We really liked our old coffee maker, but did not like the fact that there was no jar that could be carried over to the table or people in the living room to serve coffee. Rather, the coffee stayed in a reservoir in the coffeemaker and was served with a lever directly into cups there. That would have been fine if we could have easily transferred the coffee in the reservoir into a large coffee pitcher, but the device made room only for a cup. So Lorena went down to her favorite department store (Goodwill) and found a coffeemaker we really love. It can make coffee from grounds into a jar AND from single serving K-Cups. It also has a small receptacle that fits in the place of a K-Cup where you can do single servings from grounds. We really like it a lot. It is not one of those fancy espresso/coffee/mocha/latte automatic machines like our friends, the Douglas’s have in North Carolina, but it will have to do until (and if) we can ever afford one of those.
Category: House and home Page 6 of 14
Installation of our new roof is scheduled to start on Monday morning. Today, a truck showed up with a conveyor to arrange the shingles at different locations on the roof. It is still a very labor intensive process that included two very lean, fit young guys to muscle the shingles onto the conveyor then move them to where they need to go after they get there. We are changing the color from a white to “Pewter Gray.” If all goes well, we hope to get the exterior painted this summer, too. After that, we only have one semi-major improvement and we have told ourselves we are done.
Lorena found a tulip place about a half an hour from our house in Mossyrock. It does not have as many tulips as the Woodburn tulip farm, but it is in a tremendously beautiful settings. She discovered a beautiful lake we did not know was right around the corner and came home excited for next year. We will have to go buy some tulips from them to plant at our house this fall.
We had the fruit trees in the back yard pruned in February with the hope they might produce a better crop than we got last year. The reality is that it was not so bad last year–Bob brought his apple picker over and harvested a good amount of apples. Lorena made applesauce with her own apples for the very first time. The trees had not been pruned for a long, long time, so with this pruning we are hoping to see some improvement over last year. Now, all we have to do is get Bob to come back over with his apple picker…
We never get tired of this. There were a bunch right out the front door. Most of them left, but one of them decided to stick around, take a seat, rest a little, and watch Lorena as she walked around outside.
After all the hullabaloo yesterday about getting the exact same grill as we had when we were in Albany, Lorena shows up with one that is half the size (and, thankfully, half the price)–the mind of a woman. Her thinking is that we need a smaller grill for the porch and if we need something bigger, we can run a gas line and put in an actual outdoor kitchen. And rightly so. It is a really nice grill by KitchenAid with only two burners. The reality is 99% of the time we are cooking for 6-7 people or less. Maybe we can talk Tio Lauro into building us one of those really nice mesquite asadores out of block when he come up to visit.
The Rhodies are going to be in full bloom within a week are so. The tulips are still fabulous. It truly feels like spring. For the first time in… ever… we are having people over for lunch on Sunday without Bob, Gena, and Bonnie. Don’t know if we can do it, but we will give it the old college try. We have been so busy with work and visiting kids and remodeling and travel, we are glad things are slowing down a bit before things take off again at the end of April.
We have been looking for some place to store and manage all of the electronics, cables, and sundry junk I have sitting around. Today, she bought these three tool chests at our local Ace Hardware for less than $85 including tax. I would say it was a pretty good deal. It was on sale for $99, but had a ding, so she talked them down to $75 and was quite pleased with herself. I was pleased with her, too. Now all I have to do is untangle all those cables and figure out how to organize the stuff well enough in the draws so that I will be able to find it all again. Right now, I know where it all is even if it is in a big heap in those big plastic totes. It takes a half an hour to pull out the tote and get things untangled because the thing you want is always at the bottom of the bottom box in the stack.
The tulips and daffodils have been in bloom around here for a bit, but now other types of flowers are showing up. We love this time of year even though it is hard to tell from day to day whether or not we will need our winter coat.
Lorena bought a dresser yesterday, put it together herself, put it into the closet she repaint, and was quite pleased with herself. In the meantime, our bald eagle came back to her roost in the snag outside the living room window. A good weekend on all counts.
Things have not slowed down much now, even though the new floor installations are complete. We have moved my office from the double size room at one end of the upstairs to the other end of the upstairs in a much smaller room. We then moved the guest bedroom furniture and some other pieces into the big room. Actually, we think it will work out quite well. I like it a lot. We put the hide-a-bed in there, so I have a sofa for reading and for Lorena to use while I am working. We will need to get some blinds for the room because of the glare problem in the office and privacy in the now very big guest bedroom.
We had out on a really short trip to Canada tomorrow, but still have some painting to do in the master bedroom before we can move back in there. I actually think we are getting toward the end of what we are going to do on the main floor and the upstairs of the house. The most important new thing will be the blinds. Then we need to move onto the outside and, maybe down to the daylight basement.
