We were very excited that Mark P. made his way to Centralia today to start the kitchen remodel in our newly purchased (old) house. My brother, Doug, was up in Seattle so he stopped in to take a look and we scheduled him for a visit when he and his bud, Dave N., head up to Seattle for a Mariners game in July. That gives us a target date to get enough furniture together to receive some visitors! Here are the pictures Mark sent of how things are going. We are looking forward to meeting his partner in crime who, I am sure will show up in future pictures as the project progress. For reference, the image to the top left is how the kitchen looked before they started and a link where I discuss that start of the whole project. That is Mark P., our contractor (highly recommended–this is our second kitchen remodel with him–pop me an email if you want contact info).
The images below are the start of the demolition of the old kitchen. Actually we are taking out a raised hardwood floor to make it the same level as the kitchen and, particularly so that people will not trip when they are in the house. I will post more of that later as the remodel moves along.
The kitchen is GONE!!!
What with the house purchased, but the move still a month away, I am beginning to realize I may have made a very bad move. The anticipation of a move, I think, is worse than the move itself. Once you are in the truck, driving what is an absolutely beautiful drive through West Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California and Oregon on the way to the beautiful Washington state, all is good. I LOVE those drives and have done a lot of them. Going on to a new job, a new home and, in this particular case, old, lifetime friends and new lifetime friends, it really does not get much better than this. That said, I did not feel a whole lot more energetic than Kiwi the lone, twin cat sister when I awoke this morning.
Sometimes all the stars align to make life more interesting than the long periods of doing the same thing day after day that seems to be normal. When I was younger, those long periods of the mundane seemed boring. Now they just seem restful. Last night, it dawned on me that, with two days before we are supposed to close on your our new (old) house, I have not made all the arrangements for all the utilities to be switched over to us. At the same time, the sickle cell disease project on which I am working is scheduled to deliver its first device for testing in Africa at the end of April which means I need to complete a boat load of finishing touches. All the while, I have to decide whether I want to stay in my current job and travel to Texas once per month or switch jobs and travel to Vancouver, BC fairly frequently with intermittent trips to China and other far away places (currently leaning toward BC).
Lorena went to Pier One Imports today to take a class in how to do place settings on a table. She won a ten dollar gift card and a lantern, at least that is what I think it is. She won the lantern by remembering how to fold a napkin into a rabbit. She is all fired up about her new kitchen now. Notice the six pack of root beers to the right of the “lantern.” What an indicator of a great wife. Root beers when you need them.
Mark P., our contractor, said there are only a few things missing in this drawing. The microwave will be above the double oven, the range top is not drawn in and a few other details that we have actually already settled. One thing that is cool is that the curve at the bottom of the island is the line the granite will follow. The big challenge now is when we can get started and it depends on resources–ours, Mark’s and his subs. The next thing we we need to figure out is lighting and granite. We have finished with the cabinets (hickory with a pecan stain and handles, not knobs or pulls).
We are starting to figure out that picking styles of stuff for the kitchen is not for the faint of heart. We thought we had made great progress when we decided we wanted Shaker style, but no. The minute I sent out the email I got a message back asking whether we wanted pulls or handles or both on the cabinets. I have NO idea about that. I asked Lorena, but then asked our über builder, Mark P., what he thought and, even more importantly, what is the difference.
We are now on the third semi-official round of the kitchen layout. This time we put an angle in the kitchen island and moved the sink and dishwasher there from where it was previously along the wall beside the cook top. The sink is in the angled part of the island so whoever is working there can see what is going on in the living room as well as look out the back windows of the house at Mt. Rainier and the forested area below.
much everything else is in the design the way we want it our the best way we can figure out based on the footprint of the kitchen, the doors and what will be the dining area.
Drawings have started to arrive from the kitchen designers. As is always the case in these kinds of things, some of the ideas are exactly what we wanted, but there is a disconnect on others. Part of the disconnect is due to not properly communicating what was wanted. Some though are because of our own disconnect with reality. Sometimes it is not possible to do what you want because of lack of budget, a footprint and configuration that will not fit the available space, etc. etc.
The kitchen in the house we are trying to buy is getting dated. We pretty much need to replace everything. We hope to use the pieces in the current kitchen to make a standalone apartment in the daylight basement. The three things we usually do not have to replace when we move are the refrigerator and the clothes washer and dryer, but they all went as part of the sell in the house in North Carolina. We did buy a new clothes washer and dryer when we moved to Texas, so that means we are going to have to figure out how to get a range top and hood, an oven or two, a microwave, a dish washer and a refrigerator.
