More house doings, in list format

Posted on by Dawnrigger

This was the latest in a month’s worth of 14-hour workdays.

Today’s results:

Forgot to take enough pictures of progress (oops)
Built 4 bookcases & a table
Squished loads of plastic wrap into one l’il bag
Remembered follow-up appointment with locksmith
Cut tons of cardboard into recycle-bin-sized pieces
Filled the recycle can past capacity
Hung artwork on the walls where nails were left by previous owners
Showed friends around the new place
Put felt footies on a bunch of bookcases oil & new
Place d& leveled various furniture pieces
Donated another ton of cardboard to a friend’s recycle bin
Emptied book boxes & generated MORE cardboard. (Keeping these boxes, tho)

At the old house:

Packed, moved, & stored much of the Fancy Dishware I’ve inherited over the years
Trimmed back weeds  & fed birds
got the trash, recycles & garden waste bins out, and returned them when empty.

Somewhere in there I worked on my list of native perennials I like so I can share it with a landscaper who will help me with designing & digging in my new yard gardens…it’s getting to be a long list.

And I watched The Incredibles 2. Because we have internet & TV now, and it made great background noise for furniture assembly.

Today’s firsts: first use of microwave (it’s fancy!) and first drink spill. (iced tea, on old carpet that has successfully weathered many a previous spill at the old house.)

Progress pics:

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old carpet, new couches.
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entryway rug
IMG_6359
nesting intensifies

Bonus pic of our moving crew from Monday at the end of their successful campaign. I wholeheartedly recommend Brom’s. Lynn let us know exactly what we needed and provided plenty of excellent prep advice, and on Moving Day, Dennis, Brian, and Kevin did a fantastic job managing a complicated relocation.IMG_6329.JPG

And that’s all until later.

Latest project completed: walls!

Posted on by Dawnrigger

Tl;dr version: if you just want to look at pictures, scroll down to the end.

This post is about colors. I love vivid blues & greens. Cobalt blue is my favorite color ever. Much of my wardrobe comes from that part of the spectrum. My hair is often bright blue or green.

But.

When it comes to my surroundings, I go straight to the earth tones every time, and the lighter, the better. Leafier greens, red-mineral browns, and the kind of creamy pale shades of gold you see in autumn meadows.

New house is mostly painted in cooler colors like cloudy blue and sage green, but they’re earthy enough to live with for 5+ years, which is when the walls will be due for refreshing anyway.

But some of the color choices were Just Too Much:

  1. a minty-fresh green in one basement room (henceforth to be known as the game room)
  2.  a turquoise I’ll call bottom-of-a-California-swimming-pool blue” that was used in a bedroom, a stairwell and in the utility area of the basement.

Both colors are pretty. I have shirts in those colors. For walls, thought? No. Sorry, not for me.

Spouseman concurred with my judgment, emphatically so. And thus in the fullness of time, painters were hired, and lo, they have made with the painting.

I had to be at the new house at 7:30 AM two days running, which was a fun trick to manage while still living in the old one with the car in the shop all week. I got up on time both days, and the results were more than worthwhile.

The walls in our bedroom, the game room & elsewhere in the basement are now all warm, bright, and mellow…or they’re boring and bland as hell, depending on your perspective. What matters to me is that I’ll sleep better in a room with “light honey” walls than I would in one that made me feel like I was underwater.

And Spouseman says the games room looks calmer now. For sure it looks more like a room in a house and less like a dentist’s waiting area, and that’s all I ask from a finished basement.

Last note: in one of those amusing moments life sometimes offers, I realized today that without even trying, we’d matched the downstairs utility area paint toathe original vintage ’30’s door into the mechanicals room.

oh-so-blue before
After
before-blue 2
sunny warm after 2
Minty-fresh before
mellow after
MInty-fresh before 2
mellow after 2

Here’s the door and peeks at the other painted basement parts:

before…
after. It’s brighter than it looks, my phone camera isn’t all that good.

And as a bonus, another pic of my evolving soon-to-be-office space:

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bonus

Old floors made new again

Posted on by Dawnrigger

I promised I would post before & after shots of our new-old house’s floors getting sanded & refinished. Below you’ll find a place by place breakdown.

First, the entryway. This was a last-minute addition to the project, once we realized how awful the old tile would look next to the refreshed hardwood. Plus Spouseman has a huge affection for woodwork, and this was the perfect reason to give our new place a lovely custom piece.

The original
the finished entry
down to the sub-floor
working ideas
setting in place
sunshine lighting

Next, the dining room. This area had the largest number of dark, worn spots, between old radiator locations & high traffic zones.

before
Ugh.
Beautiful afters
so many dark spots
so much damage
Like magic, the wood appears
Work in progress
drying.
Bringing out the shine

The den:

Before: dark & scuffed
Beautiful color afters
little by little
repairs in progress
not so dark now…
drying stage
getting its shine on
So pretty.

The hall & guest bedroom:

Before: ew.
After: much brighter.
Not. Shiny.
Shiny.
Poof: nastiness gone.
shining things up
polshing all the old away
Much shiner now.

And the front room. This looked perfectly fine before anything was done. But after? So much lighter & brighter now.

Before: pretty good
All the shiny
Not great.
Getting down to work
Making magic happen
Shiny new corner

And there they are. Rooms. Shiny, empty rooms. Many thanks to Darek, Max, and the rest of the crew from Chicagoland Flooring who did such beautiful work.

Bonus pic of my nest-in-progress up on the second floor:

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Closets. Plural. Room for bookcases. Natural light. This is a happy room.

Spouseman and I will continue moving books and other important belongings & buying some new furniture (BOOKCASES!) over next 2 weeks. (Technically, professional movers will be doing the heavy lifting part.)

The rest of the old furniture will move whenever the old house gets under contract or November, whichever comes first. (Really hoping the old house finds a new owner sooner rather than later.)

So. That’s the update. “Complications of Moving House” remains the #1 reason I haven’t been getting much writing done, and that won’t be changing any time soon. Arranging and following up on various work projects, juggling checklists & timelines, and organizing two households has swallowed all my time and energy.

But “not much” writing is better than zero writing, and I’m making slow but real progress. And life will settle down after Dragon Con. I’m really looking forward to a productive, quiet autumn.

Anyway. That’s all the all there is for now. Until later, folks.