So we sold our house...

So, we are way, WAY overdue for an update. The summary is that in early August, we met with our realtor and told her we wanted to list on the MLS in mid-September but put it on Zillow with a make-me-move price a month or so beforehand. Todd published the listing to see what it looked like, got distracted and forgot to take it down. Around 3, he texted me, "um, can we chat?" Turns out, he had several emails from people who wanted to see the house that day. Three weeks before we were even going to put it on Zillow.

One of those emails was from a guy who said he and his family had been looking for a house since March and they wanted to check ours out. Again... that day. So we zoomed around and did the essential cleaning and decluttering and warned them that there were still projects we were in the process of completing. They looked at it on Friday afternoon and got us an offer on Monday. After some back and forth, we had a deal Tuesday evening at a price that allows us to make money—something we weren't sure would happen with this house.

Because our deal was contingent on their house selling, the closing date was set for November 3. We didn't have much unexpected crop up on the inspection except for having to drywall the garage so it had a firewall, and we came in a bit under for the appraisal, but it's been otherwise extremely smooth. It's also been great having a more casual, friendly relationship with the buyers. We know the house is going to a family that will love it and enjoy the park, pool, yard, etc., and that was important to us.

What I'm most excited about for this post and the other ones linked at the bottom, though, is some amazing pictures of the house before we start packing and get moved. My talented friend Rachel of Pixy Prints Photography came over on Saturday and gorgeously documented all our work and the work of my brother-in-law Trevor (without whose help, suffice it to say, we would not be in the position we are now).

Prepare to have your socks knocked clean off. (I'm throwing in some befores from early on and before we bought the house, just for fun.)

And just so you know...if you look through these other posts...yes, we keep a pretty clean house. No, our house isn't staged all the time. I totally wish it could look this amazing every day :)

Want to see the rest of the house? Check out the other rooms on the house tour tag:
Bedroom
Kitchen and entry
Jo's office
Upstairs and upstairs bathroom
Downstairs bathroom
Dining room
Living room

The house is set to close on 10/24, and we're going to move into a rental house for at least a year while we firm up plans to either build or buy something and have it fully renovated before we move in. Obviously, it's a little bittersweet to close this chapter of our lives. But we're excited to find out what life is like with no yardwork, no home repair budget and no worries about projects for the first time in eight years.

We are better and wiser for having bumbled into this renovation adventure, and I'm thankful I had no clue what I was getting us into, because I never would have done it. But now we get to leave something beautiful for the neighborhood and new owners. It's such a privilege to have brought this house back from being a blight on the neighborhood.

Landscaping and the Front Walkway!

Sheesh, been a while... but we've been tirelessly (and tired-ly) working toward the goal of having the house ready to list end of August/September. I'll save all my emotionally conflicted ramblings about this for some other time and instead catalog all the new stuff.

Anyway, off topic to start with, my brother David and SIL Kendra visited in the beginning of May for a week. By the numbers: at least 8 hours of The Office and 3 Bourne movies watched, 3 trips to Buttercloud, 2 In N Out, 2 beers and 2 desserts at Schoolhaus Brewhaus, 1 enormous breakfast at Morning Glory, 1 Bella pizza, 1 trip to Crater Lake (pretty snowy, which made us happy, though the lake is not as blue on cloudy days) and 1 exceptional bottle of Gnarlyhead ancient vine zinfandel paired with steaks.

It was a fun time. Then Memorial Day Weekend, I gardened. I haven't really stopped gardening, actually. The back 40 was tilled, weeded and landscape-fabric-ed.

 And now looks like this, with things more grown in. We need to lay just a bit more pea gravel (in the foreground) to meet the driveway on the right, and then this will be pretty much finished. This year, I'm growing:

• pumpkins
• cateloupe
• cucumbers
• tomatoes (obviously)
• dahlias
• 5 kinds of squash
• onions
• potatoes (the organic ones sprout super fast in the pantry)

I just picked my first yellow squash today and have eaten a few yellow cherry tomatoes already. 

Sorry about the funky lighting on this, but this is how the back looks now (minus canoe, which we sold and replaced with kayaks). Few rough edges still, but looks really good mostly.

Finally, I got to fill these giant pots for either side of the garage. I bought them three years ago and they've been shuffled around the garage ever since. They're 23 inches wide, for scale. I made little carts for them to wheel around on and strung up sprinklers around the garage door so they're watered automatically. Insert heart eyes here. Sprinkler drip lines and whatnot were a SERIOUS PAIN to install but I'm looking forward to sipping my beer and watching all my plants get watered.

 Not bad, huh?

We need to mulch most of the beds next to the pool still. I planted blackeyed susans of various types to fill in where it's still blank. Hopefully the bed in the background finishes filling in. It's a bit spotty still, but eventually the plants will entirely fill the whole bed.

The best flower in the garden right now is this hot pink dahlia. When the sun hits the petals, they almost glitter. 

And out front, we have two trees full of peaches and (super excitingly) my Macintosh apple finally has apples. I have been waiting for six years to enjoy fruit off that tree. Two of the peach branches broke from all the fruit and an unfortunate miscommunication about pruning this spring, but we'll still have way more than we can eat. 

