Category: house

Home Again, part 2

Yesterday, we did a good job catching up after a week away, including the typical fish tank chores, grocery shopping and laundry. Kevin hung Christmas lights (on the mossy, wet roof, in the dark – I asked if he wanted my safety-concious opinion of that and he declined), I did yard work.

And we both finally, finally hung the last of the trim.

Yay! Pre-drilling the boards and then hammering in the nails by hand turned out to be much neater than using the nail gun. We’re still not sure if we should have turned the pressure down or if nail guns just don’t work well with MDF, but these nail holes were nearly invisible. And I am so, so excited about the end result – it’s so proportional and beautiful.

I did another round of caulk, to finish up the work for the day, and Kevin cooked dinner. It’s good to be home.

Another step in the right direction

Our new vanity is here!! I went to pick it up yesterday, and now it’s happily hanging out with the fish. Cherry, finish color, door style, and sturdiness are perfect.

(Please ignore the paint collection at left and the assorted fishtank buckets at right. I didn’t think to move them before taking photos or frame the shot differently. Oops. At least it’s representative of our decor.)

Here’s the inside – you can see our pretty drawers and their upgraded tracks with their awesome glide.

Any opinions on what paint color would be perfect for the walls around this?

House Progress

Yesterday was one of those success stories that you fantasize about. Both of us were sick of having had certain home renovation items on our list for OVER a year. We’d done research, we’d saved money, the holes were punched in the wall, and yet the project was still “in the planning stages”. There are actually several projects that fit this description, so with 49 minutes until the relevant stores started to close, we chose the two most dire (lights for the dining & living room, and a vanity for the main bathroom), and in a moment of wild decision-making headed north to the cabinet store. This apparently set off a chain reaction of shopping & home improvement awesomeness.

I’d been a bit hesitant about this store because the prices were so, so low. (One of those “don’t test it in case it’s not true” scenarios.) It’s a tiny minimal operation on a dead-end warehouse sort of road, which could either be awesome or horrendous. We were really impressed with the quality of the cabinets when we saw them in person, and the one we chose (it was perfect) was about ½ of our budget and about 40% of the prices of any of the other reasonable alternative options I’d found. Cherry, perfect door detailing, and nice glides on the cabinet drawers. Awesome. We were offered granite countertops with undermount sinks for $300, but the colors weren’t great so we decided to wait on that piece of things.

We tried Home Depot and Lowes for countertops – expensive and really crummy. I’m glad we checked so that we can enthusiastically cross them off the list. I know of a bunch of stone /granite places, esp south of Seattle, so we’ll try there before we jump for anything.

A break: We stopped at Pete’s Wine in Bellevue – missed the tasting but still were able to stock up on plenty of fun bottles. It was a good pause (and right next to our wedding ring store – always good for karma), and for the first time we were able to use our new, free 6-botttle bag from QFC for our purchases – a fine addition to our “green” canvas shopping bag collection. 🙂

The standard bathroom remodel seems to require matching your mirror and your cabinet. Our place didn’t do mirrors. I’m really happy about that. I don’t tend to love the standard “matching” mirror styles, and they are wildly expensive for what they are (four small pieces of wood and a mirror for $200+? Really?). I’d found a few mirrors that seemed possible at Pier 1 Imports (of all places!), and one of them turned out not only to be perfect but to be $20 off. We’ll take it! (And how amazing to have something that’s a bit more creative and fancy-free.)

At home (in my room for the moment), from 8 feet away:

The more I look at it, the more I love it. (Both photos and in person – it keeps getting happier.) The leaves are enameled, so it there’s a silhouette from afar and a great color interest close-up – it’s an interesting effect as this can be seen from our entryway/the main crossroads of the house (at 18 feet away).

From 3 feet away, with all of the color:

What’s left for the bathroom?

  • The vanity top.
  • New lights.
  • A toilet paper holder.
  • Actually installing the vanity, plumbing, etc. (My uncle/ godfather sent the most wonderful anniversary card in June that basically joked if you can paint a home without divorcing, you’re probably in it forever. That one stayed on the kitchen counter for months and months. My guess is x2 for installing your own bathroom sink without total meltdown.)
  • Paint (somewhere in the cream or yellow range) once we’re done the drywall repairs.
  • And hopefully, someone to refinish the tile and tub – goodbye to the hellacious aqua?

