What's New, Round I

So this is a motley assortment of very ugly photos, but I need to start somewhere because we've been doing SO much since we moved back about seven weeks ago. And it's dark outside now, so I can't take anything out there right now.

Sunday afternoon, I decided to tackle this mess (clarification: that's the CLOSET, not the booze):

 It's a closet in our dining room that somehow became an ideal dumping ground for paint supplies when we moved in four and a half years ago. From the ground up, that's an old rug in a trash bag, second shelf is mostly old paint and also an old towel, more paint, painting stuff (rollers, including three used (??) ones, miscellaneous crap, then the top shelf had a roasting pan, a set of dishes (boxed from when we moved from Pasadena five years ago), our wallpaper steamer and...a lot of dust.

I found three open containers of spackle: small, medium and large size. Two open and rock-hard tubes of silicon caulk. SIX paint rollers. Why?

Cleaning this closet also revealed uncapped wires in a box in the ceiling. I don't know if they're live or not, but have no reason to believe they aren't. So that's cool.

Anyway, I threw away all the stuff and got it into much better shape. Unfortunately, the following image doesn't really showcase all my work that well. You'll have to trust me; 1.5 garbage bags and half a roll of paper towels later, it's much better.

After years of driving me nuts, I finally replaced the retro 60s-era hardware on the built-ins in our hallway. Martha, ya done good (they're from her line at Home Depot). These were about $4 each, so it's not turning out to be a particularly cheap project at six in the hallway and another six in our bedroom for the built-in dresser, but it makes me happy every day to walk by non-ugly, non-retro hardware.

In the way of other updates, we had a garage sale, probably a month ago, and ditched a bunch of furniture and excess junk. And we went to the dump. Oh, the glorious dump, where you can throw away an entire full-size pickup truck load of trash for $21. I love the dump. So there's been a lot of paring down, and it has felt fantastic.

We've also done some painting, some replacing of hideous light fixtures and old outlets and some gardening. I redid my headboard (tufted, it's fab), hung curtains and plotted the kitchen remodel. The downstairs bedroom floor was refinished. The upstairs floor was refinished, too, and the bathroom is complete except for baseboard and a door covering the attic access. Todd's office upstairs is in the crosshairs for demolition and new drywall and insulation. Half the beds are mulched and the driveways got sealcoated by likely a fly-by-night operation, but that's a story for another post.

Clearly, there are a lot of overdue blog posts. But we're not going anywhere for a while, and I'm going to write them all. We're home. We finally have some traction here and stuff's getting done. It feels great.

For this deliciously summery moment...

I'd like to thank Todd for tirelessly slaving over the pool for WEEKS to make it swimmable and my parents for the non-sweating Tervis tumblers. They had the vision even at Christmas. When it was cold. Which it is definitely not right now.

And also myself for thinking of putting frozen strawberries in lemonade. That was a stroke of brilliance.

Honorable mention to the weather, which has seen fit to spike to over 100 degrees. It's not even July yet!

Good timing

Been wanting these for years. Got two of the last three to be imported for the foreseeable future, plus a small, slightly cracked one for $10!

They're about two feel wide and I think they'll live on either side of the garage door, planted with shrubs and annuals. Yay!!

Spotted in the garden...

First tomato of the year! Winner: santiam.

Storage space dream come true

Might not be the most creative or glamorous dream, but nonetheless, I give you... enclosed attic storage space!!

One more...

Love.

From the Ashes...

Well, this is shameful. I had no idea it had been a full year since I last posted, but we how have an insulated and drywalled upstairs and a 60% functional upstairs bathroom. Just missing the vanity and lights at this point, but you can brush your teeth in the bathtub (and we have) if needed. It's like being a very fancy refugee. So here's what she looks like right now...

 This is from the top of the stairs, looking down the hall to the big guest room. The black thing on the left is the queen headboard I built...I should sell that. I also have a great light fixture that I bought from some guy on the side of the road in La Pine for $10. (Curious? I bet...) That will replace the paper shade.

 Looking down the stairs...looks mostly the same, but magically the floor looks even worse than before!

