The Big Adventure

While 2010 has been a year of highs and lows for so many, the Harveys are blessed to say we’re closing it out on a high note.

For us, 2010 will go down as the year of The Big Adventure. Over the years, Randy and I have watched our friends pack up their belongings and relocate to all kinds of exotic places (Korea, Anchorage, New York City, Hawaii, Colorado Springs, and Milwaukee), and we’ve thought, “wow, we cannot IMAGINE having to move again.” We said this with conviction until last March when we went for a walk in the Arboretum and stumbled across an overgrown, rat-infested, leaky, dilapidated house for sale near the park. Armed with little more than nostalgia for old homes and a healthy dose of naiveté, it was only a matter of days before we decided to throw caution into the wind and place a bid on this house.

The journey to our new home took a steep, ragged, switchback path. The path included losing the house to a builder who made a cash offer, getting the house back, selling our previous home in under a week, finding a trustworthy contractor to oversee the massive remodel, putting most of our worldly belongings in storage for 6 months, securing and losing a rental house, staying with Tim & Christie for two weeks, moving in to my best friend’s mother-in-law’s basement, changing schools, and spending every free minute of our summer and fall trying to make the house livable again. Appropriately, we moved into the house on Thanksgiving eve and woke up to a rare and beautiful Thanksgiving snowfall on our first morning. We love this house, and while we still have a lot to do, we are so grateful to be where we are right now that our joy quickly dispels any worries about time lines and money (for now). The bottom of this post shows a series of photos taken recently.


As with any Big Adventure, there have been some interesting tangential happenings going on at the same time. In May, I was fortunate to be able to go to England with Dad & Sharon to visit extended family that I hadn’t seen in years, and some of whom I’d never met before! It was a delightful trip—so lovely to see people who mean so much to me. Dad, Sharon and I ambled about a bit…starting at my aunt & uncle’s home in Devon and doing day trips to Bath and Salisbury, then heading north to my cousin Debbie’s place in Southwell (near Nottingham) and looping back down toward London where we spent a few days at my cousin Sarah’s home in Aldbury. Everyone was welcoming and generous (and patient, given that I lost my voice and developed an annoying cough), and I hope they will let me return the hospitality on this side of the ocean. It was hard to be away from my boys for over a week, but they seemed to fare just fine without me!

June, July, and August are a blur—at this point we were working diligently on the house although we did take a week off to go to Spirit Lake before school started. I even managed to squeeze in a very short trip back to Skaneateles to visit Katherine & co., some of my good NY friends, and attend my 20th high school reunion. I am definitely pro-reunion. It was so interesting to see everyone and learn about the different paths we've all taken. It felt a lot like a wedding though--too many people to talk to in the course of one brief evening.

In September Randy took a much-needed (read this as MUCH NEEDED) break from working on the house to attend his annual guys hike. As always, he found this to be refreshing, rejuvenating, and reaffirming. He has been working on the house with tireless enthusiasm for months now, so if you see him, please give him a pat on the back (gently, because he's got a few aches and pains at this point).

Of course, the boys have been busy with their own going-ons too. After watching several World Cup matches on TV, Emmett acquired an interest in soccer and so we signed him up on a local soccer league in our new neighborhood. As luck would have it, 2 other boys on his team ended up being in Emmett's new class at school, and this helped with the transition. Emmett was a little behind on the soccer field--most of the kids on his team have been playing since they were 3 or 4, but Emmett really enjoyed it and the kids on his team were amazing and supportive, which made for a great experience. Emmett also went from a good reader to an avid reader this year, and has a renewed interest in dinosaurs. In fact, he is pretty much a walking encyclopedia of dinosaur facts.



Griffen took us by surprise this year when he decided to sign up for basketball. He just started practicing last month, but so far he's having a great time. He's a bit of a ham on the court (and off the court), so his games should prove entertaining, if not frustrating for the coach. Griffen also became a more adept bike rider this year, so we're already looking forward to family rides through nearby parks once the weather warms up in...July.


We cannot possibly say thank you enough to everyone who has been so supportive of us this year. Thank you for the encouragement, the neighborly visits, the child care, the advice, the hammer swinging, and the love.

