The Past Week

Well, I have now worked with the new crew for one week. We have been able to get quite a bit accomplished. This new group is fun, despite the fact that everyone could be my grandma or my grandpa. They stay up longer at night than the last group did though. We have fun, even without a Karl. And I am still getting teased quite a bit.
On Monday I headed out to a job with Marv Sjaardema, Ted Koning, Gene VanStedum and Jannie Grendel. This house had a variety of repairs that needed to be done. The main thing was tearing out the bathroom floor and replacing the tub with a shower. This bathroom hadnt been in use since Katrina as the floor had rotted. We also had to replace some floor in the laundry room, put down new linoleum, put new carpet in her bedroom, replace the flooring in the hall and put new linoleum in the other bathroom.
The couple that we are working for are really great. They are encouraging and love to see the progress and to talk. Mrs. Graham has quite a story to tell and loves to share it. They are fairly young and have been married for 48 years. They both care for each other so much.
When we started to tear up the bathroom, we knew we were in for a surpise. Me and Marv tackled that job. We got the old tub out, got the floor ripped out and then started the task of trying to level the floor. We spent about two days under the floor of the house with bottle jacks, trying to get the bathroom relatively "level". It is impossible. Some joists were rotten, some were cracked. We got the bathroom floor to the point where we could put the new plywood on the joist on one side and up on a strip of old half inch plywood on the other side. And that made it almost level. There are still parts of the floor that have visible slopes, but we did the best we could. It was quite smelly under the house as the sink drain had been disconnected from the main drain pipe for who knows how long.
So now we have the linoleum down, the shower surround ready to be glued in, the new vanity installed and almost ready for the baseboard. We should be just about done by Tuesday. It will be very sad to say goodbye to the Grahams, but they took all our addresses and we got theirs. They are the kind of couple that you would go back to visit if you were in the area again.