So... as soon as the hardest part of the house got done we had to go on to even harder things. Dan's sister, Jan, passed away at Christmas from a thyroid condition that went undiagnosed too long. Jan had a hard row to hoe due to some mental illness issues that had worsened in recent years, so her condition got chalked up to that and to her stubborn, "Don't help me, I can help myself" nature. Her late night phone calls were sometimes a trial, but now we miss them.
Then there's my Dad, who has been our mainstay through this whole project - part of the reason we thought we could do all this ourselves is because he did it, twice, with three small children to get in the way . So he knew what to do about all things building. He gave us tons of advice, mostly prefaced by " It's none of my business, but..." or "Call me a meddling old fool, but...". He had an injurious fall last spring that had him feeling down and out for most of the summer - every time he'd start to feel like he was healed up he'd over do and be right back to feeling crappy. He finally went to a sports doctor who found he had a torn rotator cuff and did surgery in October. Dad whined a lot about the physical therapy and subverted the "no driving" rules whenever possible, but he seemed to be getting better for a few weeks. By early December he was back to feeling lots of back pain, probably more than he told us, and had been in to the doctors several times trying to get some help and sort out what his problem was. The pain meds they gave him stopped him up something fierce, so he was choosing between the kinds of pain and relying on industrial strength doses of Ben-Gay and back rubs from anyone he could talk into giving him one. The day after Christmas the doctors were able to say that they suspected he had some form of cancer in his trunk that had metastasized to his bones and that was why he was having such back pain. They scheduled him for an MRI and a CT the following week and then a biopsy to determine where the cancer started and where to go from there the next week, but in the course of that two weeks he went from being in lots of pain, but mobile and lucid to being delirious and needing help for any movement. The Friday his biopsy was scheduled Mom and I were only able to get him out of the house and to the hospital by dint of adrenalin and desperation. From there he was admitted and had the biopsy and an MRI, but by the time the results of that came back on Monday his kidneys had ceased functioning and he was beyond the help of dialysis, much less treatment for the cancer. He died Tuesday, January 13th.
As you can imagine, we haven't been super active on the house since we finished the walls. I am so glad that I was able to spend those last few weeks with Dad, helping Mom keep him comfortable. And then afterwards everything sent me into a state - I keep thinking of things I want to ask him and now I can't, want to borrow a tool and don't know where to look, want to see if he knows the answer to the 12:30 Quiz question on WPR. But lately we have managed to emerge from our funk and are making some progress. Dan has all the interior walls framed up, which don't look overly exciting in the pics, I admit. I've been working on flooring, laying tile around the masonry heater, which we've named Norbert. We always derided Dad's habit of saving things, but it has helped us a lot. He had enough tile left over from doing the floors in their house to do the hallway and border around the stove, including a bucket of leftover pieces that had been cut and saved us from having to mess with tile cutting a lot. The weird angles in Mom and Dad's house are almost the same weird angles in our house.And I like it a lot more than any of the spendy tiles I've seen around town. I'm doing a faux limestone finish on the kitchen floor and a leather look flooring made with brown paper and polyurethane on the utility room floor. The electrical work should be able to happen in the next couple weeks and I'm ordering cabinets and thermopanes for the areas between the beams on the living room side of the house. So we're back at work, trying to do Dad proud, and just glad he got to see the finished walls if not the whole enchilada.
