First things first

One of the first things that had to happen was to clean out the previous owners left-behind detritus. A 30 yard dumpster took care of most of that. As I mentioned in the previous post, Mr. Rowland never threw a thing away, so we got to do it. There were a few memorable items that went into the memento pile: an Elvis playing card (similar to a baseball card) from the mid-50's, a couple beautiful yellow bowls from France, and some old cane chairs, among other things. Mostly the dumpster was filed with ancient wall-to-wall carpet, plywood cabinets covered with black mold, and formica from the distant past. We actually salvaged the toilet and the sink in the bathroom to reuse, but all the other fixtures and appliances had to go.

When the place was finally "broom clean", we worked on preparing an actual clean space in which to sleep. We started with the bedroom over the kitchen/dining room (now one large room) as the woodstove was installed directly below us and we could break the house into heated zones and non-heated "work" zones. In this manner we began our first winter.