Work Begins Again

Finally, yesterday we had workmen at the house again. I don't think I mentioned it but we've had a break in construction and almost nothing has happened since we moved in at the beginning of the month. The problem was with Prospect Mortgage - even after we finally got through closing, they held us up again. They were selling our mortgage but I guess needed a full month to dress it up nice and pretty so that Bank of America would take it. Then, Prospect doesn't service FHA 203k Renovation loans like ours, only make them, so we weren't able to get any money for our contractor until after the sale and the two weeks processing time for B of A. But last Thursday we received the check for the nearly $30,000 our contractor was waiting for and we are all happy again.

On Monday, the men started work on the new porch for the front. Here's a picture of what we've had for the past month.

And here we are this morning.

They'll be pouring concrete into the forms today, I think, and according to Abel, we may even have stairs and a platform in front of our door by the weekend. Other work they did yesterday included moving some electrical switches to above-counter positions for when we have a proper kitchen and refitting the bathroom door. And, yes, it was awkward when family visited one afternoon two weekends ago. But we have the door now. I tried taking a shower with it shut and the fan on yesterday for the first time and I've seen much steamier rooms after a shower. The mirror was even usable.

Then, as for the garden - I have finally found my camera charger so I'll give you some updates. I'm not sure what day it was exactly but just before we moved into the house, I'll just say on 7/25, I planted a flat of new seeds. I kept forgetting to take pictures so you get to see them a month into growing. The seeds I ordered are all fast growing perennials so hopefully I can have them all flowering throughout the yard next spring. First, a picture of the little sprout, then the advertised plant:

Gazania Daybreak

I don't "love" Gazania but I'm giving them a chance. They're supposed to grow like crazy but not spread much so I think they'll be a good first stage plant even if I don't keep them. My parents have two of them so I know they're fast and very tough.

Lavender Lady

My third type of Lavender, hopefully they turn out as pretty as the pictures. I only have one type of lavender blooming right now and it's not the type I like, I'll probably get rid of it once the others start blooming.

Catmint Blue Carpet

Oh I can't wait for the blooms on these, such a beautiful blue. Stiggy might even like them, I get so many conflicting descriptions - some say Catmint isn't actually attractive to cats and some say it is. Regardless, this one I'll be carefully splitting into tons of plants, I want them all over the garden.

Festuca Glauca

These are one of my favorites - they need very little water, have a beautiful color, and very pretty seedheads. I planted one in my father's yard four years ago and we split it this summer into about 15 little ones.

Lambs' Ears
Ever since Patrick first saw this plant at the UC Botanical Garden, he's loved it. I can't think of another plant that he has really said he loved so I had to grow these for him. I love them too, they have the softest velvety leaves and they take almost no water.

Roman Chamomile

I just love the smell of chamomile and apparently ants do to, as they were swarming all over my hands when I split one of the pots last week.

I have all the little seedlings in little 3 or 4 inch pots in large rectangular flats out on the patio. They get pretty much full sun so they're all growing so much faster and looking much more healthy than the seeds I started at the condo. I just add water to the flat every two or three days and they don't seem to need anything. I'll just have to split them up soon into more pots so they don't strangle each other.

And now, I know the post has had too many pictures, but I have to add a couple very pretty shots of new roses we have in the garden. We're neither of us rose people but we bought so many established ones with the house that I'm trying to rehabilitate them. Everything else is weeds so these roses make me quite happy.

After the Move

So we've been in the house now for just over two weeks and have been able to use our three weekends so far to bring a bit of order to the inside of the house. The outside may still have a lot of construction materials and a very bad looking propped up porch roof, but the inside is organized. (mostly).

Here is our living room the best looking area of the house at the moment. It looks much smaller and more crowded than it really is, partly because I wanted to have the sofas facing each other but not blocking the dining room entry. I really need to get a nice fish eye lens for my camera so it can look like we're living in a mansion. But it really does look smaller than it is.

And here is the beautifully refinished floor that I told you about. So many great lines and colors throughout the wood, it's the exact texture and color I would have wanted if I could have chosen new floors.

