Ancestral Pile

choosing tile

2011-03-29T14:44:00.004-04:00

We're in the process of choosing tile for the master bath. We thought we knew what we wanted, but then realized that we were a little overambitious. The thing with choosing finishes is that, assuming you know you will eventually sell the house, you have to make sure that the things you pick are 'sellable'. While yes, this does mean that you probably shouldn't go with the lime green permanent tile or the bright blue carpet in the bathroom (our first house had this - bizarre), what a lot of people don't realize is that you should also think about your neighborhood.

Specifically, you should make sure that you don't overimprove your house for the area it's in, particularly if you want to recoup your costs. In some cases, it's fine to go big, especially if you know you're going to stay in the house for a while and will enjoy it - get the french door fridge, spring for the soaking tub. But for certain things, you have to think about the 'comps' - the nearby houses that will affect your eventual selling price.

Comps are a huge factor in house pricing - it's unfair, but that's the way it is. So if there isn't a single house in your neighborhood priced above $200K, good luck selling yours for $400K - it's not going to happen, no matter what luxuries you've stocked it with. It's just not that kind of neighborhood.

If our house were located about twenty minutes south, in Columbia or Ellicott City, it would be worth at least twice what it's worth here, and I'd have no compunctions about putting in luxe finishes and getting my money back. But it isn't. It's in a quiet neighborhood of old houses, most of which either haven't been updated or have been updated only to 'rental grade'. Our crowning glory is our huge property sizes and commuter-friendly location around here - not marble bathrooms.

So the travertine we wanted is out, and we're going with porcelain instead. It's exponentially cheaper, but we've found several options that mimic the look of stone without being tacky. And we're springing for one upgrade - we're putting river rock down as the floor of the walk-in shower. Just a few square feet isn't a huge splurge, it's an elegant touch, and it comes in neutral colors that won't alarm buyers. Now we just have to make a final decision on the tile that will go with it, and call our tiler!

paint swatches

2011-03-24T14:46:00.004-04:00

Now that the tile is up in the guest bathroom, I'm a little dubious about the color we had picked out - we picked it before we picked the tile and now I'm not sure it isn't a little too purple. So I picked up a bunch of paint swatches at Home Depot yesterday and we'll re-pick a color this weekend.

new table

2011-03-23T09:29:00.005-04:00

Our new dining room table is finally here! It was delivered this morning and it is awesome. We finally have a table big enough to look like it belongs in our huge dining room! We decided to put one of the leaves in for 'everyday' use - given that we have at least eight people over nearly every weekend, it seems practical and fills the room nicely. There's still another leaf, too, so it can get even bigger. Be still, my heart.

The top is hand-scraped wood, and has been roughed up artistically so that nobody will notice when we mess it up (a very necessary feature of furniture around here, let me tell you). By far the coolest part, though, is that the entire table is ringed by a sturdy steel band - it looks very solid and practical and industrial while still being beautiful. We love it!

Now on to arguing about chairs and getting rid of our old dining room furniture...

Note: the table is from local furniture institution Shofers, and I'm happy to recommend them - super smooth, from showroom to delivery. And they're on Twitter!

two days

2011-03-14T16:15:00.004-04:00

Saturday morning:

Sunday night:

true romance

2011-03-07T18:15:00.003-05:00

While I was selling jewelry at a convention the weekend after Valentine's Day, Don twittered that he had arranged a 'present' for me that would 'take a while' to get here. I was mystified as to what it was until a few days later he finally came clean: he had arranged to get the guest bathroom tiled!

I feel like I'm on HGTV, being surprised by my husband with work getting done on the house! The tiler is coming this weekend (he was supposed to be here last weekend, but had to cancel - let's not mention The Curse). Tile is, as you can see, ready and waiting for him. I'm so excited!

new furniture and not much else

2011-02-17T13:52:00.005-05:00

We have wasted our hiatus, I'm afraid. The bathrooms aren't done, the window trim is stalled, the house is messy. Nothing doing. We enjoyed ourselves, though. The holidays were, as always, wonderful. We've been enjoying some hobbies - we are developing some games, I've been working on jewelry, and Don is into charcuterie these days (we made our own bratwurst a couple of weeks ago!). Plus, we're both working, and Don is again taking three graduate classes this semester so that he will get his Masters degree sooner. So it's not like life isn't full. But no, there has been no significant house improvement in the two months (!) since I last showed my internet face here.

We did buy some new furniture, though! Our new dining room table is being built and won't be here for another month or two, but we finally found something to go in the window nook of the living room - it was delivered this morning.

It's a long, low media unit that is sturdy enough to sit on (yes, we tested it in the store). So it will provide both seating and storage in the living room. Eventually, we're thinking about doing some fancy audio-visual wiring and moving all of our components into this unit, invisibly routed to the wall-mounted TV. But that's a ways off.

You may also notice our new(ish) rug, which I don't think I posted about here. It's lovely and soft and was a great deal even though all I intended to buy that day was a new ladle. This is why it is never a good idea to take Don shopping.

hiatus

2010-11-12T09:27:00.004-05:00

As you may have guessed, nothing much is happening around here, house-wise. Don is in the final throes of a semester of taking three graduate courses at once (he's nuts), which leaves little time for renovation when combined with his recent promotion to team lead at work.

We had hoped to get the banister finished by Thanksgiving - it is, in fact, dismantled and parts strewn all over the guest room. But it is clearly not to be. Happily, we realized that since we hung the office doors, we finally have a space for overnight guests. And just in time, too. Both of my parents will be visiting (separately) around Thanksgiving, and finally they'll be able to stay with us, which makes a visit much more, shall we say, economically feasible. We'll set up the trusty aerobed in the office, shut the doors, and show them where the towels are kept.

In the meantime, we're taking a bit of a hiatus from working on the house. The pressure to have things done before the holidays has been lifted, giving us a chance to actually enjoy the holidays - we're finally going to have a Christmas tree this year! We're going to relax, enjoy our friends and family (and maybe the new Warcraft expansion) and pick back up in 2011. Don will be taking three classes again - ouch - but we have some relatively practical plans and we think we'll be able to get the last few glaring omissions in the house finished (bathrooms, anyone?).

So, you won't see me much in this space until January. I hope all of my readers have a great holiday season, and please - take some time out to enjoy your home!

worldly goods

2010-09-13T07:47:00.000-04:00

I finally brought the rest of my books back from Washington. For the first time in ten years, all my books are in the same place! Looking forward to shelving the last of them as soon as the office is put back together from window trim work.

pocket doors redux

2010-09-10T08:32:00.001-04:00

We've been working on these doors for months. They still aren't done. But, in a fit of realism, we decided that we needed to shift our priorities a bit. Finishing the antique doors we're retrofitting into pocket doors from the dining room into the office isn't the most urgent thing on our plate. Right now it's far more important that we get the stairwell banister refinished and rehung, so that the people who come to our house are safe and so that we can have overnight guests. So we elected to get the doors out of our work space (i.e. the guest room) and store them out of the way until we can get back to them to finally sand and paint them.

And where better to store them than in the 'pockets' they are intended for?

Yes, we hung the doors! Aren't they fantastic? They're really old, and really heavy, but we got hardware rated for doors even heavier, so it all works incredibly smoothly. Just imagine that the glass is clean and they're painted white!

personal triumph

2010-09-08T08:28:00.001-04:00

I've stopped biting my fingernails. It's kind of a big deal. I've been biting them pretty much my entire life, to the degree that the nail tip was generally over half an inch below the tip of my finger. Now they look like this.

finishing touches

2010-09-06T08:12:00.001-04:00

Little bits and pieces of the house are starting to really look finished, like normal people live here who don't rip down walls and have dumpsters in the driveway for months on end.

Don's parents have been breathlessly awaiting the chance to give us The Plant, which has been residing in their dining room for several years. The Plant originally belonged to Don's older brother, who is in the Navy and away from home for long periods of time. After one such stint, he came home to see that The Plant had gotten rather dusty. Being a logical sort of fellow, he did what he did with most things that got dusty in his home: he vacuumed it. It didn't work out so well. Eventually he asked my mother-in-law if she could resuscitate it, and the somewhat worse for wear plant relocated to my in-laws' house.

When Don and I moved in together, into a small apartment with a friend of ours, we took The Plant. Don liked it, it seemed decorative and homey, and it looked lovely in our living room. Then we got a cat. The cat was convinced that The Plant was eminently scratchable, and we came home eventually to discover that a large percentage of its leaves had been turned into fringe. The cat stayed - even though she also ate a bamboo plant down to the roots and had many other misadventures, some chronicled right here in this blog - and The Plant went back to my mother-in-law, to nurse its wounds. In the seven years since, the cat has become a little more sedate (not much), but more importantly, The Plant has grown at least a foot, putting even its bottom leaves out of reach of certain members of this household. So it has finally moved to its new home:

Welcome home, Plant. Thanks for making our house feel a little more finished.

new furniture

2010-09-03T08:00:00.002-04:00

It's very strange to not feel guilty about walking into a furniture store or art gallery, knowing that there's no way you can buy anything because you haven't got any place to put it. We're still getting used to not walking straight past places full of beautiful things, somehow unable to shake the feeling that this whole 'finished house' thing is just temporary, and soon enough we'll be back to no walls, no floors, and certainly no furniture.

Our most recent purchase is a set of living room accessory tables. We ordered the Madison set from Costco.com (whose customer service, by the way, is excellent - I like the website as much as I like the warehouse store). They are assembled and in place - the sofa table and one end table in the appropriate places by the couch in the living room, and the other end table put to use as a phone-holding station tucked into a corner of the office. I'm very happy with them.

Worth noting: the dish on the table is a piece by Charlton Glassworks in Washington, fused glass with a copper penguin inside. It was a gift to us years ago when you could only find Charlton's work at shows and galleries in Washington State - these days you can find it all over the country!

a new hobby

2010-09-01T07:55:00.001-04:00

Don has picked up an awesome new hobby - he is turning into a serious breakfast chef.

Every weekend morning lately I've been treated to something delicious. Pictured above is a tomato and goat cheese omelet (with herbs from our overgrown garden). Since then he's moved on to more complex things - this most recent weekend I got crepes with fresh strawberries and nutella.

This is his best hobby yet.

welcome home indeed

2010-08-30T12:47:00.004-04:00

I went out to Washington for a week, to help my mom out while she had eye surgery. I thought that while I was gone, Don would eat fast food, go to baseball games, and play Starcraft 2 (PS: Starcraft LAN party, our house, later this year. It's happening!).

Instead, I came home to a total surprise: he had spent the entire week working on window trim, even going so far as to get his dad to come over on the weekend and help him. The result: every single downstairs window has trim!

As it turns out, it's really hard to get pictures of window trim in daylight. At some point I'll remember to get out the camera at night and take some pictures.

As of this writing, the two windows in the living room are completely finished except for a second coat of paint. The dining room bay window needs a final sanding and its two coats of paint, and the window in the office is missing one piece of trim, then needs to be puttied, sanded, and painted.

We are well on our way to the next step, which is getting blinds - something anybody who has sat at our dining room table at four in the afternoon will deeply, deeply appreciate.

window trim

2010-07-30T08:49:00.002-04:00

Only one window has trim. But it's pretty! And I have high hopes that the rest of the windows might get trim, like, by the end of the summer maybe! Cross your fingers.

last of the appliances

2010-07-28T08:41:00.002-04:00

Our dishwasher finally lingered its last a couple of weeks ago. It was the last appliance left in the kitchen from when we moved in - the last appliance to die. We have been replacing appliances as they die with the high end appliances that will eventually look snazzy in our new, updated kitchen. Right now, surrounded by ancient cabinets and filthy linoleum, the sparkling stainless steel looks a little out of place.

But appliances are one of the huge, huge costs of renovating a kitchen, and by replacing them ahead of time as they've died, at the approximate rate of one a year, we've managed to spread out that cost so that it won't actually impact the payment we'll have to make when we finally get around to renovating the kitchen. They'll get used in the old kitchen for now, and when the kitchen is gutted and replaced they'll be moved into their new places of honor, and we'll be spared an even bigger bill.

The new dishwasher is a delight. We elected to go high-end but not super-super high-end -- we decided we didn't want to pay hundreds of dollars more just so that the buttons would be hidden, for instance. It's the same philosophy we went with on the other appliances, so everything matches nicely. And best of all, I only have to wash things once now, because it actually works, and we can have a conversation while it's running and actually hear each other, which is a new and different thing.

As for the rest of the kitchen, we're tentatively planning on next year, but as usual it depends on finances. If anybody has a large chunk of money they want to give us, I'll totally cook you dinner in the new kitchen.

the garden has gotten a little out of hand

2010-07-26T08:39:00.001-04:00

This cucumber weighs three and a quarter pounds.

caught!

