So Dan Says, "Are you guys building a house, or a bathroom over there?"

I guess Dan figures we should have had a whole house built in the time it's taking us to remodel this bathroom. So for all my avid readers of bathroom remodelling project updates, here's the latest installation!

Yes, we are actually making progress. No, we're not done yet.

Since last I wrote, all the backerboard and sheetrock have been hung. The backerboard has been mortared in, and the sheetrock taped, mudded, and sanded. Tiling has begun on the north wall but it's very slow in coming along due to all the cuts that need to be made for the window, the corner shelves, the moisture vent, etc.

Mom and Dad came down to the Cities again after Christmas and we worked on the project some more. Dad installed the new drain and faucet into the bathtub and checked all the plumbing for leaks (of which there was only one, and amazingly in an easy place to get at to fix!). Andrew continues to tile. Dad filled in the crevices in the floor along the outside of the room where we had to chip out the old black ceramic tile (that's so there's a completely solid surface for putting in the floor tile). Mostly I painted. All the painting except for the wainscoting (which hasn't been installed yet) is done now except touch-ups and the door frame, which needs to be sanded down first as it's really beat up from the paint scraper. (All the painting means the ceiling, walls, crown moldings, and wainscot trim boards). Dad got the crown moldings put up, too, and they look really nice. The walls are a pale lemon yellow, which will add a little warmth to the otherwise straight black, white, and crome look of the room. It's finally starting to look like a room again, instead of just a junk hole!

The bad news, though, is about the toilet: the new one that we bought can't be installed without the door hitting it when it opens. Sigh. We made sure that the new toilet was shorter than the old one, but still because of a change in design between 80 years ago and today, most of the length is in front of the bolts, instead of in back of them. Which means that the new style sits too far out from the wall, and thus blocks the door from opening. The good news about the toilet is that we still have the old one, and in spite of our not having completely drained the water out, it didn't freeze in the garage and break! We may yet find a "compact" toilet model that will fit our space, but if we don't I guess the 80+ year-old one will have to go back in.

So, what's left to do? The big thing is to finish the ceramic tiles around the shower. Then we have to put in the new flooring (a mosaic of small black and white tiles). Once that's done, things will hopefully really start to move along. We can install and paint the wainscoting, reset the toilet, install the new vanity/sink/faucet, put in the two built-in cabinets, and install the new light fixture. Oh, and put up the towl bars and toilet paper holder. And call the bathtub refinisher to make our old cast iron bathtub look new again. And then we'll be pretty much finished. Just got to get that tiling done! Everything waits on the tiling.

Here are some more pics to illustrate:

The backerboard was installed.

Andrew taped and mudded the sheetrock.

Finished sheetrock.

Some progress on ceramic tiles in the shower.

The new toilet that doesn't fit.

The crown moldings.

Slowly, slowly we are making some progress on this project!

A Story from Sahro

In the spirit of the Christmas season, I wish to relate this story to you from my student Sahro. I have edited a few grammatical and spelling errors to ensure that her story is clear, but these are her words, coming from a place of pain in her heart. For her story is the story of all those living in--or fleeing from--war-torn lands: it is a plea for peace. May God answer her prayer.

My name is Sahro Hassan. I was born in Mogadishu, Somalia. I was excited in that time, because I was living with my family. My family was a big family. We were 7 brothers and 5 sisters. We lived with our parents. I was born in the middle of them. Also I had great country, big country. It has a big sea, name's Indian Sea. Also it has 2 big rivers. It has a lot of farmers and a lot of animals. I like the weather of my country because it's not hot and not cold.

We had a governor, but our governor was not as American governor. But it was better than today. We had everything we need. We were working, studying, and we had peace and we used to be happy. Now my country is gone. Everything is broke down. The brother lost his sister, and sister lost her brother, her husband, and even her son. It was a time to think everybody wants to kill another. We had 16 years like that. Same and same and same. We are tired right now. We need peace. Stop fighting! Enough destroying the country like this. It's time to think of our children's future. We are the same family and we can do good things if we think good things, please.

Your sister Sahro.

