Blood on the styrofoam

These last few days have been big ones for us.  On Friday the fixers that the moving company hired came and tended to our damaged furniture.  While it is just a fix-up, Dee and her crew did a very good job, especially on Mom's teak hutch.  Now we can finally move our stuff into our living space!    
 And for the water in the basement we put extensions on all the down-spouts to bring the water away from the house... that was good but Mom also found a large gap in one pipe right at the elbow so a lot of water was escaping and going into the ground along the foundation.  We fixed that and are now waiting for the next bigger rain.
  We had 2 rooms booked on the weekend, just such great folks!  So that was our 2nd successful B&B weekend!
  And today we got our new furnace, replacing this ol' thing.

One of the troublesome issues we've not been looking forward to dealing with is 2 heat outlets in our bedroom that were completely filled with expanding foam insulation.  Yuck.  But with the furnace guys willing to re-connect the works from the furnace, we had to see if we could get the foam out of the vents.  Why did the previous owners disconnect the pipes in the basement AND spray foam into the floor, who knows!?!?!?  

So we removed the floor registers and started digging... One was a 4 x 10 opening and the other much larger.  

For the last 3/4 of the dig, I had both arms in this 4 x 10 hole!  I have so many "defensive" bruises on my arms, it looks like I was in a nasty fight.  Then, finally I hit metal, only to find the pipe turned and now I had a full elbow!  How could I continue after the curve?!  I kept digging at the bottom of the pipe because that's the only part I could reach, wondering what tool might work better when finally... was that a hollow spot?  I kept digging and yelled out in pure relief:  I felt air on my fingers!!!  From that point on it was just ecstasy, although there was a lot of blood on the styrofoam at that point, both Mom's and mine.

Empty and clean, with all the wee bits vacuumed away!  And with air moving through!  What a difference this will make for heating, cooling and just having the furnace fan running for fresh air.

This old grate has a piece missing but is still lovely. 

And what a difference new floor diffusers make!  We got new ones for all around the house; the old ones were painted over, rusty

and a mess, as you can see.  (Of course, we kept the antique ones.)

This huge block was the last chunk that Mom pulled out of her hole!  

And Willow?  Oh, she supervised every move, laying upside down on her folded up bed!