The goal is still to do a sub-$2000 remodel, and we’re on our way, especially with the potentially woah-expensive vanity + mirror costing less than $575 with tax. Woohoo! If we can bring a 1980s bathroom up to snuff without going over that budget I’m going to be very pleased.

More bathroom demolition

I tried to pry the wood backsplashes for the bathroom sink off the wall when Kevin was at PDC, to no avail. In addition to all of the screws, which I did remove, they were glued quite thoroughly. So when Kevin got home from work on Wednesday, he was barely in the door before I had a crowbar in his hands. Luckily he always seems up for demolition and didn’t seem to mind the non-downtime.

The glue was stronger than the surrounding wall, so we definitely have drywall replacement in our future. In some ways, it’s really not a bad thing since those two walls are so damaged already and we already have the drywall and materials sitting in the garage. Better to do it right, even if that wasn’t the original plan?

When the cat’s away, the mice further deconstruct the bathroom

Kevin’s in LA all week for PDC (Professional Developers Conference), and about five minues after he got on the airport shuttle, I was full of project plans for the house. I write to-do lists constantly, and I’ve had “repair mbr, closet, BA walls” and “paint MBR, closet, bath” on every single list for at least eight months. I’m so ready to be done with those line items. The biggest problem, of course, is that we need to sleep somewhere else for two days while the room ventilates and the paint dries. So, when Kevin left I only needed to displace one sleeper, and the renovation plan was set for the week! (I should note: Kevin totally approves of this work, it’s just that neither of us have started it yet.)

Of course, once I started with the joint compount, I found many other places to use it. The major one is the main bath, and while repairing the known wall damage is great, I was holding my breath about what we’d find under the big mirror. We were pretty lucky – four 1″ wide holes, plus the holes from the wall anchors that held up the mirror, so all well within the realm of my new-found joint compounding skills.

I unscrewed the two wood backsplashes for the vanity, but they won’t budge, so that will be a task for Kevin and his crowbar.

The thing of joint compound we had in the garage is amusing. The stuff is Barbie Pink (it dries to white – useful), and so slathering it on the walls doesn’t really feel like a legit DIY project.

I’m finding that I like joint compounding WAY more than painting – it’s fast, satisfying, and the cleanup is instantaneous. MUCH better than the priming/painting nonsense! Too bad that the whole edging/rollers stage is next in the process!!

For the next few days, the major potential blocking issues is figuring out how to move our bed (by myself??) in time for painting… hmmm?

More light!!

We’d been waiting for weeks for our permit to go through, and then early last week it finally did. On Thursday and Friday we had four trees taken out – yay! Kevin’s Dad actually did the research and found the tree company for us. I loved that – between the scam artists and the specialized lingo, it was great to just be able to trust his recommendation.

Our town limits the number of trees you can remove per year, and generally they require that you replace each healthy removed tree with a new native species. At least the permits are free. (We’ve both heard horror stories of people fined thousands for removing trees without a permit, so the free route seemed optimal.)

When we moved in, our quarter-acre property had 17 trees. Three were fruit trees that we won’t remove (especially after Kevin’s dad did such an amazing job pruning them for us), and one was a little (5″ at 4′ off the ground) hemlock that I cut down myself with the handsaw. So that leaves 14 trees – we just removed four, and will probably do another 5-6 in the next 2 or so years. Major motivations are more light, saving the roof and gutters, and saving the cars (we park in the driveway, and are perpetually fighting pitch). Here’s a very rough map of our property, with the trees we removed crossed out in blue, and the ones slated for the future crossed out in red.

This time, we removed two 65′ hemlocks from the east side of the house. At four feet off the ground, they measured 20″ and 22″ in diameter. (Both qualified as dangerous, given how much they were leaning and how close to the house they were. One of them has been a woodpecker haven all summer, and when they cut it down the center was all rotten. Whew. Good timing, us!) On the west side, we took down a 65′ fir tree that was 26″ in diameter four feet off the ground, and was about seven feet from the house. Our neighbours also told us that the top snapped off in the last windstorm and fell on the cars in our house’s driveway and the neighbours’ – explains why it looks so huge and filled out for “merely” 65′ of height. We also had the remains of the sweetgum removed. (Kevin’s dad cut down about 2/3 of the tree over Christmas – we would have let him keep going except that it was big enough to require a permit.)