Bathroom Update

Since I posted those beautiful pictures of our ripped-open bathroom, things have started to improve somewhat.

Sunday we all worked on the project but it seemed like not that much got accomplished. Andrew and I spent hours at Home Depot again buying more supplies. The new moisture vent was wired in and installed (that took a long time) and Andrew got the North wall insulated and covered in plastic. I spent most of my time playing gopher and cleaning up debris. I also helped Dad with figuring out the wiring for the reconfigured light switch/moisture vent switch/ground-fault outlet. What a confusing mess of wires that was! After much conferring and debating, and tripping the ground-fault repeatedly, we got it all connected right. Yay!

Mom and Dad stuck around for an extra day and Dad worked very hard for us all day Monday (THANKS DAD!!). He got the new bathtub/shower hardware plumbed in, boxed in spaces for our two built-in medicine cabinets, fixed the heat duct vent so that it's now a normal size, and started hanging tile backer board on the North (exterior) wall.

Since then, not a whole lot has been done. Andrew and I are too busy with our full-time jobs to work on remodeling much during the week. But Andrew has cut, fitted, and hung a couple more pieces of backer board around the shower. We hope to get a lot more accomplished this weekend. Keep checking this page for updates! And please leave a comment... It's fun to think that someone is actually reading this. :-)

Demolition Continues

Thanksgiving came and went in the usual style. Christina and Dan served up an excellent meal, Andrew got to be the fun uncle, and my pies turned out really well. The weather was lovely and we even got to go for a pleasant afternoon stroll.

Today, we got back to business in the bathroom. Well, it used to be a bathroom, anyway. Now its not much of an anything room. Dad turned up around 8:30 and we set to work making assessments for ripping out the bathroom walls and fixtures. The first thing we discovered in our plumbing survey is that there was no shut-off valve on the pipes leading to the bathroom. Upstairs there was a shut-off valve for the toilet, and one under the sink (but only for the hot water, nothing for the cold), and the shower had no shut-off valves at all. The only way to work on the plumbing in the shower or the cold water in the sink would be to turn the water off to the entire house. I'm telling you, there were some really bright folks working on this house.

So, first things first we had to plumb in new shut-off valves in the basement. Or, I really ought to say that Dad had to plumb them in since he's the only one of us with any real plumbing experience or know-how. Right away when he started with the solder we could tell something wasn't right, though, since the solder didn't seem to draw into the fitting like it should. He kept heating and adding solder but it just dripped off onto the floor. But, we thought we would test it to be sure, so we turned the water back on to see how bad it was leaking. Well, it wasn't just a leak--the whole valve blew right off the end of the pipe and went flying across the basement on a blast of water. Much swearing and foul language was to be heard at this point.

We turned off the water and broke for lunch.

Take two: Andrew runs to the hardware store for soldering paste. That gets slapped on, and the valves are resoldered. I turn the water back on, we check for leaks, and now the solder doesn't leak but the drain gaskets drip. Probably they got overheated with all the soldering and now they don't hold quite right. Finally we get those drips stopped and I turn the water open all the way. But with the increased pressure, a new leak appears in one of the joints! ack. But, after one more go with the solder the leak was stopped up and we could finally shut the water off to the bathroom.

In the next act, we rip out the walls. And the sink, vanity, light fixture, and toilet. And we make the most incredible mess. Mortar dust is EVERYWHERE. The entire bathtub is filled with debris. But the really fun moment was as I was coming back in from hauling out the sink, I open the hallway door and suddenly see a geyser of water blasting out from the wall across the bathroom! Dad and Andrew got so carried away ripping things out that they forgot that the valve under the sink was the shut-off valve for the hot water! So I had to race to the basement to turn off the water again. Oh, the unbelievable mess. We thought it was a mess before... then we added water to the mortar dust and chips and made mud. Although it did settle the dust in the air a bit.

Anyway, we stopped around 5:00 after hauling out bag after bag of debris and cleaning up the floors a bit. We've more demolition to do tomorrow, so there's not much point in doing a serious cleaning up right now. But tomorrow sometime the demolition should be done and we can start on reconstruction. We hope.

