vs. Basement: Final Round

Update: pictures added!

My blog decided, all by itself, to italicize everything on the page – what? I need to figure out how to fix this. Meanwhile, I need to finish transcribing my notes from spring break, so prepare for the uber-exciting conclusion.

In previous episodes: Galveston, the House of Doom, and preparing for the basement. I will be adding pictures very soon.

Wednesday, 04 March 2009

I’m done packing up my gym bag and am ready to leave after dinner. A quick recap of the past two days:

Tuesday we started off the morning by ripping up the carpet in a bedroom. The room was in a house over a shop in the historic part of Galveston: Morgan Studios. The owner, Danny Morgan, used to be a top costume designer in Broadway/New York (I think), but fell on hard times and set up a costume shop in Galveston. He’s now seventy-five-ish and has emphysema, which involves coughing up blood – lots of it – so the bedroom carpet had huge splotches of black, dried blood. We ripped it up in strips, bagged everything, and took them down the (steep) stairs to the street. The rest of the house/shop was pretty amazing – costumes, fabric, and multicolored feathers everywhere; rooms full of costumes, hats, shoes, and manikins, and just a general feel of the 1920s (and a little Victorian, too) in the decoration and architecture of the house.

That took us about an hour – after which we went back to the House of Doom. To clean out the basement.

vs. House: Bathroom Round

Monday, 02 March 2009

I think that this ASB (Alternative Spring Break) trip has been a good time to cement friendships and make some new ones. It’s also been a good way to get away from the intellectual constraints of Rice, away from arguing for the sake of arguing, and spend time in Christian community; just to bring up those topics which are so important, but aren’t talked about very much in normal conversation – God, salvation, His glory in nature, Christian service.

We continued on the same house today. I worked mainly in the bathroom, tearing out sheetrock. Unfortunately, the entirety of the sheetrock was backed by wood, which meant that we had to chip away at the stuff with the claw ends of crowbars and hammers, instead of just bashing it in between studs and watching it crumble. The ceiling was a killer. Grossest part: me taking apart a light/fan fixture with half an inch of dust on top. Wow.