Category: house

An unintentional day off

A pretty quick day – Kevin was planning to go to Home Depot to buy drywall and rent a truck to bring it home (did you know that Home Depot rents pickups for $20??) when the weather reports all came in that we were supposed to have an evening windstorm.

Of course, after the mess of a storm last year, everyone panicked and fled to home, but even we weren’t about to try to drive home several sails of drywall in major wind and rain. (No damage done from this windstorm – a few flickering lights, a few branches on the ground, but nothing scary or overly destructive, luckily.)

The advantage to not being able to work on the family room was that we got to watch the Red Sox win 7-1 in game 5! Rock on!!

(This photo is also notable since it shows our practically empty closet! Oooh! Contrast it with the disaster of a box-strewn living room…)

Vacation house day

I actually spent the first hour or two of my vacation day writing for work (not my norm, but things are busy there and it put me in a much better mentality for taking the day off).

I brought over two carloads of stuff – the first was the bulk of the downstairs closet (all of our sports/camping gear, plus college notes and coursework) and almost all of my paper files, and the second was all of the wood that we’ve had stashed under beds, couches, and the corners of closets for the last three years. (I had a brief wood working spell when we first moved out here until it became clear that there was nowhere really to handle such projects. I’m so excited about the new garage!!)

Then, I spent a little bit longer adding to the trash pile in the garage and driveway – there were plenty of trash bags of rotten pine needles in the back yard, some rotten pallets, some half-used moldering bags of topsoil, wet carpet, leftover fencing, rusted metal plant stands, broken playskool climbers, etc. I dragged them out to the front Luckily, our seller’s realtor agreed to haul all of this (and yesterday’s garage collection) away for us, and so I wanted to make it accessible for whoever came to retrieve it.

I also found some treasures – some long-handled clippers in good shape, a wire rake, a nice 6’ step ladder. I brought those all over to the garage, but first used the clippers to make paths in each of the side-yards so that we can walk without stooping. Much better. Though clearly, there’s still a LOT of progress to make. (If anyone has advice about when to clip rhododendrons and hydrangea in Seattle so that they still bloom the next year, I’m all ears!!)

With no other good ways to procrastinate, I reattacked the cupboards. They’re finally clean, and I took apart the face of the oven to reattach the handles that we found on the counter. Next up is shelf paper for the bottom shelves.

Meanwhile, Kevin finished the last of the demolition.

While he worked on that, I went around with a plastic cup to remove all of the nails, hooks, screws and anchors left in the walls. I finished with almost a full cup – clearly I will be a master spackler by the end of the weekend. It looks like we may be painting a bit more than we originally intended to. The master bedroom is white, which would be fine except that the walls are pretty scratched/holey. We’re thinking yellow? (Kevin pointed out that regardless, it will probably match some portion of the quilt. :-)) The bedroom that will be my office is green, but has Winnie the Pooh art all over the place, and the painting was sort of uneven. I have yet to decide on a good color. White is boring, but I love it. Green and pink are both under consideration, but they’d have to be pretty pale since the room faces northeast and isn’t too bright.

Kevin’s bedroom/office will be painted, I’m sure, and we’ll probably do another coat of white in the fish room. The living room/dining room is a gorgeous citrus green, but we want to put a red couch in there, so we’ll see how that goes. And as I said yesterday, the family room will definitely be painted. So we’ll be busy.

The new as-of-today project is the laundry room.

There is old, old linoleum on the floor, scratched walls, and a huge, heavy cabinet without shelves. (That photo is hard for perspective, but that cabinet is more than two feet deep and no shelves.) Since we’ll be ordering a new washer and dryer, we both thought that this might be the time to do things from scratch. New vinyl floors, new paint, and perhaps two white 30” cabinets? The room is pretty minimal – 56” square, with two appliances and two doors, so we definitely want to make the best use of space possible.

A long house post

Finally, some major progress!!

I got back to the house at almost exactly 5 pm (love that commute!!!) and cleaned the garage until it got too dark to see well. It was a little bit of an archaeological dig – the “finds” ranged from carpet and tile that didn’t match anything in the house, to spent florescent bulbs behind the furnace, to 70+ half-empty cans of paint, to plenty of chemicals and some not-diminutive furniture. The most confusing items to pull down were two projection screens that I found 10 feet up on top of a cabinet. The most potentially horrifying were three bags of cotton batting – all I could think as I got ready to pull them down was that if I was a mouse, that’s EXACTLY where I would want to live. Luckily, they were rodent free.

I stacked all of the “remnants” in the middle of the garage, and then swept out everything that I could reach (and see – by that point, especially with the clouds, it was pretty dark – this picture is from the next morning).

And here’s the pile from the back of the garage:

At that point, I decided to start in on cleaning the kitchen cabinets. They’re going to be a little bit of a trial, I think, and we’re hoping to renovate within the next year or so. It’s just old, sticky, heavy wood, and most of the rollers don’t work, and most of the hinges are a little bit off. The shelves aren’t adjustable, so I’m worried about what will even fit, and between the antique(:-)) microwave/oven and the trash compactor that we had removed (leaving just an empty hole), the cabinets likely just won’t become fine once we get used to them.

