Category: home improvements

The big project for the last week or so has been finally getting the lights mounted. Our old chandelier (which we hated, you can see it in all its globular glory here) crashed to the ground almost exactly a year ago (a more dramatic ending than we would have ordered, but good riddance), and we finally found new ones that we liked at the beginning of the summer, after looking for several years. We finally schemed a strategy for mounting them, and Kevin did all of the routing and drilling and electrical work over several days. We are so excited about the result.

The lamps are the Benjamin Industrial Pendants in weathered copper from Barn Light Electric Company.

We were able to mount them without moving the existing hole in the ceiling, which is good since we don’t have good ways of pulling wires through that top section (due to the framing) or of patching the wood ceiling.

I love the way the brushed copper looks against the wood ceiling and green walls. We have kind of a lot of mismatched styles in that room, things I wouldn’t have chosen but that somehow work, and to find something that I thought was pretty on its own and prettier in the context of the room feels like quite the victory.

So, success, and a good project off the list a mere month before our five year anniversary of moving in.

The microwave emitted a loud pop on Tuesday night and then ceased to function. Can’t imagine why (the thing’s only 27 years old).

I read when I was pregnant that the seal on the door is the first thing to go, and the unsafe radius is within 5 feet, so since then we’ve all duly tromped out of the kitchen while the thing heats. This microwave was definitely pre-rotating trays, and we had to nuke everything for 3-5 times the normal time…

We used the oven only once (during a brown dinner, accidentally) and it smoked and put out a terrible electrical smell.

We’ve been teetering on the edge of replacing it for years, but since it’s built into the wall, it felt like the removal of the microwave meant the beginning of the kitchen remodel, and we’re still saving up money and patience. This seemed like a pretty clear sign. Kevin was thinking that we could keep the microwave + oven in place, and buy a counter top model for the time being. I mulled that for two days, then decided my thinking was that we could remove the entire unit, get appliance removable people to haul it away, and find or build a temporary shelf to hold our new microwave until we get closer to looking at the kitchen in earnest.

Done, done, and done – now we just need to find and buy a new microwave. I’m particularly proud of us for getting people to remove it the same day we took it out of the wall instead of doing our typical excessively cheap/DIY pattern of storing it in the garage for months until the next community trash day, and then self-hauling to the dump in my car. Instead, we paid them $77 and they picked it up 6 hours after we called, and carefully removed it from where we’d left it in the middle of the kitchen floor. Yay.

I know it leaves a huge hole that we’ll have to fill (not that the trash compactor removal 3.5 years ago didn’t), but it looks SO great without it, and I’m so excited not to have to think and wonder about it anymore. We’ve been having fun with the adjectives all day – you just don’t want a retro/vintage/antique microwave. Farewell, you relic.

We’d been saving up a slew of house projects for after the baby was born and we were both home on leave to let the workmen into the house. Things finally got organized enough to tackle them three weeks ago, and we’ve been appreciating the shiny new results since.

First of all, a new furnace!!

Our old one had recently turned 18 and needed several pricey repairs, so we decided to just replace it with a brand new energy-efficient model (96%, whatever that might mean?) rather than waiting for it to fail when we had an infant in the house.

Then, the next day, new panes for the kitchen window! Two of the five top panes in our big garden window were failed when we moved into the house.

We were actually alright with that until last winter when one of them started filling up with several inches of water every time it rained. Less than ideal.

The window guy recommended replacing all five panes, since he said that otherwise we were likely to see a color difference in the panes and it would only be a matter of time until the other panes leaked. The end result is lovely, and we’re hoping the low-E glass will help moderate the kitchen temperatures in the summer.

H is such a little appreciater of windows, and for all his delight, we were even happier.

We’ve been in condensing mode here, as a result of combining our two offices. We each did a small amount of weeding out stuff when we moved into the new house a year and a half ago, but there wasn’t really much incentive because it was such a bigger space and there were so many nice closets. Since we moved ourselves, the major advantage was than anything we tossed only had to be moved once (out to the curb) instead of twice (out of the old place and into the new). Since then, there have been a few small purges, and I’ve sold lots on Craigslist, but we both still have a pretty large collection of things.

With all of the office shuffling, we’ve started thinking more seriously about what should stay vs. what should go. This applies to furniture, certainly, but also to things like music collections (which we’re going to digitize – major space saver!), books, and all of the random, mostly useless things that seem to accumulate and then get moved around just because they’re familiar or might be useful someday.

One of the more exciting decisions, in my opinion, came when we started eyeing the DVD shelves.

I’ve never loved that shelf – it’s enormous, and proportionately something about it is just really off. But we have a ton of DVDs, and the shelves are so expensive for what they are, and so it seemed like the best we were going to do. I’ve been entertaining ideas of building a shelf, though it would be expensive, time-consuming, and you’d still be able to see all of the ugly cases. But then we finally made the mental leap needed to take the discs out of their cases – originally we were thinking wallets, but Kevin found these for even less money:

Three of them hold all of the DVDs, plus extra room if we find ourselves with more. Here they are on top of the old shelves, for scale:

I printed up nice, organized lists of all of the DVDs in the cases – once you know the slot number of the movie, you slide the little table over to the correct position and open the case, and it picks out the DVD for you. Clever.

Now these guys can live in our utility closet, the dvd shelf can join the large collection of things out in the garage waiting to be Craigslisted, and we can finally start working on putting the framed photos up on the wall. Nice improvements all around!