Cliff-face flower

There hasn’t been a lot of work done on the house lately.  Mostly we’ve been saving money to get the tree removed.  We’ve made it through the permit process, now we just need to get the people out to get it out.  Our neighbor wants to work some sort of deal with his friend that will mill the wood.  Not sure how that will work out.  It will be about $8000 to get the tree removed, so we’ve been cutting spending in other areas.

To get us out and about, Eli and I have started geocaching.  It’s like a treasure hunt-hidden object game-achievement system all rolled into one.  I’ve been enjoying it thoroughly.  So far it has led us to some very beautiful areas that I never knew existed.  I can already tell my future vacations are going to have some geocaching worked into them…

More pictures behind the read more cut.

Eli across a park near campus

Searching for a cache

As a visual reminder, I’m re-posting some of the images from early on, so you can see how much nicer it is now!  Up first is a back to back comparison of then and now.

Ugly carpet, bad color, half-completed moulding

Pretty hardwood, pretty color, happy kitties

First we ripped up the carpet.  We knew there were nice floors underneath, but I had no idea what a huge difference it would make in the feel of the room!

You can see the half-done crown moulding here

Next up, ripping out the crown moulding.  After that was done, we had a contractor come in and help us do massive amounts of patchwork on the walls.  We ended up re-texturing one wall because the previous texture job was so hideous.

New textured wall

We lived with it looking like this for longer than I would have liked, but finally I got a chance to get in and primer the whole thing.

After one coat of primer

And finally, with the creamy yellow color (Behr - Provence Creme) and the cats happy on the new (to us) furniture.  A new color, AND a place to sit, it’s almost like this is turning into a real place to live!

Creamy yellow + sunlight = happy room!

Their favorite perch for looking at how much laundry there is to do

I’ll have a post up later with before and after pictures of the living room, but you’ll see a sneak peak if you follow the read more link.

Kita helping me paint

Co-existing (check out the new wall color!)

Tally relaxing (This picture cracks me up)

Me in front of World of Disney

Eli and the Giant Nitrogen

We took the red-eye out to NYC and arrived at around 7a. Neither of us were able to sleep so we were pretty exhausted. We dropped our bags off at the hotel and started wandering around checking out the sites. The first thing we noticed is that a number of corners had large tanks of liquid nitrogen sitting near the crosswalks.

According to some research done by my facebook friends, the nitrogen is used to keep moisture out of the electricity lines, or something like that.

After debating whether the liquid nitrogen was around for when you had instant ice cream needs, we went to Rockefeller Center and Nintendo World, and stopped in at the M&M store where I’m pretty sure they blow chocolate smell at the doors. They also had a wall devoted to every color of M&M you could possibly get. We almost got some black M&Ms just because, but in the end, common sense won out.

Eli in front of the M&M wall

We also got tickets to see Avenue Q that evening which was a fantastic show! Not recommended for the non-raucous among us (I’m looking at you, mom) but it’s good fun if you don’t mind some irreverent humor.

The next day the temperature kept dropping, and neither of us had brought hats. We wandered around until I found the most ridiculous hat I could find, which you can see in the first picture. Pink with pompom and ear flap braids! One of Eli’s aunts mentioned that I looked 11. I took that as a complement.

This was the day we hit up the World of Disney store which was HUGE. The top floor was the best, with original artwork based on Disney works. All of it was way out of my price range, but there were many beautiful pieces.

Eli in front of World of Disney

That evening was the family dinner at an Italian restaurant near the hotel. It was excellent food, although I can’t remember what it was called. It was really nice seeing the whole family and I have to admit I enjoy watching the family interact.

What's this white stuff?

On Sunday, we had the large birthday party. A number of jazz musicians perform, and there is catered food for the event. This year it was smoother than any previous year which was fantastic. While the party was ending, it began snowing and we heard news that there was a blizzard heading our way.

The next morning, the snow was piled up, although we never got the full brunt of the blizzard. Being Californians, Eli and I had to go play in the snow!

No idea.

After roaming around a while we headed to the airport. Our flight was severely delayed because of the snow, but we managed to finally make it home at 2a. It was a fantastic trip and I loved getting to see everyone again. And the snow was pretty awesome, too!

I snapped some pictures of some of the blossoms in our garden.  Help identifying the plants would be welcome!

Camellia?

I know this is a rose

Apple blossoms?

Another shot

No clue

When we bought the house, the color was a very dark blue. When you’d turn on the light, it felt like the light was being swallowed up.

Dark room

I fussed about trying to pick a color for ages.  I knew I’d have to keep the color very light due to the lack of natural light the room gets.  Having to stick to pastels made it more difficult for me.  I decided to delay by primering the room, which it would need since the original color was so dark.

Primered

Once that was done, I had no choice but to come up with something.  Finally I just went for it and grabbed a gallon of Behr’s Water Mark.  It wasn’t even close to the original colors I was thinking about, but I’m actually quite happy with it.   It looks like a very light robin’s egg blue.