Watching them take the trees down was simultaneously fascinating and terrifying. The drop zone was very small. They de-limbed the trees first, and dropped all of the big branches down with ropes.

(See the guy up there?) All of the small brush got chopped – they carted away two huge truck worths of it (I was so glad not to be stuffing it in the yard waste bins!). Once they had just the trunk left, they cut 16″ sections off and let them fall to earth. The thuds were ground-shaking, and we have some impressive divots. The rounds (live wood that’s 16″ tall by 20″+ in diameter) is impressively heavy, and it was falling far enough that by the time it hit ground it was really flying.

Before on the east side of the house:

And after:

Before on the west side of the house:

And after:

And from the front, before (photo from June):

And after:

Pictures don’t really do it, but I can’t even tell you how much more sky there is.

And we’re also delighted about all of our new space on the east side of the house (outside our bedroom window) – before it had really just been a forgotten area, but now it’s really worth cultivating. (And it finally gets enough direct sunlight to be able to support bushes and plant life.) We’re excited.

We still need to have three of the stumps ground, and have all of the wood removed. We have some friends who were excited about free firewood, so that should cut down our removal costs a bit. I’m also weighing the merits of just putting a few rounds a week in our yard waste bin. It will be about $150 to have it hauled away, so it’s just on the cusp of being worth it for the time and effort…

Bowing to Reality

I spent about five hours on Saturday pulling weeds (especially the healthy amount of blackberry and ivy starts), which means that our gardens are lovely and that I finally got a good look at our roof from the back side of our house. Wow.

Note especially the red-from-pine-needles roof, and the trees sprouting in the gutter at lower right. Hmmm. Apparently we need to run a tighter ship in September – none of this was there four weeks ago!

Between the sight of the roof, and watching our neighbour and his electric blower, I finally caved and gave my blessing to buying a needle-blowing noise-machine. I’m still not proud that we have it in our garage, but realistically, you just can’t do that many square feet of roof with a push broom (and we’re allegedly 10 years into a 30 year roof, so I’m sure that every acidic pine needle that’s blown off is a blessing). Kevin was thrilled – he knew exactly the model he wanted. We still had a $50 gift card from Sears due to the water heater fiasco last fall, and so it was free. Nice! Here he is, blowing the last few needles from the roof.

It seems to work on gutters, too, or at least the top portion of them! We’ll do a more thorough pass of them in a week or two once the tree guys come to take out the four trees. We’re taking out two on each side of the house – 3 80-100+ foot pines and one sweetgum. We’re planning to get the stumps ground on the west side of the house and ignore the eastside for now. But I’m sure the tree-removing will produce more pine needles than we’ve seen so far, so the new blower will get quite the work out. 🙂

One last question – does anyone in the Pacific Northwest have suggestions for removing moss from a roof?? The internet says a lot about vinegar (bonus points for being cheap), but I’m all ears if you have better suggestions. It’s only October and we already have a bumper crop.

Farmers Market Flowers!

Now that we have the fruits and veggies from the CSA each week, I haven’t been to the farmers’ market once this summer. On the balance, I’m fine with that, but I do miss all of the flower vendors, and I’ve been wishing for sunflowers. I spent about five hours yesterday working on caulking the trim in the family room. As I worked, I listened to all of the cheers and honking for the Breast Cancer 3 Day Walk, which headed past the top of our street. As the day got late, I decided to run up the street to pick up white thread for Kevin’s curtains and see all of the walkers (aka, do a little honking myself) – many of them get dressed up in things ranging from “outfits” to complete costumes. I actually found it quite emotional to see their progress – most of them are either survivors, or friends and family of people who have had cancer. I know several people this year with horrible, sad cancer stories, and this walk seems like such a brave and hopeful thing to go do (you can’t walk without a hitting a minimum pledge – it’s not little, and it’s a big physical and time commitment), and at the same time each walker is so small in the face of the dollars and years that are required for improvements in care, let alone a cure. You see all of the PINK, and the friends, and the brave T-shirt slogans (“I had a war in my raq.”), and it was a steady stream of women and supporting men and sons, but it still made me kind of teary to drive by. Very emotional and powerful.

