SasEz! Scenes & Scrapbook…

For those of you who have been wondering just how bad our roof leaks were, hopefully you can get an idea by looking at these pictures. They show how much ceiling damage there is in this room now…

Hole number one, shown above (behind the ceiling fan), was our worst spot. We had a 33 gallon plastic storage bin catching the worst of it, plus about six other buckets surrounding that one to try and catch the runoff that was outside that bin’s catch area. Sometimes we’d have that 33 gallon bucket filled within 10-15 minutes during bad rains.

When this second hole starting forming, we decided we couldn’t deal with this any longer. We actually started looking for a place to move first, but that didn’t pan out so we hunted around for a roofer.

As you can see from this last picture, the problem was only spreading… really fast.

These pictures were taken after I started cleaning up too. The first thing I did once the roof work was finished, was take a broom to the ceiling and knock down all the loose plaster and drywall. I still need to trim a couple of spots but believe it or not: This actually looks much better than it originally was.

Well after close to two years with a leaky roof in the big back room of our house, we FINALLY got it fixed! Whoo Hoo!!

The big back room of this house is technically a den with a fireplace. It appears to be an add on, and it has a flat roof. When we moved here, we used it for a master bedroom because the other bedrooms are pretty small, and we wanted each of the kids to have their own anyway. Well almost two years ago the roof started leaking in this room. It wasn’t anything major for awhile, but about a year ago this past July all hell broke loose. We had been patching the roof metal, trying to seal it, for several months before the landlord finally came out to try and fix it. He tore the metal off the roof and did I don’t know what, but the result was… our leaks were ten times worse! Or at least they sure seemed to be. We had to quickly move our furniture out of the room to keep it from being ruined, and since then it’s been used primarily for storage.

Last Tuesday though, a professional roofing company we hired finished replacing the entire thing from the deck up. The inside ceiling still looks like crap but with a brand new roof on top we should be safely dry for the next several years. So with that finally fixed, I’ve been working on cleaning up and moving things. I’ve decided to make this room my office and photography studio, and the old office will become our storage room. It’s pretty small anyway, so it’ll work ideally for that.

We’ve made ourselves at home in one of the original small bedrooms, since both boys have moved out in the past two years.

I plan to redecorate this entire room over time, but for now I’m concentrating on getting things cleaned up, organized, and functional. This week has been really busy with that, and I’m only about halfway there so far but I’m really happy with how things are turning out

I plan to share pictures here as I go along too. I almost hate to show how horrible the room was even after I’d started the cleaning, but those pictures make the improvements look that much better so I will (BTW, these pictures are not wonderful works of art. Some are blurry because the lighting in here is poor, and for the most part I’m taking them as I go without trying to make sure they’re excellent quality.)

This corner shot was taken after I’d done most of the clean up - it was horrible, trust me - but before I started moving my office equipment into place. This corner is just a slight bit smaller than the entire room of my old office.

And this is what the corner looks like now. Plenty of room for my big corner desk, bookshelves, filing cabinet and more. Plus, I can actually move my chair back without hitting a wall!

Along the left side of this picture, you can see the wall (and floor) has things piled all over the place. The entire room was worse than this before I started cleaning, because we were constantly moving things around and trying to find new containers to catch water. In all, we had 2-3 dozen containers trying to catch the drips and run offs each time it rained.

This is that same wall after I got most of the clean up done. The plates which are currently on the floor will be hung on the wall above the table, and I still need to clean and polish some of my china.

I still have a long way to go - two other corners are still fairly piled and messy - but I love how far things have come even just in the last several days