2010-07-23T14:33:00.002-04:00

Sorry I haven't posted. We're in the dead of summer here - literally, as fifteen people have died this summer of heat-related causes in Baltimore - and it's hard to do anything but sit around appreciating the air conditioning. What little energy I have goes to work, as we are swamped and understaffed. Scheduling issues have meant that not a lot has gotten done on the house, anyway. But frankly, as long as the air conditioning keeps working, I don't really care.

for the nerds

2010-07-02T08:00:00.001-04:00

Remember the big pile of dirt left in the driveway from filling the garden? The other day, Don announced that he'd finally figured out what to do with it:

doors, continued

2010-06-30T08:25:00.000-04:00

The door refinishing operations have been moved from under a tent in the backyard into the now-painted guest room, as the weather here in Baltimore has been horrifically humid for the last week or two - not the best conditions to leave untreated wood out in.

Once we scraped off all of the paint stripper and let everything dry out for a day or two, we borrowed a couple of power sanders from my father-in-law and Don went to work on the doors. At this writing, he has finished the first sanding, with 80-grit sandpaper, on the wide areas of the doors. The beveled edges of the inside molding are going to have to be done by hand - I think the best we can hope for is to take the top layer of varnish off and rough them up enough that primer and paint will stick well.

I think when we're done these doors will be beautiful, but they are a lot more work than I anticipated! I shudder to think that we still have to strip and refinish the stairway banister, as well as the (fortunately plainer) doors for all of the upstairs rooms.

meet the project killer

2010-06-28T09:22:00.000-04:00

Hard to work on the house when you could be playing with this thing, let me tell you.

father's day brunch

2010-06-25T12:17:00.002-04:00

Last weekend we hosted a Father's Day brunch for Don's family (my dad, alas, lives in Seattle, which is a little far to travel for brunch). We had eight people total, adults and children, which was down some from the numbers we hosted on Mother's Day, which required an additional table to be set out.

All this entertaining is really emphasizing our need for more permanent dining room furniture. (The need to remodel the kitchen is already a given!)

refinishing

2010-06-23T08:57:00.000-04:00

One of the 'small' projects I'm really excited about is finally refinishing all of our doors. When we gutted the house, we saved all of the original doors and put them in storage (okay, our garage) until we were ready to start finishing the house. When we cleared out the attic, we were excited to find two more doors up there, that Don's dad told us had been original to the house but removed during one of the family's extensive renovations. They were french doors, solid wood with squares of beveled glass inset. They were painted a hideous shade of teal, but seemed to be in good condition.

The discovery of these doors actually changed our structural plan mid-construction. We had originally planned for the transition from the dining room to the office to simply be a large opening, like the one that goes from dining room to living room. When we found the doors, though, we decided instead to install them as pocket doors dividing the dining room from the office. A header and doorframe had to be built where there had been nothing before. Fortunately nobody grumbled too much.

So now here we are, with a mostly finished house, and it's finally door time! We decided to start with the office doors, both because they're the most complicated and because we'd like to get the main level finished as fast as we can, since it's more 'public' space.

We set up a tent in the backyard, got some sawhorses, and got to work.

The citrus-based nontoxic stripper we used worked wonders! Hardly a hint of the teal remains - or the other three shades we discovered under it. Next up we'll sand the doors down with increasingly fine grits of sandpaper (80, 100, and finally 120) and then prime and paint them to match the rest of the trim in the house. They'll also have to get squared up and have pocket door hardware installed - but after all that effort they are going to look amazing!

gardening

2010-06-21T08:48:00.001-04:00

Lots of little projects going on around here - to the point, in fact, where we decided we needed to take a step back and do things one at a time instead of flailing around trying to get them all done.

In the meantime, here's a picture of the raised bed Don built me earlier this year. I'm not a very good gardener without some technological help - I am just awful at remembering to water. So we've put in a soaker hose, and it's working really well - this picture was taken about a week and a half ago and everything is a LOT bigger now. Er, except for the cherry tomato plant, which is mostly dead. I'm clearly better at growing herbs than actual vegetables.

In case you're curious, what I've got in this bed is:

-cilantro
-dill
-flat-leaf parsley
-basil
-thyme
-oregano
-rosemary
-three kinds of bell pepper
-two kinds of cucumber
-two kinds of tomato

The bed itself is about five feet by eight feet, and it's constructed of pressure-treated 2x12s, which are offset top and bottom and bolted into upright 2x4s in the corners. We dug out the edges of the ground in the spot we planned to place it in so that it would be level. Once we put the frame in place we did a little more digging and filling to get it as level as we could, then lined it with landscape cloth. We had some high-quality fill dirt delivered (too much, in fact, which is why there is still a pile of dirt in my driveway...) and lo! garden.

because you need to know about her sleeping habits

2010-06-01T08:15:00.003-04:00

The cat has finally deigned to sleep in the cat bed I bought her. After she ignored it for months, it had been tossed in a corner of an empty bedroom currently used as storage. Once I discovered she was actually sleeping in it, I moved it into our bedroom. She's very smug about it.

it's balticon weekend

2010-05-27T13:04:00.002-04:00

This weekend I'll be selling Anapurna jewelry in the dealers' room at Balticon. If you're local, stop by! Balticon is geeky bliss.

why they make warranties

2010-05-26T09:39:00.000-04:00

The window in our master bedroom is cracked. It appears to be some kind of stress fracture, probably from the house settling.

It's being replaced next week, no issues, no charges. A man from the window manufacturing company came out to measure the opening, and a new piece of glass was ordered and is ready to be installed. Always, always get a warranty.

conversation

2010-05-25T08:56:00.000-04:00

Putting primer up on the walls of the guest room this weekend:

Him, muttering as he rolls: "1... 3... 5... 7..."

Me, baffled: "What are you doing?"

Him, as if it should be obvious: "Priming!"

Nerd.

a little break

2010-05-24T08:20:00.003-04:00

We went to the beach for Don's birthday, a little mini-getaway that we both needed. I found a great hotel deal in Ocean City, and we lucked into amazing weather all weekend. We came back tanned and refreshed (the cat was delighted to see us), and we're looking forward to trying to fit in a few more weekend getaways this summer on the few weekends we're not working on the house.

The above photo was the view from our room on the first day, complete with surfers.

more projects

2010-05-21T08:05:00.000-04:00

We keep saying to each other, "Look! We just have normal homeowner projects to do now!"

And it's mostly true. We walk into Home Depot like regular people now, buy the materials for one small project, go home and do it. It's still weird. That said, our house is far from done. We've been so busy enjoying the finished feeling of the downstairs that it's been easy to ignore that the upstairs doesn't really look like Joe and Suzy Homeowners' house yet.

That's our guest bathroom. It's full of stuff. People keep mistaking it for a storage closet.

I really, really want to get the upstairs bathrooms done - or even just one of them - before the end of the summer. In order to do that, we've got to get the stuff out of the guest bath. Which means we need to complete the projects that the stuff is there for - i.e., get the three upstairs bedrooms primed and painted. Once that's done, the painting stuff will get put away - at least for a while - and we can clear out our "storage closet" and start tiling.

This would be a lot easier if I didn't hate painting. And tiling.

how to make me happy

2010-05-20T13:46:00.000-04:00

I would much rather be given bookshelves than jewelry. We've been planning to make one whole wall of our office into a giant wall of bookshelves for a long time, and I'm incredibly excited that we've finally gotten started. Originally, we had planned for floor-to-ceiling built-in bookshelves. We had hoped that Don and his dad could build them together. But we soon realized that if we waited for that to happen, our books would stay in boxes for a long, long time - and when I said we should move in to our house and start living in it, I definitely intended including the books. So we looked at other options. There are a couple of companies that custom build home libraries and bookshelf walls, but they are crazy expensive. So we downgraded our plan; we would get off-the-shelf (ha!) shelves, and just line the wall with them.

We discovered that IKEA's 'Billy' bookshelf system was the perfect solution. The system offers shelves in two widths, and has corner adapters to make the shelves fit into corners and continue along the wall. The shelves are seven feet tall, but they also sell extenders to make them taller. The system also has cute accessories, including various doors, lights, and even a ladder.

We bought our shelving system in two batches, to spread out the cost between paychecks (it wound up being about $650 total, if you're curious). The first batch was bought and assembled shortly after we moved in, and I gleefully unpacked all of our books, games, and little tchotchkes. Half is decidedly not enough - as you can see in the picture below, the books are stacked haphazardly wherever I could find room once I ran out of shelves. And there are still more books at my mom's house that belong here.

Fortunately, the second batch has been bought, and is awaiting assembly. Once all of the shelves have been assembled (the boxes below include a second corner set, another wide shelf to go along the main wall, and extender shelves for everything), Don's going to bolt the whole thing to the wall and to each other so that it's really secure and effectively built in.

And then I'll finally get to organize my books. I'm torn between organizing by genre, by fiction vs. non-fiction, or simply alphabetically. It's a good problem to have.

living room detail

2010-05-19T12:51:00.000-04:00

The throw blanket on the couch was a wedding gift. It's beautiful. We were almost as excited to get it out of storage as we were the couch itself.

childhood memories, and making more of them

2010-05-17T11:43:00.000-04:00

A couple of weeks ago, we finally got what Don has been waiting for: a piano.

Specifically, the piano of his childhood. It's been sitting in his parents' dining room, unused except for whenever one of the grandchildren comes over and plunks around on it noisily. We knew from the start that when we finished the house it would come to live with us - and his parents were eager to have more space in their dining room.

Don and his dad made one futile effort to move it themselves - it didn't work. At all. So we hired piano movers, and for a very reasonable price they hup-hup-hup'd it out of Don's parents' house and into their truck, drove it ten blocks over and brought it right in our front door and over to its new home tucked next to the stairs.

Don says he'll have learned how to play it by Christmas. He has visions of himself playing while we all sing carols. I have a deep suspicion that in his vision, he's wearing a sweater. With red knitted reindeer on it.

it's don's birthday today

2010-05-14T08:39:00.000-04:00

I'm getting him golf lessons.

pride and joy

2010-05-13T12:22:00.000-04:00

We spend virtually all of our time in the living room now. It's amazingly comfortable. That couch? My new best friend. It was worth every second of the rain-soaked nighttime frenzy that was moving it (for which my father-in-law is officially a hero - not that he wasn't before).

The couch was a miraculous buy at Costco. I'd fallen in love with a couch from Restoration Hardware that cost five thousand dollars. Don never had any intention of letting me buy it, sensible man. But one day at Costco (where I do a lot of my shopping - did you know you can get a pound of goat cheese there for five dollars?), I happened upon a couch that was nearly an exact duplicate of the one I loved. And it cost $700. I snapped a picture of it on my phone and sent it to Don, with many exclamation points. There were only three left. We bought it that day, and it sat in my (very generous) in-laws' basement for months and months, as our house was still gutted at the time.

It emerged unscathed from its tenure as a basement dweller, and now we love it. The cat likes the ottoman - otherwise known as Kitty Sofa Adventure Island.

The image above is the living room from the front door. You can see Don's pride and joy, our gigantic new TV. The only reason it looks a little small in the picture is because the room - and the couch - is huge. It's 55 inches. The room is actually so big that we elected to install two ceiling fans, which have already been put to very good use in the warm spells we've been having. The couch seats seven or eight people, which means that when it's just the two of us we can comfortably stretch out and enjoy the gentle breeze from the fans as we watch Mythbusters in high definition.

Just like in the dining room, we still need a few pieces of furniture and decor - a new sofa table, a storage bench at the far end of the room, picture frames and art for the empty walls - not to mention some sort of window treatment. But it's an awesome place to relax, and we're really happy with it so far.

dining room detail

2010-05-12T10:18:00.001-04:00

I don't think I can possibly relate in coherent words the amount of marital discord caused by choosing a chandelier for the dining room.

PS - all of the arguing was totally Don's fault. And I still wish there were a few crystals.

dining room

2010-05-11T09:06:00.001-04:00

The plan for this summer is to try to finish off the house one room at a time, one weekend at a time. We'll start our downstairs projects in the dining room: it needs crown molding, window trim, and the pocket doors into the office to be installed (this involves stripping and refinishing the cool old doors we found in the attic, which are what will be hung as pocket doors).

We also really need a new dining room table and chairs. Right now we've got our old table from our first house, which was a tiny townhouse. We've got both of its extender leaves in it and it's still dwarfed by the size of the room. The folding chairs don't help, either.

But at least it's a table - shown here with the pink and white Mother's Day flowers from brunch on it. The huge bay window, even without trim and finishing, is just as nice as I imagined it would be when they were installing it. We've had several family events as well as our gaming group in the new dining room, and it's great. Dinner parties to come! (Also, curtains.)

let's pretend i was here all along

2010-05-10T11:50:00.004-04:00

Oh, hello, dwindling blog readership. Is that you? I've been gone so long I hardly remember what you look like. Here's the thing. Lately, instead of working on our house, we have been living in it. It is AWESOME.

