Good Day Sunshine! (So far anyway.)

We have been truly lucky of late...   usually living on the coast you get used to misty, chilly, foggy winters. And summers.  However, we moved in a very unusual weather year. Since we have been here I think it has rained lightly once, and has been foggy maybe two afternoons... other than that the winter sun has been brightly shining, and we have loved it.  But now the weather lady tells us we will finally be getting some rain.  Thanks Roberta!

It is about 5 am and the wind is starting to blow hard enough to get my well traveled chimes on the front porch singing.  They are larger chimes so they have a beautiful baritone sound that I have always found relaxing.  There is just something about sitting in your quiet home hearing the chimes slowly ringing.  Love it.  I have been dragging those chimes around for years, they have been ringing through 100 degree weather, -20 degree icy days, and have watched over golfers slogging through the rainy, rainy, rainy days in Oregon.

(Good grief that is awful)

Well, we have been very busy working on the house.  There has been a lot more sheetrock, paint, trim, paint again and things are finally starting to take shape.

We could always see what direction we were going in but I know that has not been the case for all our visitors.

Here is David after, during, before replumbing, rewiring, repainting, and tiling the laundry room: 

A lot of people walk in and are just overwhelmed with no walls... or many different types of walls, wires being reworked, and a migrating 3 foot tall refrigerator which gets plugged in to wherever there is an open spot.  Ya just have to be patient and keep your eyes on the prize.  (The prize being a finished home.)

Speaking of the refrigerator... it has been an interesting job trying to 'keep house' during the remodel.  Fortunately, it was not completely out of my realm of experience but let me give you an idea of the joy of cooking in a house being remodeled.  I have a 3 foot tall refrigerator, that has a "freezer section" about as big as a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.  This refrigerator always seems to be in the way, so it frequently moves around the house.  I cook in a combination of an electric skillet and a single extra burner...

That is it.

Once in awhile I use the crockpot but for anyone who has used a crockpot you know that the meals prepped usually leave plenty of leftovers... I mean that is the point. You make stuff and save part of it.   Well, with a mini-fridge and no freezer there is no where to put leftovers so I don't use the crockpot as often as one would think.  That leaves the single burner and the electric skillet.

I have to say... the electric skillet is a useless piece of equipment and I plan to get rid of that S.O.B. as soon as I have a range... and I think just to keep it company that single burner will be joining it.   Because of this, lately we eat a lot of very similar meals... very similar.  David is a good sport but I suppose when one has worked all day and is hungry just about anything will do.

Something did happen the other day at Sears though that gives me hope and will call for a celebration!  There was a big ole MLK Jr. day sale at Sears and we ordered this lovely thing (queue Gregorian chant:)

Great sale, great stove, and I will be more than happy to cook on it... someday.  We have to get our cabinets going first but when they are done this puppy will be all ready to hook up and I will be digging my cast iron pans out of.. well.. wherever they are right now! 

Also... I did not want you to think we skipped Christmas.

It literally blew by!  

That is a picture of my Grandson Donovan.  That is what most of his pictures look like...  I even had my camera switched to sports mode. He is just ALWAYS on the run.  Anyway, he rolled in wearing his red footy pajamas and bright yellow Sponge Bob boots on Christmas eve and as usual he hit the ground running. 

Remind you of someone?

 Here he is below with his first view of Great Granny and Great Papa's tree sharing his excitement with David.   

 

After this picture I think he jumped up and down twice and then ran off again.

Then of course after his batteries finally wore out and we were all exhausted ourselves, 

he went down for the night...  

but when he awoke Santa had visited and brought him exactly what he wanted.  

Woody and Buzz

and he has played with little else since then. 

November blows by... with lots of photos

 

 

Early November this year started on a very sad note... two sad notes actually.  My aunt Maureen Killion passed away, and so did my ex-sister-in-law Dana Ahner.  

Maureen Killion                                                                                        Dana Ahner

Their services were one right after the other.  My aunt Maureen was 80 years old and she was ready to leave us.  Maureen was married to my 'Uncle Brother'. Alan Duane "Buck" Killion. He was my mother's brother and the family knickname of 'Uncle Brother' summed up what he was to all of us... except of course for those who called him Dad and husband.  Maureen taught my sister Beth how to knit, something which Beth enjoys immensely and has always given her great pleasure.  Dana was 38 years old and had been ill as well but her death was certainly not expected.  She also had a spitfire sense of humor and was constantly reinventing herself.  She was not afraid to jump in and try something new.  I remember so clearly going to the airport near Seattle to pick her up after she got out of boot camp.  She was deployed as an airman to the Naval Air Station on Whidbey Island in Washington.  I was so proud of her when I saw her come off that plane in her Naval uniform.  I first met her when she was 9 or 10 years old, and I see her face in the two young sons she left behind.  Both women leave behind families who grieve deeply.  They were sisters, mothers, daughters, aunties, friends, and in Maureen's case a grandmother and great-grandmother. They will be sorely missed.