Here's the most recent photos:

My other classroom

Here's me in the computer lab at Lehmann Center.



And my most faithful open lab attendee: Manivanh Voravang, working on one of our brand-new emac computers.


And here's Koffi Kodegui, working on his class assignment.


This is a typical evening class at Lehmann Center. Annie's class is learning about the Pilgrims, the voyage of the Mayflower, and the First Thanksgiving. This website has great audio and video, that's why everyone is wearing headphones.


The ladies all say, "We love computer class!"


Annie, say hello! Annie is one of the wonderful teachers that I work with here at Lehmann Center.

My Classroom

I had my camera with me in the classroom today to take pictures for a ABE awareness/publicity event that is coming up in January. Since I have permission from the students to use their photos, I thought I would post a few of them here for friends and family to see.

My Monday volunteer, Helen, took this picture of me teaching (at the moment, listening to a student in the back row).

The students are at work, practicing a conversation from our textbook. Musa and Issa are in the front row; Sahro and Nasra are in the second row, and in the back row is Jisow.

Sahro thinks about what she will write.

At break time, I finally catch up with Helen and get a snapshot of her with Jisow, Aman, and Halimo.

Susan looking teacherly again... helping Musa with a question.


Shukri always listens so carefully. What a wonderful student!

Asha and Zerithun reading a dialogue together. What a cute pair!

"Commander" Jisow is working on his vocabulary sentences.

We're remodeling now...

Yep, I think we can safely say that this project has been upgraded from "stripping paint and repainting" to "bathroom remodeling". Sigh. Well, we knew we wanted to do it eventually. I guess eventually is now. Good thing we've been socking money away in our savings accounts this year.

I think we were doomed to remodel by the awful "home improvement" choices of previous owners of this house. Their shoddy work, poor decisions, and half-assed plans have left us with few options other than to gut the room entirely, right down the wall studs, and start over from scratch. Ultimately, this will mean a much better result, but of course it's a lot more work and the room will be out of commission for much longer. Oh, and it's much more costly, of course.

The good thing is that if we really do rip out the plaster walls and lay new sheetrock, we will also be able to do some of the other projects that will really improve the room--like put in a moisture vent, insulate the outside wall, replumb the shower, and make the medicine cabinet a built-in rather than just hang it on the wall.

But we've little choice now. I think we passed the point of no return last night when we discovered the old tile hiding behind the top layer of newer tile. We were definitely not expecting that, and it seriously derailed our plan of scraping down to the plaster and lathe wall and repainting. If it had just been the newer layer of plastic tile we could have done it--the stripper does take that putty off--but two layers of tile? and who know what behind the older one? I don't think we have any option other than ripping the wall out. We were doomed from the beginning, we just didn't know it until we started scraping off the outer layers. Working in this old house is sort of like archeology--peeling back layers of house history to discover hidden mysteries.

Lady Lily, Chief Archeologist in Charge of Bathrooms

Tile Disasters

Our beautiful bathroom...

So the super-stripper seems to be doing a good job of softening up the putty, and we can scrape down to the plaster and lathe using several coats of stripper. This system worked well enough that we decided to chip the plastic "tiles" off of the remainder of this particular wall and strip the putty off tomorrow. And then we found another, unwelcome surprise: underneath a large portion of the plastic tiles is... another layer of tiles, this time real ones (probably original to the house). Oh dear. Now we're faced with the thought of trying to chip these original tiles off the wall and sand off the mortar. Or maybe we'll have to give up entirely and knock the wall out and put up new drywall. We were really hoping to be able to avoid that. But we may be left with no other choice due to the stupidity of the previous owners of this house. I mean, who lays tile over the top of old tile??? Honestly, these people must have been complete idiots.

The tile mess.

Anybody know how to hang drywall?

Bathroom Destruction

We started out with the intention of scraping off the peeling paint and repainting the walls. Then we discovered that underneath the layers of paint, the original layer over the 80+ year-old plaster and lathe wall was... A piece of linen cloth. Then we discovered that we could grab the edge of this linen cloth, pull, and peel off every layer of paint with it in huge sheets. The entire painted area of the bathroom has now been "peeled" down to the plaster. It took us about an hour once we made this wondrous discovery.