When last I wrote (in, uh, March, sorry about that), the floors were being finished up. After the flooring people cleaned up and left, we sat down and tried to make a cohesive plan to get the rest of the smaller tasks done so that we could finally move in. Things like crown molding, window trim, replacing the front door, etc. We just couldn't figure out a way to do it quickly while Don's graduate school classes were still in session. Turns out grad school is a lot of work, who knew? At the thought of waiting until his classes were over (last week, actually) to sit on my beloved still-in-storage couch, I may or may not have thrown a tantrum. Once I allegedly calmed down, we realized that there was, in fact, another solution: throw up our hands and just give up!

Okay, not really. What we decided to do was to move in with the house as it was - finished floors and walls, no window trim, no crown molding, unpainted upstairs, unfinished upstairs bathrooms, front door still unreplaced. We elected to just stop working on the house for the rest of the semester, to just move in and enjoy having a house that looked mostly finished even if we knew it really wasn't. We would pick back up as soon as classes were over, and hope to get the rest of the finishing stuff done this summer so that we could focus on the next big project we'd like to start (which involves filling the nursery upstairs). This way, we can finally actually live like normal people in this lovely house we happen to own.

So. We've been doing just that - living. And in the process, the house got really messy, because we are huge slobs, and then I was too embarrassed about the mess to take pictures of it for you all but also far too lazy to do more than cursory cleaning. We're, uh, looking into a cleaning service.

But! We cleaned the house up this weekend in order to host a Mother's Day brunch (a raring success, incidentally), and I took the opportunity while it was still clean this morning to snap a bunch of pictures. So I'm writing up a bunch of posts so you can see the house as it now is, and what there still is left to do. Don's classes are over, and we've got big plans.

almost there

2010-03-09T08:44:00.003-05:00

The baseboards are fixed. They look lovely. In addition to fixing the baseboards that needed fixing and installing the ones they hadn't gotten to yet, yesterday the flooring people installed the flooring and baseboards in the master bedroom. It is very, very strange to wake up and swing my feet over to a real floor.

We're moving our office tonight, and they're coming back tomorrow to do the very last bits - the guest room and finishing off the stairs. And they're going to clear up some of the dust, which is why I'm going to wait to take a picture until then, so you can all see the floors in a relatively clean state. Much prettier that way.

The need to replace the front door has moved to the top of our list of priorities, as the old one is set very low - so low, in fact, that right now we can't use it, as it would scrape the new floor. It's also practically falling apart, so we knew we needed to replace it anyway. But the giant piece of cardboard protecting the floor in front of it is pretty unsightly, and we need to be able to use it at least once in a while even if we do normally use the back, so we're bumping it up to the top of the to-do list. Don has to write a paper for one of his graduate school classes this weekend, but I'm hoping that next weekend he and his dad might be able to replace the door. We went to the store last night and picked out a lovely door, so the decision-making part is done.

Other things to do as soon as we can: window trim and crown molding. More on those later, I think.

one step forward...

2010-03-08T11:36:00.004-05:00

I don't have any pictures today. Hopefully I will a little later in the week, but I was too busy to take any this weekend. We suffered a little bit of a setback on Friday, when we came home from dinner to discover that the baseboards had been installed in a hurry and had some pretty major issues - issues enough, in fact, to prevent us from moving our office downstairs as planned.

Essentially, the drywall in the office didn't go all the way to the floor. The drywallers assured us that it wouldn't be a problem, as the gap would be covered by the baseboards. While this is in theory true, the problem is that since there wasn't any drywall there, there wasn't anything to support the bottom half of the baseboard, and when the installers tried to nail them up, they wound up slanting inward at the bottom and looking all kinds of messed up. That was the major issue - there were a few other trouble spots that I think came from the installers doing the baseboards last, late in the evening and kind of in a hurry to finish.

So we called the flooring guy, who promised that a) he'd come out today and inspect and b) they would fix everything. He's not here yet, but his crew is, and they're already taking off the slanty baseboards in order to put some support behind them. They're also working on the master bedroom - they're perfectly willing to move the furniture in there around while they work, so we don't even have to move it ourselves. We do still have to move the office ourselves - they don't want the responsibility of moving our computers and all of the jewelry supplies - but it's a relief not to have to move the bedroom back and forth.

We plan on moving the office on Tuesday night (Don has class tonight until late, alas) and hopefully we'll still be completely done with the floors and baseboards this week. And I have to say - the baseboards might have been a minor issue, but the floors themselves look amazing. We were able to have our gaming group over on Sunday! It's an auspicious start.

straight from the cameraphone

2010-03-06T14:20:00.002-05:00

New stairs. (Cat installation priced separately.)

color choices

2010-03-05T15:51:00.000-05:00

We went to Home Depot last weekend to pick up a few things and also get paint swatches to choose colors for the upstairs rooms. I told Don that it felt very strange to be looking at paint colors "for real" - rather than me just dragging him to go poke at them, when he isn't even close to ready to think about them yet because paint is such a long way off. He laughed at me and reminded me that we'd already chosen - and painted! - the downstairs colors, so I should be over it. I'm not.

Even more surreal - and this one is from both of us - is going to Home Depot and not having to park near the contractor entrance, or get a gigantic cart. We're not used to just walking in the doors like normal people yet.

Here's the color palette upstairs, minus the color on the landing (which is the same light brown/beige as in the living and dining rooms):

From left to right: Yellow for the middle bedroom, hopefully to be a nursery very soon; a warm gray with hints of plum for the guest bathroom; a purple-plum color called "Gypsy Magic" for the guest room; a deep greenish blue called "Nature Retreat" for the master bedroom, and a lighter shade from the same swatch for the master bath.

I hope they all look good on the walls!

naming names

2010-03-04T13:37:00.000-05:00

I was going to write a romantic paean to my electrician, but then I realized that it might be creepy.

Instead, I'll just note that I don't recommend contractors by name on this site until a) they've completed their work here and received their money and b) they have done such a good job that I have absolutely no hesitation in naming them. You'll note that up until now the only such name I've posted was the dumpster company.

That said, my electrician is Vince Madden from Madden Electric, and he is absolutely fantastic. Baltimore Magazine feels the same way. He (and his crew - ask for Miguel!) did an amazing job here, and we couldn't be happier. Call him. Use him. Feel free to tell him we sent you.

As noted by my plumber raptures in a previous post, there will be at least one more named recommendation to come here - but he's not done yet, so I won't publish his name publicly until our contract is complete. If you're looking for a plumber in the Baltimore area, I'm happy to recommend him privately - drop me an email at jamailac at gmail dot com and I'll give you his contact information. If you want to know which contractors I am NOT recommending, and why, I will also provide that information by email.

flush

2010-03-03T11:25:00.000-05:00

Once we'd painted the office, we realized (somewhat belatedly) that there was something else we should take care of before the floors came. When we ran the plumbing for the new bathrooms, we left the original stack in place. It was cast iron, and very large. So large, in fact, that for some strange reason it stuck out of the base of the office wall. We'd notched around in when we installed the subfloors, and told the drywallers to just cut around it if they couldn't get it flush. They did so, and we realized that it really looked much worse than we thought it would:

The original plan was to just leave it, since we intended to put bookshelves in front of that area anyway. But we've been revising our bookshelf plans now that the end is in sight, and there may not be one at that exact spot. And besides, what about when we go to sell the house? Savvy buyers won't be fooled by a strategically-placed potted plant - even if I was capable of keeping one alive long enough to get the house on the market. And, more immediately, we both hated it. And we live here, and will be doing so for a while. So we called our fantastic plumber, and asked him to come out and take a look. He gave us a huge break on pricing, and replaced not only the bit in the picture, but all of the ancient cast iron pipe in the basement below for several feet straight down and an extra branch out for a price that was seriously, amazingly low. And he did it the day after I called him. (Okay, it was the day after that, but he could have done it the next day if I hadn't had to go to the office.) We had to get it done really fast because the flooring was due to be delivered, and it was no problem. He and his crew are the absolute best.

Once they'd replaced the pipe with one that would fit inside the wall all the way down, I patched the hole in the drywall. You can see the patch in the picture below - it isn't repainted yet, but you can see that not only is there no gaping hole in the wall anymore, but the flooring installers will be able to install all the way to the wall. Everybody's happy.

a studious color

2010-03-02T10:10:00.001-05:00

Before the flooring was delivered, we made an effort to get the downstairs painted. As I mentioned before, we paid a painter to paint everything that is the same color, but the office gets its own color, so I painted it myself.

We chose an absolutely gorgeous olive green called "Carriage House" by Behr, and I think it's the perfect color for an office/library. It's going to look amazing with the brown floors and a big wall of brown bookshelves (can I tell you how excited I am about the prospect of unpacking my books?)

exciting things afoot

2010-03-01T14:57:00.003-05:00

No pun intended in the title, but guess what's sitting in my dining room right now?

This:

Hardwood flooring, baby! A lot's been going on here lately, and I've been really, really bad at keeping up. I'm getting some pictures uploaded and some posts written up right now, but I had to share this immediately. These boxes - and another pile the same size in the office, and a smaller one in the living room - were delivered this morning by our flooring guys. Installation starts Thursday morning. I snuck a sample out of one of the boxes so that you could all get a glimpse of the flooring we chose:

It's prefinished hardwood, three-quarter inch red oak in a color called 'gunstock'. Don tells me it's called that because it is in fact the color used for those wood bits on guns (clearly I am out of my depth in this discussion).

Things we looked for when we were choosing wood and color:

-Hardness. Not only am I the clumsiest person on earth, we plan on having children and dogs both in this house, so the floors have to stand up well. Don originally wanted pine, which is what his parents have, but for this quality oak was the way to go for us (we never had any interest in any of the exotic hardwoods, for what it's worth - they're not suited to the house or the neighborhood).

-Grain. We both wanted a strong grain - we saw a lot of wood with only a very light grain pattern, and it frustrated us because we want our wood to scream "Hey! I'm wood!" and not look like laminate.

-Brown but not red. I can't tell you how many times I've pointed at a wood sample and Don has wrinkled his nose and shaken his head, saying "Too red!" I love cherry wood and mahogany tones but I can see his point. The floors should be relatively neutral and go with whatever we choose to accent them with, and red tones don't always go with everything (ask my mother the redhead). If you ask me, the wood we wound up with still has a little hint of red (as you can see in the poorly-lit picture above), but it's brown enough to suit him finally and I love it, so we're happy.

-Prefinished. We're living here and don't plan on moving out - there's no way we'd be able to deal with having the floors finished here. There is nothing anybody could say to me that would outweigh the huge pro of ease of installation with prefinished wood. And the finish is guaranteed for far longer than we plan to be in this house - if the next owner wants to refinish them, fine.

A few other things swayed our decision on which supplier/installer to use, like warranty, wood grade, and of course price, but they weren't things that we went into the process determined about.

I'm looking forward to seeing this stuff installed! The plan is to complete the downstairs, stairs, and landing on Thursday and Friday, then have us move our office downstairs. That'll empty out two of the three upstairs bedrooms, which can then have their floors installed on Monday, whereupon we'll move our bedroom into one of them and the master suite will be finished off. Given our scheduling luck, I make no promises that it will actually happen that way, but that's the plan!

oh, did i mention?

2010-02-17T10:35:00.002-05:00

We have color.

We did something that we both thought we'd never do, and actually paid somebody to paint. A friend of our drywaller gave us a ridiculously good price to bring in his paint sprayer and spray all of the public areas (dining room, office, living room, stairwell, landing, and all the ceilings thereof) with primer and then roll on paint. Since the dining room, living room, stairwell, and upstairs landing all flow into each other with no breaks, we elected to paint them all the same color, and were able to take advantage of the deal.

We'll paint everything else ourselves, but I can tell you straight up that it was worth EVERY PENNY to have somebody else paint the two-story stairwell, which involved precariously balancing on a plank stretched from a ladder to the top of the stairs. Not my thing.

End result? It looks great, and has saved us a ton of time. Even better, we were able to get this huge amount of space painted before the hardwood floors are in, which makes everything easier. I plan on painting the last of the downstairs spaces - the office - this weekend. It's closed off from the open area, so it'll be a different color, which is why it wasn't included in the deal. It is primed and the ceiling has been finished, though, so it won't take much work.

PS - If you're wondering, the color we chose is Behr's Pecan Sandie, in eggshell. I'm very happy with it - it looks even better in person than it does in pictures, and picks up the natural sunlight we get an abundance of very nicely.

not managerial material

2010-02-16T09:37:00.003-05:00

Here's something I didn't think I'd be saying several months ago: I'll be really glad to get back to doing things ourselves.