Behr - Water Mark

As you can see, it’s lightened up the room a lot.  I finished off the trim work tonight, and tomorrow I’ll see if I need to touch up anywhere.  If not, that’s one room *gasp* DONE!  And we can start moving in!

Next up, living room, I think.

Half-pruned

I also have been working slowly on the potato vine growing up our back deck.  There’s quite a lot of dead stuff underneath the live vines.  This makes it so you only really see the dead stuff when you’re on the deck.  It’s all tangled up and difficult to get to, so it’s been slow going, but I’ve made progress.  Here’s a close-up of the dead stuff as seen from inside the deck.

Dead undergrowth

This is the old view from outside the deck.  Some of the dead stuff is visible even from this side.  It’s a lot worse in person.

Original view

I’ve finished pruning most of the vines that are working their way across the deck.  The stuff near the roots is taking a long time.

Pruned vines

Green waste gets taken on Tuesday morning, so hopefully I can get more work done later this week!

Patching - Early stages

In the living room, we had a few places that needed patching.  Millou (our agent) recommended Peter as the master texture/patching guy.  He came by on Thursday, and I showed him what needed to be done.

On Friday I left him in the house and when I came back, I found a lot more patching than I realized was required.  (Our sheet rock is starting to buckle and seperate, and these places needed to be scraped and patched.)

I talked to Peter about the HORRIBLE texture on one of the living room walls.  It had large horizontal grooves and generally looked poopy.  After talking to Peter, he said that it wouldn’t be much more work to mud that wall and redo the texture.  I asked him if he would show me how to  do it, so maybe eventually I could do it on my own in the kitchen.  He was very obliging, and that’s how I ended up mudding the crappy looking wall.  I’m beginning to see how these things grow out of control..

First layer of mud

Saturday involved the second layer of mud and retexturing the patches and the wall.  Talk about things having to look worse before looking better!  I have loads of pictures of the work, as well as a picture of Peter, my mudding teacher and the texturing expert.

Patching after bein textured and blended

The new, uncrappy texture

Peter, the mastah

Old, crappy texture

The front room is now ready for priming, so soon it will look great instead of patchwork.  I can’t wait!

My parents came to visit this weekend which was great! I was in the middle of TSP-ing the walls in the back bedroom, and I was more than happy to take a break. I was really happy they’d taken the time to come visit and it was fun showing them the house. I’m pretty sure they think we’re insane now that they’ve seen it, but I’m also pretty sure my insanity is not news.

Small paint swatches

So I’ll start off with the quickest updates. We’re trying more paint colors on the exterior of the house. The house is starting to look pretty patchwork at this point.  However, we narrowed it down to three colors from there and tried them in bigger swatches. And now it’s narrowed down to two!  Which is your favorite, the deep blue at the bottom middle (Benjamin Moore - van deusen blue), the blue green on the left side under the window (Sherwin Williams - Studio Blue Green), or the olive green on the right(Fuller O’Brein - custom color)?

Large paint swatches

The bank was talking to the title company to see how they could reverse the recording process, and in the end we decided this just wasn’t worth the time, so we signed their stupid paper. I suppose if it comes down to it, and we gave up some right we needed, we can say we signed under duress.

Eli was gone from Thursday to Sunday due to his grandmother’s funeral.

Friday, the washer and dryer were delivered. The installer took a look at where we wanted the washer and dryer and pointed out that there was nowhere for the washer drain hose to connect to. Oops. I also removed the old carpet from the garage add-on. No staples to remove, thank goodness!

Saturday, our agent and her husband came over to help a bit with stuff around the house. Her husband is a contractor, so he was able to quickly take care of some of the little things. He shaved the bottom of the bathroom door so it would close easily (it was scraping against the tile before), fixed a bit of roofing above the addition in the garage, and took a look at the washer drainage problem. We noticed a place on the wall that was patched, and when we cut it out, we found the drainage pipe. Phew. He also hauled away the rest of our gross carpet.

After that I went to a Do-It-Herself workshop at Home Depot. It wasn’t much new information for me (although they did talk about how you could use a Dremel to carve a pumpkin which seemed to excite most everyone there) but I did get to try using a jigsaw and an impact driver.

Sunday, Eli came back, yay! It was hard doing things around the house without him.

Monday we met with the mudding guy who is going to fix up some of the holes in our wall. I’m hoping to be there when he does the work so I can learn how to do it myself. He said he would stop by Tuesday to fix up things. The plumber who was supposed to fix our drainage pipe for the washer didn’t show up.

Tuesday (yesterday), the mudding guy didn’t show up, although he did call and let me know he wouldn’t be able to make it until today. It was Eli’s birthday, so I took him out to dinner and he said he wanted to work on the house. Wow, how times change! I pulled off the 1/4 round base moulding that was only installed in half the living room (what IS it about the previous owners and moulding??) Then we started cleaning every surface we could reach in hopes we could finally conquer the leftover animal smell in the house. I left at around 10p, and Eli was still cleaning.

I apologize for the lack of pictures, I’ll try to make it up next post!