we hope and pray for'))), Jesus is teaching us that they are fading very fast,
and will continue to do so=His Holy Ways'...this is where deep grief comes in, but oh, the
confidence in the FUTURE that He has PROMISED!!!...
-----------------------------------------------------------------

satan surely seems to be 'capturing-the-minds-of-the-masses'...'oh heah, oh yeah'

those whom He calls, know and identify with those who are expressing and sharing
His Truth and are Obeying what He is asking of them at any time,
with their 'converted/called-out-chosen, brethren'...how else could we be witnessing it
and watching it happen/unfold!?!?!

oldethennew · Dec 24, 2017

SG,

needs a spanking'...

An Act of God (with photos) Part 1

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