Then, we may have gotten a bit carried away. We decided to see if we could also peel off the ugly, painted-over, plastic "tile" using the same method. It started out great in our test area, so we dug in whole-heartedly on the main wall... and we now discover that the cloth layer appears to not continue all the way down the wall. Uh-oh. We are now trying Plan B: the super-stripper that we bought with the intention of peeling paint is now being tested on the putty that was used to put up the crappy tiles. Initially, it seems this might do a decent job of cutting the putty so that we can remove it with paint scrapers. But we haven't actually tested that yet. I will update this page with the details as they continue to unfold...

Lady Lily, Paint Peeler Extraordinaire

Here's the documentation!

A return to the blog

Wow... I haven't been here in a while. I keep thinking about it, just not acting on those brain waves. It's good to be back online, though.

This is a picture of the best apple pie ever. Well, at least in my personal baking history. I made this pie as a "birthday cake" for my mother in law. It's the first time in my life I have ever made a pie crust that did not fall apart, get soggy, burn, or just not taste good. It was a beautiful thing. And it lasted about 24 hours. I hope to make one just a beautiful and scrumptious for Thanksgiving, and pair it with an equally scrumptious deep-dish pumpkin pie. If you are lucky enough to be joining the Wetenkamps and Brandts in Apple Valley for Thanksgiving, you can sample them. Love and Hugs!

Lady Lily, Mistress of the Pies

The Raspberries are coming! The Raspberries are coming!

About 7:30 last night I went out to the garden for a bit of an evening wander. I got attacked by a herd of wild raspberry canes and almost didn't make it out. I got scratched all over and barely escaped with my life and my bowls full of fruit. I tell you, gardening is a dangerous hobby!

On another note, there is beautiful bread dough rising in the kitchen, which I must soon go form into loaves of Ciabatta. Yum yum yum....

Now Blooming...

Evening Primroses, aka Sundrops.

The bees are very pleased.

Semester's End

Well, here I am at the end of another school year. It's amazing how quickly they go by. I get so wrapped up in the day-to-day lesson planning and teaching that it's easy to lose sight of the calendar pages turning. It's been a rough year in some ways... uncertainty about continued funding for my job was a constant stress, juggling a large, multi-level class stretched my classroom management skills, and as always there were one or two problem students that made me want to rip out my hair. But it's been an excellent year in other ways. I've seen enormous progress with so many learners, attendance rates and test scores for my class were at all-time highs, and so many wonderful new people came into my class and brightened up my life with their friendliness and caring. The sweet, kind, warm-heartened students by far outweighed the crabby, complaining, maddening ones. And then there were the wonderful volunteers who came to my classroom and made my job so much easier and more fun... I miss them already now that they've finished their time committments!

For the summer I will continue with the same group of students, so there won't be much change, just a week break and then it's back to work again. But come fall semester and a new school year, I hope that I might be able to teach a different level. It's not that the beginning levels aren't fun to teach, but I think I'm ready for a change and a new challenge. And although teaching the beginning level students is so very rewarding (how powerful it is to teach someone to read for the first time!) it's also very draining. I think for my own good it would be wise to switch to a different level, and I hope I'll be able to.

In the evening, I'll be in the computer lab as I have been for three years now. I continue to enjoy that job immensely, and I'm happy to be able to continue. It's a constantly changing job, especially as technology changes and I need to adapt to the new technology in the classroom. Plus, the evening school students are just amazing! Their motivation to learn and improve their lives is so inspiring. The shame me sometimes with their hard work, juggling full-time jobs (many times with overtime!), 4 nights a week in school, and families too. I feel lazy in comparison... but they energize me! Sometimes I come in to work feeling run-down and unmotivated, but as soon as the students start arriving, the tempo picks up and by the time I go home, I'm in high gear. It's incredible to have a job where I can go home with more energy than I arrived with.