I leave you with a few things I’ve learned this year:

• Time goes by more slowly if you wake up every morning and ask "Is it Christmas yet?"
• Laughter should never be stifled, even at the office.
• George Washington may have been killed by wild pigs.
• I am wholly responsible whenever a lunch, homework, or book is forgotten on route to school.
• Geckos are hardy; African Dwarf Frogs are not.
• When you are upset about something, it's perfectly acceptable to make up your own logic and expect others to buy into it.
• When you are happy about something, it's perfectly acceptable to roll around on the floor with your limbs flailing so that your entire body is involved with your exuberance.

May 2011 find you rolling around on the floor, overtaken by happiness.

Love,
Randy, Joanne, Emmett & Griffen


Before and After

A Holiday Blog?

Dear Friends and Family,
I apologize for not posting in so long! I have been meaning to, but most days get by me so quickly that it's bedtime before I know it. In fact, I've been too busy to write my annual holiday card, so I've come up with what I hope will be an acceptable solution: the holiday blog post!
My promise to you: on Christmas day, I will post a recollection of our year, along with some before and after pictures of the house. I don't mean to drag you away from your Christmas dinner (or worse, opening your presents), but I will do my best to make my next post the most thorough (and thoroughly entertaining) entry yet!
What does this picture of Griffen in Halloween makeup have to do with anything? Well, it's just a small sampling of some of the more humorous moments from 2010...so I hope you'll "tune in" on 12/25/2010!

Running Behind!

I know, I know! It has now been a month since I've provided an update on the house and I apologize. Fact of the matter is, I've been spending every spare moment at the house with Randy and the kids trying to get it move-in ready. The good news is that we are almost there! The walls are painted, the floors are refinished, we have heat, and the tile person starts on the bathroom and kitchen next week. Most of the broken windows have been repaired, but they still need to be sanded, primed, and painted before they can go back in. Did I mention that 17 windows (some small, some large) needed to be fixed?

Truth is, at this point I'm a little hesitant to post pictures. Now I'm leaning toward waiting a bit longer and posting some dramatic before/after shots.

With any luck we'll begin transitioning to our new home in the next couple of weeks. Today we even had our first furniture POD delivered. Things have been complicated by Randy's work schedule, which has him temporarily starting at 6 am and working until 5 pm, and working weekends (this is also why I insisted we hire a tiler rather than doing the work ourselves). Fortunately, we are still in the hands of our very apt contractor, so progress continues to be made. Stay tuned...

Lots of Drywall (pictures only)

Big Week

What a difference one week can make! This past week was by far the busiest one the house has seen. Eric was working around the clock to get everything done before the drywall team came in...including pulling/hammering in thousands of nails left from the lathe and plaster, installing the microhood ventilation in the kitchen, building a sofit (sp?) around the kitchen, moving an electrical subpanel, moving some electrical switches, demolishing the plaster in the basement stairwell and installing the plumbing for a potential powder room in the future. Whew! In addition, the radiators were stripped, the insulation was packed into walls, and yesterday the drywall went up! No pictures of this yet though, sorry.

First up, we have the radiators. Before this week, I didn't think it was possible to fall in love with such things, but now I can honestly say I'm in love with our radiators--every one of them. I might have to assign them names. Randy refinished one radiator last week...including priming and painting with an antique bronze color that has a tint of green in it when a camera flash hits it. Gorgeous! Because the radiators were doused with many layers of paint, we had no idea they had so much detail on them.

The next picture is a shot of Griffen (with our contractor's potato chips) checking out the new insulation in his room.

Onward and Upward

Time is flying by! Progress on the house continues, but our contributions have slowed with the start of school, start of soccer, and fewer daylight hours to work with. Still, since the last time I wrote a new roof has gone on the house, more painting has been completed, the electrical and plumbing have been mostly completed. The plumbing was stalled when near the end of the installation, a new City inspector came in and rejected all the work that previous inspectors had signed off on! This cost us about a week, but our ever-calm and ever patient contractor has been doing his best to meet this new inspector's criteria.

