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