Category: home improvements

Our house doesn’t have great cross ventilation in the living room, fish room and kitchen. The bedrooms manage to move some air with the windows open, and the family room is great with all of those big screened windows and the ceiling fan, but the main rooms of the house get hot and just stay that way. When we went back to Kevin’s parents’ house in May, I was impressed at the retracting screen door that they’d installed in their kitchen. We decided to get quotes for them, and now we have screens on the front door, and across the double door in the living room. You can just see the white frame around the edges, and the handle on the far right:

When the doors are open, we get an amazing corridor of air flow through the living room. With all of the heat this week, the air outside generally doesn’t start to get cooler than the house temps until around 9 pm. By that point, the house is hot and stuffy, and we’re wild to get new, cooler air through. The guy came and installed them right before the worst of the heat hit, and they’ve been an amazing addition.

I think they’re going to be just as exciting once the heat finally breaks (supposedly Tuesday or Wednesday of next week?) and we can keep them open during the day for nice breezes through the house. (Again, I know these aren’t great photos – it’s hard to photograph something that’s effectively see-though – but at least you can at least see the white trim around the edges and the handle on the far left. You can also see how scorched the poor yard is.)

Those double doors in the living room are so appealing when they’re open – our back yard is one of our favourite parts of the house and it’s nice to feel like it’s even more accessible. I’ve sort of felt like we haven’t gotten to take advantage of our Seattle summer this year, since time on my feet or out in the sun hasn’t been as appealing as it usually is. We both have parental leave (Kevin’s taking two months, and I get five), and I’m having visions of how pleasant August and even September might be with our new screens. Hopefully that won’t doom us to another cold, rainy August?

When we bought the house, all three of our bedrooms had the same stained, unravelling Berber carpet that we’d had replaced in the family room last winter. I’m not sure when it was put in – it seems slightly unlikely that it dated all the way back to the family room addition in the mid-eighties, but not impossible given its condition? The previous owners had all of the carpets cleaned professionally, which really didn’t make much of a dent, and then we did our best to cover the worst of the stains with furniture and ignore the rest. Once we knew that everything was going to be moved around for the baby, though, it didn’t take us very long to start talking about using that opportunity to replace the bedroom carpet as well. We decided to go with the same carpet we installed in the family room, just different colors.

It’s hard to photograph expanses of horrible beige berber, but here’s a sample before photo:

The guys showed up, took out all of our old carpet, and revealed this linoleum loveliness underneath:

(Who puts linoleum in a bedroom??) Glad that we covered that right back up. 🙂 Kevin took advantage of the exposed subfloors/linoleum to fix a bunch of loud squeaks, especially in our room and the baby’s room. It makes such a difference to have silence while walking.

While the guys were working, we had an unexpected visitor fly in through the open front door:

He was quite determined to get back outside through the (unopenable) living room windows, but we managed to coax him off his perch and out the door pretty quickly, and without a mess. The carpet guys seemed amused by our efforts.

The new carpet looks amazing, and we love the colors we ended up with. Here’s our new shared office – I really just love the way that this one works with the pink walls.

We have the guest bed and trundle moved back in, and have started assembling our new desks. The closet is where we’ll store most of what’s now in the family room once we weed it down a bit, and my guess is that it will be a work in progress for a week or two.

Here’s the baby’s room, with its pretty new carpet and paint:

The paint color looks yellow in the mornings, green at night, and varies remarkably in brightness during the day depending on the light. There’s one part of the day that seems to bring out a color that I can only describe as “lime yogurt” and that I’m not that fond of, but other than that one shade we’re both quite pleased with it. Between the north-west exposure and the fact that the garage blocks almost all direct light, we worried about finding a color that would have some saturation without making the room too dark. I like the end result. Here’s the view looking from the window to the closet:

(Unfortunately the new carpet and pad are higher than the old, so we’re going to have to remove most of the doors, sand and paint the bottoms, and rehang them. Ugh. Nothing like unanticipated extra steps.)

And we chose a medium blue carpet for our room:

I was afraid that the new carpet color wouldn’t work with the existing wall color, but I’m actually a huge fan. We were both especially impressed with the work they did in the closet, installing around all of the parts of the built-in and modular shelving. (This photo came out pretty yellow, so the carpet looks greyer than in reality).

Here’s the view from the door with all of the furniture back in…

… including the baby’s bassinet!! Very exciting to see that waiting for his arrival!

Such a huge improvement!