The floors are all in. Thankfully, we are done with hardwood floor installation for awhile and maybe even forever in this house. That does not mean the house is not still in complete upheaval. Lorena wants to paint the master bedroom before we put anything back into it. Then we have a ton of furniture moving and reassembly as well as some trips to the dump and Good Will. Seeing all the rooms in an uncluttered state inspired us to realize we still have too much “stuff.” In this last series of moves between North Carolina, Oregon, Washington, and Texas, we rid ourselves of much of it, but there is still a lot to go. If our goal is to truly downsize in the house after this one, then it will be quite a big job. There is just so much stuff we carry around that we will never, ever use again.
It is snowing again as we speak. We are glad Lorena was able to get out of the house to do a little shopping and running around, but it looks like it might snow for the next few hours at least. We saw the most amazing sunrise when we got up this morning and wondered whether it might have something to do with the snow and cold weather.
This new floor installation has turned into a marathon process due to a gazillion things out of anyone’s control. Today it was the weather. Jamal called and was willing to come up. I told him not to come and it was a good thing I did. It snowed hard (for here) all the way up until 5 pm. There is no way it would have been a good move for him to come. Nevertheless, he put the last coat of finish on the floor yesterday before he went home and no Lorena has taken over and is painting up a storm (no pun intended). Actually, the upstairs guest room and half the library/landing are complete, too. I moved out of my office into the guest bedroom to work for the next several days say we can move things around to make way for the new floor. Hopefully, it will all be done before the end of the week.
The work has finally started on the upstairs floor. The last coat of finish will go on the master bedroom floor tonight, too. We are still a couple of days away, but from what it looks like so far, we love it. It is a darker color than we thought we wanted initially, but seeing this, we have decided we were wrong. This color is way better than anything we might have chosen.
We are hoping they will be able to get everything finished. I have to move out of my upstairs office into another room while they work, which is a little bit of a disruption, but I should be able to handle it for a day or two.
Jamal put the first coat of finish on the floor on Thursday. We think it looks great, but will have to stay out of there until mid-week next week to give him time to put on the other coats and to let it dry before we move back in. Most of the upstairs floor space is prepped for the engineered wood to go down. We hope to move stuff back into the upstairs guest bedroom by Monday evening. It is interesting the product Jamal chose for us is actually nailed in place and not floating like some of the engineered floating products. It is amazing to me that the floor finish comes with a 25 year warranty. It is actual wood and can be sanded and refinished just like a regular hardwood floor. In addition to that, it has some kind of hardened and waterproof finish that allows it to be mopped and is relatively impervious to dents when stuff is dropped on it. Also we think it looks really good. We are excited to see what it looks like when it is installed and, even more so, what it does to the rooms where it is being put.
The floor in the bedroom was all installed yesterday and partially sanded. The finish arrives today and we should be all done with that part by–oops, our floor guy just called in sick. So, now, the floor finishing will start early tomorrow morning and we should have a room or two of upstairs flooring finished tomorrow night.
We currently have all the stuff from the master bedroom stacked around and clogging up the living room, all the stuff in the upstairs guest bedroom and half the stuff from the upstairs balcony/library stacked around and clogging up the bonus room/office. We are sleeping on the hide-a-bed in the library until the floor in the upstairs guest bedroom is complete. Then we will shuffle everything around so they can do the library and then again, one last time, so they can do the bonus room. After that, there is still the stairs between the main floor and upstairs. Jamal tells us he should be done by early next week with all the hiccups happening to slow things down.
Our new buddies Jamal and Austin started actually putting down the hardwood in the master bedroom today. It is the same oak flooring in the rest of the main floor of the house. When they finish that, they will start on the stairway and upstairs engineered wood flooring. We hope we have enough pennies left over to pay for the engineered wood on the stairs leading to the bottom floor, but we do know the bottom floor is going to have to wait. We will put something synthetic down there. We are thinking of LVT when and if the time comes. Jamal and Austin are great. They work hard and do a super job. This is the third job Jamal has done for us and we highly recommend him. If you need some contact info, let me know.
We emptied out most of the master bedroom last night so Jamal could start the installation of the hardwood floor there today. He got all the carpet out and started in on the underlayment. He thinks he could have that mostly installed by the time he goes home tomorrow afternoon. He says it might be little tight, but he will get close enough that he only has to do the cleanup and then start smoothing things out and finishing. Next week he will start on the stairs and the upstairs with an engineered wood product. We are very excited to see how it comes out. He did a great job on the last two remodel floors he did for us.
The old laptop Lorena used as her main computer died yesterday, so in the middle of my day job and bean project, I got to build her a new computer. I have to admit I had quite a bit of fun with it. It is based around a Kangaroo $99 computer with an Atom processor, bluetooth, wifi, etc. The computer is that is the smart phone shaped thing between the coffee cup and the terabyte hard drive. We have the following things connected:
- Monitor
- Mouse
- Keyboard
- 1 TB drive
- Webcam
I ordered a cheap USB speaker and will get a microphone so we can use the system for Skype. It hooked up to the wireless internet with no problem. We installed Xubuntu on it which is a lightweight version of Ubuntu. It is actually pretty snappy and just what Lorena needs to browse the web. I kind of wish I had one myself. I will just have to be satisfied with my Raspberry Pi.