Really. After the months (years) of DIY work to do the demolition, the subfloors, and the framing (et al), I was more than ready to have some contractors come in and work. But last night I handed the drywaller the last two hundred dollars of his fee and waved him out the door with sheer glee. I'm so tired of dealing with other people! Scheduling them, supervising them, PAYING them, dealing with fallout when they don't show up, pointing out their mistakes, getting them to FIX their mistakes, getting them to show up at all... I'm so over it.

We have just one more contractor to decide on and deal with: hardwood flooring. We have two estimates in, and two to go - last week's snowstorm derailed us a bit, with two appointments rescheduled and us stuck at home for a full week. Fortunately - and I don't mind a bit of a plug here - we live in Baltimore County, not the city, and our snow removal was beyond excellent. Our street was plowed early on for both snowstorms - the only thing stopping us from getting out was our own effort in shoveling the driveway. And the taxes are lower in the county, too. I'm just saying.

Anyway, we've got appointments today and tomorrow with hardwood flooring estimators, and we're hoping to make a decision over the weekend and get started as soon as possible. Once the flooring's in, we'll finally be able to live in most of the house again, which will be a new and different thing. There's a comfy couch sitting in a box in my in-laws' basement, waiting for me to take it out and sit on it. I'm very excited by the prospect.

downstairs drywall

2010-02-04T12:37:00.003-05:00

After many snafus, most of which have been documented in hysterical detail on my Twitter feed, the downstairs drywall is done. Here, have some pictures.

Standing at the foot of the stairs, looking into the living room and dining room:

What's making that weird circle of sunlight on the floor, you ask? Why, it's the awesome round window we installed in the stairwell! (Which, I might add, the drywallers did a really good job dealing with - it was definitely a challenge the way the window people installed it.)

In the corner of the living room (opposite where I stood to take the first picture), looking at the dining room and the doorway into the office, as well as a glimpse of the stairs. See that corner under the stairs? Don's parents' standing piano is going there, as soon as we get moved in. I'm excited about it (so are they - they want it out of their dining room).

Today we've got somebody here spraying primer downstairs. I've got appointments with three flooring companies, and will be making two more. Moving forward!

whoa

2010-01-27T12:14:00.002-05:00

In what seems like a whirlwind compared to their previous effort, the drywallers have been here all three days this week and the downstairs drywall is practically done. Seriously. We took delivery of the materials on Monday, the hanging crew hung it all on Tuesday, and the taping crew just left after taping and mudding the whole thing today. All that's left is a day of drying time, skim-coating (probably Friday), and sanding (probably Monday).

And, of course, fixing the problems. You didn't think it was all smooth sailing, did you? Fortunately, there's nothing so egregious downstairs as the window issues upstairs (beautifully fixed, by the way, for more money, of course). The biggest issue is that in the half-wall that divides the kitchen from the dining room, there's a little plastic thingie that protects the gas line that goes to the stove. The hanging crew didn't notice it, and just slapped drywall up over the top of it without realizing that it makes the wall bend out - and, more drastically, back in. The result is a relatively drastic curve in the wall that's going to make hardwood flooring an issue. We're going to try to get the drywallers to fix it, either by taking down the sheet and re-hanging it or, I suppose, by using copious amounts of mud to sculpt it back into shape. Whatever. That's really the only issue I have, although Don is dubious about a couple of other things. We'll see how things go.

Depending on how all this problem-solving goes, we could potentially be putting primer up on the walls as soon as next weekend, which is shockingly fast. I mean, shockingly fast for around here. I hear there are other renovations that get done in LESS than four years, can you believe it?

drywall pictures!

2010-01-19T11:48:00.005-05:00

So the drywallers are, in theory, done upstairs. In practice, they're not - they still have to come back and re-hang those window walls, which should be happening today or tomorrow. Then they'll be done. In any case, they're done enough to take pictures, which is what I know you've all been waiting for.

Looking in to the master bedroom from the landing:

Standing just inside the master bedroom door - when I took this I was basically standing in the doorway to the master bathroom, which is directly opposite the master closet, which is the door you see in the picture below (yes, the closet has a window!):

The master bathroom - or at least some of it. The drywallers have to come back here, too, to finish the area around the tub. The master shower is to the left of the picture - it doesn't all fit in one frame. The drywall in here is greenboard, which is a specific kind of sheetrock used for rooms that can get wet, like bathrooms. It's not the same as durarock, which is the cement board used behind tile (that's what's in the shower):

The middle (and smallest) bedroom, which will be a nursery - hopefully by the end of this year! (No, Mom, no news):

The back bedroom, which will be the guest room. Hard to take pictures of - I stood in the doorway to get as much in as I could. There's a sizeable nook in front of the closet you can see on the left, and the window is centered in the room, so that should tell you how much room didn't fit in the picture on the right:

And finally, the guest bathroom. Small, but serviceable. The nook behind the bathtub will get some sort of shelving built in for towels and toiletries, as the sink that's going in here is a pedestal to save room.

a somewhat convoluted update

2010-01-13T16:27:00.003-05:00

So, the drywall upstairs is nearly done. It looks super cool - if you follow me on Twitter, you may have seen a couple of fuzzy cameraphone pics. I'll take better pictures soon. The drywall process is as follows:

-Stock (bring it into the house, an event which can take a whole day by itself)
-Hang (attach sheets of drywall to walls, cut around electrical outlets, lights, etc)
-Tape and mud (stretch tape over each seam, use joint compound to make a smooth wall)
-Mud some more (fill in big dents, make corners sharp, generally make walls)
-Skim coat (make it pretty - check for last imperfections, fill in)
-Sand (after all mud is really, really dry, sand it so it's perfectly smooth)

The upstairs is currently past its second mudding, and is slowly drying (the drywallers did the first and second coats all at once, so it takes a while to dry). In theory, they could come in tomorrow and skim coat, let that dry, and sand on Friday so that we could move upstairs this weekend.

But.

The windows in the two guest rooms (back and middle bedrooms) are kind of badly framed in, in that the framing for the windows juts out into the room a bit. So currently the drywall is cut around it, and it looks kind of icky. Ordinarily one would just fix this by hiding it with trim, but the framing is significantly wider than the windows themselves and we really don't want huge trim around two random windows! So the drywaller was over today, inspecting his crew's work and delivering some materials, and he suggested a solution: add another layer of drywall. It'll make everything even, covering the framing and going right to the window. It might not be the simplest solution (which would be, I don't know, ignoring it? Attempting to spackle?), but it'll be the best one. If we want it done right, this is what to do.

So now the plan is for the crew to come in and skim coat the rest of the upstairs. Either they or their boss will come in and hang, tape, and mud the two window-walls before the weekend, and the new drywall will be skimmed on Monday, with sanding on Wednesday. So far it seems like a good plan to me - not only can we take a break this weekend (poor Don has already worked 120 hours in this 80 hour pay period, with two more days to go!), but it'll give us extra time to clean up and move next week. I might even be able to get the electrician to come in and turn the electricity on up there!

The only drawback? I made this decision totally unilaterally - Don's still at work and has no idea. Eep! Let's hope he agrees with me - and is willing to pay for the extra sheets of drywall!

glamorous action shot

2010-01-11T09:42:00.002-05:00

The upstairs drywall is about three-quarters of the way hung. Due to some sort of delivery snafu, the hanging crew ran out of drywall on Friday. So, being practical fellows, they left. More drywall has, I'm told, been ordered and should be delivered today. I'm told that the upstairs will be completely finished by Friday - mud, tape, sanding and all. I am dubious.

Should it actually happen, Don and I will move all of our stuff upstairs this weekend (PS anybody who feels like coming over for some heavy lifting let me know) and the crew will start work on drywalling the downstairs next Monday. If it happens like that, awesome, but I'm not holding my breath.

submitted without comment

2010-01-07T08:25:00.001-05:00

Mostly because the only comment I've got starts and ends with exclamation points.

seriously?

2009-12-04T13:53:00.003-05:00

The insulation is in, and that is the only good thing I can say about this last week. Let's do this in timeline format, shall we?

Early November: I call the drywaller, and agree to find my own insulator when he tells me his has retired. After much calling back and forth, I find an insulator and call the drywaller back and schedule our drywall to begin November 30th. He puts us on his schedule, or so he says, and tells me to call him if anything changes.

November 27th: I'm getting nervous, as I haven't gotten any sort of call from the contractor asking if we're still on, or confirming anything, or even saying anything about signing a contract, which we haven't done. I assume he'll bring the contract with, on the first day of work, but STILL. So I call him, the day after Thanksgiving, and, predictably, get no answer. I leave a message saying that I'd like to confirm that we're still on his schedule for Monday, could he please call me or Don back, and leave our numbers (although he should have them).

November 30th (Monday): Don takes off work so that he can do a walkthrough with the drywaller when he arrives. We wait, and wait, and he fails to show up. I call his cell phone at least five times and leave a couple of messages.

December 1 (Tuesday): He finally answers his cell phone in late morning. I say politely that I had thought we were supposed to be on his schedule this week, and that I'd been trying to get in touch with him. He says he was out of town, makes no mention of getting any of my messages, and says he can PUT us on his schedule for the week, just let him call his hanging guy and see when they'll be done that day, he'll call me back in a bit. I wait until nearly 5 PM, then finally call back. He says he was going to call me as soon as he got into the office, and that the drywall will be delivered on Thursday and hanging will commence on Friday. I ask if he can come out for a walkthrough, as there are a few trouble spots that weren't there during the estimate (plumbing, etc). He says absolutely, he can come out around 2 PM the next day, he'll give me a call when he's on his way and oh, he'll bring the contract with him.

Wednesday: He doesn't call. Don takes the afternoon off of work to be here for the walkthrough. The drywaller doesn't show up. We call several times throughout the afternoon. Finally, Don leaves a message on the guy's voicemail saying, essentially, either call us back or we'll be moving on to another contractor. Rather predictably, he doesn't call.

Thursday: Shockingly, no drywall is delivered. I call the other drywall contractor we got similar quote from in August, and leave a message asking if the quote's still good and if not, can we get another. He calls me back and says he'll check.

Today: New drywaller calls back again - meaning he is officially two phone calls higher in my estimation than his predecessor - and tells me they can do the job for the same price he quoted me in August. I ask him to come out for a walkthrough. He says he can come out on Monday, and will give me a call. I have limited hopes.

This whole thing has been... just... why wouldn't you put forth the simple basic minimum effort and call somebody back? Clearly the guy didn't want our money. And, it seems, may not in fact know how to check his voicemail. In which case, uh, good luck with that business of yours.

So now I don't know if we'll have drywall by Christmas, and I'm kind of depressed about it. The entire experience has left a decidedly bad taste in my mouth, and I'm so sick of waiting for phone calls I could spit.

briefly

2009-11-23T12:57:00.003-05:00

Don got in touch with the new HVAC guy over the weekend. He said he'd come out late today and do the work. He called this morning and said he wouldn't be able to make it until tomorrow. Whatever.

I've scheduled the insulators to come on Friday. Assuming the HVAC guy actually shows up, and Don can get the data rings installed for the speaker wire relatively quickly, all should be on track for drywall next week.

Surgery recovery is going very slowly - I'm not good for much these days. We're looking forward to Thanksgiving, and I'll be at Darkover selling jewelry over the weekend - hopefully I'll be pain-free by then.

a minor update

2009-11-20T17:15:00.002-05:00

So, I had my surgery last week. For those of you who follow me on Twitter, you know already that I was stuck at home up until yesterday, recovering and being very bored. I'm now back to driving, though still no heavy lifting and various other restrictions. It's all very annoying.

House-wise, we are (as usual) having communication issues. We found a nice new HVAC man - our old awful one has now disconnected all of his phones (!) - who agreed to come put in vents for our bathroom fans and install the last bit of sheet metal from the downstairs return out to the wall (it's set back from the wall, and needs to be connected to where the vent on the wall will be). He gave us a very good price, told us he could get it done this week, and promptly disappeared. We would be happy to give him his money if we could get HOLD of him.

Other things that need to happen: Don has to run to Home Depot and pick up some data rings and install them in all of the places where he and his sister's boyfriend ran speaker wire - it won't take long, it just needs to get done. Also, we need the electrician to come back yet again and fix a couple of things - a matter of ten minutes, really. Then the insulators can come - they've already called me once, wondering when we're going to schedule them.

The drywallers are scheduled for November 30th, and I REALLY don't want to change it. I have no idea how we're going to get this stuff done before then, particularly with the upcoming holiday, but I am determined.

disaster of the day

2009-11-10T16:39:00.003-05:00

We have carpenter ants. Lots of them. With wings. And they think my desk is really, really interesting.

