Chapter 40: Moving in

Tom's father flew in, and Tom and Saul and the professor went to the house and crawled around for three hours. They found lots of work to be done, but the structure was sound; surprisingly so.

Saul's father closed the deal for the house. There was enough money in the mortgage to cover the most urgent repairs to the house and to buy some basic furniture and floor coverings.

The group went to work on the place every spare moment. They had to hack a passage through the hedges for their cars. First thing was getting heat into the place, then water. They replaced the furnace with multiple hot-water heaters, tested the heating system for leaks. They had to repair a lot of drips, but it was soundly built. It turned out Mary was a pretty good plumber. When the water was warm, they ran it through the floor pipes and let the building warm up for the first time in years.

As soon as there was water pressure, Anne went through the house replacing faucet and toilet washers.

They put in a big, new, electrical breaker cabinet. Running wiring could wait. Alex checked the existing electrical system, figured out where new outlets were needed, marked for telephone connections.

The warm, heated floors meant they could go barefoot. The hard work and the solar gain from the windows had them peeling off their clothes. Sigrid kept her panties on and scrupulously avoided body contact, but worked at the heavy tasks alongside all of them, sweat sometimes coating her body. The showers upstairs got lots of use.

One day when they had been sanding floors, Sigrid stopped for a rest, her body coated with dust, the sweat leaving tracks between her breasts. She announced, "I want a sauna." When she had explained what that was, she said, "I know were it goes, too. Downstairs, where we can get out to the pool."

Mary went shopping and found a hotel mattress sale. She got sixteen king-size mattresses at a good price. They built a platform bed in each bedroom, took the rest of the mattresses to the living room. The beds upstairs got used when someone wanted privacy, otherwise their duvets were folded on the mattresses in the living room, with the cushions. On the Big Bed, they loved each other without restraint.

They all swept, scrubbed, sanded and finished floors and woodwork, painted and worked at any job that came along. When it was Friday, they kept on working as much as they could while studying. At Anne's insistence, Saturday night remained movie night.

"Gotta have some break time," she said.

They washed the seemingly hundreds of windows. It quickly became clear the sun was going to do a lot to keep the house warm. The fireplace drew well, and they started spending Saturday evenings on the Big Bed in front of it. Every evening, Sigrid would leave for the dorm with obvious reluctance.

Second-hand commercial refrigerator, washer, drier and dishwasher arrived in Sigrid's van. Mary, Tom and Alex spent two long evenings installing the appliances. They were followed by furniture and lumber, supplies of all sorts. The bottom floor remained an echoing emptiness, clean now, but not yet in the queue for rehabilitation. They never touched the outside of the building after washing windows; just cleared away any brambles or branches that were in the way.

The end of the term came, exams with it. Exam week meant extra tension, more hard work, but some spare hours to spend on the house. Mary's spreadsheets showed their GPA holding. Finally, a week of break between semesters.