Building a Modern Mountain Life

Moms!

2013-05-12T07:24:00.001-06:00

I'm lucky to have a bunch of fabulous and inspiring moms in my life and I'm sure missing them and thinking of them all today! Not sure what I would do without these women. They spoil me in spades.

The Next?

2013-05-10T13:46:00.000-06:00

Tuesday, we went under contract on another house we are trying to buy. As Curt always tells me, that is only step 1 of 4 (mutual acceptance, inspection, appraisal, closing) in the house-buying process, and no cause for early excitement, and I should know because we have lost houses at each of those steps. It has been an interesting few months with the ups and downs of looking at houses, making offers, not making offers in time and losing offers for various reasons. Though we started hunting 2-3 months ago, with what seemed like plenty of time before our now-looming condo closing, last week we had to start looking into apartments and short-term rentals since we were going to be moving out and homeless (at least in Denver) in less than a month.

Then we saw a cute house on Monday evening. It was not a bungalow, victorian, ranch, farm house or otherwise in any state a fixer upper like everything else we'd been looking for. It's a lot more like the house we still own in Washington, though it doesn't share any walls and it's about twice the size. It doesn't have a big yard nor the space for the chicken coop I'd been dreaming about building. It is however in a great neighborhood with high asking prices and a new mixed use development almost underway nearby, not to mention directly across the lake we currently live next to, just a mile around it on the other side. We'd both be a little bit closer to work and I would even stay on my same bus route. So we put in an offer and negotiated until it was accepted. The house already had a full price offer on the table but luckily for us, those people had another house they wanted too so they backed off this one. For anyone who knows Curt, you know it would kill him to pay full price, so we were lucky to shave even a little bit off list price - it's hard to do in this market.

While this house is newer and not a fixer-upper, it still has an unfinished basement to play around with as well as a kitchen and bathroom that need updates. Well, need is a relative term. We would change them because we can and enjoy doing it and to personalize the house. But that's about it. Am I sad to have no garden? Yes, but I will keep up the containers I've used the last two summers. Am I upset to have no yard maintenance? No, we are gone most weekends anyway and I'd be content to enjoy the limited time we spend in Denver doing what we want. I have been torn on the big yard versus small yard thing for the last few months. I was completely won over by the big yard (10,000+ sq ft) on the brick ranch we lost. I envisioned a chicken coop, garden beds, firepit, happy pups...and when we lost that house I wondered if my search parameters were wrong because I had originally wanted to be closer to downtown not farther away (where the bigger yards are). I wanted us both to spend less time commuting and more time closer to the things we do in the city, since we now spend a lot of our time in the mountains.

So it took awhile, but now I can admit that location trumps yard and I'd rather be near everything I want to do than attempt to raise chickens and be farther away from our jobs and our friends, who we already don't see enough of. The house we recently lost was only two miles further into the burbs than where we currently live, but it was not really that ideal of a location, the neighborhood was not that appealing and it was not bikeable at all. In reality, our dogs have never been good yard dogs even when we had a small yard in our previous house. They are the type to dig holes, destroy grass, attempt to escape, eat twigs and leaves and bugs, chase birds, maul my garden plants and generally be a pain in the ass if left unmonitored for more than 30 seconds. Plus, they ARE bird dogs, so I don't know how good of an idea the chickens really were in the first place...I just like eggs. They get the big yard benefits on the weekends in the mountains anyway.

Is this a long-winded way for me to come to terms with this unexpected house purchase we're in the midst of? Kind of. My first thought after seeing this house, even though I liked it and I knew Curt really liked it, was of defeat. And maybe even a little bit of guilt for taking the easier route. As if, because we just built a house, I have to make excuses to myself about not embarking on another difficult, stressful, lengthy and expensive challenge. I didn't think we'd be moving into a 17-yr-old house with current paint colors and stainless steel appliances in an HOA-maintained neighborhood where someone else cuts the grass in the front yard and trims the plants. It has been frustrating being unable to buy the houses we have wanted over the last few months, which was exactly what happened two years ago, and led to us living in a townhouse. In retrospect, that worked out perfectly and allowed us all the time and money we had to spend in Breck. Maybe it was overly ambitious to try to dive into another big house project so soon after finishing our mountain house. We didn't think so, or at least we did not admit that to each other, but the banks called the shots on that and here we are. I do know that when we're ready to buy another house after this one (the two-year timer is about to start ticking again), we will have probably sold at least one or both of our other houses so we have some real cash to work with, and can buy exactly what we want when we want. That's flexibility we don't have right now, but has been a goal and hopefully a benefit of the work we put into our mountain house. Flexibility!

