Happy Anniversary Eleanor!

Thanksgiving weekend marks the one year anniversary in our house, which we have named Eleanor (since most of the mail that comes to our house says "Eleanor" on it). More accurately is marks when we purchased our house, since we didn't actually move in until January 1. While I often feel like the projects never end, it feels really good to look around our house and see everything that we have completed. Most homeowners tell me the work never ends, so I'm beginning to just accept all the projects that fill our weekends.

Most recently we put new windows in the front of our house and turned a window in the back of the house into a sliding glass door. Jesse and my dad took out the old window in the back and retrofitted it for the door - saving us 1/3 of the bid price! Everything went really well and I can now say our house is warmer and quieter with the new windows. Zorro is also loving the easy access to the back yard. As you can see from the photos, Zorro was a big helper with the project as well.

We also hosted our first holiday this Thanksgiving. My parents, sister, brother-in-law and their doggies all came for the holiday. I prepared my first turkey and did most of the fixings as well. It went really smoothly!

Next up for household projects are drywall fixes in kitchen, backsplash in kitchen, and deck off the new sliding glass door. Like I said: the projects never end!

Greetings!!

So we're making headway here in the kitchen. The cabinets are just about done and the appliances can go in as soon as we install the floor. We just picked it up a on Friday and the cork needs a few days to acclimate to our house before we can lay it down. We're in the home stretch here, we just need to pick up a sink and a few light fixtures and we'll be home free. I just thought I'd post so everyone can see how its coming along. Enjoy!






Oh yes, and this is our biggest distraction, our new puppy Zorro (notice the black mask over his eyes). He is just the greatest little dog in the whole world. He's a ten week old border collie corgie mix. I'm sure he will be what will dominate our posts from now on :)

What house would be complete....

Without a new puppy!


Look at this sweet little guy Becky and I are going to be taking home this weekend. We were going to wait until summer when Becky is out of school and can be home with it, but an opportunity presented itself and the timing, while not perfect, works out pretty well.

We went out to a farm near Corvallis with Becky's sister Sierra and her husband Spencer to meet the puppies. The breeder is the same breeder who Sierra and Spencer got their dog Massy from, and in fact the mother of our puppy happens to be Massy's sister, making our dog Massy's nephew. I still kind of wanted to wait until Summer when we would have more time and the house would be done, but the stars seemed to align when we realized next week is Becky's spring break and most of our remodel should be done by this Friday. When I say done, I mean that we will have a functional, if not pretty, kitchen. The cabinets and appliances should be in and hooked up, we just won't exactly have a floor or counter top. I think we can live with that after the past 4 months.


We don't have a name picked out yet so feel free to suggest away. I'll leave you with some more pictures to melt over :) cheers, and Happy St. Patty's Day!

Demolition Derby

Finally, we're back to getting work done! It has been a while since we've done anything of consequence, little things here and there, of course, but not much real progress has happened since around mid January. Well the impetus for getting a move on was that our new kitchen cabinets were delivered about two weeks early! Our garage is now piled so high with boxes you can barely get through it.

As you can see, not much room left in the garage.

This past weekend we got a move on with ripping out the existing kitchen. We hired a friend of a friend, Dave, to help us with the demo and rebuilding. Dave used build houses for Habitat for Humanity, and has remodeled much of his own home. He is an aspiring teacher who's having a hard time landing a job with the economy being in the tank and all, so we figured why should we have all the fun with this project? Let's spread the love.

So with Dave's help on Monday I demolished what was left of our kitchen. We took down about 1,000 lbs of sheet rock and plaster, knocked down some studs and opened the whole thing up.

This is what it looked like while we were ripping down the sheet rock. Yes we wore masks. Our whole house is covered in a thin film of dust.

Dave brought his trailer over so we could make a run to the dump to unload all the drywall (I wasn't kidding about the 1,000 lbs of plaster, it cost about $60 to dump it all). If you've never been to the dump, you should go; it's an interesting place to go to get perspective (unfortunately I didn't bring my camera along, but just picture piles and piles and trash). For me it brought up issues about how we use things, and how we produce things, and just how wasteful our society is.

We have this linear system which extracts materials from nature and transforms them into "disposable" commodities, and at each step of the process we emit toxins into our air and water supplies. It doesn't really make a lot of sense. I could probably write for hours on this topic, but I'll save that for another forum. If you want to explore the issue more, check out the book Cradle to Cradle by William McDonough & Michael Braungart.

In the mean time, back at the ranch walls have been removed, wiring exposed, plumbing ripped out to make way for what will be our new kitchen/dinning/living great room. We had an electrician come by yesterday to give us an estimate and some ideas. He might be starting as early as tomorrow while Dave continues to reshape the bones of our kitchen and gets started on our plumbing. The ball is rolling, we are on our way. We'll keep you all posted on the progress.

Finally Some Photos!

