"This should only take two hours"

Possible titles for this blog post included:
1. Adventures in mold
2. This OLD House
3. Galvanized Steel Pipes is code for RUST
4. At least one part of our house is now "up to code" (kind-of)
5. Yay! The washer finally drains!

So here's the story. We've known for about a year that the drain for the washer was overflowing and causing mold in the wall going down our stairs and in the storage closet below the washer. I switched to running medium loads of laundry to help the situation, but Jon had to patch the wall once already last year from the water seeping through the drywall. Well, recently the wall was starting to show signs of water damage again, so we borrowed a snake from our friends and Jon tried to snake out the drain pipe. Now, let me remind you all that our house was built before people knew that galvanized steel = rust. Therefore, the drain pipe was completely rusted on the inside, along with 50+ years of gunk. Jon could not get the snake through the p-trap, so he decided that it was time for the pipe to go. He ended up cutting the pipe out, which included cutting out a large section of drywall on the stairs, and all of the shelves in the closet. When the dry wall was removed, we could see that this needed to be done a while ago. The amount of black mold was indicative of many many years of that drain overflowing (go-figure). Jon sprayed all of the mold down with bleach and then painted over it with Kills, so that it doesn't come back. Fortunately the weather was really nice this weekend, so we could open the windows to let the house vent. We decided that since the wall was open anyway, the electrical and the fresh water pipes should be replaced also. So, the good news is that we have a new rust-proof, functioning drain on my washer, and new up-to-code electrical in that wall, and new copper pipes for when we redo all of the plumbing, and the black mold is gone. The bad news is there is no drywall on the stairs yet, and this project was more than budgeted (both time and money). But I think that the positives far outweigh the negatives. It needed to be done, and Jon did a great job, even though he thought it would only take two hours- it will take about two weekends.

During Jon's project, I was sewing the whole time. I got the drapes made for the new guest room, and I got some gifts made too. The guest room is almost finished. We got the new sconce hung, and the drapes are in there, so now we just need to touch up the paint. My parents will be staying with us on Friday night, so they will get to try out the new room first. Now we are on to the nursery!!

In other news- did anyone else see the space station moving on Monday night? That was awesome! Our neighbors came and got us when I was making dinner to see it. It was very cool to see how fast it was moving through the sky.