Oops, I Did It Again

Oops, I did it again.  I scheduled posts and then I forgot to click the Publish button.  Sorry!  (And sorry, too, for making you think of that Britney Spears song.)  To get you all caught up on the past week, I mooshed two posts together into this one.

After I found the horrible dried-up dead rat in the ceiling, I really did not want to go back in there and finish tearing out the rest of the insulation.  I was afraid the rat had friends up there and I wasn't sure I could handle pulling another rat mummy out of the ceiling.

But my foreman told me we were on a strict deadline and I better get in there and finish the job.

"C'mon, Momma, you can do it!  I'll even stand on the ladder with you in case you find something else up there that's yucky!"  Louis Cat is a great supervisor.  He never asks me to do anything he wouldn't do himself.

I'm happy to report that we found no more surprises.

But I did find a patch of beadboard up there, with some peeling paint on it that reminds me of the outside of the house:

 And over in the middle of the room, I found a chewed-up wire which I'll have to replace:

Then I ran the ShopVac all over the floor, the walls and the ceiling and heaped up the ceiling tiles in the corner:

That's a pretty big heap of ceiling tiles.  Somehow, though, I managed to fit all of them into the back of the Toaster:

I'm still not quite sure how that happened.  And then I took all those ceiling tiles down to the city's Public Works Department, which just happened to have a whole lot of dumpsters available for City-Wide Cleanup Week, and unloaded all that junk in an almost-blinding snowstorm.  (On May 3rd.) Snow in May.  Craziness.

For a few days, the ceiling was bare.  I love the look of that old wood.

I really liked it that way.  So much so that I was tempted to pull off those furring strips--the lighter wood you see in that photo--and leave the ceiling like that. One itty-bitty problem with that idea: there's no attic space above those ceiling joists.  That stuff above it is the underside of the roof decking.  So, that room would be pretty darn cold in the winter and stifling hot in the summer.

Out to Nerds Hardware and Home Center I went.  Y'all, I know nothing about insulation, so I went out there with only my debit card and that picture of the bare ceiling and asked the nice folks at Nerds what to do.  They didn't look at me like I had three heads, actually knew exactly what I needed, gave me excellent advice, and helped me load the new insulation in my car--altogether a much better experience than at the big-box stores.

Now the ceiling looks like this:

And I'm waiting to see what the weather is like on my days off before I decide what to do next.  Nice weather means I'll be outside scraping paint.  Bad weather means I'll be inside making some more progress on the ceiling.