The Bend: A sad story

So they wired and they sweated and they spackled and they painted, until one day some bad old robbers decided to break in and steal a lot of hard work.

Sad, but true.  Kenneth and Papaw and Uncle Rob and Kenneth's apprentice Stephen worked six weeks getting the house completely rewired and up to code and were making quite a bit of progress.  Climbing into the dusty old attic, fishing wires through the walls, making sure all of the breakers were hooked up correctly.  Then one day, I met Kenneth out at The Bend to check out all the work they'd been doing.  We walked in and noticed the back door was open.  Then we noticed the new wire to the oven was gone.  Then we noticed the new wire to the fan was gone. Then we noticed the wires in the ceiling were gone.  

Remember this picture?

See all those nice yellow wires coming out of the breaker box?  Yep, they were gone. Every one of them.  There was even a big hole in the living room ceiling where the perp's foot came through while he was stealing all of their hard work.

So to save time and, believe it or not, money, we decided the best thing to do would be to rip down all of the old sheetrock and ceiling and just start over. That way the wires could be properly stapled in, the walls could be well insulated, and the time-consuming task of fishing the wires down through the walls could be finished rather quickly.  Drywall is cheaper than time. 

So down came the walls.  Down came the ceilings.

Living room looking through to the back bedrooms.  Only the lonely closet doors were left.

Mounds of itchy insulation covered the floor and filled dozens of garbage bags.

Looking into the kitchen from the living room.

Once we were down to the bare bones of the house, we decided to look around and see if there were any structural changes that we would like to make.  So we decided it would really open up the main living areas if we took down half of the wall between the living room and kitchen. Even though it would take away a good bit of precious upper cabinet space, we decided to go for it.  So down came the cabinets, the door to the kitchen, and the upper half of the wall in the above photo.

All in all, though exceeding aggravating and time consuming, we made lemonade out of lemons, and are thankful that we have not had anymore uninvited guests.