Live Together, Die Alone

Winter came and left without a peep from me. A LOT of work has been happening since January so I will update you with a few posts over the next few weeks.

Just when I thought we were done with demolition, I forgot about this guy:

That's our laundry closet. If you've never been to our house, let me paint a picture for you about what it's been like doing business with this guy. It's right in Kevin's "bedroom", which actually has no door but is considered a "room" because there is a "closet" in it. (Please don't report me to Unnecessary Quotes, all these quotes are truly necessary). He's been living this way for a few years now so we thought it would be best to officially welcome him to adulthood by giving him a door and closet, and moving the laundry center out of his room and into the addition.

And here she goes:

This is the "closet" in the hallway to Guff's "room". This also had to go in order to make room for our new furnace and water heater.

Bye-bye "closet". The gray plastic square on the floor is a hole to the crawlspace where the furnace will sit.

New furnace. You can see the duct work to the left, which will be inside Kevin's new closet.

Framing. The furnace and water heater will go behind bi-fold doors, and one day we'll finish Kevin's closet and door.

Ain't it a beauty?

So our furnace and water heater used to be in a giant protruding closet in our kitchen. See it behind that giant dog, with the doors and the coat rack? Since we moved the water heater and furnace to the hallway, it's now giving us some much-needed extra storage space. Down the road when we have some more dough and have recovered from this remodel project, it will be knocked out during a kitchen remodel.

This is the hole left in the floor of the closet where the furnace used to be. It had to come out so we could actually put stuff on the floor. Apparently I'm not quite strong enough or determined enough to take something like this out on my own.

So once again it's Will to the rescue. Down the hatch he goes...(4 8 15 16 23 42).

And this is what we were left with.

Next post I'll hopefully have some attic pics to share.

Extreme home makeover

Now that winter is officially here (in my book that is when it first snows, which was Nov. 10th, ugh), I think it's time for a little retrospective, if you will. This all began in February.

A little bit of before, and a little bit of after:

 

Original back of house

Not done, but getting close.

This is the best photo of the original east side of the house that I could find.

New east side

Kitchen window.

Best I could find of the west side of the house. At least you get an idea of what things were like up-close-and-personal.

New west side of house.

Original front of the house. This pick was taken when we were house trolling, before we even bought it. See the For Sale sign in the bottom right corner?

New front! The door and the white brick still need to be painted, but everything else is finished! Tim had the honor of painting the last pieces of siding at the very top.

The only full house pic that we have. We've come a loooooong way.

Did this all really just happen? Although there are several small outside projects we still hope to finish before old man winter completely settles in, I feel confident saying we are halfway through our project.  Ok, maybe more like 45%, but who's crunching numbers anyways?

Progress

You know you've gone granola when...

...you start making your own granola.

Over the last year I've had several requests for the granola recipe I use. It's not my own and it's nothing fancy. BUT--store-bought and home-made granola can be expensive, so I went out searching for the most bare bones recipe I could find. And if you make your own vanilla extract, it can be even cheaper.

Sunset Hill Granola
8 c. rolled oats
1 1/2 c. brown sugar
4 t. vanilla extract
1 t. salt
2 c. nuts (if you have them around. I use extra oats when I don't. The cheapest options are walnuts or peanuts, but it tastes real daggone good with chopped almonds).

Stir brown sugar with 1/2 cup of water and microwave until brown sugar dissolves. Add the vanilla extract to the sugar mixture and stir. In a large bowl, pour mixture onto oats and nuts and stir. Line two baking sheets with parchment paper. Spread granola evenly on each sheet. Bake at 275 degrees for 45 minutes to 1 hr. Let cool before storing.

God Bless the Indian Summer

Wow.

What a whirlwind of a last two weeks. A LOT has gotten done that we totally did not expect to get done. Why? One reason is that the Totally Crazy People Willing to Travel to Bloomington to Help Us With Our House list has grown to include another offender: Weston.