And lastly, here's a before (over eight years ago, when we were just looking at the house)...

And an after, now that we have our shutters up and Todd finished the brick walkway, which turned into a much bigger project than he expected. It makes me smile every time I drive past the house because it looks so dang cute. We're going to put window boxes up under the two big windows and fill them with begonias or something. It's going to be unbelievably charming.

Oh, wait...one more. I just loved how the kitchen looked one morning a few weeks ago with a kind of crazy bouquet of flowers and the filtered light. Hard to believe it was so dreadful three years ago.

Concrete Projects and This Year's Container Gardening

I pinned a picture of a concrete bowl full of succulents years ago and then on our California trip a few weeks ago remembered it was a project I wanted to try. So I read some tutorials online, bought a bag of concrete from Home Depot and some bowls from the dollar store and went to work last weekend.

I broke my first bowl almost immediately because I didn't let it cure, but it wasn't that good to begin with. The second one, I allowed to cure in a garbage bag for almost a week. It was a major exercise in patience. I also broke a vase right away too. Turns out the molds are a lot easier to remove once the piece is dry, instead of trying (unsuccessfully) to pry it out while the whole thing is wet. The great part here is concrete is dirt cheap and easy to experiment with.

So that's what I ended up with, using the bowl in the picture below and another bowl inside of it (not pictured). The waterbottle was the inside mold of my broken vase project.

And here's my little succulent garden. I'm really, really hoping I can keep it alive, because succulents aren't exactly cheap. Also, I love how it came together and would like to enjoy it all summer.

I'm looking forward to continuing to refine my concrete skills. For the successful bowl, I removed all the rocks from the concrete using a strainer, so it was easier to mold. I'll be doing that in the future, and I'm also going to see if there's a rock-less premade mix. I'm betting there is. 

Here's part of this year's container gardens, featuring celosia, ageratum and a sweet potato vine (and my all-time favorite pot I've ever bought, the blue-willow-style one).

Lastly, I couldn't not share this sunset over my new lagoon pool. And check out our craigslisted offset umbrella! 

The Pool Is Open!

It seems fitting that on this, my 150th post for the blog, there should be a momentous announcement. And there is: THE POOL IS FINISHED!!!

Last week, there was a flurry of activity on Tuesday and Wednesday, and the finish went on. That didn't really take long at all.

Then we started filling. We didn't run the hose overnight Thursday because we didn't want to accidentally flood the pool, so it ran from Thursday morning until it was full on Saturday morning.

 Close shot of the steps and the pebbly finish.

 Full :D and freezing. We think it looks like the Wood River (a spring-fed river near Klamath), and it still kind of feels like it, too.

For reference, here is the Wood River...

Maybe not quite so green. But still... you get the idea. 

So, for your viewing pleasure, here is the progression of the pool.

 Before. Ever so slightly worse than what we started with six and a half years ago, but...barely.

 Coping stained.

 Bond coat applied.

 Pebble Tec applied.

DONE!!!

Side Driveway Entry Facelift

Last weekend I knocked another item off my list: cleaned, sanded and painted the side driveway entry railings. Despite what the image would have you believe, they actually weren't that rusty. No, my friend, someone, somewhere in the 70-year history of this house not only hatched the idea to paint these railings orange but actually acted on it. Not that many things about this house leave me befuddled anymore, but this did. Seriously, WTF. An orange wrought iron railing?

So obviously, it looked delightful. There was some rust, some orange, and mostly a lot of chalky old black. And some moss on the steps that I sprayed off with the hose.

Knowing that spray paint was absolutely the way to go for this project, I prepped the living daylights out of the side of the house and the steps. Black spray paint next to a white house is not the time to mess around.

Even so, the overspray was ridiculous. RIDICULOUS. Like, shot four or five feet ridiculous. Got all over my hands.

 

I've used this paint before and haven't had an issue, but apparently I got two dud cans because the one that made the mess was the can that actually worked. The sprayer in the other one was clogged, so I ended up using the messy one for both cans. (I pried the top off the first can and put it on the second. Sometimes spray paint acts up; it's not terribly uncommon that I end up having to swap out nozzles to get something to work.) Yay...

I'd probably use it again at some point but I'd want to test it in the store before going home with it. Not really fun to have to take a bath in mineral spirits to get the paint off your arms, hands and feet, and then have to scrub the side of the house with mineral spirits too. Five feet of overspray? Come ON. How was I supposed to prep for that?

But it did come out looking really nice. The black is crisp and because the finish has a little texture in it, it hides the unevenness where the paint partially flaked off the railing.

I'm still getting used to the shininess of it, too. It's been dull and awful for so many years. Still kind of a lot to tackle on that side of the house. Bit of white touch-up painting, paint door (white? Black? I feel like it should be something fun but I'm not sure what.), and I'd love to add a window box to brighten things up.

But there's always another project left, right? In the meantime, look, shiny! And not orange. And that's almost always a win.

