Been a long week.   We've all been sick with a cold this past week.  Nothing really bad but Keiran was up several times during the night wednesday which of course woke the rest of us up.  Keiran and Jon were both really grumpy thursday.  Fortunately we've all been getting better.

Our deck job started a couple weeks ago.  For the job we got a huge dumpster which has been great for getting rid of the massive amounts of crap left over from the remodel upstairs and even the toilet and tank left over from the bathroom remodel.  Our old deck has been removed, sonar tubes in and concrete poured.  Lumber is here as well.  We should have a new deck by next week.  The whole thing is being done with pressure treated because its the least costly.  It'll be nice to have a deck with proper handrails that's safe.  

Not much else going on.  Still busy at work and working on completing my office here at the house.    Just need to coat the drywall once more then fill in any bad spots and pinholes.  I still need to find replacement doors for the room too.  How two doors went missing I'll never know but they didn't come with the house :/.  Found a place down towards the cape that sells used house doors and hardware.  They claim to have thousands of doors.  Hopefully they have something that fits.  Once the office is done we'll move Keiran in there so I can start on his room.  Then we can move him back.  

Since starting school a few months ago Jon has been bringing us home various fun an exciting new viruses.  The latest fun has been a stomach bug which we thought the boys were both done with until they came back down this symptoms on Thursday night.  Nothing like being woken up by puking sounds at 4am in the morning.  It seem so far as if they are having less of a problem with this than they did with the last one but last night Jon was up sick in the middle of the night again.  Keiran only had one "episode" yesterday and seems ok today.  Anyway, this morning we spent 3 hours disinfecting their toys with bleach and soap and then rinsing them well.  Then Danielle swept and mopped up the floor.  We're still doing load after load of laundry making sure all the bed sheets and stuffed toys are clean.  Hopefully this will be over soon, at least this run of it. 

On another subject we contracted with Porter Contracting to do our roof replacement and chimney rebuild.  They'll be taking the chimney down below the roof line and building all new up from there as well as stripping, flashing and replacing the roof.  We made sure they have insurance and called a couple of their reference.  They seem to check out.  Hopefully we'll finally have the roof issues over with.  A shame really.  The roof material is largely in pretty good shape it's just things were done so poorly shingles are falling out here and there and the chimney is in tough shape.  We had a handyman in last year to tar up the chimney and around the stink pipe which bought us some time but now it's time to get things fixed correctly.  We are still taking bids for decks trying to get that squared away as well.  We both wish we'd bought a newer house but not much we can do about it now other than fix things up and look forward to moving eventually.    This place has been quite the money pit, most we paid for except our floor refinish which my Dad and Stepmom paid for.  Summary:

New Boiler:  $5,000
All new plumbing in the house, add bathroom upstairs, redo downstairs bathroom,  all new wiring, new fixures (I did all but plumbing and fan hookup upstars):  $18,000
New Windows:  $4500
New Garage Roof:  My and Joel's labor (Dad + Stepmom paid for Shingles)
Refinish All Floors:   I forget the total now.  It was several thousand.  Dad and Stepmom paid for this.
Re-line Sewer Pipe to the main feed:  approx $5800
Roof and Chimney Repair (Pending):  $8800
Redo walls in Jon's Room and Master Bedroom:  About $1200 (did this ourselves)
New Fridge and Dishwasher:  $1100

There were other things as well that were less expensive like replacing the basement door but I don't remember all of it.  You certainly don't save anything buying an old house unless you can do all the work yourself.  Even then it could be only a break even deal or even a loss.

Final subject of today's overly long post is work.  I've successfully made it over to the enterprise development team at my job.  This move happens this coming week and I'm pretty excited about it.  Been a long road trying to get but  my chance finally came up a couple weeks ago and I decided to take it.  The company so far seems to be doing well weathering the bad economy (knock wood).  Hopefully this was a good move.  At least I didn't have  to change companies to change positions and this is more a development position and less support / development like I was doing prior. That's all for now. 

Work has been absolutely crazy the last few weeks.  We had a deadline for this month of some software that we knew was next to impossible to reach.  We managed to hit the date and released today but not without various nights, weekends and long days.  So glad to see this stuff into production so things will maybe return to normal.  I'll be looking to get some new pictures up soon and plan a visit up north to see the family as soon as we can.

We actually got a tax refund this year (with the changes I made to my W2 I was surprised) so, we finally bought our new dishwasher.  It's been great to have it this week.  We got a Kitchen Aid and it's much quieter than the old Tappan we had that stopped working.  Washing dishes by hand was starting to get pretty old.  But glad we waited till we actually had the money.