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

Refreshing, Rain, Races

Hi!

A few things I've noticed this week.

PAUL NEWMAN passed away this weekend. Of all his many movies, I think I only saw "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" and "The Sting" (both with younger Robert Redford, so I think that's actually why I watched those...). But the truly memorable part of this man's life is just now coming through the articles and postings, now that he's gone. Every article and quote from people who knew him talks about how generous and humble and sincere he was. Glowing reports from his 5 daughters, and he had the same wife for 50 years.(Ok, it was his second wife. But they stayed together 50 years.) His salad dressing line(there are other foods they make, too, but the salad dressing is what I buy) has been around for years, and guess what: all procedes from sales go to charity. Paul Newman has donated over $250 million to charities.

It is so refreshing to read that kind of report on "normal life" of a celebrity. It seems like he was a really good person, an example that we non-celebrities could follow.

RAIN, rain, rain! I don't even think this weekend is rain from a hurricane or tropical storm. It's just a lot of RAIN.
(Clipart photo, BTW) It' makes you appreciate umbrellas, I suppose! Or not. Many people just don't notice it, or seem to...while we are fumbling with our umbrellas at the front entrance of Home Depot to leave, other people just walk right out into it, to their car. What's a little rain? This is why New England is so green.

LEAVES are just barely starting to change colors. You'll see green, green, then all of a sudden there's a tree or group of trees that are mostly vibrant RED or YELLOW. This is just a ClipArt photo from Microsoft Word.Soon, I'll take some pictures of fall leaves HERE, when they change colors a little more, and when the sun comes out again!

CROSS-COUNTRY. David has been practicing and running in cross-country meets with the middle school here. Having never been involved in this sport, these meets are new to me! Here is the overview: they map out the route they will run, around school buildings, around soccer fields, through streets of the surrounding neighborhood, for 1.6 miles. They start and finish at the same line. When the bus brings the other school team, they all walk the course so they know where to go (whether the kids pay attention or not, is up to them...once or twice, I have seen a couple of kids start to loop the wrong direction around the field, then a bystander notices, and turns them around the right way).

Boys and girls run separately. They alternate who goes first each meet. Everybody starts the race at the same time. They space themselves out pretty quickly, the faster ones take off and they all run at their own pace for the rest of the race. Here is one of David at the start line, with all the other boys from both teams:

David has done really well in the first 2 meets. He came in 8th place (out of 44--7th and 8th grade boys)for the first meet, and 6th place for the 2nd meet last week. There's another one scheduled for tomorrow, at a different middle school.

Have a glorious week! Love, Kari

Visiting Plymouth

Hi!

A few weeks ago we went to Plymouth, Massachusetts, about an hour from here. They have homes from the 1600's, memorial statues and parks, and a replica of the Mayflower!
They call this replica the Mayflower II, and it was built in 1957 in Plymouth, ENGLAND (did you know there was a Plymouth, England?).
Then they actually sailed this ship, the same route as the original, from Plymouth, England to Plymouth, Massachusetts! Fantastic. We walked around the ship and talked to a crew member, learning about life on the ship.

I especially liked this leather pitcher: it's pliable, like leather shoes--you can bend it in or out, but it's watertight!

Then there is FOOD on the ship. When you haven't seen land for weeks, food on a ship in the 17th century could be decent or tolerable, or it could be downright nightmarish. Here is what I found to be a literary masterpiece: one sailor's journal entry depicting nightmarish ship food. (click on it to enlarge...)We also walked to Plymouth Rock, which is just that: a rock! It's in a cage to protect it from overly-zealous tourists, I am sure. This cage is also under construction...of course! Here is Frank, filming through the scaffolding.

Etched upon this rock is the year "1620," but in general the rock itself is rather anti-climactic. One gentleman recorded: Following our afternoon full of history and lots of walking, the kids were ready for...of course, races rolling down the hill? (There weren't THAT many cars...)

All in all, a lovely day.

9/11 a Week Late

Hello--

I couldn't miss the chance to post a 9/11 blog, a week late. I found out that the people here feel an especially close connection to the tragedies of that day, because the flights that crashed into the Twin Towers departed from Boston that morning 7 years ago. Previously, I had not paid attention to this fact.

Until we move into our house (we have another month in this apartment: mid-October), I drive the kids to and from school each day. The schools are 2 small towns over from our apartment, about 20 minutes each way. Timing is a little off, though: Kara's Elementary School starts a full hour after the Middle School! This gives us some "together time" in between. Daily we drive past a big park in Weston, the small town before "our town," Wayland.

Weston put up flags in the park, one for each person who died on September 11, 2001. Kara and I walked through the park and counted flags, the length and width of the rectangle, a couple of days ago. 3000 flags. Here are a few shots I took on Monday.





(Here's an unplanned irony that I just noticed: I didn't even ask Kara to wear her flag shirt, but she wore it that morning! Very appropriate.)

It was a beautiful display.