Of course everything is negotiable, but Lorena knows what she wants, especially when it comes to the range top. The range top shown in the picture on the left is the one she wants. It is the Thermador Professional 36″ with an electrically heated griddle in the middle (for warming tortillas). The range top is always the center piece in her kitchen so we do the best we can. We think we kind of have it figured out this time. In these pictures, it looks like the Albany range top was better and, in some ways, that was true. It had the cool blue knobs (actually, we still have them because we kept the blue knobs that came as add-ons and returned the original metal knobs back to the range top when we moved from Albany to Raleigh) and it was a 36″ inch top with a grill in the middle. That is not entirely true because we had a much better hood in Raleigh than in Albany. All in all it was about a wash.
After church a couple of Sundays back, I was talking to the elder, Al R. (we meet in his home), about the doll house business my father ran for many years. He told me he made birdhouses that were similar. I thought that was nice and interesting, but did not think much of it. Then he texted me a picture of his work and I was completely amazed. It is not just that they are beautifully done with a lot of ornate rock work, but the houses are weatherized so they can handle the outside, too.
The appraisal for our house purchase came in fine yesterday. We signed off on all the improvements required for the sale. The only thing left is to close. The close will occur, God willing, at the end of the month. So now we are are excited about making the move. We know a lot about that part of the world, but not so much about the particular place we chose. We love everything we have seen in our visits and within a two hour drive of our house we have a gazillion old friends. Right in town it surely seems like we have a great and growing group of new friends we look forward to getting to know better.
I am starting to talk to truck rental places. Some of you might know that, even though we are currently living in Dallas, all we have is an apartment and enough “stuff” to live there short term. Most of our “stuff” is still in a warehouse in Raleigh. So, this trip will entail me flying from Dallas to Raleigh, loading up the truck, driving to Dallas, picking up Lorena and the “stuff” in our apartment there, driving to Tempe to spend some time with Christian and go to one of our church conventions, then driving (through California, not Utah) on up to Washington state. I put “stuff” in scare quotes advisedly. Why do we need all that?
We bought a new house in Albany, Oregon back in about 2004 (picture to the left). When we bought the house it did not have anything but a small slab for a patio in the back. Grandpa Milo helped us put in a beautiful, stamped concrete patio with large planters in the back. There was no landscaping other than a small patch at the front of the house; all of the rest of it was dirt and weeds. I have to say we had a great time putting in the lawn and doing a little landscaping around the house. We planted rows of trees along both streets (it is a corner lot) and the back property line. There were some electrical services at the front of the lot that drew attention that we did not look. Since there was a very slight slope toward that corner of the lot, we put a small retaining wall around the services, built up the dirt behind the wall a little and planted some trees and plants. We also added the porch roof and decorative posts that cover the porch that leads to the lawn on two sides of the house and the French doors that lead out to the porch. lead out to the lawn from(well that was our builder Mark, but we paid for it). What you see here is the result.
Lorena and I need to decide how much of the lawn we want to maintain as landscape and how much we want to maintain as “forest.” We definitely have an opportunity to put in some terracing that will change the area behind the house into something eminently more usable. One of the first things we plan to do as soon as we get out there is take a bunch a pictures of the yard and start figuring out what we want to do. Part of our goal is to get me some manual labor with a shovel in doing any kind of transformation we plan. I think the landscape will be at least a three phase effort, especially since I am going to be providing the manual labor (unless I wimp out).
Lorena is at the airport right now, waiting to return home from a very good stay with Christian. Of course Christian was slammed with work–he had to respond to reviewers on a paper he wants to publish, prepare for a technical presentation for his Network Information Theory class, etc., etc. But at least now he is slammed with a shiny clean apartment, food in the pantry, rotated tires and all those other little details of which Lorena is queen.
Lorena took me to McDonald’s early this morning then dropped me off at the airport. If all goes well, I will have a look at our (hopefully) new house along with my real estate agent and my builder (thank you Mark P. for driving up from Oregon). Then I will get on a plane at midnight and arrive back in Dallas just in time to go to work on Tuesday morning when we are going to make the first major new installation of some machine vision/machine learning/video analytics software.