The exterminator is coming tomorrow. I spent most of today huddled upstairs while Don killed ants downstairs.

crawling forward

2009-11-03T14:39:00.002-05:00

We've picked an insulator. The quote came in at a fairly reasonable price - or reasonable enough, anyway - and I just called him and accepted the proposal. The only thing that has to happen before they come is getting us wired for sound. Our order of speaker wire came in yesterday, and Don's sister's boyfriend should be coming over either this week or this weekend to run it and put in data rings and whatever else he says we need. I'm hoping I can get the insulators in on Monday or Tuesday of next week, but if I have to wait until after my surgery, oh well.

The really exciting thing is that right after I got off the phone with the insulator I called the DRYWALLER. He is scheduled to start on November 30th. Seriously. For real. Actually happening. Holy crap.

who wants to take a bath?

2009-10-29T09:57:00.003-04:00

The master bathroom tub has finally been set in place. I'm pretty excited about it. For those who are curious, we went with the five-foot Kohler Archer tub, with 'air massage' as opposed to whirlpool jets. (And for the even more curious, Lowe's prices are actually pretty significantly lower than the listed prices from Kohler - worth looking into, plus they offer delivery, and the delivery guys carried it all the way upstairs.) The only thing now missing is the faucet for it, which will actually go in after the tile is set on the tub deck (so that it can be installed neatly through the tiles, instead of trying to cut them to fit around it and having lots of ugly grout lines).

We are going to have to find a tile person soon.

connection

2009-10-28T09:44:00.001-04:00

I just finally got hold of the drywaller - I was right, his message service isn't actually delivering my messages. He said he called me, too, and never got any voicemail or anything, so there's some sort of phone line mixup going on. Whatever. I have a new number for him, and I'm keeping it close. In the meantime, he told me that he can't insulate the house -- his insulation sub has retired from the business, and he hasn't gotten a new one yet. So now before I can get him to come in and drywall, I've got to find an insulator. Don is going to say we should just do it ourselves. I really, really don't want to touch it. Time to call for quotes!

of course

2009-10-24T10:06:00.004-04:00

Something has finally gone wrong. I cannot for the life of me get in touch with the drywaller. I talked to him on Tuesday, and he promised me a callback the following morning with a quote to add insulation to our existing drywall quote. No call, so I called and left a message later that day. Still haven't heard back. I am fairly sure that their phone line goes directly to a voicemail service that he picks up pretty regularly - but I know for a fact that their messages were screwed up a couple of months ago, and I'm wondering if it's happened again. I don't have another number for him, unfortunately.

It's very disappointing - we were hoping to schedule the drywallers/insulators to start on November 2nd, and we're completely on track to be ready for them. But if I can't get hold of him, that's pushing the start date further and further back, because they usually run their schedules about two weeks out.

In any case, the electricians are done with the rough-in, although we need to ask them what we're supposed to do with a couple of things -- there's no box for either the master bathroom tub or the data cable terminus in the office. The plumber's coming on Wednesday to set the tub and fix the sink rough-ins in the master bath. Don ordered several rolls of speaker wire last night, and his sister's boyfriend will come over and wire us up for sound as soon as it comes in. After that, drywall, if I can get hold of the guy!

The real problem with this drywall issue is that I am having my gallbladder taken out on November 12th. If they were able to start on the 2nd, that would give them a good week plus to finish before my surgery, which should be fine. Pushing it back much further may mean we have to delay quite a bit - having drywallers around while you're recovering from surgery is not so practical. All things considered, though, I'd rather reschedule the drywall than the surgery. We'll see how it goes.

lists

2009-10-21T11:33:00.004-04:00

Things the electricians are installing in our house:
-Outlets
-Recessed lights
-Ceiling fans
-One chandelier
-Bathroom fans
-Cable wiring
-Telephone wiring
-CAT5 wiring

Things Don and I have argued about placement of:
-Outlets
-Recessed lights
-Ceiling fans
-One chandelier
-Bathroom fans
-Cable wiring
-Telephone wiring
-CAT5 wiring

Arguments won by me:
-Ceiling fans

Arguments won by Don:
-CAT5 wiring
-Bathroom fans

Arguments won by the electrician:
-Outlets
-Recessed lighting
-One chandelier
-Telephone wiring
-Cable wiring

yet another picture of don swinging a hammer

2009-10-20T13:37:00.003-04:00

Over the weekend we got the last few bits of preparation out of the way for the incoming flurry of contractors. We worked on cleaning up and condensing our stuff, since it's going to get moved around a lot. We took five huge bags of clothing and some other stuff to Goodwill, and cleaned out everything we could from the basement. We condensed my craft and business supplies down to two tables instead of three, and cleaned off our desks. All very exciting.

We also added two inches to the header in between the dining room and the living room:

Don wanted the header to be exactly the same size as the one separating the dining room from the kitchen, so he hopped up on the scaffolding and added a 2x4 to the bottom of it, which did the job. He also built a small wall in the guest bathroom, something we decided to to in the hopes of making the room feel a little less slanted - it cuts off the very back of the room, where the eave slants down almost to the floor, and makes the room feel bigger.

The electricians are here today, making lots of noise and getting lots done. The plumber is coming by a week from today to do the final rough-ins in the master bathroom. I'm trying to get in touch with the drywall guy - once the electricians and plumber are done, believe it or not he's the next step! Hard to believe we might have actual walls soon. I'm waiting for something to go wrong.

wiring coming soon

2009-10-13T07:26:00.001-04:00

Yesterday we signed a contract and handed over a check. The electrician is starting next week!

electricity

2009-10-08T11:34:00.002-04:00

Today I emailed an electrician and accepted his quote for doing all of our electrical work. I got quotes from several of them last week, and though we're not thrilled about spending yet another large chunk of money, we've agreed that having somebody come in to do the electrical work is the best idea. They'll be able to get the work done MUCH faster than Don would, and they include a very great deal of work in their proposal that would take Don even longer than just the rewiring. Not to mention they, uh, know what they're doing.

The electrician we eventually went with gently pointed out that the way that Don ran the temporary lights was "the way they did it fifty years ago." Makes sense, given that Don learned from his dad, who learned from HIS dad, who was an electrician - fifty years ago. Sigh. So our new electrician will get it done both quickly and correctly, and we'll be able to move forward.

Speaking of moving forward, check out the vanity we're going to buy for the master bathroom one of these days. Snazzy, no? We may hold off on buying it and just have our drywallers drywall everything but the bathrooms. It'll be annoying but we can afford it. We still have to find a contractor to do various bathroom things like pouring the shower floor and tiling. I'm beginning to feel like calling contractors is my full time job.

pocket doors

2009-10-05T09:52:00.003-04:00

Pocket doors. They're awesome. Most of you have seen them, somewhere, sometime; they're doors that slide into the wall rather than swinging out into the room. They save a lot of space. What you may not have seen is the framing that's involved in installing a pocket door. When we first decided to put them in, we knew nothing about how to install them or frame for them. After a great deal of research, we discovered that they are SO EASY. All you have to do is leave a blank hole in your wall that's double (or so) the width of your doorway. Then you buy a kit -- we bought ours from the best in the business, Johnson Hardware. In fact, we bought five of them. The kit comes in a giant long box, and contains a header, studs, and all of the hardware to install them, plus of course the track for the door itself. You provide the door.

So. You've got your gap in the framed wall. You hammer in a nail at each end, at a prescribed height. Then you just hook the header onto the nails, rotate it into place, make sure it's level, and bang the nails the rest of the way in, adding a few more for good measure. Bang, header in place. The studs are, essentially, half-studs; they're metal-clad 1x3s. They slip into a metal bracket, which spaces them the right width apart on the floor. You attach the tops of the studs to the header, nail the bracket into your floor, and bam. You've got a pocket door frame.

Once the kit's installed, it's best if you can put in a little bit of framing above the header, just for the sake of structural stability. It's not too hard to bang in a few header studs. Overall, installing pocket doors is crazy easy. We've put them at the entrances to the master bathroom, master closet, and guest bathroom upstairs. We also decided to put in a double set of pocket doors downstairs, between the dining room and the office/library, where we had originally planned on leaving a large opening instead. We like the idea of being able to close off the office a bit - and the deciding factor was when we realized that we could use the antique doors we found in the attic as the double sliding doors. They're solid wood, with dozens of squares of antique beveled glass set in them. I'm looking forward to refinishing them and hanging them; they're the perfect entrance to a library.

In the picture below, you can see the double pocket doorframe we installed downstairs. It's not much more complicated than installing a single frame -- all you have to do is slice off a bit of one of the headers and hook it into the other one with a special bracket, sold separately. Then it's the same procedure.

It may be a little hard to distinguish everything, what with the giant construction mess and scaffolding behind the doorframe. Sorry, not much I can do about it. I'm looking forward to getting rid of it as much as you are!

The drywallers will cover up the studs, of course, and leave the wide doorway open. When it warms up a little, I'll strip the doors and refinish them, and we'll hang them up and be done. The upstairs doorways, incidentally, are also getting antique doors -- we saved all of the original doors from the house and will be stripping, refinishing, and re-hanging them. The master bathroom and master closet may get replicas instead of the originals (or maybe we'll be able to find something at an architectural salvage shop), as they are new openings that weren't in the original house. For the time being, though, we're just going to be living without doors. Not a huge hardship, given what we've lived without so far!

Got any questions about installing pocket doors? Leave them in the comments, we'll try to answer! With the obligatory disclaimer, of course, that we're not experts and you probably shouldn't really take our advice on anything, but whatever.

the plumbing post

2009-09-30T12:52:00.002-04:00

I finally took some pictures of our plumbing progress! We're on hold until a) the big expensive vanity gets ordered and b) we get drywall and tile and the like so that the finish work can be done. So what we have now is considered rough-ins. But it's lovely to see. It looks like progress!

First up: the guest bathroom. The final studs for the pocket door aren't in place yet -- we had left them off so that the window people could get in and out easily as they took out and sealed up the old window. That's been done, so we'll get those studs in soon. They're super easy to install -- but I have a whole 'nother post coming up about pocket doors. Just you wait. Anyway, as you can see below, the guest bathtub is in! The cat, for some bizarre reason, keeps jumping in it to play. We hear clanging as she flops around in there at night. It's very strange. This bathroom will also have a toilet and a pedestal sink -- space is limited, so we chose pedestal over a full vanity.

The master shower fills me with both excitement and terror. Excitement, because hello, it's awesome. Terror, because I have NO IDEA how we're going to get the base poured. If anybody knows any contractors who do that in this area, let me know. For that matter, if you know somebody who does tile, too, I'd love to hear it. I hate tiling. Hate it HARD. We went to a tile store for some preliminary research a couple of weeks ago, to see how many of our appendages we'd have to sell off to get nice tile (verdict: a lot). I'm wondering if a bathroom contractor of some sort might be able to both get us a better deal and install it for us.

And finally, the rest of the master bathroom! The shower is just to the left out of sight; this picture shows the plumbing rough-ins for the vanity and the bathtub. The toilet will be across from the vanity, between the bathtub and the door -- another pocket door, incidentally.

I won't bore you with the details of what it took to get to this point -- there were decisions made that impacted both the upstairs and the downstairs, but not in any major way. I'm just glad that it's done, and that it looks like we're finally moving forward. Or rather, we would be if I could find an electrician.

waiting in the wings

2009-09-29T13:09:00.002-04:00

The last of our bathroom appliances arrived last week. This forest of boxes in the guest room contains two toilets, a pedestal sink (for the guest bathroom), the master bathtub, and faucets galore. The only thing we're missing is our master bathroom vanity, which comes with sinks and faucets and a marble top and is glorious but expensive, so we haven't ordered it yet because we're still trying to pull money around to make it spread to all the things it needs to go to.

In the meantime, the cat is having a lovely time climbing around on the boxes. Most nights, she sleeps curled up on the big one that contains the bathtub. I'm looking forward to getting all of this installed - and more importantly, being able to pee upstairs. Can't wait!

fake kitchen remodel

2009-09-22T14:13:00.004-04:00

A very short post, while my Internet is up. We're having horrendous connectivity issues here. A tech is coming out Thursday, but in the meantime I spend about five minutes having Internet and then twenty minutes without. Not very conducive to productivity. Anyway. Here's a picture of how the kitchen looks now (or now-ish, anyway):

We finally -- FINALLY -- took out the wall separating the kitchen and dining room, and it makes a HUGE difference. All the light from that fantastic, expensive bay window in the dining room pours into the kitchen. We installed a couple of temporary inexpensive dome lights in there to replace the old fluorescents that never worked, but we never need them until night time. Running the wiring for those lights, however, proved an adventure. Don probably doesn't want me to tell you this, but he got his hand stuck in the ceiling. While he was standing rather inelegantly on an upturned bucket. I'll leave that mental picture with you. As a final touch, we found a spare 2x8 and installed it as our temporary breakfast bar. It gets a lot of use when we have people over for dinner, as a buffet or just as storage. I can't wait for the real thing -- we'll be replacing it in the same spot with a nice countertop bar and some stools eventually.

