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!

Gifts Galore

We didn't want to spoil the fun for our family that didn't get our handmade Christmas gifts yet, but this might be too good to wait for.

Early in 2009 we were in Sonoma for the beautiful wedding of Sean and Hollis and saw really cool candle holders made from the sections of wine barrels. So a few months ago hubby bought two wine barrels from the Carlton Winemakers Studio in Oregon (thanks to Tom and France!)and he set out to making his own. Taking apart the barrels was tougher than expected. The rings are all that hold the staves together, but they are held into place by pretty tough tacks. Once he pulled the tacks and tapped all the rings off, the barrel just fell into pieces. It was pretty cool.

He bought a 2-inch drill bit and drilled a place holder for each of the candle holders. Then sanded and stained the top of the wood to make it shiny. The bottom is a beautiful red wine stain, all natural, of course!

We thought they were so cool that we've decided to try our hand at etsy. Take a look at the shop and tell us what you think. If you like, post a comment here.