Wow! What an incredibly fruitful and productive weekend we had! And what a great feeling it is to be fruitful and productive! I'm afraid that I just don't do enough of this gettin' down and dirty kinda elbow-grease stuff!
I started on Friday over at Jennifer's new house where they suddenly found themselves under the gun with the impending visit of the inspector this week--and lots of projects still required to get done. My husband got up at 3:40 a.m. (yes--it starts getting light at that time right now in this part of the hemisphere--unbelievable!) on Sat. to get some watch work out of the way so we could shoot over there early enough to have a large chunk of the day available to at least get the plumbing leaks mended so they could begin getting their floors laid. It got down to the very end of the day--hardware store having already closed at 4:00--and found that all that was needed was one more elbow fitting to complete the job! They scrambled around desperately searching for just one more elbow but it was not materializing.
So, my hubby, the resource junkyard genius that he is, hopped in the car and toodled around town until he spied a place that was a.) still open and b.) might happen to have the elbow pipe fitting the exact size that they needed. Lo and behold, the mattress and appliance store was still open (albeit in the process of closing up shop)...and sure enough the owner thought that he might just happen to have one of those elbows in his store room somewhere. So they searched through some boxes of junk and bingo! found the exact elbow fitting that he needed! My husband asked this owner how much he wanted for the elbow and the guy chuckled and said, "Well, it looks like it's worth about $100 right now!"
My husband then proceeded to start handing the guy one dollar bills until the guy looked like he was happy (which amounted to $4) and ran back to the house with that now very precious elbow fitting! And voila! the plumbing is complete! Yippee! And phew!
This is something I really love about Small Town U.S.A.! There's always room for a laugh and people aren't so dadgummed streamlined and professional that they don't have miscellaneous junk lying around in their back rooms or closets!
It was very heartening to me to see how friends, neighbors, and family also rallied around Jen and Erick this weekend, too. I heard that they had sent a note over to their little church in town that morning pleading for some aid and no sooner had church let out, than they had several people knocking on their door donned in t-shirts ready and rearing to head over and help out with this young couple's new house! And more of them will be popping over already this week to be lending a hand. How encouraging is that! And Ive found that scraping wallpaper off walls is actually a marvelous upper-body arm workout--even my long neglected triceps got some action!
We wrapped up around 7 or 8 p.m. and took our kiddos (who had happened to be absolute angels ALL DAY LONG) out for some hamburgers, wraps, and nuggets for a late evening picnic by the lake....aahhh!