And here is the old old heater (or do you call it a furnace maybe?) in between the living and dining room. It may look its age and have a bit of paint on it from the previous owners poor painting jobs but it actually works. Without any modification. Although you do have to use a pair of pliers to turn it on because while there probably was a knob connected to it once, it certainly isn't there now. That goes on the search list - after all, it's an interesting piece and it will look nice once we clean it and paint it a nice nearly black color. Not to mention, best make it look nice and functional as it would cost thousands to remove it.

Here you see the living room from the dining room (bit of bad lighting in the picture, it's not so yellow). I'll agree with Patrick here that the sofa does not look good from this angle, blocking the passage, but it's the best place we can put it. Eventually we'll get a nice comfy chair for that corner and get rid of the loveseat. The blur around the light from the window shows our cheap one dollar shades from home depot. They really don't look bad. Certainly better than some pictures I've seen with sheets pinned up over the window. Once we repair the cracks in the walls and repaint, we'll chose curtains to go with the new colors.

Now, I won't show you another angle of the dining room because, really, there's nothing more to see except the still badly finished built-in and Patrick's messy electric piano.

The bathroom, however, is coming along - compared to the gutted hole from before. We have all the necessities - which is nice as I swore when I first saw that port-a-pottie in our yard that I would never use it. We have our brand-new clawfoot tub (in the end, after looking everywhere the only reasonable option - and easily the cheapest - was to buy new). You can see our beautiful tile and the old mats from our condo bathroom. You might also be able to see the gaping hole in the wall. That is where the previous owners had a toilet roll holder - our contractor removed it but I guess it took the wall with it. We want to eventually take off the remaining bead board and put up new stuff with a better technique. The other guys just tacked in up and left nail heads visible everywhere. It seems so stupid. I figure use screws at the very top under where the cap will be and at the very bottom under where the baseboard will be. But no accounting for all the crap they did.

Now look at the pictures below to find out what my little Stiggy's favorite thing to do is.

She is a real bathroom cat. The moment I'm even walking to the bathroom, there she is trying to squeeze herself in. And as we don't actually have a door to our bathroom right now, she has free range of it. It's really quite adorable, she's never more affectionate and playful than in the bathroom, she's always been that way. In the picture above she may look like she's just lounging about but she's rolling around and purring like crazy. I just barely got a picture in focus.

Anyway,

Here is the make-do kitchen. We have most of our appliances now, a new refrigerator and dishwasher. We got both at the Sears Outlet in San Leandro and they make me so happy, knowing how cheap they were. You know it's quite odd having a built-in dishwasher without the surrounding cabinet. Can you say over balanced? I'm pulling out the top rack, loading it for the first time and it begins to tilt, and I'm too slow to react so the bottom rack flies out and onto the ground in. Luckily all of the breakables already in the rack were okay. We now have a very heavily filled suitcase sitting on top of it.

See here our make-do oven, range, cabinets, workspace i.e. the table and floor i.e. the cardboard boxes laid about the room. But we've been over to Home Depot and planned out our future kitchen now and maybe this next week one of us will visit our credit union to see if we can get a two or three year loan to make it easier to afford. Our plan is for a kitchen as economical as possible while still looking good for resale.

We had chosen this style with MDF doors but then noticed that the white finish is applied after the door is put together making the corners and edges look really bad, so we changed to the painted maple which felt great under our fingers. It was an upgrade of about $1500 but the MDF was really ugly so I can't imagine the next buyers thanking us for the kitchen remodel. The countertops will definitely be of stone... eventually but to save the $1700-2000 it will cost, we'll put in laminate for about $200 and upgrade in a year or so.

Moving on...

Here's our new back of the kitchen configuration. That new corner houses our water heater, accessible from the outside only. Obviously, our laundry next to that, no pedestal for the dryer yet. But, really, no dryer yet because that one is electric and silly me, we don't have the correct 220 hook-up. So we're currently waiting for a good gas dryer to pop up on the Sears Outlet website in our itchy clothesline clothes. We'll get that one returned when we find the replacement and hopefully we'll get the restocking fee waived by buying the new one in the same place.