So I'm going to attempt to go with the flow and be relaxed and try to enjoy the bright side of this whole roller-coaster journey, which first of all is a real summer for the first time in two years! No huge projects. No working all day every weekend day. Sleeping in, seeing our friends, riding our bikes, camping, going to concerts/parks/breweries/farmer's markets. Living in a decently cute and comfortable house not even a mile from our nearest and dearest Denver friends that won't fall apart if we don't immediately attend to its issues. I want Curt to take a break (not his strong suit). And just BE, as my friend Cara says.

Of course, that is unless this deal goes haywire, ha ha. Hopefully within a week, we will 100% know for sure that we will be getting the keys to this house. You just never know, but I am not one to pretend I'm not excited even if I'm not supposed to be quite yet. And that's why I'm posting pictures, again, on aother house that is not completely a sure thing. Sue me! :)

Not exactly the brick bungalow we had been searching for!

Living room on the front of the house

Open living/dining/kitchen off the front door

Two sided gas fireplace - needs new tile and that weird mantel removed

Kitchen - ready for a remodel

Sliding door to backyard deck

Loft/office area at the top of the stairs

Master bedroom big enough for our king bed, nightstands and two dressers

Three closets - two full size and one walk-in (mine, duh!)

Spare room (don't get excited by the CURRENT owner's cribs)

Powder room on main floor

Unfinished basement where we'd add a bedroom, bathroom and family room

Back patio

Tiny yard, but no grass to maintain (or for my dogs to eat and then barf up on my carpet, let's be honest)

Laundry closet

On To The Next Next!

2013-04-18T14:36:00.000-06:00

Our bank-owned buying dreams crashed to a halt Monday morning when our bank would not lend on the home we were trying to buy. They requested that multiple items from our way overblown inspection report be resolved before closing on our loan. But bank-owned properties are sold as is and the seller is not obligated to make any repairs, so there went that. Even if we had not done an inspection, some of these items would have been brought to the bank's attention during the appraisal, so we were facing an uphill battle. It was disappointing - especially because I loved the style of the house, the huuuuuuge yard and the inexpensive and easy (to us) repairs - but it was still fun to brainstorm all of the ideas we had for the house so it was not a total waste.

On the bright side, we both knew the odds were not hugely in our favor so it wasn't a shock and at least we only waited two weeks on this house - not four months like the last time this happened. On the even brighter side, they thankfully did not tell us this news last Friday afternoon and waited until Monday, which means we enjoyed a ridiculously awesome weekend snowboarding in a foot of fresh powder and listening to free concerts with our friends, with no inkling of the bad news coming. Well, maybe a small inkling. Nonetheless, I woke up Tuesday morning completely over it and eager to see what else is out there.

We're back on our hunt all over town. This hilarious map made the rounds a few months ago. We're currently over by Casa Bonita and the house we were trying to buy was slightly to the west of Tiny Chinatown (pretty sweet, I thought) and Little Mexico (we love our taco shops). I'm really hoping to end up in the vicinity of Cruiser Bikes or Ravers while Curt is shooting for Mustaches, Flannel and PBR (no surprise). The Most Dangerous Place in Denver is also high on my neighborhood list. We looked at at house there the other day that had about 15 couples our age pass through in less than an hour. Dangerous is in!

On To The Next!

2013-04-12T10:48:00.001-06:00

We are in the middle of the fun adventure of trying to purchase a bank-owned home. Two weeks ago, we put an offer on a Fannie Mae HomePath property. HomePath typically favors owner-occupants and discourages investors, which was good news for us since investors are snatching everything else up with full price cash offers. This house had been on the market for 70 days already. They responded to our offer later that day, saying they had received multiple offers and that we needed to submit our highest and best. Hmm. After over three months? Funny, the same thing happened when we tried to buy our Breck house. Multiple offers on a bank-owned home after over three years on the market? What are the odds? Apparently for us, pretty damn good.

Still, since the house was such a great bargain and had recently dropped their already depressed price by $40k, we raised our offer and then waited anxiously...definitely me more than Curt. We didn't hear a peep back until the following Wednesday, after I had already lost a few nights of sleep, when they countered. Even though we accepted their counter and reached mutual acceptance last Wednesday, we did not get our signed contract until over a week later. It has been a slow process and completely unlike everything else that is happening in the ridiculously fast-moving and competitive real estate market in Denver. However, this was a faster process than the last house we tried to buy two years ago. Short sales are much more complicated than regular foreclosures, so at least this time around, we didn't have to wait multiple months to have our offer accepted in the first place.

Last Friday, we had our inspection and it mostly turned up issues Curt had already identified before we placed our offer. We need to replace the water heater and the furnace. Actually, there are two furnaces due to a previous expansion/remodel, and we will probably replace one and re-duct to combine both systems. Those were the two most expensive items. In comparison to the other houses we've looked at, this house actually needs very little renovation and repair. We would clean up the three bathrooms, tear out carpet and replace with hardwoods and tile, update lighting, paint, refinish doors, replace windows, remove the swamp cooler and install AC along with the new furnace - all minor things. No rooms need to be entirely reworked or walls moved. The original (and gorgeous) wood kitchen cabinets can stay. The electrical and plumbing systems are mostly in decent shape as is the roof. The exterior brick looks perfect. All in all, it was a much cheaper house than we had been looking at, with far fewer changes needed. A win win!