We had to move everything out of the three bedrooms so that the new carpets could be installed, which included emptying the closets of the front bedrooms, since the Closet Maid shelving in there has posts which rest on the floor. While it doesn’t look like it to me when everything is packed away in its spot, it appears that we have a LOT of stuff. And all of those books aren’t light. Luckily we started clearing things out early last week, because between Kevin’s shoulder and my size/shape/endurance, we needed lots of breaks. Exhausting, but at least we were laughing at ourselves together – it’s nice to both be able to see the humour in that sort of situation.

Now everything is sitting in the living room and family room. The view of the living room from the front door and bedroom hallway:

And looking towards the dining area:

And the view of the family room from the doorway (you can see about 2/3 of the stuff here, the rest didn’t fit in the shot).

We moved the bed out of our room the night before the installation and just left the mattress to sleep on, which lent an odd/happy feeling of camping out to the whole affair. The only drawback was that my current elegance getting out of bed is magnified when I’m also trying to get up from the floor. I’d definitely say I’m past the “cute” stage of pregnancy.

Like all projects, this one seems to be a case of two steps forward, one back. We found that one of the screws for our bed was stripped to the point of uselessness. The closest match at the hardware store was about a sixteenth of an inch too wide for the bracket. We thought the store we’d bought it from (Underhills) had closed last fall, but it turns out the son has reopened a new version of it so we took a field trip up to Lynnwood after work to get more screws. (We were both so happy to know that store is still around in a new incarnation – love the furniture and the customer service.) Now we at least have one of the three bedrooms back in standard condition.

When we ordered a new light for the bathroom, we also found sconces to replace the ones in our living room. The old ones were small and yellow. I disliked the color of the glass shades during the day…

But they were worse when we turned them on at night, since the shades were opaque enough to block most of the light, and what got through was a dark yellow-orange that made skin look ghoulish and most colors look garish.

Lamps are such a matter of personal taste, but we found white art glass sconces that we both liked a lot. They’re bigger, so I think they look more proportionate on the wall, and the light is a much more natural color. We’ve had them up for almost two weeks, so you’d think that I’d be getting accustomed to them, but I’m still so happy every time I turn them on or walk by.

It’s hard to take a closeup of a lamp when it’s on, but I wanted to try to get some of the pattern of the glass. It’s a mixture of more and less opaque chunks, and I think it’s quite lovely, both on and off.

Yay for lighting improvements!

Kevin got all motivated after work and got the curtains back up! We were both very impressed that we’d managed to keep track of all of the hardware over the course of that many months!

There were a few difficult moments. Since two of the old windows were just surrounded by that faux-paneling and didn’t have trim, the windows are now narrower. One of the curtains still fit, but the metal bars at the top and bottom of the other were about ¼” too big. Hmm. Kevin did something to them with power tools in the garage (I was very happy not to have to spend time stressing over the problem/solution), and now they still look lovely and actually fit in the window. Yay!

At some point, I need to go around and fix the lengths on all of the cords, but they look so much better than they did on the dining room floor – a great milestone. Now all that’s left is figuring out a way to recover the blue butterfly chairs and the room can be declared completely done!

We are so very close to being done with the family room! I’d spent several weekends in the fall caulking, recaulking, and repainting trim. We had a few touchups left by the end of November, and so I finally went around and put all of the faceplates back on the outlets, only to find that the holes for two of the outlets were too big by about an inch in each dimension. It meant a tricky patch job, then re-priming, texturing, and painting, and we just couldn’t face it. We decided to invite friends over for the Superbowl, though, and that was just enough incentive for Kevin to remotivate on the horrid outlets. So while he was working late and redoing the bathroom, he was also repairing those two tiny, wretched bits of wall. The end result (completed shortly before everyone arrived for the game) was perfectly done:

So now, for the first time since October 2007, we have neither the 10′ stepladder nor painting tarps in the family room – it looks so classy without them! (Also the photo above is a great one for seeing the wall vs. trim vs. carpet color combination – I still keep admiring how nice they look together.)

There are two remaining steps. The first is to relocate all of the hardware so that we can rehang the blinds, which have been hanging out in front of the windows in our dining room for the better part of the last 15 months.

Again, it will look so empty and neat without them on the floor. The second goal was to head back down into the crawl space and rewire the TV cabling and internet for the XBox under the floor and up through the wall. Our interim solution has had the coax cable running across the room one direction (from our hall closet) and the ethernet cable cutting a diagonal from the opposite corner.

This Sunday before the Brown dinner, Kevin got all suited up and headed down into the crawl space, and I fed him cables down through the wall (I’m always so thankful that I get to be the above-ground person), and we ended up with this:

A combined outlet with speaker wiring on the bottom, a CAT-5 ethernet jack and a coax connection. Yay! The cables run directly to the hall closet and hook into all of Kevin’s other networking there.

So now it’s just the curtains. 🙂