The Wonderous World of an ESL Teacher

Life as an ESL teacher is weird. Fun, but weird. This past Monday I came back to work after having been gone for two days (Thurs. & Fri.) to a conference/training inservice. When I walked into my classroom at 9:00 feeling rather ehrg about coming in to work that morning, all my students burst into spontaneous applause and cheering. Now, that just blew me away. When working with people from other countries who don't get much chance to connect with Americans, you often form close bonds, and especially at beginning levels, students get very attached to their teachers. But I've never been cheered just for showing up at work before. It actually brought tears to my eyes .

And now this evening (I teach in the evening as well as the morning, and have the afternoons off) I took a couple hours off to attend a staff event at the school where I work in the morning. I had arranged a substitute to run my open computer lab hour for me, and informed my manager that I would be arriving about 15 minutes before regular classes started in the evening. So I arrive at work at 6:15 and walk into the staff room to put something in the fridge, and suddenly everyone's talking, asking me what happened, where I was, was I in a car accident, am I OK? And I'm thinking to myself, "What, can't a girl take an hour off without everyone panicking?" But it turns out that my substitute had apparently gotten the time confused and arrived half an hour late, that my manager had completely forgotten that I was planning to take the time off, and that no one had actually bothered to ask my substitute where I was... and so they were worried sick about me. When I showed up they were very relieved to know that I was not sick or hurt or mysteriously missing, but very confused about why no one was there to open the computer lab at 5:30. It's nice to have such a reputation for reliability that if I arrive an hour late for work, everyone will automatically assume the worst--rather than assume that I am just late for work--but it was a bit surreal.

I don't think I know anyone who doesn't work in this field that has such bizarre but heartwarming experiences at work. If I could explain it better, I would. But it's a strange world, and lovely.

Leaf Destroyers

Well, the damage doesn't seem to be too much worse than it was yesterday, and there were fewer bugs today. So maybe the homemade bug spray is working...? I gave them another spraying this afternoon.

Here you can see the nasty little things, and some of the damage they're doing to my radishes, though this picture doesn't show the areas with the worst damage.

I don't know what kind of insect this is, and I can't find it in any of my gardening books. If I find out, I'll post it next time.

The perils of organic gardening

A.B. and I went out to our community garden plot yesterday afternoon to do some work weeding and putting up cages and supports for plants.

And what should I find but an infestation of small, black, jumping insects eating up the leaves on my cabbages and radishes! The community garden is an organic garden, with absolutely no pesticides or herbicides allowed (because it is on the property of a elementary school) so I can't just spray them with an inseticidal soap as I would do at home. What to do?

I looked up alternatives on the community garden website, and found some options for homemade, non-toxic "pesticide" sprays. From these I concocted a spray of a 1/2 cup of rubbing alcohol and a spoonful each of Murphy's Oil Soap, lemon juice, and cooking oil in a quart of water. I shook it up in a spray bottle and headed back to the garden to douse the little buggers. It seemed to have some effect, so lets hope I can save my plants! I'm going to try to get back there this afternoon and do another spraying if I see more of them. Maybe I'll get a picture to post here later. And I'll let you know how it worked!

Iris

My Irises are blooming on the boulevard. They seem to love it there, and are thick and tall and covered with flowers. I love Iris!

The spring ESL training network conference is over. My brain is full. I had a good couple of days, but it will take me a while to process all of the conversations I've had and information I've taken in... it's all churning around in my head now, making it impossible to think straight. But I'm sure I'll integrate it all eventually.

It was fun thinking about ways to use this kind of internet technology with students. I have interesting thoughts about trying an ESL assignment blog this summer. I wonder if I will be able to bring them to fruition? More on that later.

Now I really need to go off and think about something totally unrelated. Else my head will explode. Perhaps I'll go see "The DaVinci Code" movie. That ought to get my thoughts aligned along a different path!

Good evening and good weekend!

Launch!

Hello! Hola! Gruess Dich! Bonjour! Asalam Alekum!

Welcome to my new blog everyone. This is my first ever blog experience, I hope it will be fun.

It's a brand new virtual world out here...

10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1-WE HAVE LIFTOFF!

Susan WB