Finishing Touches

With our final bank appraisal and inspection now scheduled to happen on May 23rd, we are scrambling to finish up the work that the bank expects to see done. This includes all the touch-up paint, trim pieces, the kitchen backsplash, and putting in a new back door. We've finished the backsplash and putting in the door, but we still have lots of other little things to do.

Still, we like to think that we're in the home stretch, because once the house passes inspection we'll be able to work on it at our own pace. We do have some immediate things that we'll work on through the summer, including the dining room and attic, but we if we want to take a day off from house projects, we'll finally be able to do so.

Attached are some pictures of the finished kitchen tile, the lighting in the pantry space, and the finished exterior paint (we'd been waiting a long while to stucco the basement pony wall and get this painted). And you can see that our new lawn is starting to come in, although it's already been infiltrated by weeds.

Okay, you'll hear from me again after we've had the final inspection. Fingers crossed! (For the curious: if we don't pass this inspection, we basically get hit with a bunch of fees and we have to pay for another $600 appraisal, but we don't lose the house.)

Portico

A quick update with some more photos! Eric completed our front porch a few weeks ago (note that the gutters drain inside the columns!), and since then we have been racing the clock because the porch was Eric's last big ticket item and now he has moved on to other, non-Harvey-related jobs...meaning that the completion of the house is now in our hands. We miss Eric and his crew, so we try not to dwell on it. He'll be back to finish some work on our pantry and some other little things at a later date.

Randy has been working on the "sunroom." This is the small room that sits just off of the living room and that was originally designed as an exterior sleeping porch. We have carpeted it with a remnant we were giving by one of my friends, and we bought a couple of consignment shop chairs and now it serves as a TV/game room.

We also had 4 yards of topsoil delivered just this weekend. The whole family spent Saturday smashing up and moving clay in order to get the grading right, and then today Randy hired a day laborer for 4 hours to help him disperse all the topsoil. It's looking pretty good, but we'll have to get some grass seed down soon.

In other news...

You're probably wondering what our contractor, Eric, has been up to in the last few months. Eric and his wonder team (comprised of his daughter Lisa, his friend Gavin, and his dog Parker) have moved back outside. A couple of weeks ago we came home to find new steps up to our side East entrance (currently our main entrance) and I cannot tell you how thrilled we were to say goodbye to our super-treacherous stairs.


They also designed and put on some new columns on the sunroom (on the West end of the house), and began work on our front porch. Right now we remain a neighborhood curiosity because the entire front porch is covered in tarps...as if we are preparing for a big unveiling. In reality, the porch is tarped off because we've been having record cold weather, and after painting the porch floor with a sealant and anti-slip paint we needed to set up space heaters on and below the porch in order to keep the temperature high enough for the sealant to cure properly.









Other things that are in the works:

• I have ordered the wallpaper for our dining room. As mentioned in an earlier post, one of my NZ cousins recently started a wallpaper business, PaperHands, and I love every pattern. We ended up going with a more traditional print...vice in silver/green, for the dining room, but I hope to order a bolder choice for the Ladies' room eventually. This reminds me that I need to tell everyone about the Ladies' room...coming in next post.
• Eric is constructing a new front door. We love our existing one, but the lock and frame are so badly damaged (possibly from break-in attempts), that we had to get a new one. I was very disheartened to have to replace the door until Eric came up with a brilliant solution: buy a new door, cut out the glass panes from the old door and drop them into the new door. Yay!
• Eric and his team also hung drywall throughout the attic. We weren't planning on doing this anytime soon because it's not within the scope of work for our construction loan, but Eric wanted to keep some folks busy during a slow period and he very generously paid their labor as a gift to us. If I haven't said it often enough, WE LOVE ERIC!
  
• I have decided to try my hand at design consulting by representing WillowHouse. I'm NOT a designer at all, but I do love to entertain, and I do love the WillowHouse product line. They have an ongoing special: buy $40 worth of items (including Outlet items) and you can get any full-price item at 50% off (up to $40), so I've already purchased some much-needed kitchen and tableware upgrades.
• Yesterday we got a cat. The cat's name is Cat. Cat is a mellow boy who came to us from a from a friend who is packing up and traveling around the country for an undetermined amount of time. We'll see how we do as feline owners.
  

February Update!

Let me start off by apologizing for the awkward placement of the photos in my blog updates. I cannot format tables using this blog editor, so the pics end up floating around. It's pretty annoying.

Work hasn't slowed much on the house since I last wrote in December, but the work we're doing now is primarily finish work, so the noticeable progress is taking a little longer.

We now have a kitchen floor, granite counters, and finished windows in the kitchen, so all that's left in that room is some door trim and the glass tile backsplash (which I'm getting anxious to see completed). I don't think I mentioned this earlier, but I designed this kitchen so that almost everything under the counter is a drawer, and there is a sizable pull-out pantry next to the refrigerator. So far, I'm pleased with this layout--no more pulling stuff out in order to get to things in the back of a cupboard!

Randy has been working tirelessly, and I do mean TIRELESSLY on the trim on the second floor, and the doors. This is a complicated process that involves using harsh chemical strippers on the wood, scraping it off, sanding a bit, staining, wiping, varnishing, varnishing again, and then filling in nailheads. I should mention that we have 17 doors in the house...all of which needed the full strip/sand/stain treatment on both sides. This week was a landmark week because Randy started making his way down the stairs to the landing (as seen here--the left side of the window hasn't been stripped yet in this picture).













The newly-stained trim does look pretty incredible, I have to say. Here is a shot of the recently-finished upstairs hallway.













Stay tuned for some upcoming shots of the exterior! Nothing too glamorous, but progress nonetheless.

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...