Not much on the house, but I found a cool bottle!

     Last weekend didn't exactly go according to plan... We hoped to get some of the floor joists into the former porch area that we enclosed, but Steven was called out on his first REAL cave rescue! Steven got the call about 4:00 pm Saturday afternoon and didn't get back home until 2:00 am Sunday. A caver fell about 10 feet and cracked a rib, so the cave rescue unit had to form a line to pass the stretcher along and out the very narrow entrance (like it had to be widened just to allow the stretcher to pass through). Steven's been training with our local high angle rescue team for several months, so he was fine... but I was sooo worried about him! Obviously, I was also up til 2:00 am and not much in the way of remodeling productivity happened on Sunday.

     This weekend we went to see my family for Easter. I hadn't seen the folks on my mom's side since Thanksgiving, so it was wonderful to see everyone and eat way too much. My favorite part was staying up past midnight chatting with my brother and parents (and Steven!). We just don't get to spend time together like that often enough!



   
     After getting back home this afternoon, we took out a beam that's seen better days and did some crawl space cleanup.

Someone had previously tried to save this beam by cutting out the rot damage and replacing it with solid wood, which may or may not be enough reinforcement. Since there was damage to almost half the length of this beam, we decided to just take it out and replace it with joists. We did keep what we could of the (possibly) poplar beam - I'm thinking newel post! The pipe you see in the center here is the vent from our old kitchen sink. We're going to ask our plumber to come cap that off this week as it's no longer needed.

Yep, it was pretty well butchered... there were even ax marks.

We've mentioned the LAYERS of flooring before, but I just had to take this profile shot while I was in the crawl space, haha! Starting at the screwdriver handle, that's vinyl (1), vinyl (2), particleboard, hardwood (1), hardwood (2), and subfloor. I'm pretty sure we end up discussing this topic at most of our neighborhood get-togethers, and, believe it or not, there are homes here with even more floor layers!

Lastly, I found this "Souders Elegant Flavoring Extracts" bottle in the crawl space tonight!!! I've gotten pretty nerdy about  bottles from researching them at work, so this was incredibly exciting :) From the little information I found on the Royal Remedy and Extract Company of Dayton, Ohio, it looks like this bottle was made about 1900-1910. Makes perfect sense to find this in our neighborhood!

Hope y'all have a great week!