On the way to the thread store, I drove by a woman with a tent selling flowers along the way, and I stopped and bought these.

They’re so extravagant, and exactly what I’ve been feeling we were lacking. The right flowers to be summery, but heading into fall colors. Perfect. 🙂

The weather has been cooperating with brilliant sunshine, so our kitchen was full of glowing flowers and bright sunlight all afternoon.

We’ve been hoping to replace the kitchen cabinets since we moved in. (We have a hole where a trash compactor used to go, and none of the current cabinets are adjustible, so they’re a terrible use of space. We still have glasses in storage. Plus there’s a mid-eighties-era microwave/oven that you can see in the photo above that would make an excellent pantry if we redid things.)

Do any of you live in Seattle or on the Eastside and have custom cabinetry recommendations? We’ll definitely scope out the Lowes/Home Depot standard options, but we’re hoping to keep the current Corian countertops and the kitchen as it is just doesn’t fit the standard grid. Any thoughts (including keywords to search for online) would be awesome.

P.S. If you know an electrician, we’re in the market for one of those, too. 🙂

And now we’re committed

We have two bathrooms – one off of the master bedroom that was beautifully renovated by the previous owners, and one off of the main hallway that serves as a main/guest bath. Here’s the view from the tub mere moments before I took a drill and removed the medicine cabinet and above-toilet cabinet.

Now we have a big hole in the wall and an unpainted patch of drywall, respectively.

Our plans are to replace the vanity with something a bit more sleek and modern, replace the mirror with something a bit more proportionate, paint the walls (after repairing a slew of holes, dents and major scrapes), put in a new medicine cabinet (Kevin bought one today that’s perfect!!), and get someone to resurface the tub. (We’d been looking to do one of those tub liners, but the more research I did, especially with the Better Business Bureau, the more leery I felt. Since the tub’s scratches are all superficial and the tile is in good shape (I just don’t like the color) resurfacing looks like a good option, and about a fifth of the price.)

We’re planning to leave the floor, toilet and trim alone. Not to jinx things, but right now, it’s looking like we’ll be able to make the changes we want for just under $2000 – not bad for a bathroom remodel.

We have ice, valves, and one orange tomato!

We had a plumber in two weeks ago to run a new line to our ice machine. The line that came with the house used a saddle valve (which is apparently tantamount to begging for a gushing leak in the crawl space AND they’re illegal in our town). The poor guy had to go down in the crawl space, dig through our new insulation and resolder our pipes in the cramped dark. Plumber rates are impressively expensive, but better him than me!

I’ve been delaying this post, for fear of sudden leaks. But, we have ice!!!

We’ve been making our own ice cubes since October. I’d sort of gotten used to the inconvenience of it, but I can’t tell you what a treat it is to have a full tray of ice. We had four ice cube trays before, and they’re all washed and away in the upper cabinet. (I’m keeping them in case I decide to make mini popsicles, or raspberry-mint ice cubes, or some other rare and unlikely delicacy. You never know.)

The other very exciting thing is that there’s now a shutoff valve for the ice maker water line under our sink!!

(It’s the bottom-right.) The plumber also told me what the three existing shutoff valves do, which is useful knowledge. I wrote it on an index card that’s now tied under the sink so I don’t even have to think if I need it. Having experienced an ice machine line failing, I am VERY happy to know how to kill the water if need be. 🙂

Yay, modern conveniences!!

In other news, we’re a few days away from our first ripe tomato!

In addition, on the last day of August, there are about 5 other green tomatoes, and around a dozen green cherry tomatoes. Wow, the weather didn’t work for tomatoes this year. (Though you can tell it’s been raining here – the grass went from semi-scorched to fluorescent green). I suppose it makes sense, since I didn’t get them in until the last week of June (the temperature wasn’t consistently above 50 at night until then). The tomatoes are Early Girl, but you wouldn’t expect fruit in less than two months anyway, and we’ve had our fair share of cool and cloudy this summer. I’m excited about that one fruit though – we’ll savour it, regardless of what the rest of the green dudes end up being.