Day 2 - Project Helpers

It works sort of like this: Erin, me, Kevin, Neal, Mom, Dad, and Mark. Seven people. Working for about seven hours. That's forty-nine hours of work, which would have taken Erin and me almost twenty-five days to finish by ourselves. Hooray for friends and family.

We got the carpet out last night and spent all day pulling out those dang carpet tack boards and pad staples.

The upstairs master bedroom, clear of carpet, ready for paint.

Erin starts out the painting. The master will be green.

Weeds beware! Mom and Dad will rip you from your homes, shake you violently, and stuff you into a garbage bag to rot in the spring sun.

Among other things, Neal and Kevin helped Erin paint the second upstairs bedroom.

Lots more to do tomorrow. A second coat of paint, a lot more weeding, maybe some transplanting from the old house. We'll see. And we'll keep ya posted.

Day 1- Project Carpet!

We got our keys today to our new house! We didn't waste any time getting to work. After doing our walk through and reorienting ourselves with our new home, we got down to buisiness.

Brindzi seems excited for her new home! She sniffed out all the spots.

We opened all the windows and doors to get some fresh air in. The carpet is in really good shape but due to my allergies, its got to go.

Up it comes...

And look...wood floors underneath. No tar, no linoleum, but some kind of paint around the edges. They will have to be refinished but it was easier than we expected.

We are super excited that we don't have to pull up tar and other nasty things on the floor. We can get right to the sanding.

We did find some funky linoleum in the hallways. Wow its the 70s again!

We have to figure out what to do with this spot. The wood just stops where they added onto the house. Should we replace the whole hall or keep it and add the new floors from this point.

We ordered our new floors today. Antiqued Natural Oak floors. They are 5'' wide and have a hand scraped look. They should look pretty good!

We will keep you posted with all our pictures as we go. Next will be taking out the carpet tacks, gardening, and painting!

Tomorrow is bigger than today

One more day--oh my god!

We signed our foot-high stack of papers yesterday, and we should get our keys to the new house tomorrow. Tomorrow! Holy geez.

Our renters are all lined up for the old house, starting in mid-May. Plenty of time for us to shift our stuff slowly.

For the next week it's pulling up carpet and gardening and painting. And lots of helpers! And pictures for the blog! Yow!

Oh, and listening to the Mariners. Go Barristers!

craigslist is the most powerful advertising tool on the planet

Or, at least it gave us plenty to stress about.

We've had nearly twenty calls or emails of interest from our craigslist posting for renting our house. Way overwhelming. We have shown the house to two couples, and will show it to a third on Friday.

Almost half of the interested parties are from out-of-state, something we weren't expecting. A lot of them actually seem more serious than the local callers.

We're doing credit checks and taking applications, trying to do everything the way we're supposed to. There's a lot to think about. Too much. But I think we're close to getting it all squared away. Hopefully. At least, we have some promising applicants and are looking forward to trying to get a lease signed with them.

Anyway. Renting a house is stressful. Is that a surprise? Not really, I guess. But it is...er...stressful!

Yikes!

Yeaugh! We got so many calls and emails we took the posting off craigslist! So now you can't see it anymore!

Inspection done, now we just wait....

Ok... so we had our inspection yesterday. Everything is sound! So I took some more pictures of the inside. Of course I put them on the blog in backwards order...so it would be best for you to start at the end and go back up, that is if you want to move through the house in some form of order. They might seem random but I tried to go through the house in order from room to room. Also, we haven't figured out how to rotate some of the pictures and have them stay rotated, so sorry for some of the sideways pictures.

START AT THE BOTTOM FIRST!

Front walk way, looking southwest.

Entrance to storage!

Storage!!!!

View from upstairs window out to front walk way.

Windows facing north in small bedroom.

Upstairs hallway. Master bedroom on the right, small bedroom on the left.

Upstairs bathroom.

Master bedroom looking out towards hall with bathroom and other small bedroom.

Master bedroom. Windows face south.

More wood paneling and stairs...

Ugly wood panel room. This is the room is a funny entrance room, with the sliding glass door, stairs, and right off the living room.

Front door. That window faces south.

View of fireplace in living room and front door.

View of dinning room from the living room. Kitchen through the door on the right.

Downstairs bathroom.

Looking down the downstairs hallway. TV room is to the left, bedroom to the right. Bathroom to the left, closet to the right.

Downstairs bedroom across the hall from the TV room. Left window faces east, right window faces south. Love the floral...should we ask to keep it?

TV room. Window faces east.

Looking into the room below from the dinning room and the door to the hallway.

Same room as below, looking outside to the east and the door to the TV room.

Same room as below. Looking at water heater.

Looking out into the dinning room. This is a room that has two doors- one to dinning room and then one to the TV room.

Looking out to back door and bathroom off of kitchen.

Those windows face out to the west.

That door leads to the laundry room from the kitchen. Country kitchen!

Inside laundry room/back entrance into the kitchen.

View of out building/chicken shed. Just left of the picture below. Notice the apple tree!

Just to the left of picture below.

View of garden looking south from the back entrance and back of garage.

View of the back entrance to the garden.

Now we are around the back entrance. That is the laundry room and the back out building in the back.

View of front of house, just right of the front door. Notice the odd placement of the sliding glass door. This is the southside of the house

View of detached garage and entrance to garden from the front walkway. Looking north east.

Holy cow!

Some people know, but we've been doing a little house shopping the last few weeks. This weekend we went and did it. Bought a new house. What!?

