Messy house & closing the lake

Had a pretty quiet week until Saturday.  When we first bought our house almost 5 years ago we said the first thing we were going to do was take down the paneling in the stairs.  Welll...we've painted 6 rooms, painted the outside, put in my bamboo floor, and tore out 90% of the landscaping but the paneling has stayed...until now.  Wednesday Matt & I finally started pulling it down to see what we could be getting into.  Saturday (yesterday) one of Matt's (college) nephews came over for 7 hours and helped us tear down all the paneling, tear down the ceiling tiles, and then take down all the plaster behind the paneling.  Our house was a mess, a disaster.  Matt's brother had warned us that the plaster would be messy...we underestimated how messy.

Before doing much in the upstairs

And I thought it was messy here...

The dust, there was so much dust

After most of the plaster was down

Yes, a complete mess.  I believe we have 20 trash bags of plaster and a huge pile of paneling in our backyard.  Cleaning up the plaster mess wasn't so bad.  It's cleaning up the dust that will take a loooong time.  We spent 3 hours last night cleaning and the house is livable but still waaaay too dirty for me.  The dust got everywhere, we hung up a sheet so the front room & our offices aren't too bad.  A quick vacuum and dust and they should be ok.  It's the kitchen, bathroom, stairs (obviously), bedrooms, and basement that will need more work.  The kitchen & bathroom are pretty ok right now besides the floors.  Same with our bed room.  The carpet in the whole stair area probably needs trashed (having that much plaster crushed into it has ruined it).  Haven't touched the extra bedroom or the basement much.  Just discovered this morning that the dust made it into the kitchen cupboards too so pretty much everything in those needs washed.  We're not going to do much else until we get the rest of the plaster down (just a few spots around the edges) and sand down the drywall mud.  Then I will start super cleaning our house.  

Tomorrow we're tearing out the rest of the plaster and putting up some insulation.  Saturday we're supposed to be getting nephew help again for drywall so we hope to have everything prepped and ready before then.  My goal is still to have this all done by Thanksgiving (I would be ok with still having to paint by then, that seems like a really clean project after this!).  We're going to make it, I am determined.  I will not survive in a house this dirty much longer than a week.

Sooo...after all that work yesterday, today we went up to the lake for the annual closing.  It went really fast this year since the leaves were so dry.  It's always so strange going up in the fall.  It's so much different than the summer even though the summer doesn't seem that long ago.  The water was about the lowest I had ever seen it.  Nobody jumped in this year (our house was 54 when I got up this morning.  I've had my share of being cold & wet lately) so we were only there about 3 hours (and we beat everyone up there by an hour).  Quick lake closing.  Nice to go up one last time for the year.  Memories always flood back and then are tucked away until next summer. =)

Even with all this house stuff going on (and the house being a disaster), I'm still trying to have my NYC scrapbook done before Thanksgiving.  Only have 34 pages to go... (of 34...)  Need to get going on that. =)  Hopefully by next week our house will be in better shape.