 This is exciting, folks. Really, it is. It's one of several FULLY ENCLOSED attic storage spaces that the house will have. No cobwebs, no mice (hopefully), just niiiiice clean storage space.

 Ok, here's the reveal!! In my last post, I said it was going to be all white. We ended up doing a gorgeous slate floor with super-thick grout lines.

 Lots of finish work still to be done (sconces, vanity, fan), but the shower's in and functional and the space is HUGE. The vanity will go where that little table on the left is now.

 Big windows look out to the backyard, and you look up at the trees and sky from the tub. It's heavenly.

 And LOOK! No more hobbit-sized doorway! This is a standard 30 inches! The slate is a dark gray; it's just dusty from all the drywall dust that's been tracked in.

 Now, the guest room... you can see the wall on the right is where the bathroom wall extends to, so a bit into the room.

 It feels surprisingly not at all smaller, partially because we ripped out that awkward closet. That little doorway is still unfinished and leads to more enclosed attic storage space. That's a nice new window there, too.

 So that's from the other side of the room (back facing the window) and you can see how the bathroom extended into this room a few feet and ate up the other window. I was a bit unsure about that choice, but it's not horribly dark and the bathroom is so nice now; I'm pretty sure it was the right move.

 This is the attic storage space. Filled with remodeling refuse and crap right now, but will be SWEET when it's cleaned up and finished!

 And one last shot of the dark corner...

We are so happy with how things are coming along. It's going to be really exciting to see the vanity. The guy who built the one downstairs is doing another custom one for up here. It's modeled on a Kohler vanity and will be a distressed honey-oak color with a slate top. Looks like a dresser. I'll be sure to put up more pictures when that finally goes in. I love seeing the progress we're making on this house.

Upstairs Demolition

So last weekend, we ordered a dumpster, bought some respirators and gloves, donned our grubby clothes and went to town on the upstairs of the house. It was, in a word, AWESOME.
We filled a whole five-cubic-yard dumpster (plus had a smidge of room left over for our old broken grill and a busted lawn chair. We are totally less like hicks all the time!)

After learning from previous projects that what you rip out of your house and throw out a window has a way of spreading, and not everything will end up in the dumpster, I put out a tarp. And felt really smart when it rained and made the bits of old wallpaper what would have been horrible to clean up, were it not for the tarp.

Anyway, you didn't come to see pictures of us or our dumpster. You came for the before and after pix (or before and halfway...whatever. After is still a ways down the pike.) With no further ado, the guest room!
Guest room again, facing south...
Hallway/landing. Standing in guest room doorway, facing Todd's office. CHECK OUT THAT RAD CHIMNEY!!! So excited about that.

Hallway/landing facing the guest room.
I also have a video, for your viewing pleasure.



We didn't find a whole lot surprising in the attic. Pretty standard stuff: mouse droppings, old rat bait boxes, cruddy, patchy old insulation (which we're paying someone else to deal with -- luckily NOT asbestos insulation, YAY house!) and packing peanuts, which someone evidently decided would be a workable substitute for actual insulation.

Next steps include:

• getting someone to clean out the insulation
• making a plan for the bathroom (move the wall or don't move the wall in the bathroom?)
• getting the electrical inspected while all the walls are down
• properly insulating the upstairs
• finishing (drywalling) the attic space, hallway and rooms
• adding sconces and Solatubes for more light in the landing area
• replacing the windows
• executing whatever plan we formulate for the bathroom (it will be an all-white bathroom, for which I'm kind of excited)
• refinishing the gorgeous red pine floors
• possibly adding a large dormer on the back in the guest room

So, just a few things to do. But it's going to be great when it's done. Especially with that chimney.

ALSO! I never posted a picture of this when we picked them, but the apples from our "anniversary tree" orchard are SO GOOD. They are the best apples I've ever had, and I don't even really like Red Delicious that much. Having fruit trees is going to be so much fun.

Phase Two

So, it's official, our friends are moving out on the last day of October and Kate and Trevor are moving into our house!