Pending inspection, of course, and all that. It's got a great huge yard/garden area, a shop, a small garage, and plenty, plenty of space inside. Lots of sunlight. The things we really wanted. Anyway. Very exciting and also sort of Freak out! Okay...mostly freak out. Because Gah! We just bought a house!

We brought eight people over to look at the house today, before we heard if our offer was accepted. We tromped about and talked it over and discussed pros and cons and proish cons and connish pros. It has lots of cosmetic projects for us to work on. Lots of weeding to do. Lots of rocks to pick up. One room of ugly wood paneling to discard. But it has room for: Working on bikes! Waxing skis! A chest freezer! More bikes! A table saw!

Gah!

Plus, we won our soccer game today, after losing three in a row.

Holy cow! House! Geh!

To honor our Presidents, we leave the country!

We headed to the great white North this weekend, and it was great, white, and North, just like they say it is!

Last year we went to Leavenworth with our friends Jill and Paul and Kevin and Becky, for some cross-country skiing, game playing, and fun, over the midwinter break. It's tradition now. So this year we ventured to Mount Washington, on Vancouver Island, for much of the same. And we added more friends: Julie and Jerry and Matt and Aubrey, though we had to subtract Kevin.

And it's like this: Mount Washington would be a great place if one didn't have to cross a border and take a 2+ hour ferry to get there. As is, it will have to settle for really nice.

Four or Six Sentences for Each Day

(1.1) I left early with Julie and Jerry, blew through the border, caught the ferry, and rolled slowly through the fog into the parking lot at about 6 pm. (1.2) We ate dinner, and I won at Hearts. (1.3) Julie and Jerry went to bed. (1.4) I waited up until about 1 am for Erin and Becky, who got stuck at the border but would have made their ferry, had it not broken down, and for Jill, Paul, Matt, and Aubrey, who got stuck at the border and wouldn't have made the ferry, though it didn't matter since it broke down.

(2.1) We woke up late, had super scrambled eggs, and walked to the cross country ski trails. (2.2) It was snowing like crazy. (2.3) It was blowing like crazy. (2.4) We classic skied for about an hour. (2.5) We trekked back to the cabin. (2.6) We were soaking wet, and cold, and had crock-pot chili for dinner.

(3.1) We were worried that we'd have another awful day, but when we got up we could see blue skies and fresh snow. (3.2) We got out a little earlier, drove to the trails, and decided to go on a 12km black diamond lake loop on the skate skis. (3.3) We are not yet good on skate skis. (3.4) Black diamond cross-country ski trails have lots of uphills. (3.5) Uphills on skate skis are hard. (3.6) We nearly died, and Erin's hip flexors nearly exploded, though I perfected the single pole V2 style, and we headed back to the cabin, exhausted, exhilarated, and wishing we had taken the blue trails instead.

(4.1) The return travel day, we cleaned a bit and left the cabin at 9:50, about 50 minutes earlier than I wanted to (overruled). (4.2) We arrived at the ferry terminal about one hour and 45 minutes early ([4.2.1] Erin refused to acknowledge my superior time insight). (4.3) We learned a fun new Russian card game. (4.4) We won the neck-and-neck race through the US border, came home to a grateful Gryffin and Brindzi, and enjoyed the last few hours of a fun-crammed weekend.

Three Pictures from One Day

The view across the valley from our cabin. The day before, we could hardly see past the railing.

Trying to work that V2, which is especially hard when you're dead tired from 5km of uphills, with 5km still to go.

Erin and Jill enjoy posing by the lake after--yep--another long uphill. And they still look happy!

Must...write...post...

Erin says I have to.

The snow is all melted. We had a good run. Actually, all the ridiculousness made last week the longest four-day week ever, and I'm actually glad to have a somewhat ordinary week again. Except for the reschedule of our winded-out-but-not-winded-out Christmas concert. Someday life will be normal again. And then it will probably snow again.

We've been out on the new skate skis a couple of times, on the dog-friendly trail. Skate skis are fast, even when you're not good on them! And we brought Brindzi's new dog pack. She loves it, though we learned some things:

1. Do not put crackers in the dog pack.
2. Do not put soft, squishy cheese in the dog pack.
3. Do not put the camera in the same pocket as the soft, squishy cheese...in the dog pack.

These things we learned when Brindzi decided to roll around in the snow and crush all of our crackers and mush our cheese into our camera. However, the dog pack is great for hard things like water bottles, carrots, and for future reference, soft things inside of hard things, like tupperware.

I want to ride my bicycle.

Our soccer team is on an epic nine-game winning streak, including an easy win over our rivals Sterling FC last Sunday. But don't tell anyone. You'll jinx us.

Only about 70 days until the Mariners' season starts.

And I let Brindzi on the futon. Sigh.

I'm dreaming of a white day-after-Christmas...

Hello from New Hampshire. Some snow finally fell here on Christmas night, and proceeded to turn to slush. We didn't even bother bringing our skis out, there're no tracks to be made.

Still, it's nice to see some of the white stuff on the ground, even if it's too soggy to play in and too thin to ski on. It's been a very Western Washingtonish winter in most of the East this year, while we got our little Thanksgiving blast.

I'm typing on a new computer. Can you tell? We've turned Apple, and I'm experiencing some frustration with the learning curve. I'll figure it out.

We hope everyone's holidays have been relaxing and engaging! Ours has!

How's that crossword coming? Too hard?