The other big update is that we got a new fridge, and it is glorious. The old one finally died conveniently right in time for one of those interminable appliance sales at Sears, so we picked up this fab fridge for a discount. It has SO much room. It didn't fit in the old fridge's spot, so we went ahead and moved it to where it's going to be when we finally re-do the kitchen. That left us with a big gaping hole in the corner, so we went to Home Depot and picked up a pre-made base cabinet that fit perfectly. We covered it with plywood and laminate -- no need to get fancy, after all -- and now we have extra counter space and extra storage. I'm still trying to convince Don that this means that I ought to be able to buy lots of new pots and pans.

The last thing we did was some reorganization. We picked up another set of industrial grey garage shelving (whatever, it doesn't have to be pretty, it just has to hold stuff!) and set it in the corner with our existing set. All of our small appliances and serving dishes fit on one set of shelves, while bulk pantry items are in labeled containers on the other. Bowls, canned goods, and things like spare mayonnaise and cupcake liners are tucked away into the pantry proper. It's all very functional, and I've been cooking at home a lot more since we finished the whole project. It's not very attractive, of course -- everything is mismatched, old, and/or ugly -- but it works spectacularly well for me right now, and means that we can hold off on the kitchen remodel without complaints.

More about the rest of what's been going on soon, when my Internet is fixed.

PS - broken Internet also means I can't play my new game - so frustrated!

what we did on our summer vacation

2009-09-20T11:51:00.002-04:00

I thought I'd take a brief weekend interlude from house updates to tell you guys about our vacation this year. Every year, the week of my birthday (August 28th, if you care), we take a week's vacation and go out to western Maryland, where there is a huge man-made lake and surrounding vacation community called Deep Creek. It's a four-season destination, as there's a good ski mountain right at the north end of the lake. We like it so much that we're hoping to buy a vacation house there soon -- we're talking to a realtor and everything. Anyway, this year we went out with three friends and had an awesome time. Don and I actually took the opportunity to drive out two days early, and stayed at Rocky Gap Resort in Cumberland, a place we've stayed before. It was a pleasant little private vacation extender, and one of the coolest things we did all vacation happened the very first day: we took a ride on an old steam train. The Western Maryland Scenic Railroad runs from Cumberland to Frostburg and back again, generally twice a day on weekends. It's a beautiful trip -- you start at the old train station in Cumberland, go through some astonishingly gorgeous mountains, rumble along past farms and small towns and valleys and cliffs while you listen to the chuff-chuff of the engine and, if you're Don and I, stand in the open-air vestibule and get coal dust all over you -- a totally authentic experience, I assure you -- and wind up in the college town of Frostburg, where you can get lunch and watch the engineers turn the engine around on the giant train turntable. Then you go back again, and ogle all the scenery you might have missed on the way up. Don took probably hundreds of pictures, but this is one of my favorites:

Check out that steam! If you ever find yourself with a day free out in western Maryland, this is definitely a trip worth taking.

The rest of the vacation was full of books, games, friends, boating, relaxing, swimming, and just generally enjoying the peace and quiet of the little chalet we rented, tucked away on the side of a mountain. Don took lots more pictures -- I'm getting him his own camera for Christmas this year, incidentally -- and this one definitely captures some of the spirit of the week.

That's Molly, perched on the deck, surrounded by nature and reading, reading, reading. We went to the library together before we left for the trip, and we may have shocked our fellow library patrons by the sheer volume of books we took out. I read every single one. It was glorious.

let's start with the yard

2009-09-18T09:43:00.003-04:00

Does everybody remember last year, when the backyard looked like this?

Or worse, the year before, when we got a visit from the county because our neighbors were so irate about our backyard overgrowth? It looked like a jungle out there. The weeds in the very back were so high they were over my head, and threatened to completely engulf our little outbuilding. The aluminum shed next to the garage was rickety and rusted. The giant hole in the ground from where we took out the old aboveground pool filled with water at least once a month. Our friends' children took great delight in 'fishing' in it with fallen branches from our wildly overgrown trees, but the rest of us were not so pleased with it.

Enter the landscapers. We took down the aluminum shed ourselves, one hot and sweaty Saturday afternoon, but they did the rest. They filled in the pool hole, cut down the trees that were weed-ish in origin, and scraped the entire back half of the backyard. A concrete guy came out to jackhammer up and haul away the concrete slab the shed had been on -- that was a WHOLE NOTHER adventure. Don's grandfather poured that slab, and to economize he filled it in with whatever he could find. There were tire hubs, chain link fencing instead of rebar (almost every link had to be snipped, as the jackhammer didn't fit between), and all sorts of other things inside the slab, which went from a reasonable four inches or so thick at the front to over eight inches thick at the back. It took forever to get it out.

In the meantime, the landscapers seeded the rest of the yard and covered it with straw. When the concrete was gone, they did the same for the small patch where it had been. The picture below was taken shortly after that, while the final patch was still growing in. The whole thing is grown in now, and it looks lovely - when they mow, we end up with stripes like a baseball field!

Talk about a difference. We had a party here a few weeks ago, and people spread out all over the lawn without fear of falling into a hole or tripping over debris. It was amazing.

Future plans include getting rid of the old electrical line for the pool and shed, and the corresponding posts, plus probably cutting down the old flagpole. We'll eventually tear out the little outbuilding - originally, we thought to keep it and refinish it into a separate office or studio, but instead we'll tear it out, finally dig out those old footings, and put in a semi-inground pool. That may happen next year, depending on our financial situation. We'll also have to talk to our neighbors about replacing the falling-down chain-link fence, preferably with something a little taller and less transparent. In the meantime, we're enjoying having a vast swath of grass to look out over whenever we glance out back.

we've been busy

2009-09-17T13:35:00.003-04:00

Normally, when I go without posting for months at a time, it's because there's nothing happening and I just can't bring myself to whine about it online. This summer's hiatus, however, has definitely been the opposite. There has been SO MUCH going on here, and I feel tres guilty about not posting and telling what few readers I have left about it.

Here's a list of some of the stuff that's been going on here in the last few months:

-As you may have noted in the last post, Don and I finally got married last week, in a civil ceremony at the courthouse. If you are related to me, you will probably find a wedding announcement in your mailbox soon. If not, you'll have to live with the online version. Being married isn't very different from being engaged for seven years, other than the Big Name Change: I'm Jamaila Brinkley now.

-I've had a host of health problems since May; two emergency room visits, countless doctor appointments, and more blood and urine tests than anybody should ever have to go through. In early May, I had my second kidney stone (the first was about six years ago). The followup for that included a cystoscopy, two rounds of antibiotics, and a great deal of nausea, most of which turned out to be unnecessary. During the CT scan, they happened to find out that I have gallstones lurking menacingly around inside of me, too. I'll be having gallbladder removal surgery sometime in the next year, although it's not urgent. In the meantime, I can't have alcohol, caffeine, or extra-greasy foods -- turns out that the gallstones' interactions with those things have been why I've been nauseous practically all the time for the last three or four years. Who knew? Right after all that had gotten cleared up, in early August I abruptly developed gout in my foot, a genetic inheritance I had no idea I was due for. I couldn't walk for two weeks, and slept on an air mattress in the dining room. It was all very exciting.

-While I was battling all of these health issues, somehow -- you're not going to believe this -- the rest of the subfloor and ALL of the framing got done. Yes, we have walls, even though they're just studs. But you can actually see the shape of the rooms in the house!

-After the framing was done, right in the middle of my gout issue, we got PLUMBING. Or rather, we got rough-ins. The plumbers came out, politely ignored me flailing around on my dining room air mattress, and roughed in the plumbing for both upstairs bathrooms. There's a little more rough-in work to be done -- the master bathroom tub was delivered later than expected, and we haven't ordered the master bathroom vanity yet, so they'll be coming back, but most of it is done.

-Our old fridge died, to nobody's dismay. We bought a new fridge, and while we were at it, rearranged the kitchen and finally opened up the wall between it and the dining room. It's a much more pleasant place to cook and clean and hang out now, and the new fridge is AMAZING.

-Right after my gout healed, we went on our annual vacation to Deep Creek Lake with friends, and had an amazing, relaxing, wonderful week. I also turned 27 that week, which was less exciting.

-Don passed Spanish (I know, I couldn't believe it either), and at the beginning of September embarked on what will actually, truly, really be his last semester of college. Undergraduate, anyway. He's applying for January admission into UMBC's graduate program in Human-Centered Computing, and he's really excited about it.

-The last post before my unexpected hiatus announced that we'd hired a landscaper to come in and wrestle the backyard into shape. He did it at the very beginning of the summer, and we've been enjoying it ever since - along with his remarkably reasonable rates for biweekly mowing services.

I've got pictures in various stages of editing for almost all of the house updates; I'll try to post visuals to get you all up to speed right away. I'm sorry to have been gone so long, and to have let so much get done without documenting it here; it got harder and harder to put together an update as more and more got done and we got busier and busier! Right now we're facing a brief plateau as we get ready to get the electrical work done, so I'm going to try to get everything documented and up to date and then we'll go from there.

in case you were curious

2009-09-10T09:24:00.000-04:00

getting to be the season

2009-04-02T10:19:00.003-04:00

It's that time of year. The Outside Times have begun. We're striking preemptively this year, though. Yesterday we met with a very nice landscape guy. In addition to lawn service -- cheaper than both of last year's people, no less -- he also provided us with a quote to do pretty much everything that needs to be done in both the front and back yards to finally wrest control of our landscape back from the jungle. He'll be tearing out half-dead shrubs, removing chain link fence, filling in the hole from the pool (hallelujah!), clearing out vines, gigantic weeds that have turned into trees, and random rubble, and he'll be scraping and re-seeding pretty much the entire backyard. By the end of it, we'll have a very large expanse of grass, and nothing else. Which is exactly what we want, for now.

I just emailed him and accepted his quote, and we're talking timeframes now. Don wants to tear out the rusty aluminum shed in the middle of the yard and jackhammer up the concrete pad it's resting on before the landscape crew starts work. So we've got to figure out when we're going to do that, and how much notice we need to give the crew, and how long the work is going to take, and all the other stuff. The tedious administrative details (and hefty chunk of money) can't dampen the sheer glee I'm feeling over the thought of having a real backyard by summer, though. Backyard barbeques! Crab feasts! Touch football! Picnics! You're all invited.

the guest bedroom will be prettier soon

2009-03-31T08:53:00.003-04:00

Remember this shot of the back half of the house?

Here's what it looked like Saturday evening, after Don and I finished moving every last little thing over to the front half, including the Anapurna tables downstairs and the tools upstairs.

And here's what it looks like now:

That's right, progress! Don's dad came over early Sunday morning and the two of them removed the walls separating the eaves from the bedroom - the closet and the bathroom, just like in the master suite. Then Don's dad left, and Don spent the rest of the day pulling out the flooring all the way back to the chimney, as that's the first section they're going to work on. Leaving the floor in on the other section gives them a place to put debris and lets them keep up a wall that's holding the air conditioner up in the attic. When he was finished, Don installed the giant railing to keep me from falling to my death, because he's just a nice guy.

Soon, he'll start cutting out the joists and the old bathroom pipes (the plumber's going to be replacing them anyway) and there'll be a vast open space to be filled in with new joists and subfloor next time his dad comes over. Which, hopefully, will be soon. Scheduling these days is a nightmare.

movers and shakers

2009-03-25T11:39:00.003-04:00

Well, we've moved. Or at least, we've moved enough to get going this weekend. Our bedroom is now in the master suite. There aren't any walls dividing the suite into its three parts yet, so right now we're luxuriating in a huge bedroom that basically takes up the entire front half of the house. It's very nice, but I'm trying not to get used to it. Once the bathroom and closet are in, the bedroom won't be nearly so big. But the four inches we added by scooting the wall between it and the office backwards a big are going to make a big difference. The cat is probably the happiest one about the new room; our bed is just below the big bay window, and the sunlight streams in just as I thought it would. She spends the mornings perched in the window staring out at the birds -- it's warm enough outside that I've been opening the windows -- and her afternoons sprawled in the sunlight on the bed, sleeping. I have to admit I've taken a few sunlit naps myself. She's got the right idea.

Our desks have been moved into the living room, but the two large tables which hold all of the Anapurna supplies haven't yet -- we'll probably move them this evening. Then Don will put tarp up between the living room and dining room and we'll be ready to go. Provided nobody's school schedule interferes, Don and his dad will be doing some demolition this weekend and taking out the eave walls on either side of the guest bedroom. Once that's done, Don will rip up the flooring in his spare time and then they'll get started on the new joists.