To celebrate, we decided to bash out a wall...Ok, not exactly to celebrate. More like, to start plotting the remodel of our lovely upstairs...and its closet-sized dysfunctional charming bathroom.Wait...I didn't show you the shower. This space is less than 32"x32" -- that is super tight.Nice, huh? Anyway, no matter. It's all going away. We're still hashing out how we're going to configure the bathroom and looking at some creative options, but it's exciting to be moving forward. (I'm also pleased because this means I get to go to the Home Depot--more saving, more doing...I'm not a sucker...)

Meanwhile, outside, here are the laurels Todd's dad planted in July to fill in the gap that the now-gone dead tree left.
There are actually four total, two on each side of the tree stump. The right two just lost a lot of leaves, but they're doing fine now.

One other SWEET little discovery that we are soooo excited about...One of the things we contemplated as we're trying to plan out the bathroom remodel was moving the shower out to be even with this (apparently) useless wall. So we poked a hole in it to find out whether that was an option, and this is what we found...
This is the chimney vent from the oil furnace (removed three years ago when we moved in) and it is fabulous original-to-the-house red brick, so we're going to expose it when we redo all the drywall. That should look legitimately charming and add a lot of character (in a good way) to the upstairs. Cool, huh?

One more down, lots left

I've been meaning to post this for a few weeks, but we FINALLY got that dead cedar tree cut down! I have video, too, but my new camera takes much higher-quality videos than the old one, so it's taking a really long time to upload. I'll post it later, probably. Anyway, you may remember that we used to have this lovely tree in our hedge:
I'm referring to the one right in the middle. It looked much worse in person. It's been on our list to cut down for about two years, but we didn't know if we wanted to put up a fence or plant more shrubs, or put up a fence while we waited for the new shrubs to grow.

Then we discovered that city ordinances placed restrictions on fences near roads, so we decided to just put in new laurels. BIG ones. (This may have been done, but Todd's dad did it for us. We weren't around for that part.)

So we had a good old time borrowing Tom's chainsaw and creating a new pile of firewood.

And here's the hole it left. I didn't take a farther-away picture...maybe next time. As you can see, it left a big gap. So that's the story of the great tree-cutting-down.

I also have some very exciting news in the remodeling category: it looks like Kate and Trevor might be moving into our house in a few months, and we've arranged a work-exchange agreement, so we're going to be able to finish our house, with their help!

On that happy note, I think I might use this river rock pebble stuff in the upstairs shower pan. But I would pull out all the black/gray pieces and replace them with white. It's probably going to be an all-white bathroom. EXCITING!!!

Memorial Day Weekend Update

Just a little update from our weekend a couple weeks back...weather was sadly cruddy, but we did get out for a little while. Todd found cherries...and little peachlets on our fruit trees. I don't think the apples had anything yet, but there were actually a fair number of peaches on the peach trees. Totally excited about that! They're so adorable and fuzzy :)
I also weeded this bed in our circular driveway, which had grown a number of normal-size weeds in addition to these trees. I left the trash can and shovel in the picture for perspective. The one in the middle was taller than me. Yikes.

The rock border around this bed was where I had my first true run-in with a black widow (I picked up a rock with an un-gloved hand and the evil little spider was sitting there on the rock about five inches away from my finger. GAAAHH!!!) so I was a little wary and careful poking around in there. No spider encounters to report this time.

I forgot how high it is when you get to the top of the roof (and how steep the climb is), I decided to scurry up to inspect the chimney that used to vent the furnace. It's a bit on the crumbly side and was supposed to have been capped when we got the fireplace chimney fixed a few years ago. I HATE HATE HATE going on that roof. It's very high.

I was inspired by Todd, who went up to the garage roof to sweep it off (oak leaves and acorns and whatnot collects there)...he finished his job and is sitting around in, taking in the views.

One bigger project we're planning on getting done this summer is cutting down the dead cedar tree. You can see the lower branches just to the right of Todd in that picture above. We've been stalling because it'll leave an open space that we're going to fence, but fencing is (probably) a day's work.

We'll see about tackling that later in July or August. The tree's a magnet for landscapers, all of whom want to cut it down.