The good news is we found out camera cord in order to download some photos. The bad news is we still can't find anything else. Example of the week: my swimming suit. We went out of town this past weekend to a place that had a hot tub and I needed my swimming suit - no where to be found. Oh well! Hopefully all this hecticness will be worth it in the end.

Today we spent our afternoon at the Portland Home Show. I never thought I would get to the point where I spent my Sunday afternoons at the Portland Home Show. I feel about 10 years older than I should right now. Anyhow, we went looking for some ideas on kitchen counter tops, flooring and windows. We're kind of liking the look of the concrete counter tops with recycled glass mixed in the concrete. Checkout the fuez website to see what the counter tops look like. The cool thing about these is this is a local company located about 1 mile from our house. Not only are the recycled counter tops, well, recycled, but the company strives to be sustainable and green.

As for flooring, we wanted to check out some cork floors. We didn't have much luck in that area. Quite frankly, the home show was kind of lame. The benefit we got out of it was talking with a few window companies. We still have the old original single pane wood framed windows in the house with aluminum storm windows on the outside. They've been more efficient than I thought they were going to be, but we're still looking to get new windows within the next couple of years. We'll definitely replace the kitchen window when we redo the kitchen over the next couple of month here.

A few weekends ago, Jesse headed down to Ashland to visit with his family and also to pick up a washer, dryer and table saw his aunt and uncle, Mary and Dan gave us. We are very thankful for their gift, learning very quickly how much all of these things cost. So Jesse rented a truck and made the drive to bring the stuff back up here. This trip was two weeks ago and we still have yet to use the new washer and dryer, which means we haven't done laundry in a month (Jesse had to go out and buy more underwear)! It's not because we lazy or too busy, but we have a bit of an electrical problem. The dryer has a four prong plug, but our outlet only has a three prong plug. OF COURSE!!! Why should we assume this was going to be an easy task? Nothing is ever easy around here! We have the washer all hooked up and ready to go, but no dryer. We have a buddy coming over tomorrow who is going to help us in changing the outlet.


Below are a couple pictures of the bathroom with the sink in and the backsplash I tiled with my mom. The other picture is of the shower tiling. It was hard to get a photo with the limited amount of space I had, but I hope you get the idea. We are thinking of painting the bathroom purple so below are some paint choices we are mulling over. Any opinions on which you like the best?


This is a photo of our living room. I'm not sure if you remeber what it looked like before the new paint, but I encourage you to look back at the first post to see the before photos. It's amazing what a difference paint makes.

Any finally, these are photos of our current living qaurters in the basement. I HATE this little makeshift kitchen area! I cannot deal with having only one burner and no oven, but again, I keep reminding myself that it will all be worth it. We also have our "living room" in the basement right now because the kitchen remodel will be interfering with our living room space upstairs. Notice the space heater right next to the couch - it's cold in the basement!

Living in Chaos

President Elect Barack Obama called for a day of service today on the celebration of Martin Luther King's birthday. In Portland, there were so many people interested in helping, that some volunteer organizations had too many people. I performed my day of service for Eleanor. Eleanor is the name of the elderly lady who owned the house before us for 42 years. I helped Eleanor by painting the last coat of paint in the living room, installing a new light fixture in the living room (electrical work is a little scary) and doing some unpacking. I think Eleanor and President Elect Obama would approve.

I know many of you are bugging us about getting some more photos up, but to be honest, we have no idea where our computer to camera cord is in order to import our photos. That's kind of the story of our lives right now. "Becky, where's my ___________?" "I don't know - probably in some box in the basement!" Living out of boxes is making us both crazy. Now that we have the three bedrooms complete, we are going to make more of an effort to get these rooms unpacked.

We have learned and continue to be affirmed, that nothing is as easy as you think it's going to be. For example, that light fixure installation I did today. I was thinking about a 20 minute job...2 hours later the fixture was installed. I think the biggest example of this has been the pedestal sink. If I can give anyone advice when deciding on a pedestal sink or a vanity - go for the vanity. Our bathroom is relatively small so I thought a pedestal sink would free up some room. Also, the pedestal sink kind of matches our bathroom decor theme the best. We bought the sink, bought the faucet and then started doing some research on installing the sink. I googled "pedestal sink installation." Thisoldhouse.com has step by step direction. I'm thinking, "great, we'll have this done in an afternoon or so." Then I read the first paragraph of the article when my attitude quickly switched from optimistic to dreadfully pesimistic. The second sentence reads, "Pedestal sink installation is the graduate school of sink installation." Not sure if you all have picked up on this yet, but we are not graduate school ANYTHING when it comes to home remodeling. Heck, we aren't even upper elementary school yet!