In the meantime, I'll be sitting here enjoying the sunlight with the cat.

bare minimum

2009-03-17T14:51:00.003-04:00

We did manage to do one or two things that needed to get done this weekend, although far too much of it was spent playing World of Warcraft and vegging out in front of our computers (on the plus side, I hit level 80!). After brunch on Sunday, while I did food-related things, Don replaced a ceiling joist and tore down the old header from the previous master bedroom wall. I joined him upstairs to help clean up and we were able to get the upstairs finally cleared of sawdust (the cat will no longer be able to roll around in it and then jump on our bed, to her disappointment). This week is Don's spring break, so we'll be trying to get our things moved after work all week. Nothing is happening this upcoming weekend, as we have external commitments which will keep us out of the house all weekend, but we're trying our damnedest to be able to start ripping up the last of the floors up there the weekend following. Fingers crossed.

As usual, if you want up-to-the-minute info on what's going on, feel free to follow me on Twitter, if you use it. I'm a pretty regular updater, although I warn you that you may find out more about what I'm having for dinner and how the Anapurna stuff is going than about the house just now.

park-goer

2009-03-09T11:32:00.004-04:00

We didn't do any work on the house this weekend. We did, however, buy a sausage stuffer attachment for our KitchenAid mixer -- Don's decided he wants to make his own bratwurst -- and go on an exploratory expedition to a butcher shop. Plus our weekly Sunday brunch with friends and a nice evening with Don's family to celebrate his sister's 21st birthday.

We're stuck until we can find the time to move all of our stuff over to the front side of the house, and with Don trying to (finally) graduate relatively soon (he predicts December, you may open a betting pool if you like), plus work and Anapurna tasks ramping up, time's at a premium. We'll get there eventually, though.

In the meantime, the weather has been mind-blowingly gorgeous for the last couple of days, so this morning I decided to walk up to Northeast Highlands Park, which is just up the street. I'd never been there before, but having a park within easy walking distance is something I don't think I should take for granted. I asked Don about it at one point and he told me there wasn't much there, just a baseball diamond and a little grassy area. He's wrong! The Department of Natural Resources' "open spaces" program has paid for a nice little play area (future Brinkley babies, take note!), and behind the baseball diamond and grassy area is actually a startlingly large wooded area, with a really nice trail running through it. I walked to the very end and back, and I plan to do it again as often as I can, and maybe take my camera. For a suburban area, it's very undisturbed. I saw a spiderweb that was eight feet tall sparkling in the sunlight. Doggy pawprints indicate that at least some of the neighbors are taking advantage of the nature in their midst -- on the way back I waved to a lady walking two large dogs as she was heading in to the area I was just leaving. The natural area actually wends its way back pretty far, significantly farther than the map indicates the park goes, and it swings its way along behind and above the industrial buildings along Patapsco Avenue (Baltimore Highlands is perched on top of a cute little cliff, so the park stays above the buildings). There's a secondary trail along the top of the little cliff overlooking the buildings, and I elected to take that back. It's not nearly so well used as the main trail, and I had to climb over some fallen trees and things, but it was fun! On the way in and the way out, I paused to admire the English Consul mansion, which is right next door to the park. All in all, a pleasant morning interlude and a nice neighborhood exploration.

still here, plus one wall

2009-03-05T12:04:00.003-05:00

Uh, did I forget to post here for almost two weeks? Whoops. My bad, internet. I've been really busy with the new Anapurna advertising campaign, designing and placing ads and monitoring progress with my new favorite thing, Google Analytics. (PS, if you want to see one of our ads in action, check out TheTorchOnline, a fantasy website that's gaining popularity. Then go buy some jewelry.)

In any case, a significant step has actually been made in the house progress, and it was made almost two weeks ago, so I should probably post about it before Don's head explodes. We built a wall!

Don and I actually built this wall ourselves, just the two of us. I used a miter saw and everything. And yes, I still have all my fingers. This wall is actually the wall that separates the master bedroom (and master closet) from the middle bedroom. It stops where the entrance to the master suite will be; on the other side of the entrance will be the shower in the master bath, approximately where the two-by-four on the ground and circular saw are sitting.

The next step is to clean up from the construction and move our stuff over into the master bedroom. We can't build the other walls yet because they're too long -- they cross over into the area of the subfloor that isn't finished yet. So we'll make do with this one, move our stuff over both upstairs and downstairs (the office will go back into the living room), and make a push to get the rest of the upstairs subfloor done. Both Don and his dad have had a lot of exams for school for the last week and a half, so we've been waiting for a free moment to get the moving done. I'm not actually sure if any work will be done this weekend or not -- if it is, you can be sure I'll probably forget to write about it.

a plan of sorts

2009-02-18T09:49:00.003-05:00

So I had a fairly incredible weekend -- the con report is up over at the Anapurna Girls blog, if you're interested in the small business side of my life. While I was gone, Don mostly sat around and watched movies instead of doing schoolwork. He did take a few minutes out to do some mapping out upstairs, though, and has figured out where various walls and fixtures are going to go. In the spirit of fair play, he even measured out my bathroom idea. Alas for fair play and my ideas, it doesn't work; the bathroom isn't long enough. Oh well. He did come up with a solution to make the shower less cave-like; once the measuring was done he found six or eight extra inches to put in there, to make it wider. We'll use those inches as a little bench with shelves over it, which will keep everything out of the shower proper and leave lots of extra room. I'm mostly resigned to it now, and the extra space does help. And there's always the fact that we're not staying in this house forever to reassure me.

In any case, Don discovered that the only wall that he can put up right now is the one in between the master bedroom and the middle bedroom; the rest are all too long and cross over into the part of the subfloor that isn't finished. So this weekend he and his dad will put up that wall, and we'll start moving our stuff over to the front side of the house.

an anapurna sneak peek

2009-02-12T10:26:00.003-05:00

I'm occupied in getting ready for this weekend's con adventure -- namely, our second year selling Anapurna jewelry at Farpoint in Hunt Valley. I thought I'd give you all a little sneak peek at some of the new stuff that'll be on our table this weekend, things that aren't on our Etsy site yet. If you're free this weekend, you should definitely stop by. Those of you who read Ancestral Pile in a feed might not know that there's a little Etsy widget in the sidebar of the site that takes you directly to the Anapurna store, with a few images of featured items. We have a lot more available than what goes up on Etsy, though -- the best way to get a look at our whole inventory is to come check us out at a convention.

I don't want to annoy you all with too much salesmaneering, but since I'm out of house pictures for now, and Lindley's product shots are amazing, I pulled a few things from the Anapurna Flickr page to show you a few cool new pieces, since it's on my mind.

This brass dragonfly necklace is delicious; the body of the focal is made of a really pretty smoky quartz cabochon.

This one is iolite with a shell focal hand-wrapped in sterling silver. The necklace ties with organza ribbons the exact color of the iolite (which means it's adjustable!).

Our clockwork pendants are huge hits; one of our famous author clients snapped up the first one we made before it even got out on the table at our last con. This is a new design, more ornate than the first, and I love it. Here's hoping somebody else loves it too!

everybody likes the new subfloor

2009-02-11T09:58:00.000-05:00

clarification

2009-02-10T10:34:00.002-05:00

I thought maybe all of this 'front half of the house' versus 'back half of the house' talk might be a little confusing to those of you who haven't actually been in our house (although considering my dwindling readership, that might not be very many! Must post more). So I thought I'd snap a quick picture that's the opposite of the 'status' pictures I've been taking.

I took this picture from the 'front half' -- standing on the new subfloor. You can see the staircase railing that's always in the foreground of the status pictures, so it's pretty easy to see where I usually stand to take them, tucked away into the little corner at the top of the stairs. What you're looking at straight-on is what I always refer to as the 'back half of the house.' It's actually less than half, but it's easier to call it that. It consists of the back bedroom -- what will someday be the guest bedroom that you're all invited to come stay in -- and the guest bathroom. We're currently using the guest bedroom as our bedroom, and will move all our stuff over onto the new side once the walls have been framed in, as I mentioned.

The current conundrum is what to do about the wall you see in the picture. It's got to come down -- it's positioned right over the section of floor where the joists mysteriously change direction, and all the joists have to come out so that can be fixed. Unfortunately, it's also holding up the weight of the heat pump in the attic. Which is a very heavy thing. So part of the demolition process for the back half of the house is going to be figuring out what to do about that. Fun times!

hey, what's that?

2009-02-09T14:03:00.003-05:00

I'll tell you what it is. It's a FINISHED SUBFLOOR, that's what it is! Holy crap. Don and his dad worked all day Saturday while I was down in Virginia having an Anapurna studio day. They tore down the master closet wall, finished up the joists, and installed more subfloor. Then, on Sunday (after brunch of course), Don and I decided to see if we could finish up. We installed the very last of the cross-bracing and the last seven or eight pieces of plywood to complete the subfloor. (And I used a circular saw by myself and retained all ten fingers, an accomplishment that was dimmed somewhat by the fact that I had to ask Don what the saw was called when I was telling my mother about it on the phone.)

Bear in mind, of course, that this is just the subfloor for the front half of the house. The back half, which we've been using as a bedroom, will have to get done as well. That's the reason you see those strange gaps in the forefront of the picture. The last row of tongue-and-groove plywood is actually just loosely screwed down about an inch away from the tongue of the row behind it. The reason we didn't fully install it is that it'll have to get taken up in order to lay the new joists, which will overlap and come out under that row. There's also a larger gap in between the plywood and the old floor of the back half of the house -- about six inches or so. It's not a huge issue for us, and it'll go away soon enough.

Next up: walls! The framing for the master suite needs to go in before we move our stuff over to that side -- it's hard to build a wall when there's a bed in the way, after all. Then, after we move our bedroom over to the other side (and the office into the living room to avoid raining debris), we'll do this all over again, and then I'll never have to talk about another subfloor as long as I live.

PS - Yes, that is the cat in the middle of the room in the picture. Just try and stop her.

PPS - We don't expect any work to get done on the house this weekend, what with it being Valentine's day and all. We personally aren't doing anything for Valentine's, in case you're curious, because I'll be up at Farpoint all weekend selling jewelry and resisting the urge to lick Alan Tudyk every time he walks by. Swing by if you aren't busy!

bathroom update

2009-02-04T11:58:00.004-05:00

He hates it. But refuses to give any reason for his hatred, which makes it awfully hard to argue against his reasoning. We haven't had a great deal of time to talk about it (there wasn't much I could say to "I just don't like it"). I like the solution because I've never been really crazy about our proposed shower being built out into the landing -- I feel like it's going to feel like a dark, scary cave, whereas this gives us a shower with lots of natural light and also preserves the large upstairs landing I liked so much when we moved in. But it looks like I'll just be stuck with the cave -- Don is completely unwilling to consider this option, and is as far as I know totally committed to the current plan. Yet another reason to finish this house and move on to a new one! One without a scary shower-cave.

pondering bathrooms

2009-02-03T16:37:00.002-05:00

So I was just watching the final episode of this mini-series of "Bathroom Renovations" on the DIY Network, and they had a bathroom-under-the-eaves situation kind of like ours. Their solution was to put the tub under the eave, just as we plan to, but then instead of a separate shower, they just tiled the whole eave area and a shower's-worth further out from it, and enclosed the tub within the shower, with a frameless glass door to separate it from the rest of the bathroom. I am utterly enchanted by this idea. I'm trying to figure out if we could do it in either or both of the bathrooms upstairs; I think the only struggle might be to find room for the toilet in the master bath. But I suspect it's doable. The only problem? Don will probably hate it.

Any thoughts? Should I try to convince him it's worthwhile? Do you agree with his hypothetical hatred? Any better ideas?

minor setback

2009-02-02T09:27:00.002-05:00

Clearly, I was tempting fate by posting my last two pictures on Friday. Fate responded accordingly, and Don's dad called early Saturday morning to tell us that Don's mother wasn't feeling well and so he couldn't come over to work on the house. Alas. We spent the day doing very little, which was refreshing, and followed it up on Sunday with our now-regular Grand Brunch with friends. All very relaxing, until the Cardinals up and lost the Super Bowl.

Tentative plans are in place to work on the house next weekends. School has started in earnest, though, and both Don and his dad are taking classes, so schoolwork has to come first. We'll see.

new wall, old boards

2009-01-30T11:54:00.003-05:00

I meant to post this yesterday but got caught up with work and other things. So you get two pictures today. Below, you have a major moment of note: the very first new wall got put up upstairs. It's a tiny little wall, but it's still a wall nonetheless. Fortunately, we were able to reuse some of the old boards from the walls we tore down, and will continue to do so as we're moving forward with the framing upstairs. We'll still have to buy some wood, but hopefully not as much as we might have had to if the old wood had proven unusable. The wall they're finishing up in the photo below is the wall at the top of the stairs; it encloses what will someday be the master bathroom.

Picture number two is the usual end-of-day shot -- I'm loving being able to take this same shot from the same place every weekend and being able to document the changes like this!