That said, I love our corian counters, and that big sink, and the wall tile, and I suspect I’ll like the stove a lot. And the bow-out window is awesome. So it certainly isn’t all doom.

Before I could clean the cabinets, I needed to remove all of the baby-proofing – took longer than I was expecting! I only made it through two cabinets and two drawers by the time we decided to break for dinner.

Meanwhile, Kevin came home, we turned on the stereo, and he started to go to town on the “wood paneling” in the family room.

It turns out that the wood was more of a sticker/wallpaper than it looked. The wall has a weird bump-out shape, and so we were hoping to correct that, plus removing the “wood” also took along a fair amount of drywall. Kevin had a blast with his brand new crowbar and the sawzall from his family. He definitely made fast work of the demolition.

It turns out that the wall is bumped out because they poured the foundation unevenly. Oops. We found about a good number of bottle caps and three ping pong balls sealed into the former wall – perhaps the construction was some sort of fraternity reunion bonding exercise?

We’ve decided to keep the bump out – I actually don’t mind at all, since it will be a good place for potted plants, and the part that grated for me was the faux wood. Kevin’s going to add some insulation, since they did a spotty job and missed entire sections. Then, he’ll put in new drywall and we can start painting. I can’t wait to replace the blue! 🙂 It’s sort of a big, undefined room, so we’re thinking of putting in an off-white chair rail to continue the line from the bump-out, and doing a medium café-au-lait below the line to ground things a bit and a lighter shade above. It will need to coordinate with both that fireplace brick and the “cedar” (green-grey) couches. I’m hoping that those colors and a light neutral rug will really work well? We’ll see. Choosing paint is so hard.

(An aside – like the fire screen? I’m such a big fan. This, along with the buffet cabinet and the sofa/chair/ottoman were what we purchase furniture-wise from our wedding gift money. I can’t wait until the rest of the room matches – so pretty!)

*Really* homeowners!

We ended up getting the word at around five that the sellers were out and the house was ours!! Pretty cool!

I drove home to get a carload of cleaning supplies, the vacuum, the stereo, some folding chairs, and some tools. I got back to the house to meet Kevin a bit after 6, and we just wandered room to room for almost an hour. A bit overwhelming! I’d forgotten how echoing and dark an empty house can be.

We went to buy light bulbs, and then promptly ran out of steam and retreated to the apartment for dinner. I’m planning to get out of work early tomorrow and take a vacation day on Wednesday, so there will be plenty of time in the next few days to start cleaning.

The house was in pretty good shape – surfaces were surprisingly clean, and it didn’t look like there was much moving-out damage other than about a million hooks and anchors in the walls. The garage still had a LOT of stuff in it – no good – and the carpets are more stained than I remembered (but in line with what Kevin thought) – but on the whole, really not bad.

Homeowners

We signed the documents yesterday, and received word at about 2 in the afternoon that the house was now ours.

Despite the closing and the fact we have a key, the sellers requested a three-day period before we took possession. This is making our parents nervous, and now that I’m here I can completely see why, but it’s written in the purchase and sale agreement and so there’s nothing to do now but wait.

(In addition to not being able to sign off on the house between closing and possession, the pity of the thing is that we lose one of our weekends for moving, and so cleaning and the initial car trips will have to take place in the evenings after work. Bummer, especially now that it’s dark so early.)

But, all that aside, we’ve closed! And now a month and a half of waiting is reduced to one last weekend… 🙂

Moving the tank…

I haven’t posted a tank photo in ages. Here are the dudes, happy and oblivious to all of the coming changes.

The fish tank will be the last thing that we move. There are a lot of pieces. We have a 55 gallon display tank, a 40 gallon refugium, a +/-5 gallon sump, a 10-gallon quarantine tank, a stand, a cabinet (that the sump sits on), plus lights, plumbing, about 80lbs of rocks, about 80 lbs of sand, nearly 100 gallons of water, plus corals, fish, invertebrates, and zillions of worms, critters, and creatures that we didn’t put in the tank but that we want to preserve.

The rough plan is to set up the quarantine tank (with its lights, CPR Backpack II skimmer, pumps and heater) on the counter of the new house a few days ahead of time, with water from the main tank. Then we can bring the clowns, shrimp, snails, hermit crabs, and smaller corals and keep them there until the main tank normalizes.
One of my coworkers has offered to lend me four of his (sterilized/sterilizable) 6.5 gallon jugs for beer brewing to transport all of the water. So, then, the plan will be to:

1. Transport water from the tank to the quarantine tank two days ahead of time. Also transport all of the ready-water buckets and their water.
2. Transport fish, crabs, snails, and small corals in bags to the quarantine tank.
3. Scoop out sand to container.
4. Siphon as much tank water to jugs as possible.
5. Move coral-encrusted rocks to containers, with water and, if possible, heaters and current?
6. Transport 55 gallon tank and stand to new house, along with water, sand, rocks, equipment. Also transport 40 gallon tank, sump, and cabinet.
7. Reassemble stand, tanks, rocks. Add water. Heat and circulate. Add lights.
8. Connect full plumbing loop between 55 gallon display tank, sump, and refugium.
9. Continue to bring water from the old apartment for water changes (to reduce stress on the creatures) for the quarantine tank and the main setup for the next three days.
10. Once the tank seems in the clear and the water is testing normal, reintroduce the fish, etc from the quarantine tank.

