updates

The camera battery is dying so no pictures, just some quick updates. We lined up someone to repair the kitchen floor and finish the kitchen, laundry room, and sunroom floors in July. The painter is also contracted to start work in July, just after we get back from a week in Wisconsin. No real idea on exterior color yet, perhaps a sage green or a light grey close to the current color. We're thinking of doing the dining room in a brick red to match the hearth tiles. A dark, slighty orange red should complement the brown kitchen and bronze-green sunroom.

On the "actual work" side of things, Ted emptied one of the downspouts and Kelly did one of the gutters. The downspout was packed full to about 5 or 6 feet of what turns out to be rich looking soil, and the gutter was an ecosystem in itself -- soil, earthworms, tiny trees ...

Thus we continue to reclaim the house from nature and the ravages of time.

color

Mountain laurel in bloom.

it's beginning to look somewhat like something

At last, some "after" photos:














Above is the sunroom in early spring, before we'd closed on the house.


















Here it is as of today, carpet and curtains removed, and freshly painted. The color is "fig" (Pratt & Lambert) aka "leapfrog" (Behr), though "the color of certain bugs when smashed" and "yellow bile" might be more apt. Alas, they didn't ask me. It may not come across on the computer just right -- it looks slightly off on all 3 of our monitors. In reality, though, it's really wonderful.

Visible in the backyard -- Adironack chairs and a fire bowl. We had a roaring little fire last night, thanks to Ted's Boy Scout training and all the brush we've cleared in the last few days.














Ted's office before. This has been the easiest room to prepare thus far. The Senders (or whichever previous tenant) went lightly on the wallpaper paste. For a family whose motto went something along the lines of "that oughta hold it," this was an uncharacteristic but welcome move.














Ted's brown study, his "Bison Brown" study.




































The upstairs bath "Bejeweled" in green. Just one of the many nonsensical color names we're working with.

back in contact

Much has happened since last we had access to the internet, and we'll begin to fill in as we get pictures of the new work. Ted emptied the hot water heater, all 40 gallons of it, 2 gallons at a time. He also installed a dishwasher (which you can read more about here) and has replaced and grounded most of the electric sockets. Kelly finished painting the bathroom and scrubbed, stripped and sealed the tile. She pulled out a kitchen window, figured out how it works and promptly put it back. Ted's office is painted, though, a deep "bison" brown, and the computers are up and running. We haven't achieved normalcy by any strecth, but there are reminders of it here and there.

A long term plan had been to remove the shrubs in front of the house, but a knock on the door last night changed all that. Neighbors were having a patio installed and came over to offer Chris -- the landscaper -- and his Bobcat. Since he had the equipment at the ready, he offered to do it for next to nothing. It happened just about as fast as it will take to look at the pictures:

This last picture is an aerial view of the destruction, taken from the front bedroom. After the painter is finished with the house (hopefully by the end of June) we'll put in the new shrubs. Currently, we're considering some combination of burning bush, boxwood, daphne, mugo pine, compact Japanese maple and possibly red twig dogwood.