Kitchen Adventures

Hello!

Well it's Sunday, and it's only been a few days, even though it feels like it's been a month or a year since I wrote last!

Remodeling a kitchen/master bath/and building a closet space where there was none, has been very enlightening to me. So many thousands of details, steps that have to happen before other steps can take place. So many inspections each step of the way! Plumbing, electric, occupation permits (so you can live in it).

Friday I found out there is actually an "Insulation Inspection." The guy comes to look at the insulation. Hmmm.

The dusty, dirty part is trying to live in it right now. Every day I mop after they all leave, wipe things down and they still seem gritty. Heaven forbid any of us go barefoot anywhere. I have to believe we will like it when it is done! I keep telling myself that, anyway.

Here are a few "before and during" photos of the kitchen. (You can click on them to enlarge.) We are closing the wall where the former door and window were, and opening up the opposite wall to make a 1/2 wall/peninsula.

Here are the "before" photos...it's very nice, it has been very well-maintained. It's simply SMALL. There are a VERY small amount of cupboards and countertop space.

Notice: the "L" shape of countertop you see in the last photo, with the sink side and right by the refrigerator, is ALL the counterspace there is, in the whole kitchen.

NOW, fast-forward to the demolition stage, where we wall-in that door and window, move the refrigerator and stove to different walls, and cut down the wall on the Dining Room side, to make a 1/2-wall peninsula instead.



Now, add insulation for the "Insulation Inspector" to sign off...

Now, add the board to make walls! You can see where the peninsula will be, with raised 2nd countertop...

I guess I've gone a little overboard with the photos, but this has been SUCH an education for me! I had no idea there were so many steps, what had to happen first, etc., etc. Saturday morning the plasterer came. Incredibly dusty part of the job, I can't believe how everything was coated with this stuff. Here are some photos of the kitchen after he came:

Now you see it as it is today. The cabinets will be delivered Thursday, but the moving truck with all our stuff & furniture comes tomorrow, Monday.




We'll get there, eventually. Let the chaos continue! :)Love, Kari

Garage Challenge

Hello!

It is Monday again. We are in our house, just not with all of our stuff! We are sleeping on air mattresses and have "some" of our stuff. We'll get furniture & the rest in about a week.

Meanwhile, we are working on Home Improvement Projects. BEWARE: In an older home, this is dangerous ground upon which to tread! "Let's re-do the kitchen" turns into "look, the ceiling is also cracked here and into the living room: we could re-plaster and paint the whole ceiling while we're doing that." Take down the kitchen cabinets, to reveal that there is no insulation in 1/2 of it, and rotten wood beneath the siding.

We are currently living with a torn-out kitchen and master bathroom upstairs. I can use the appliances, when I choose to wipe off the thick layer of dust first. NEXT blog, I'll show you "before" and "during" photos of those.

TODAY's blog, however, is to pat ourselves on the back (well mostly Frank, but we all helped) for ONE successful project!

We start out with the garage. This seems like a strange place to start, I hear you say under your breath? Well, it would SEEM so. BUT. We need the storage space in the garage, to put camping gear, canned and boxed foods, Christmas decorations... just all around "stuff."

This garage, built in 1950, had accumulated 58 years of YUK. The cement of the walls and floor was black with oil and who knows what else. Old cabinets on the walls were mildewy and smelly. I could imagine sending a child into the garage to retrieve an item, followed by my additional instruction, "And DON'T TOUCH ANYTHING ELSE in there!" Eeeww.

So. This project takes over a week of late evenings, and a full Saturday. Frank removes smelly cabinets and other miscellaneous debris. He scrubs the cement of the floor and walls with cleansers, oil removers, etching acid--anything Home Depot has to sell, he buys to try to clean that cement. I think he scrubs the same "worst" area 3 nights in a row.

When it seems acceptable, and he thinks paint will actually stick to the now-much-cleaner cement, we use the seals-out-moisture type of paint. The kids and I paint with rollers the 1st 2 coats on the walls, and then Frank tries out his new toy, a paint sprayer, and does a final coat and the ceiling.

THEN, the floor. We have the sales guy come out from Home Depot, with his samples and pictures of the epoxy-paint-sealer you can have them put on the concrete floor. It looks really nice, lasts for years and years, and it's also quite expensive. Frank looks at all the information after the sales presentation and says, "We can do this."

