Mt. Pleasant Classical Academy

If you’ve ever watched This Old House you know that in any remodeling job there are always surprises.  And rarely is a surprise good.  We’ve had our share of nasty surprises too—-for instance when we pulled the dry wall off our living room wall in our New England home we discovered that the header was missing.  Let me explain, the header is the BIG piece of wood that runs horizontally from one end of the window to the other end of the window and carries the weight so that the windows do not carry the weight of the roof above them.  This window was a 7′ window and should have had two 2×10 or 2×12 and 7′ long to carry this weight.  YIKES.  There were many such surprises in that New England home.

In our present home we had a wonderful surprise when we put in our kitchen slider.  DH cut into the dry wall above the slider to discover that it was already framed for an atrium window.  A wonderful surprise.  Rarely in a remodel does such a surprise occur.  Usually they are awful, and presently the guys are working through just one such surprise.

On Saturday the cabinets, countertops, and all the appliances left the kitchen.  Sunday morning the boys and DH started removing the floor.  Well, they tried to remove the floor layers but some idiot who was much too happy with his staple gun laid about 1000 staples per square foot throughout the kitchen floor.  And he did this on both the bottom layer of laminate and the top layer — through two layers of subfloor material.   It is a mess.  ScienceKid and DH are using a crowbar to move a little bit of material into the air, and the progress is oh-so-slow.  MilitaryKid is sitting there pulling each staple left behind out of the wood.   We figure our house will be at least one ton lighter with all these staples gone.  What a mess!   DH who has remodeled homes throughout his life said that this is the worst floor extraction ever.

On a positive note ScienceKid took his AP Biology exam today and thought he did quite well on the multiple choice questions.  He would have loved different questions on the free response though.