Weekends, working on the interior of the house was a long, slow process. There was no insulation around the windows and no finishing trim around the windows.
There were open gaps in the sheetrock all over the house. The upstairs was unfinished. The 3 bedrooms upstairs had some ugly gray carpeting loosely laid down and never cut to length or had the carpets anchored against the base of the walls.
There was no railing on the steps going upstairs and the hallway to the bedrooms had no railing. On slip or misstep and you would fall from upstairs to downstairs in one second. The previous owners must have hired a monkey to install the wiring and outlets upstairs. Most were not properly installed. Like downstairs, the upstairs windows had no insulation or finished trim.
The funny thing about all of this was the previous owner was a plumber and a general contractor. He had the ability to fix everything, but never had the time to do it. He was busy working long hours in Springfield. When he got home, his wife didn’t have the heart to put him to work all night at home. The family before us was living there for 5 years and not much had been done to the house. The one thing the contractor did was re plumb the entire house with modern plastic pipe, removing all the cast iron water lines. He also remodeled the master bedroom bath and almost finished it. His wife had him complete that for us just before we took possession of the house. That proved to be a blessing for us. Even a non plumber like me could fix leaks with plastic pipes.
We did take a little time to dig up the garden and put plants we brought from the house in town and also plant some seeds I had collected over the last winter. On my way home from work I would stop at a nursery to pick out a few plant starts for the garden and Joyce did the same thing. Usually they sat and waited for the weekend to get planted when we had more time.
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