July 3, 2010 - Somerville, Massachusetts

Alena's insanely cute kitten helps me caulk a ceiling

For the past three days we have been in Somerville, a town just outside of Boston where my sister bought a two family house out of bankruptcy last year. She's done most of the hard work to get the rental unit ready for new occupants, but there are some details left to take care of. So we've spent the past few days caulking and taping, priming and painting, scraping and rewiring. In addition to all the good work we've done we also managed to put a big hole in one of her exterior walls.

I came up to the third floor on Saturday afternoon to find Alena and Sten in the process of destroying an old broken air conditioner in order to remove it from a wall. The prior owners had built the wall around the unit. Alena and Sten decided that the only way to get the unit out of the wall was to remove the guts of it so that it could be compressed enough to remove it.

At some point Sten decided that he needed to go out on the roof of a second story bay window to try to cut some of the construction adhesive that was holding the AC unit in place. When they told me about his adventures on the roof I had to leave the room for a few minutes so that I didn't bite anyone's head off. If we are going to stay in the States for a while, it is probably high time that we did something about getting ourselves some health insurance.