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.