Next, our badly badly painted built-ins. I finally started my first DIY project - refinishing our kitchen built-ins. Above you see our first door missing. I used a heat gun to strip off the four layers of paint on the backside of that door - every color horrible to imagine. Then, after getting practice on the back of the door I turned it over and found out that there was only one thin layer of white paint on the outside. So the other owners took care of the nice finished outside of the cabinets up until the last poor paint job. And the wood for the cabinets - now I'm not exactly knowledgeable in this area but I think it looks like a beautiful redwood. You tell me. You can only just see the clean sanded wood in the picture below on the left side door.

These two doors show the progress we've made so far. I stripped the back of the left one to where it looks like the far right side of the right door. The right door is the interior side of one of the doors. I half stipped that with the heat gun and then we tried out a chemical stripper. When I found out that there was only one layer of paint on the outside of the doors, I also found out that the heat gun doesn't work very well on such a thin layer of paint. So as I went on to the next door, Patrick tried to sand off the thin layer which worked pretty well - you can see the smooth sanded middle of the door. Then, he went to get a chemical stripper to see if it would work any better. It was definitely easier - the part surrounding the sanded middle is what we had after two chemical layers were scraped off. He also tried it on the rest of the door that I was peeling and it worked quite well but I prefer using the heat gun I think.

In the closeup you can see the residue of the mushy paint which is left behind after scraping the chemicals off. With some washing I guess it will all come off but I kind of prefer the slow gentle removal using the heat gun. Though as we plan to paint the cabinets white again, we can probably just lightly sand the outside of the doors and cabinets and then repaint (still stripping the inside because there are so many layers).

Also, while I was using the heat gun earlier in the day, I was quite close to the paint on the outside of the house so I got a little curious and aimed the gun at it for half a minute. When it started to get all bubbly I scraped a bit off and found out that the pink isn't original. It seems our house used to be a very nice canary yellow. I would have much preferred that. Not that I've changed my mind - I still want blue in the future.

In the House

So there's been a bit of a break since I last wrote but with good reason. I don't know where my camera is and I hate that I can't put up pictures to show what I'm talking about. But more than that, this weekend we finally moved into the house. The work was right to the wire. We were packing the van with help from two of Patrick's friends in the morning and in the afternoon had all but about three boxes worth of stuff in the house. But come evening, late evening, we still had carpenters and a plumber at the house.

There were quite a few repairs and updates that we were trying to squeeze in before we moved in - mostly for convenience and safety sake. We got the floors refinished - and here is were I'm loathe to describe it because it's nothing without pictures. I saw the finished product on moving day, just finished the night before, and it is gorgeous. A wonderful light mocha brown with a great variety of dark brown grains. It really does assure me of how beautiful the place will be.

So luckily, as we had a lot of boxes and furniture to move, the floor was nice and dry on Saturday. The reason that the carpenters were there was the back door. We didn't have one until Saturday. We arranged when work was started for a little reconfiguring on the backside of the house. I've already mentioned that the three small rooms were combined into one big kitchen and that was part of the original bid but then there was the problem of the laundry area and water heater. The three pieces had originally been hooked up to plumbing in the wall in the middle of what is now the kitchen so they had to be reinstalled and we decided to spend a little extra to make the area really work. We arranged with Abel to have the back door, on the extreme left of the back wall, moved over about 3 feet to accommodate a closet for the water heater that would be accessible from the outside. Next to that in the nook created by the closet and the original kitchen built-ins, the washer and dryer would sit. Well, the washer, because, I forget if I mentioned but the dryer was stolen (I still believe it was the brother who didn't want to sell the house). Anyway, the majority of the work for that project was finished well before Saturday but the back door still needed to be hung and a new functioning security door needed to be installed (the old one didn't function very well, bent in the robbery).

So that's the reason why the carpenters were there but the plumber had even more work to do. He was at the house working until nearly 10PM and the amazing thing to me is that he was still talking that late. He really likes to chat. All I was thinking was God, I want to go inside and fall onto the bed and he wouldn't stop talking. Then, I didn't want to be rude because he'd worked so long that day. Anyway, he had the most work to do. Saturday morning, he still had to install the vanity, the toilet, the washer, and the water heater. Fortunately, he'd already done all the below floor and in wall prep work for those things so it was just the final installation to be done. So he was working all day, right up to 10pm and we ended up with a functioning and hot water for a nice bath in the clawfoot tub.

Next, I'll find my camera and get some pictures in here to illustrate everything.