Category: house

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!

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.