I have a nice chart in progress for the four car trips that I think this will take.

I’m daunted.

Impending move…

Knock on wood, we close on Friday (so close!), and I’ve been making lists like a madwoman for the last week. We get the keys on the 12th, and our lease doesn’t end until the 31st, so we have three weekends plus the intervening weekdays to make the move.

We’ve rented a van for the final Saturday in October to move over all of the big furniture (and we have some awesome friends who actually volunteered to help – bless them. I’m so excited not to have to wrangle the couches and mattresses.). We’ll do the fishtank the next day, by ourselves. (The details on that deserve their own post).

In the meantime, we’ll clean, paint (the family room, and one bedroom), and start moving over all of the bits and sundry. The new house is actually right on both of our drives to work, so it won’t be too hard to bring a few box-fulls over each day until everything’s in place. (Even better, it means we can just keep reusing the boxes and packing supplies! AND, there’s real incentive to fully unpack each day, so that when we finally start sleeping in our new home at the end of the month, everything will be unpacked into its spot instead of sitting in a wall of boxes.)
I’ve been sort of grieving for our apartment for the last few weeks, in my typical poorly-transitioning way. (We’ve lived here for more than three years – the longest-lived home since high school. Kevin proposed here. I’ll miss the daily view of the Olympic Mountains and the lake. It held the first several phases of the fishtank. Larry came over for movies and sports, or just to hang out. The way that you can see what the weather will be in three hours by looking at the sky to the east. The first seven months that we lived here, when I was willfully unemployed and spent most of my days reading and knitting. Our running routes. Our fireworks spot. I keep thinking of things that I’m sad to leave.)

That’s not to say that I’m not excited about the new house. I’m totally won over – we both have been since we first saw it. We can’t wait for the projects, we can’t wait for family and friends to visit. And, last week, it occurred to me that the move could be such a last hurrah for our apartment. All of the reasons we’ve grown past it (kayaks and bikes in the living room, skis and camping gear and power tools and luggage crowding the closets, wonderful wedding gifts that have nowhere to live, wood from furnishing projects that we didn’t have the space to finish) can move to the new house. (Yay for garages!) And so as we settle our new place, our old place will just get better. It’s a relief to finally have a positive way of viewing the move.

In the meantime, I’ve been going through cupboards and cabinets and closets to find the things that we no longer need. I don’t want to move anything that we don’t have to!! For example, the almost-empty shampoos and expired sunscreens from Boston and before would have taken up a full box.

Finally, something for the blog

There’s so much going on here (hint: a house!), but I’m feeling leery about jinxing it and a bit reticent about posting all of the details for the world to see, so blogging has suffered. If we get past the inspection details, and financing, then I’ll definitely start posting more frequently (endlessly?) about choosing appliances and little home projects. But as much as I’ve been scheming, I’m trying not to be too public just yet, lest it all disappears.

So, between THAT excitement, and a big crunch at work, and a secret gift knitting project, I’ve had nothing particularly bloggable. Kevin’s been taking a game development certificate at UW for the last year (it ends tomorrow night), and had a ton of work left for his final project, and I was feeling overwhelmed with too many new concepts and half-way-along research (insulation, and slabjacking, and kitchen renovations, and energy efficient appliances, and curtains, and garage storage systems, and carpet, and utility sinks to name about a tenth of the topics I keep getting waylaid by). So, I decided to take the day and make progress on the quilt.

As you may remember, I had almost finished the near-shore land, and the lake (4 squares remain of 32), when I realized that I’d made all 28 squares of my yellow and blue sky four strips too small.

Since I’d sewn the squares together already, I not only needed to add the extra strips, but first had to rip out all of the seams holding the squares together. And since these were my first squares, and my piecing was pretty wobbly, most of them were a fair bit under 5”x5”, so I’d actually put multiple seams between squares in hopes that it would make the quilt less rippable. So, yesterday, away I went with the seam ripper:

I’d finished the blue and was really getting going with the yellow, when I realized that I’ve never liked that blue to yellow transition, nor the two half-blocks sewn together, and so I should take this as an opportunity to fix things. So, I started eight yellow squares from scratch:

And before I knew it, the daylight was almost gone (especially now that the sun is setting at 8 pm! So sad.), and I had eight full yellow squares. I spent the rest of the evening working on the 16 blue squares – even with only one round left, all of that matching and sewing and pressing eats up time. But now I’m so happy with it.

The best part is that the yellow is so much smoother now. The first version, with its half squares, didn’t allow for long vertical strips, and so the long horizontal strips got lost in the busyness.
I also have a new plan for the yellow-to-blue transition. Hopefully it will work, and I can show you in a few days. (You can see the beginnings of blue encroaching in half of the yellow squares…)