Having brawny lads scampering all over your house (banging and scraping and banging and climbing and banging and thumping) is rather more distracting than I had expected.  And I had expected it to be distracting.  I just hadn’t expected it to drive me stark raving mad.  And I hadn’t expected it to go on for days.

What I did expect (it’s an old house, it has trained me well), was to find some sort of lurking problem.  Don’t get me wrong.  I love my old house.  It’s pretty, and it’s well made, and it looks and feels like a house should.  But it is 91 years old, and sometimes it has little incidents.  So it wasn’t a huge surprise when we discovered that some of our windowsills were a bit rotted.  This had happened before, and we knew it would likely happen again. The last time it happened we hired someone to come fix it.  This time, we decided to tackle it ourselves (on the advice of the guy who came and did it last time actually…he assured us it was totally a do it yourself sort of project…shortly after we paid him lots of money to do it).

So we scraped out the biggest chunks of rotted wood and then went to the lumber yard.  We bought some fancy goo that soaks into smooshy wood and restores it to its former splendor and some fancy play-doh that fills in the holes and turns into something that acts much like wood and set to work.  It wasn’t exactly hard, but it did take longer than expected.  It also required a fair amount of time on ladders.  In the end, we had sore arms, proof that someone out there got more from their chemistry classes than we did from ours, and something that looked suspiciously like a windowsill.

Given that what we had had was a panic-inducing hole, I’m going to call it a net gain.

And please don’t freak out about the way it looks now.  This picture was taken in the middle of the scraping stage of the painting process.  It’s apparently quite natural for it to look like six shades of hell at this point.  I’ve been (repeatedly) assured that it will look awesome once we get through the scraping and priming stages and into the painting part of the process.

But until the banging part is over, I’m not sure I’ll be able to muster the mental clarity necessary to knit.  Unless one of you wants to have me over for an hour of peace and quiet.  Because here?  Here is kind of noisy.