This guy just shows up to our house with a) a positive attitude, b) a week's worth of free time (which was originally only a weekend but was VOLUNTARILY extended to a week--double crazy), and c) carpentry and painting skillz and BAM! We got ourselves some major progress on our house.

Will's parents have also assumed the title of REPEAT OFFENDERs on my list.Will's dad spent a rainy, nasty day helping Will clean up our trashy yard and Peggy came up another day and painted the front of our house until after the sun went down (she used a light, don't worry).

Wanna see what we've been up to?

Weston and Will working on the siding on the front of the house

1st coat of paint on the front of the house.

front door w/ painted siding.

Oh--and I think I forgot to mention a while back that we successfully chose a trim color together. I've had mixed feelings about it since it's been up, but have decided that I officially really love it. It makes me think of our house as old (rather than modern-old, which I think it would have felt like if we had just gone with plain white, if that makes sense), and it reminds me of butter. Who doesn't like thinking about butter every time they walk into their house???

trim color: Benjamin Moore HC-6 Windham Cream

kitchen window

This is our new crawlspace door. Tim and Guff couldn't quite get a handle on how to make it at first, but they eventually figured it out.

The guys also cleaned up our junk-yard yard, taking 2500 lbs. to the dump in one day. Sorry, no pic. I figured words could speak for themselves on this one.

With winter right around the corner, we only have a few things left to do. BUT--even if we don't get to them, that's ok, because the house is technically winter-ready at this point.

Thanks friends and family for all your help this last week.

Parents Weekend

Will's parents came up for the day yesterday to help with the house. Could I ask for better in-laws??

To do list for the day: upstairs windows, painting, trim, and working on the shingles for the front porch roof.

Getting ready to install the windows.

2 in.

3's a charm.

With trim. Except for the two middle pieces. Those will be finished later. Also--trim installed around the windows and doors downstairs.

Thanks Marge Flowers for the lapless 2nd coat!

Father-son bonding.

Thanks guys for the help!

Paint ball

Paint.

No one ever told me that the hardest thing I'd ever encounter in married life would be choosing a paint color, together. Sickness or health, poverty or wealth...cake. Paint? A whole other ballgame as far as I'm concerned.

So our old siding was a creamy yellow-y color. First hitch in this whole one-flesh, one-color debacle was learning that Will had always "hated" what I considered to be the most attractive part of our somewhat dingy-looking exterior. Yellow-y creamy color=out.

So we tried a bunch of other yellows. And we hated them all. Paint hyperbole was everywhere:

Will: "I can't think of a single nice thing to say about either of those colors."

Colleen: "That reminds me of some putrid yellow vomit from 1970."

Yellow was going to break us. So, we said goodbye and moved on to green. Decided not to go green. Moved on and arrived at what had always secretly been my dream color...

(drum roll)

Blue!!!! (or, more specifically, Benjamin Moore HC [Historical Color]-136 Waterbury Green)

Dear Mom: Please don't be disappointed. I know you really wanted us to stick with yellow. So did we. But after taking a long, hard look at our priorities, we decided to keep the marriage and ditch the yellow. We're feeling blue, and we couldn't be happier about it. 

Our favorite thing about this color is that it reminds us of the cottage we stayed in on the beach in South Haven, MI (ok, so we stayed in the brown cabin behind the pretty blue cottage house, but that's a minor detail). It just makes us want to relax, slow down, and enjoy where we are. Which we'll get to after this whole house remodel thing.

In other remodeling news, Duke finally buried this thing (i.e. electrical line):

And now we have this nice, jump-out-of-the-top window-during-a-fire-worry-free-because-there-is-no-electrical-line-in-your-way wall:

Oh, and remember our roofless porch?

Now we have this:

We're pretty stoked with our new front porch roof (and the new front door and last replacement window on the left). It looks like this from underneath, and will eventually be covered with stained beaded board:

Ahh, progress. Thank the Lord.

Next up: Upstairs windows, lots of painting (and choosing a trim color, God help us!), more siding, and gutters.