After doing some more research it turns out that when you install a pedestal sink, you need to anchor and bolt the sink to a 2X4 screwed horizontally between the studs in the wall. Easiest thing way to do this is to saw out a piece of sheetrock at sink heighth, screw in 2X4, patch it up and then go about installing the sink. Weeeelll...we tiled our entire backsplash from the floor up the all about 3 1/2 feet first. Putting in a 2X4 for anchoring would mean we'd have to tear out the tiling job we just did. AWWWWWW! Why can't anything be easy! Long story short, my dad called some plumbing/contracting buddies to see if there was anyway around this. It seemed as if we could bolt the sink in using these toggle bolt things. So my dad started screwing through the tile and it turns out there was a stud there anyhow. Hooray! In the end, the sink installation ended up being a lot easier than we initially thought.

The bathroom is almost finised with the exception of faucet installation, some wall texturing, and painting. The end is in sight and that is gratifying! I finished the living room today. All we need to do now is find window coverings and furniture. Right now, the only piece of furniture we have in our living room is our refrigerator. We bought I first appliance, the fridge, right when we moved in. We found a really nice stainless steal Whirlpool Gold side-by-side refrigerator at the Sears scratch and dent center for 45% off which saved us a good bundle of cash. We have yet to find the scratch or dent.

Right now we have our kitchen and living room set up in the basement. I'll be honest with you - I hate it! I can't wait until our kitcen is finished so we can actually start living comfortablely in this house. We ordered all our cupboards and they're set to arrive in mid-February, so my goal is to have everything done by Spring Break at the end of March so I can use that time to unpack. I know that setting these kinds of goals can be dangerous, but I'm feeling like this is a realistic goal. At that point we will have owned the house for 4 months and that's about all I can handle of living out of a basement!

Once we discover the box with the camera cord, we'll post all our updated photos of the bathroom, living room, fridgerator and our basement living quarters. Stay tuned!

We've Moved!

It's official - we now live in the house we own! We had to be out of our apartment on the 31st, so we spent the last two days of the month moving and cleaning. It's amazing how much stuff you can accumulate in a year in a half. As we were packing and cleaning I came across some boxes that I hadn't even unpacked from when we we moved into the apartment. Most of it was school/teacher stuff, but still, I found it a little unsettling. Now that we are in a place which I know we won't be leaving for a long time, I can only imagine the stuff that is going to accumulate. I don't really considered myself a pack rat, but I guess you could call me a saver. For example, I have saved every ticket stub from every concert I have been to. I keep telling myself I need it for memories or I'm going to make an craft or art piece out of them, but really, they just pile up. I get this from my mom and let me tell you how I figured this out.

My parents have been incredible this past month. My dad has been a huge a help with the bathroom reconstruction and my mom and been pretty helpful with just about everything. She stayed with us for a week after Christmas - packing, painting, tiling...everything. But what I discovered is my mom is also a "Saver." I found myself putting things in the Goodwill pile and then my mom would say, "Why are you getting rid of that? Don't you want to save that?" For example, I had an old shower curtain that I think someone had given me as a gift about 10 years ago (note to anyone reading this - a shower curtain is a really weird gift). I put it in the Goodwill pile and my mom says, "Don't get rid of that. That's a brand new shower curtain. You could use it for a picnic tablecloth." So now I have an old shower curtain that I know is going to sit in our basement for the next 10 years and will never get used for a picnic tablecloth.

I have a feeling that once we are done with all of our remodeling the childhood boxes will start arriving. My parents saved a lot of my special toys from childhood, like my Carebears action figures and cloud car or my my buckets of Lincoln Logs (the old school ones made out of actual wood, not the plastic ones they make now). Once we get to a stable location (as in a have a mortgage payment), my mom unloads these childhood boxes on us. For example, when my sister moved into her last house my mom brought most of my sisters childhood toys to her house. This happened to be right around Christmas time so my mom unpacked these boxes and set up these toys under my sister's Christmas tree. Kind of funny because she received most of these toys for Christmas about 20 years prior.

The thing is, Jesse is what I like to call a minimalist. He doesn't seem the need to keep around much and in a way, I really admire this. When we first moved in together, I was amazed at what few belongings he had. I think he took a carload to be moved (with the exception of his bed). On the other hand, I took a Uhaul truck to be moved. Granted, I supplied all the furniture and kitchen supplies, but still, it's the saver in me. What can I say, I was raised this way.

Anyhow, while we are offcially moved into our place, we are far from being settled in. The bedrooms are done and liveable, but that's about it. We are finishing up the bathroom this weekend. The toilet is in an working (thank goodness), and we plan on installing the sink tomorrow. We finished tiling the shower walls today and will grout tomorrow. It's starting to look like an actual bathroom and I must say, it's turning out really well. We set up a faux kitchen in the basement to serve us for the time being. Now that I've become a little more realistic with our time tables, I expect we'll finish the kitchen in February or March. Eveything takes about four times longer than we initially expected. And for everyone this applies to - we know, you told us so.

Happy New Year Everyone!