Happy Anniversary, House!

If it feels like it’s been a while since something has been posted about our favorite past time, you're not imagining it. I’ve been assigned to a big project at work for the better part of the last 6 months. The job has had me out of town just about 2 weeks out of every month – and every week for the next 5 weeks. It’s been really hard to get started on any home projects when I’ve only got about 30-40 hours to hang out with hubby and friends, wash clothes, and repack for the next trip.

This weekend, though, was perfect. I flew home to the most beautiful weather. It’s like Seattle sensed my need to be happy, enjoying perfect outside-in-the-yard-digging-in-the-dirt sunshine. The best thing about this kind of weather is that we finally have a yard to dig around in, plant in, and grow amazing things in. The juniper is gone, the soil has been revitalized, and I'm ready to get my garden on!

This gardening thing is not cheap though. Fortunately, we started out with a lot of stuff already on the property. We had Juniper (which we’ve removed), three cherry trees, an enormous rhododenron, a lilac bush, three beautiful rose bushes, rhubarb, and bulbs covering the entire property (tulips, daffodils, bluebells, lily of the valley, a ton of iris, and many more I don’t even know the name of - including an amazing lily-like flower that blooms in the fall and smells like cotton candy!) On top of all of this, we’ve been given two baby japanese maples, a magnolia tree (it's finally blossoming!), a rose bush, day lilies, crocosmia, peonies, and a juneberry tree.
It seems like a lot, but there is so much empty dirt from where the juniper used to reside that most of the yard feels naked. So a few weekends ago hubby and I hit Sky Nursery for some essentials. Sky is one of the bigger garden stores in the area and apparently they’ve just completed a massive addition and remodel. The place is HUGE. If you’ve got a yard and need stuff to fill it, this is where you need to shop.

The most exciting additions to the yard were a blueberry bush (below), a fig tree, and two kiwi plants (one male and one female - because you have to have a male to polinate and the girlfriend produces the fruit). I am very excited about the fig tree - but think the kiwi is the coolest new addition. Apparently they do very well in the northwest!

I spent a good amount of the weekend finding homes for our newly purchased plants and moving some stuff around. We also started some seeds for the soon-to-be garden boxes which hubby will be designing/building in the next few weeks.

Last, but certainly, not least...today is the one-year anniversary of moving into our little fixer-upper. I can hardly believe that one whole year has already flown by.

Our 'Best of 2009' posting listed pretty much everything we've done so far on the house. But the 'to do' list never ends.

The big things for 2010:

• Finish basement, add bathroom
• Remodel upstairs bathroom
• Paint exterior
• Plant a garden

In the meantime, I'll do my best to juggle work with posting and house projects!

Downstairs Demolition

When we bought our house it was listed as 4 bedrooms and 1 bath. Two of the bedrooms were pseudo-finished basement rooms. They had windows and closets - so it wasn't a stretch to see them as rooms. In fact one of them served temporarily as an actual bedroom for our friend Michael while he was home-hunting! That being said, Michael has a high tolerance for sketchy living spaces (he was a UW frat boy, after all)!!

This is Michael during the ceiling tear-out preparing for the rewiring.
Here's Nic removing piles of torn out knotty pine - with only the bedroom door left standing.

And the grand finale! The bare room. No door. No walls. No ceiling. No more knotty pine. Kind of sad to see it go. I actually asked hubby to save it - just in case we decide to use it somewhere else in the house (ha!). So half of the basement bedrooms are torn out and plans to rebuild and reconfigure are underway. I'm very excited about the edition of a new bathroom downstairs. We've got some really cool ideas - and we'll post floor plans as soon as we can come to a consensus.

Opening a Can of Worms

So I go away for two weeks for a business trip and while I was gone hubby found a gaping hole in our foundation wall. How does this happen? We've been living in this house for over 10 months and we never noticed a HUGE hole in our basement wall? I'll do my best to explain a) how this happened and b) how my super handy rockstar hubby fixed the problem and fast!

The upper left corner of the picture above is showing the northwest corner of our basement. Yes, it's ugly, but I'm actually getting used to the creepy 'haunted house' looking interior of the basement. Someday it will be finished....

So we before this creepy crawler corner of the house was exposed - it was covered by a large floor to ceiling cabinet that had probably inhabited the space for at least 5o years. When the cabinets were ripped out (by hubby and entourage of awesome and equally handy friends) a massive gaping hole was discovered. The picture below shows the daylight seeping into the basement from the outside. The picture further below shows the basement from the outside. Are you kidding?! It's a miracle that our neighbors' rodent problems didn't become ours.

To fix the gaping hole problem, hubby cut a bunch of 2x4s to fit the gaps. To fix the problem of the wood rotting, hubby dug all of the dirt away from the house (dirt against siding and non-cement exterior walls is bad - fyi). Bad boards!

Lastly, here he is, my hero putting primer on the exterior wall board that will go where the siding had rotted. When we paint the house - no one will ever notice!

Before & After (kitchen vent)

Before
After
Since these pictures were taken the vent covers have been painted to match the rest of the cabinets. I'm still not really sure why we needed to hide the vent (since they were behind closed cabinet doors already...) but VOILA!