Phase 2 of Pool Updates

I finished up a project earlier this week that I was expecting to be a lot more intensive than it turned out to be. About two hours of thorough scrubbing and two or three of application took the pool from this...

To this. 

Go ahead and focus just on the formerly pink coping around the edge. Wait, I conveniently have a closeup for you, in case you forgot its pink awfulness. 

A few weeks ago, I was at Home Depot browsing around the paint section and had this brainstorm: what if we stained the coping? We'd talked about redoing it, but it was going to be too expensive with the other little pool plumbing update we'd decided to do at the advice of the resurfacing company.

So I launched into researching Behr Semi-Transparent Concrete Stain.  Lot of super mixed reviews, but people mostly loved it or hated it, which told me some people did kind of a crappy job prepping or selected a surface that wasn't a good fit and thus hated the result, and some people did a good job prepping and picked a good surface and liked it.

I was pretty sure our very rough, very weathered and very porous coping was a good candidate. The "water drip" test confirmed the surface was open (the dripped water absorbed immediately). I figured that literally anything would be better than the pink, crossed my fingers it wouldn't flake off in three months leaving me with a huge mess and went for it. Here's my review of Behr's concrete stain, at least so far.

Before on the left, after application on the right in the photo below.

After some discussion, we ended up selecting Sunbaked Clay as the stain color. I tried that the day before and wasn't thrilled with the color, since it came out warmer and pinker than I was hoping. You can actually see a tiny bit of it in the image above, on the bottom right corner of the pink block. It's warmer than the end result. I took the can back and asked them to add some gray or green to dull the color and cool it off, which had very satisfactory results.

Lemme tell you, it was pretty fun very carefully working my way around the deep end hovering above that swamp. I'm glad those boards were nice wide 2x12s, which were left from the tile job.

You can see that the stain didn't absorb immediately all over. I think this is at least in part due to the inconsistent weathering of the coping blocks, the original surface of which was mostly long gone but inconsistently worn. I also opted to use a throwaway chip brush to paint instead of rolling; the roller felt like it was applying too much product and seemed like more trouble than it was worth. I had to cut around the edge of the tile grout anyway so the brush was more efficient.

But by the time it dried (left, vs. just-applied on the right) it had soaked in very well and the color dried down some. The texture was just like it was before I stained: pretty rough and not slippery or finished-feeling. I like how the texture of the material comes through. It's exactly what I was hoping for when I went with the semi-transparent over the transparent stain.

This is a spot where the stain took inconsistently. I think for some reason the old original finish of the coping was left around the crack and in those pink speckles on the right and bottom of the image below. Hardly any of the coping had that smoother texture, and given that I have no reason to believe the coping was ever replaced in the 50-some years the pool's been here, I think it just wore off years ago.

 Again, more inconsistent absorption.

 On the whole, I'm pretty happy with this. It was $25 for the gallon, which I used about half of. Even if I had to redo this annually, I would still be satisfied. We'll see how it wears for the summer, with some traffic and water and chlorine and lots of sunshine.

A lot of the reviews I read commented that it wasn't stain, it was super thin paint. My opinion is that I might call it paint if I were applying it to a less-porous surface; I can see how it would sit on top and not sink in. But given how rough my surface was and how readily it sucked in anything liquid, it sure acted like a stain to me. It's latex/acrylic, not oil, so it's different than a wood stain, but I still think it acted more stain-like than paint-like.

I'll report back again (hopefully next year at the earliest) on how it's wearing. I'm optimistic for a good summer on it, but we'll see.

Sprinklers and some fun stuff inside

Sprinklers are officially a go! Please note the 300-some feet of pipe strapped to the top of my car. The Home Depot guy was not confident about our use of ratchet straps, but those things are the greatest. 

So now our front yard looks like this. Back yard is similar. Lots of small trenches. Todd's dad (who's heading up the project) used a Ditch Witch to dice up what remains of our pathetic lawn. (Also I recently got an iPhone 5 and am working on mastering the panorama shot.)

Inside, I hung the floating terrariums I bought a couple months ago. My air plants arrived earlier this week and will be living in them, hanging in the kitchen window for now.

This one has three: it's a 6-inch diameter bubble and has a big plant and two small ones, one at 4 o'clock and one at 7-8 o'clock.

 This one just has one; it's only a 4-inch diameter.

Cool, huh?

I also (slightly intoxicatedly) did this to the powder room trashcan. The idea was devised while fully sober, but Todd pointed out that I might regret executing a drink and a half in. He was sort of right, although I could also argue it adds to the desired irregular nature of the pattern. Anyway...this bathroom is slowly getting a little more personality. (And it was really good gin from Bendistillery.)

And this variety of asparagus fern is living in the back entry. Seems happy so far. It's so fluffy!

And lastly, I painted the artichoke lamp in our bedroom a lovely glossy white from the tan-with-gold-glaze it came as. I'm still working on finishing up the plan for our bedroom. Missing art, bedside lamps and possibly a couple accessories, depending on how the lamps turn out. Something about this still seems a little disjointed to me, but I'm sure it'll come to me eventually.