After attempting to strip one of our eight radiators himself, Randy quickly sought out a backup plan for the restoration of these heating units. Now it looks like we'll be dragging the radiators up to Mukilteo where an industrial place that specializes in aerospace work will load the radiators on to a palette and then dump shot on them. Yes, shot as in tiny fragments of metal. We tested this process on one radiator and were thrilled with the results. Sandblasting was out of the question because this would have run us close to $6000. Instead, we should end up paying about $50-$200 per radiator, based on size.

We have ordered the fixtures for the main bathroom and we went to look at kitchen cabinets last weekend. We will likely go with IKEA's white Lidingo cabinets. I wasn't overly thrilled by this prospect, but the Consumer Reports and online reviews for the cabinets are very good, and they come with a 25-year warranty. We'll try to jazz up the kitchen with nicer hardware and fixtures and appliances.

With any luck, the insulation will go in this week and the drywall will begin next week. We're still hoping to be in the house by the end of October, but a lot will depend on how far we get with the bathroom, if we can have the new boiler installed by then, new exterior doors and broken windows repaired--a lot to accomplish in a 6-week timeframe.

Dreaming of Paperhands

I used to hate wallpaper, but in recent years it has begun to excite me.Wallpaper can be a great way to add art and intrigue to a home, and the many unique design options out there today provide lots of interesting alternatives to florals.

When my mom recently wrote and told me that one of my NZ cousins had started his own wallpaper business along with his wife, I immediately went and checked out their website. Then, I fell in love. With wallpaper.

Check out http://www.paperhands.co.nz

Now you see why I'm in love. I'm particularly partial to the Vices print and the Native print, and within 5 minutes of looking, I was e-mailing my cousin to see if it would be possible to ship some of this fabulous wall covering to the US. I encourage you to do the same. ;) If I could figure out a way to do it, I would be selling this stuff on street corners, because this is how much I love it. I love the print process, the colors, and the way it transforms a room.

Sure and Steady

Sorry it has been awhile since I last wrote...the days seem to be blowing by right now! Progress on the house is coming along, but the visuals aren't nearly as dramatic as the demolition pictures from July. Randy is STILL working on finishing up the monumental task of painting the house. In many regards, I think we could accurately call his task "extreme painting," because he's had to do all kinds of crazy things, like construct a narrow catwalk between roof overhangs on the front of the house and double stack ladders. For this reason, I'm going to hold off on including any more pictures of the paint job until it is completely done...so you can ooh and ahh.

In the meantime, Eric, our contractor, has managed to complete the following tasks in the last three weeks:

• jacked and leveled our sunroom and replaced the subfloor in this room,
• reframed a couple of rotten walls in the basement,
• run the electrical for the entire house (and included a second subpanel on the upper level),
• run most of the plumbing (Randy helped with this, and R removed all the old plumbing one weekend),
• reframed underneath the basement stairs,
• framed the pony wall along the front of the house where the new foundation meets the original wall,
• excavated the old stack/drain in the basement, replaced it, and repoured the concrete around it and the only working toilet (see picture above),
• removed a three-story chimney that hasn't been used in decades,
• started regrading the yard, and
• numerous other things that aren't coming to me (hired roofers, called in boiler specialists, made many trips to the dump, etc.)
  

In addition to the items above, our good friend Erik devoted the better part of a Sunday to helping Randy install five new windows on the upper floor of the house--a job that Randy could not have done alone, and that I would not have been much help with.

So, progress is being made, but right now a lot of what is being accomplished is stuff that is essentially "behind the scenes." The interior of the house is a disaster, but our enthusiasm hasn't waned.

Scraping the Surface

When we originally sat down with our contractor, Eric, to go over who would handle different aspects of the project, Randy and I quickly signed on for all the paint work. We've painted entire interior and exteriors before, so we thought we had an idea of what we were getting ourselves into.

Let me take a second to remind you that our new house is 3,400 sqft. The exterior is 4 stories high and according to my best estimate, it has about 100,38o sqft of surface area, most of which is pitched at awkward angles. The process is slow-going, as we have to pressure wash, scrap, caulk, prime, and then paint.

At least there are some good views to be had while dangling from the eaves. The pictures below don't really do the view justice; we look out across an expanse of green (the Arboretum) toward the Cascade mountains in the East.