I'm told that this weekend they'll take down the old wall you see in the photo -- it's the wall that divides the master bedroom from its closet, and it's precariously balanced on not much at all. So it'll come down, as the bathroom wall did, and once the joists and subfloor have been built all the way across to the far wall, it'll be rebuilt, complete with new doorframe for the closet. Not too much else going on this weekend, as it's Super Bowl weekend and the Brinkley men must have their football.

a subfloor at last

2009-01-28T11:48:00.002-05:00

After the first few pieces of insulation went in on Saturday, Don and his dad were able to put in the first piece of subfloor upstairs, a fairly momentous occasion. The hardest part of putting the subfloor itself in, I'm told, is heaving the gigantic pieces of plywood from their resting place in the living room ("lumber central") up through the joists into the upstairs. It involves some gravity-free hang time for the boards and a great deal of muscle on Don and his dad's part.

Board-heaving aside, as the insulation went in, so did the subfloor. I posted the picture below to Twitter on Saturday, with the caption "happening right now!" It was pretty exciting to see the subfloor slowly taking shape across the master suite.

It's starting to feel like real progress is being made around here. It's all very exciting!

the first insulation this house has ever had

2009-01-27T13:06:00.004-05:00

Once Don had pulled the wire for the new front porch overhead lights and fans, he could start putting insulation between the new joists over the front porch, to keep us from freezing in our bed once we open the porch back up to the elements. It's practically the first insulation that's ever been put in this house (there were some random bits stuck inside an interior wall, doing nobody any good, at one point).

Don and his dad joked that it already felt warmer after the insulation was in, a joke that turned cruel at around midnight on Saturday night when our heat broke. The furnace upstairs just stopped working. Just in time for snow! On Sunday morning, we called BGE Home (we intend to get a service plan with them, as they're sort of the only game in town), who told us they'd get to us on Tuesday (today). They sent a very nice service man out early this morning to tell me that a) we needed to put some "flooring" up in the attic before he'd go further than the fourth step up the attic ladder (there's a piece of plywood up there that gets moved around as portable flooring -- not good enough!) and b) there was a gas leak somewhere so he couldn't look at the furnace without that getting fixed anyway and c) the service division no longer fixes gas leaks -- and, ironically, neither does the utility division. They just find it for you. The utility people, I mean. The service people don't have any equipment at all for dealing with gas. The service people of the gas company. Whatever. He was very nice about the whole thing, and didn't charge me for the visit since he couldn't do anything. He recommended that we call the utility people, have them pinpoint the leak, and then either fix it ourselves or call a plumber.

We elected to bypass the utility people entirely and just call Len the Plumber, who had a plumber out here by 9:30 AM (I called at about 8) -- no two-day wait here! He fixed the gas leak -- there was a defective part in the line, an angled piece of pipe that had apparently been deformed from the start with an almost miniscule hole -- and then, out of the kindness of his heart, fixed the damn furnace too. Two days of huddling under the blankets and being miserable, gone in the blink of an eye.

In any case, I have a lot of photos ready and waiting to be posted about Saturday's work day, but have been too cold and miserable to do anything about it until now. So stay tuned -- my typing fingers are toasty warm!

how the cat spent all day saturday

2009-01-21T13:20:00.003-05:00

Apparently huddling nervously under the blanket avoiding the construction noise is much warmer than her usual practice of huddling nervously under the bed.

brave new floor

2009-01-20T13:30:00.004-05:00

Remember this? What a difference a few weekends can make! Don and his dad spent this Saturday working on the upstairs floor, and they got a truly tremendous amount of work done. Our friends at the Lansdowne Home Depot delivered a big pallet of lumber on Friday (with a truly excellent forklifting performance by one Randy, witnessed by yours truly) and at precisely 8 AM on Saturday the work began.

I don't know how many of you remember when we did this downstairs (what would we do without the Internet to help us remember?), but we are doing things a little differently upstairs. Rather than keeping the old joists in and sistering new ones to them to make the attached subfloor level, we elected to rip out the old joists and put new ones in. The reasons for this were many, but the important ones were that the old joists were in incredibly bad shape -- worse than the ones downstairs -- with cracking, rotting, and sometimes just plain bad installation. Additionally, there was the issue of the random change in the joists' direction in the middle of the house. So, all in all, it was deemed more sensible to just replace the joists upstairs.

The first few joists around the staircase and in the future master bathroom were ripped out ASAP, and the first piece of wood went up against the exterior wall of the house.

Here's where the clever part came in. Using that first joist as their baseline, they were then able to install a sill on the front wall of the house, creating a level base to nail all the joists into. The edge of the porch ceiling provided another level base, to end the first joists (front of house to mid-master bedroom) and start the second (mid-master bedroom back to center of house). In the picture below, they're setting the first of the mid-house joists. There's a lot of measuring involved. The end of the joist is resting on the wall that divides the center of the house downstairs, between the living room and everything else. When they do the back half of the floor upstairs, they'll install an end cap against that layer of joists for some extra stability.

I had honestly expected them to just get the wall cut down, move the lumber inside (Home Depot will only deliver to your driveway), and get the first few joists laid, mostly in the front section. But you can see what they accomplished by the end of the day on Saturday below -- Don was installing the last few pieces of cross-blocking when I took the last pictures of the day. Check out the difference between the picture below and the image from the 'vast wasteland' post linked at the top of this post! They're taken from the same place (squeezed into the tool closet which will someday be the guest bathroom) and the changes are awesome.

As a final note, I'd like to point out that anybody who follows me on Twitter, particularly on Saturdays, will generally get the play-by-play commentary of all of this stuff going on as it happens. It's a fun time.

a strange shot

2009-01-18T20:46:00.002-05:00

This picture came out so interestingly that I had to post it. I was standing on the first floor, in the living room, shooting almost straight up. Don's dad was in the second bedroom upstairs, handing something up to Don, who was perched in the attic. Really drives home the fact that the house is really, truly completely gutted!

proof!

2009-01-16T11:34:00.002-05:00

Ever since the plaster got cleaned out of the front porch ceiling, I've been hearing mysterious thundering from above while I work during the day in the office downstairs. Come to think of it, it sounds awfully like one small and yet mysteriously dense cat jumping back and forth on the the loose plywood pathway over to the construction side, where she is very definitely Not Allowed. But she's always sitting innocently on the bed when I go up to check on her, or she comes down to twine around my legs and look cute before I can get up there.

I'd given up catching her in the act, so to speak, until one day I heard her howling miserably like she does when she's gotten stuck somewhere. I grabbed the camera and went upstairs and lo! Finally, proof! One small Cat, being quite Bad.

And yes, she was howling because she'd gone over there to sit and had somehow immediately forgotten how to get back. Even though she'd been running back and forth for a week. I did not rescue her. She howled for about fifteen minutes, then got up and figured it out as soon as she heard me in the kitchen downstairs, preparing food that she was convinced might be for her, despite years of evidence otherwise.

please don't do this

2009-01-15T10:38:00.002-05:00

It's really not safe.

Don and his dad employed this extremely dubious ladder-balancing tactic to put up a header for the middle wall yesterday afternoon (I know, working on a weekday! Crazy!). It's not much of a header -- just a large piece of lumber nailed securely to a couple of uprights that aren't going anywhere -- but they assure me that because it's not holding up much of anything other than the joists above it (as opposed to, say, an air conditioning unit, a person, or several adventurous and fat cats) it will be fine. I've given up worrying about things like this; my attitude is "well, if it falls down it probably won't hurt anybody since we don't go over there, and if the house is ruined we can collect our insurance and move somewhere finished." Works for me.

They'll be cutting out the studs of that wall this weekend, I assume, and I just got a call confirming that a vast amount of lumber is going to be delivered here tomorrow. Very exciting.

plaster accomplished

2009-01-14T11:24:00.003-05:00

I'm really far behind in uploading pictures, I'm sorry. This one's actually from last weekend, when Don and his dad spent the day finally getting rid of that plaster in the master bedroom. It was a fairly messy job, but it's all gone now.

The picture above is what it looked like when they'd finally gotten all of the plaster out and were cleaning up. Never have we appreciated our ShopVac more! What the builders did was just put in a little mini-floor between the joists, which, alas, I didn't get a picture of. Rest assured there were only like four inches of plaster, not a foot or so, thank goodness. All the joists and "floorboards" in this section are gone -- the verticals you see here involve the front porch ceiling somehow -- although you can see bits of the joists from the next section sticking out from under the plywood in the foreground. The mini-floor was there solely to hold the plaster they poured. Very strange.

Up next, they'll be ripping out that middle wall you always see in these upstairs pictures. It's bearing, so they'll need to build a header first. I hear that's happening today. Then it's on to the "chop-and-drop" -- tearing out old joists and installing new ones. The first joists to go in will be in that front half of the master bedroom over the porch; before the plywood subfloor is put in on top of those joists, Don will run wiring for the porch's ceiling fans and lights, since this is the only chance we'll really have to access that area. Then insulation, probably, and the subfloor. The joisting and subflooring will continue over to the edge of the stairs, which is where the original floors are still intact. I think the master suite framing will come next, and we'll move our bedroom in there from the back bedroom. Then ripping up the floors and more chop-and-drop.

Don thinks that the upstairs floor will be done by mid-February. We'll see how it goes. Once the floor is done it's all a downhill race; the plumber will come and install the bathrooms, we'll run the electrical stuff in the evenings probably, and then it's insulation, drywall, and hardwood. But you all know that already.

progress, of the miniscule variety

2009-01-05T08:47:00.005-05:00

So. Hope everyone had a nice holiday season. Ours was lovely, with lots of family time, both here and elsewhere, and lots of giving and getting of nice things. And lots of food. Oh lord, the food. Anyway. It's over now, and it's back to the daily grind, or something. I haven't got much to say today, and no picture, alas, but Don and his dad did work on the house on Saturday and managed to get all that plaster up from over the front porch. All that's left to do there is pull out the boards the plaster was resting on -- Don says he'll try to do it after work this week, we'll see how that goes -- and then they're going to put in the new joists for that room and pull the wires through for the front porch's ceiling lights, since once we put the floor down that area will be inaccessible again. Having the wires pulled through and the boxes installed will make it a lot easier to finish up the front porch when we get there.

Measurements have been taken, a list has been made, and Don will be going out relatively soon -- probably this weekend -- to get all or most of the lumber for the upstairs floor. Hopefully the whole thing will go fairly quickly and we can finally move on with our lives. I'm SO ready to have the upstairs bathrooms installed.

tis the season, or something

2008-12-15T11:19:00.003-05:00

The holiday season is in full swing here. All work on the house has, predictably, halted, because we're far too busy cooking and wrapping and socializing and (occasionally) working. I'm about to run out to the post office to ship off the last of the far-away gifts. The living room is Holiday Central; wrapping paper, shipping boxes, cards, envelopes, tags, and three different kinds of tape are scattered over the big tables in the middle of the room, and wrapped presents are stacked up along the far wall (along with some holiday-themed beer somebody brought over, but we won't go into that). Every time I go through a roll of wrapping paper, Don claims the empty cardboard tube -- he's got three of them leaning up against the wall already and I predict a grand swordfight next time our friends are over. Because, you know, we're grownups.

In any case, that's what's going on here; no pictures, as a) my camera battery's not charged anyway and b) you never know who's reading this thing and there are still a few unwrapped presents scattered around. Don and I are both lucky enough to be able to take off of work for the holidays; I anticipate lots of relaxing and a great deal of hot chocolate being consumed.

We're kicking off our relaxation by attending the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra's Holiday Spectacular on Friday night -- it looks like it's going to be a lot of fun and we're both looking forward to it. If you're local, you should consider going. If you're going to be there, let us know! I'm thinking dinner at Sascha's beforehand.

a belated anecdote

2008-12-09T17:57:00.002-05:00

So, that plaster area over the top of the front porch? Inaccessible by any means other than joist-walking? Guess who made her way over there back while I was in Washington because it looked like a great place to nap and then got stuck, couldn't figure out how to get back over to the "safe" side, and howled her heart out until Don took pity on her and managed to get across the joists to rescue her?

Yeah. And then the ungrateful little monster made a panicked leap for the bare wall you see in the picture when he was halfway back across the joists with her, nearly knocking him down into the living room below, and then got stuck THERE until he finally managed to pry her loose and get her onto firm footing.

For once, she seems to have learned from a negative experience -- we haven't caught her over there since, no matter how tempting a nap-place it must seem.

She also managed to crawl into the underside of one of the upstairs bay windows while I was gone -- Don called me in a panic at three in the morning because she was howling and he couldn't reach in there to get her out. Three phone calls and some cussing later, I told him to open a can of tuna and stick it next to the hole she'd crawled through and ignore her. Lo and behold, one free cat (with some help -- once she got close enough he was able to grab her and help her out, as the drop was honestly too high for her to jump back up). We've blocked up those holes. And imagine, since I got back to pay attention to her at all hours of the day we've had only the normal kitty craziness. Spoiled!