Big find! Little less progress...

Stained glass
Originally uploaded by southsideandy

Check THIS out! I'm so psyched about it. Of course, I had to demolish walls to find this, when really all I needed to do was clean out the utilities room, and it would have been right there for me to discover.

This stained glass window is sweet. It's got a few cracked panes, but overall just needs a cleaning and to be stripped on the "outside" which is painted white (not a big stunner on that point). I'm not sure where, exactly, this window came from. We have a bricked-in stained glass window portal in the living room (that you can see from the outside), but that looks more square from the sidewalk than rectangular, which this is. Also, we have a closet window to the front porch that is rectangular, but vertical, not horizontal, which this clearly is. So I'm not entirely sure where it's from. But, of course, I'm overjoyed to have it and to have found it. Maybe I'll use it as a door on the cabinets in my future bar, with a backlight or something to make it look good. I don't know... :)

Anyway, I cleared another short wall today, but didn't make it around the corner to expose the utilities room entirely. That's because I had to haul the demo debris out to the alley for trash pickup, which is tomorrow morning. It wasn't a ton, but it's enough that it took me quite a while to clear it all.

I also exposed the center post and found, to my dismay, that it's an original wooden post -- cool for nostalgia purposes, bad for structural purposes. Bad because, over 85 years, this post, which is sitting on a concrete footing on the concrete floor, has wicked up so much moisture that the base of the post is very rotted and brittle. I'm almost afraid to touch it for fear that it will crumble. So this becomes a high priority to rent some equipment to shore up the support beam and replace the post as soon as I can. I just hope Home Depot or somewhere rents out this kind of thing. I certainly don't have something like that around here.

Tomorrow is a busy day at Building a Better Bungalow. My buddy Luis is coming over bright and early at 7:30 to help out with the demo. It'll be good to have two bodies working on the project. It should roll along smoothly, and maybe we'll be able to knock out the rest of the walls AND the ceiling. That would be GREAT, but that might be unattainable. We'll see for sure.

Also, between 9 and 11 a.m., we finally get our baby room furniture delivered. Gina, of course, is excited, and I am too, even though it means I'll have to put the basement project aside briefly at some point in the very near future to assemble the crib. But, hey, that's OK. Once I get to a stopping point, which shouldn't be too long from now, I can jump into that.

Tonight, I'm sore and tired. But it feels good to make such a big discovery. Now, if I could only stumble upon the house's blueprints or old photos or renovation plans or ANYTHING else related to the house's history, that would take the cake. :)