Water, You're Not Welcome Here

There's a lot going on at the house this week: the last of the lathe and plaster is being evicted, the foundation walls have been poured and the moisture barrier is up, the drainage ditch is being dug and Randy has painted the North wall (except for the miles of trim) and has begun prepping the West wall for painting in the next week or so. I'm afraid I don't have time to write much more today, so I will let the pictures do the talking.

Chutes and Ladders

We went by the house again tonight (7/15), armed with more paint samples. Randy has been busy prepping the North wall of the house for days now, and even did a number on his back while attempting to move a 32-foot extension ladder by himself. Here is a shot of Randy in action "after the fall" (on a smaller ladder, but still an impressive ladder).


We now have a calico house. We were hoping to paint the exterior a deep blue-gray with white trim, but there are a lot of blue-grays out there. We want a dark enough shade that the trim really pops, and we want something more to the gray than the blue. We think we have finally settled on a color. You can guess.

In the meantime, Eric and his crew have been busy gutting the house. The lathe and plaster is completely gone from the main level, except for in the pantry area, and they just started working on removing the trim from the bedrooms upstairs. Lathe is really heavy stuff, so rather than lugging 5-gallon buckets of the stuff, they have constructed a temporary chute to aid in the removal. And while they're busy on the inside of the house, the foundation crew is busy on the outside; today the foundation footings were poured and the walls should go up on Monday.

And the Walls...Came Tumblin' Down

The whole family went by the house again tonight (Tuesday, 7/12) to check on the progress. Randy immediately set to work caulking and masking the exterior North wall, which he pressure-washed last weekend and he and I intend to paint on Friday. I painted a couple of test patches on the wall, and neither of the colors we had chosen seemed dark enough once they were on the structure, so the kids and I made another trip up to the hardware store to get additional samples...we didn't have time to go back and add these to the collage.
Front door
On the inside of the house, the lathe and plaster is coming down very quickly. We have some real worker bees on our team. The house is a mess, but as our contractor said to me, "Sometimes you have to crack a few eggs to make an omelet."

Living room

Bathtub gone!

Progress continues on the foundation. We opted to put a new entrance into the basement...it just makes sense to do this while the concrete is being poured and the drainage is determined. Here you see a shot of the form for the retaining walls around the new entrance. There will be 4 or 5 steps going down to the door (on the SE corner).

A House on Stilts

So we were feeling pretty proud of ourselves after the July 4th holiday weekend. We worked hard, took down 3 trees and cleared almost the entire lot...lugging a total of three 14' Uhaul trucks' worth of green to the transfer station.

On Monday (July 5th...a holiday for most), our contractor Eric showed up with two helpers and also got to work. First up: jack up the house and stabilize it so that the damaged part of the foundation could be repoured and a drainage trench could be put in.

In the meantime, Randy got to work demolishing the bathroom in the evenings, but even he was shocked when we went by the house this evening (Friday), and this is what we saw.We thought we worked fast, but Eric and his crew put us to shame!

Fabulous Finds

Randy and I are secretly hoping that we'll stumble upon a hidden treasure during the rehab process. So far, we've only found about a dozen old bottles, some underwear, some spray deodorant, about 30 plastic plant pots, 3 hub caps, a rotted garden hoe and vine support. But by far the best find during the garden work has been a shoe from circa 1968. We may have to save it and give it a place of honor in the final landscape.

Worker Bees

Okay, I have to admit I love this first shot, taken after about 4 hours of yard work during a Slurpee break. We still had about 3 hours of work left for the day, yet look at these guys! Talk about forlorn. They're sitting in a rental truck in the driveway, because we knew we'd have far more yard refuse than our regular vehicles could handle.

And next you see a shot of the 14-ft Uhaul after filling it with one day's worth of work. It might not look that impressive to you, but let me point out that half of that mess is grapevine and blackberry brambles that had to be cut down and stomped into submission. Stay tuned for pictures of the full front yard...we still have more to accomplish before I take that picture. Unfortunately, we're going to lose about 4 fruit trees during this process, so we'll be looking to replace them with some fast-growing natives once we put in the new drainage and have the soil back in place.