Valeria Out Loud

First let me say Thank You to all of you guys that have been reading! You have no idea how much I appreciate all the comments and feedback from FB, Twitter and here. And, I saw this morning that I have gained a couple more followers, and that is so flattering!  Thanks guys!

Hey All,

Well, holy moly what an insane couple of days around this house!!

With Halloween tomorrow, the girls are all a chatter about dressing up twice tomorrow, for school then trick o’treating at night.  I am as well!  I love Halloween.  Though, I will also be slightly bummed, too.   Every year my family and friend crew go out from a central meeting point for Halloween night. We had been that point for a handful of years, just missing it one year when we had the power outage and the town changed the date.  But, as we are knee-deep in the reconstruction phase right now, we are all jammed into this living room space, so not much room to entertain.  Then with my sister and sister-in-law having little ones, this year we will be a smaller group going out from our house to the neighborhood.  It’ll be a bummer for sure, cause I now have to figure out how to celebrate this with them and get pictures!

Only good thing is .. It’s supposed to be in the 50’s tomorrow night, which means NO GLOVES AND HEAVY COATS!!  lol

So about the house. The biggest changes, noticeable aside from the gutting of the space, are the construction of the pocket door for the TV/playroom, that rickety back door was converted to a wall for our laundry closet, and that entryway into the kitchen was framed into a wall. The unnoticeable things are all the joists and ceiling work that has been going on every day.

Lots of fun every night when we venture to ‘the other side’ to check out all their hard work, though. The construction crew has been working full on 6 days a week! SIX! From sun up to sun down. The electrician was over on Saturday till almost 8PM and last night was around till 6:30PM!!  YOW$A!  But he is really working hard to get the house up to proper code since it was a disaster before. All the guys are working intensely hard all day. And the most amazing part of it all is that they are always sweeping, vacuuming and keeping it neat throughout!  At the end of the day you can walk over without much worry…it is a good thing. 🙂

The coolest thing happened over the weekend.. we found a few vintage items left in the walls from homeowners past. It was awesome!  In the ceiling of the bathroom, I found an interesting orangey newspaper clipping from 1945 poking through the insulation. A newspaper out of California, that was all about livestock auctions. Weird and random.  Then the crew found a few vintage Christmas cards from folks out of Lawrence from 1946 addressed to the residents here with just the street name, no number, and along with those was an invoice to Cedardale, in Haverhill, for tennis lessons from 1979; both to different people and all stuffed in the dining room ceiling between beams.

This got me thinking.  Of course it did! 

We were planning to put a 2013 penny in the wall, as a token to say we were here and what year it was when the walls were opened up, BUT, then when I saw this stuff, I thought, why not make up a little snapshot of what year it is and what we’re doing to the space with a blurb about the family on paper then tuck it into the ceiling or walls. Like a hello we used to live here kind of thing; add to the tapestry of its past…?

I know I would’ve loved to have a better sense of who lived there, what it looked like and what they changed.

That is it for now!  There is a whole mess of noise right by my ears of saws, wet/dry vacs and singing.. 🙂

Love you all!

xoxoxoxxo