I groan a little, never having done this before! But I agree to try. With step-by-step instructions, and a DVD showing the Very Happy Lady doing Very Easy Work, can we mess it up that badly?

It turns out that we do okay! Here is the final result.

Before Yukky Corner, After Yukky Corner:
Bonus: by doing it ourselves we save about $2500. Now my kids will not be afraid to go into the garage.

Happy week-before-Halloween! Love, Kari

Autumn at its Peak

Hello!

Another week gone by...feels like a month, but I'm getting used to that! This is an Autumn Colors post.

I have been driving around with my camera in the car, stopping where I can to take a photo or two. I can't adequately describe how amazing it is to drive around with all these huge, majestic trees, each one at a different stage of changing colors.
You have green, of the evergreen Pines and the oaks and maples that have NOT changed color yet. Then turn a corner and WOW--here is a tree seemingly on fire, bright orange or red with the sun shining on it.

Educational Moments for me...

First: trees have their own individual timing of changing colors. They don't all change within the same day or week.

Second: some trees change from the top, down! This makes sense when you consider it. Think of a tree that is 10 or 12 stories tall: 120 feet into the air. The night air at the top is actually colder than the air at the bottom. The leaves higher up will change sooner.

So, as I drive around, I see multi-colored trees, top to bottom, AND stretches of green trees interspersed with quick spurts of vibrance, in yellows, oranges, and reds. It's just beautiful.

OK, and here's an interesting one: Frank took this photo of a tree by Brandeis University on the way home. The VINE is wrapped around the branches of this tree, and the VINE has turned red. The tree itself, however, has not yet changed leaf colors. So the tree leaves are green, and you can also see red leaves, which belong to the vine on the branches. (You can see it better if you click on it to enlarge.)
Have a great week! Love, Kari

Homeowners and Tourists

Hi!

It's been a week! I'm not sure if I should say "it has flown by," or "it feels like one week has actually been 6 months long...?" Either way, I'm beat.

OK, way too much is going on in life right now. We closed on the house last Monday (yippee, cheer, throw streamers and confetti, play your favorite music REALLY LOUD)!

Our stuff gets delivered October 14th, so we'll actually "move in" in about 8 days. This means we have about 8 more days to do any work we can on the house while it is empty. Much easier than when it's full! Of course all our projects cannot be completed in a mere 8 days, but we will do what we can.
Frank has been spending every night over there, with one to four other family members with him. All the little fixes are too lengthy to list. MAJOR changes will include kitchen remodel, master bath remodel, add a closet to the front room where there was none, and re-claim the large garage from 40 years of oil, exhaust, rust, mildewy cabinets, etc. This home was built in 1950.

I'll show you before/after pics when we are to the "after" point! Ha.

Meanwhile, Mom came to visit this week! She booked a "fall foliage tour" months ago, and it started today. Of course we THOUGHT we'd be all settled in a house by now! All the best-laid plans...

We have been able to squeeze in a LITTLE sight-seeing, amongst cross-country meets, field trips, and of course camping out at Home Depot, staring at floor tiles.

Frank's co-worker Andre, from Brazil, is also visiting for a conference. He's never been to the U.S., so we tried to give him a smattering of sight-seeing, of his choice, of course.

Saturday two of our tours were Fenway Park and Harvard, so THAT is what you get this week!

FENWAY PARK. I am not even a huge baseball fan, but this was a very entertaining and interesting tour!
There is quite a history, here at the oldest ball park stadium, home of the Boston Red Sox.
Also there is a WILDLY intense rivalry between the Red Sox, and the New York Yankees and their sadly disillusioned fans. One funny "lone red chair" is in the bleachers (the rest are green), to mark where a man sat in the 1940's, when a home run ball hit him in the head at something like 510 feet! Knocked him out cold for 2 minutes. He was a Yankees fan and converted, after he got bonked in the head.

HARVARD UNIVERSITY. (I just thought it would be a lot bigger!) Very nice, very stately, very expensive.
I liked the courtyard "Harvard Yard," and the huge library with columns. We would have liked to see their 52 MILES of bookshelves, but once inside the front doors we were met with this sign: (I think the intellectual, emotional and monetary stress involved in getting that "Harvard ID" is a little more than I'm willing to pay right now...we are content to see it through the window, from the outside!)
Have a great week! Kari