As for David and I, we have been chipping away at the house... literally.  We finished the sheetrock in the bedroom and painted... this is a terrible picture as the lighting does not show the colors well at all.  I blame the photographer completely.

The ceiling is white (really it is), the now non-existent trim will be white, and the walls are a soft Wickham Grey from Benjamin Moore paints.  Here is the inspiration... you have to imagine our room trimmed and the floors done etc.  It will get there but maybe not quite with those exact built ins, but I got ideas.  Quick! To the Pinterest boards Batman! 

We also worked more on the side fence in the yard which added a ton of privacy to the yard.  There was just a chain link before between our house and the neighbor's back deck... and on the other side of the neighbor's yard was another chain link and a small apartment complex of what looks like maybe 8-10 units.  We could see from our yard right onto the deck next door and then into the laundry room of the apartments.  The fence changed that completely.

At the risk of sounding very Eddard Stark-ish 'Winter is coming' and that assisted greatly in the decision to get our heating situation under control.

We picked out a nice little woodstove to replace the old oil burning stove that was here and it was installed a few days after Thanksgiving.  Just in time we are thinking as it is a bit chilly in this mostly un-insulated little house.  Not Michigan chilly by any means, but California coast foggy chilly.  However... since the stove was coming in we had to change our focus quickly from the bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen and instead sheetrock the area above and behind the stove and build a hearth.  So we put the brakes on the jobs we had started elsewhere and quickly switched gears to the hearth area. 

                                                                                

First the old weird painted brick face had to come off the wall behind the stove, then the old painted brick hearth itself needed to be chiseled off, then the wall paneling, then the fancy wallpaper, then a couple boards of the side solid paneling, so that we could insulate.  The wall boards were replaced, and then back to sheetrocking or drywall.... I have always called it sheetrock which might very well be incorrect but it is just a habit. 

Oh yeah... and David finally had to build the hearth.

If you have followed the blog for awhile you might recognize that hearth tile as the same from our Michigan house. Look here and here and scroll around a bit for a quick reference.  It is the same... the very same actually we have been dragging around a couple of boxes through our travels.

Once that section was done we moved on to a different jobs.  My parents came over to the coast for a couple days and after a quick inspection my Dad jumped in and helped David tear out a couple walls.

We waited to do this to hear from him which walls were load bearing or not.  We were pleased to learn those weird old partial walls were not load bearing so out they came and all of a sudden the house is opened up! 

Here is a shot of the old wallpaper found under the walls in the old dining room... it was different from the paper in the front room. Must have been pretty lively looking in this small house back in the day with all that colorful vine-y ribbon-y swag-y wallpaper.

Just this one act of tearing down walls and faux walls seems to have made a significant difference in being able to visualize the house completed.  Of course I think I thought that when we took that ramshackle weird tiny bedroom wall in the middle of the house too.

Once the walls were down, and the hearth was finished and ready for the stove we turned our attention back to the job we had put on hold.   

The bathroom... good grief. That weird overhead box tile thing, the 5 layers of Amityville Horror house paint over redwood tongue and groove, the HUGE redwood plank trim that covers up the old window which hid lead weights, and the blue painter tape that they decided to leave up after they painted.

I forgot to mention the "medicine cabinet".... wow.  You can kind of see it in the left picture there where it would be behind you when you stood at the sink facing the window brushing your teeth. Here it is below in all it's glory.

 

The thing is... the sink is centered on the edge of the window, so one can not really hang a mirror directly over the sink necessarily.  We are looking into a hanging mirror off the trim or an arm mirror that attaches next to the window that can be adjusted to where it is needed over the sink.  In these older houses sometimes you have to make do with some little quirks unless you feel like dropping big cash to redo things.  We don't so we adapt, overcome or just deal with it as is.

Well... that catches you up a little bit.  We remodel in a scattershot fashion so these posts will kinda be all over the place.  Once we are done I hope to do a final posting with simple before and after photos. 

There is one thing I would like to show you we 'found' in our backyard though before I close this post out that I just love to share with everyone.  Take a look at what we can see over our back fence... a little black skunk making it's daily trek!

Heh heh... I guess I should say The Skunk and along behind the engine are the viewing platform of happy tourists, and passenger cars... all the folks out for a view of the northcoast redwood and pine forests as well as a taste of a historical trip out to one of the old logging camps where they disembark and have lunch etc.   Kinda fun!