But, just like the house we tried to buy two years ago and lost, the bank giving us our loan has to sign off on us purchasing the house while knowing the extent of the repairs needed. Thankfully we don't have the structural issues like we did on the last house, which is why we lost it after four months and two banks with two different types of loans. Our inspector didn't do us any favors though, and way overstated needed repairs in his report compared to what he told me in person. Boo. I'm optimistic, but could use some fingers crossed! :)

A 1954 brick ranch - my midcentury modern dream

DIWine Storage

2013-04-01T10:24:00.000-06:00

Long before we had a closet, mudroom or wine room ready in our house - but definitely back when I was dreaming of alcohol during the dark days of our ice cold, manual labor-filled months - I saw the two pictures below on Pinterest. The first is a wine rack made out of terracotta pipes from This Old House. The second is PVC plumbing cut and arranged in a honeycomb shape for shoe storage. I thought one or both ideas would be cool to use in our mudroom for things like goggles, hats, gloves, scarves, turtle furs and other ski gear that can be annoying to dig through a basket for. After I showed the photos to Curt, he had the idea to turn our scrap PVC pipes into a wine rack of sorts in our wine room.

Many, many months went by before Curt finally had some free time and got tired of the pile of PVC pipes taking up space in our basement. They had been moved from one room to another multiple times and were now laying in the garage. Curt used a saw to cut them all down to pieces about 10 inches long. There were different widths of pipe, and unfortunately when he brought his first cut piece upstairs to test it on a bottle of wine, the pipe was too narrow for the bottle. He also decided to test it using an open bottle, not the many sealed bottles sitting right to the open bottle, and spilled the red wine...oh Curt.

So, as you can see in the photos below, there are about four different thicknesses and four different colors of pipe. He cut and I carried upstairs and started randomly building my rows. We both liked the idea of the varying sizes, even knowing that they can't all fit a bottle of wine. Only the two largest sizes can hold normal sized bottles, but I did manage to fit a skinny bottle of fruit wine (port would work too) into one of the narrower pieces.

I didn't use much of the wall, not even half, and I'm wondering if we should add more pipe to go taller? Or build a shelf over the top? Hang wine glass racks over it? Decide on some sort of organizing or labeling system so I don't have to pull out every single bottle trying to find something?

The best part - everything was recycled! And therefore free.

We talked about somehow affixing them together, maybe with glue, and even painting them, but for now I want to see how they work as they are. The nice thing about not being stuck together is that we can still move parts around but they don't actually shift or slide around themselves unless I remove a piece of pipe. It feels quite stable and solid. The nice thing about being unpainted is that the white, off-white, gray and black pipes already coordinate with the other colors in the house especially the kitchen.

Looks like bubbles to me!

With a few bottles...can't wait to add more.

Happy Hooks

2013-03-27T11:42:00.000-06:00

I received this beautiful set of five wooden twig-like hooks as a Christmas gift from my mom and I was ridiculously excited because they are exactly the type of thing I had envisioned for our mountain house ever since we started this project. We finally hung them about a month ago. After a lot of stewing over my options and the many expanses of huge empty wall space, I decided on the wall near the front door because I wanted to show them off, even though I wasn't sure it was the most useful spot since they are right next to the mudroom which has plenty of space for jackets and gear and bags already. You can see the front door to the right and the mudroom door to the left in the photo below. So we hung the hooks and they proceeded to go unused like I feared. Nonetheless, I was in love with them.

But a few weeks ago, we brought up a bench that Curt built over a year ago. It was meant to go with our dining table but we have been using it as a coffee table in Denver. Since we had 10 people in our house a few weekends ago, I wanted to make sure we had enough spots for people to sit and put on or take off boots and shed all the outdoor layers. After we put the bench under the hooks, all of the sudden people started using them! I love how the color of the bench is similar to the hooks and it adds some wood and warmth to our cold gray tiled entryway. We also miraculously eyeballed the spacing pretty well, at least in my book. I could not believe that when we put the bench there, it lined up with the hooks perfectly, especially since the bench was more of an afterthought and we used very little rhyme or reason when putting the hooks up in the first place. A small victory in my entire lifetime of poor measuring, not to mention the inevitable husband-wife discord over nailing things into the wall!

I have yet to hang art or anything else to personalize our space, but this is a somewhat practical and still pretty start :)

Finally!

2013-03-20T10:34:00.001-06:00

Finally our house is being used as it was intended - full of friends! And skiing and snowboarding and cooking and eating and drinking and board games and dogs and sleeping in. We've had the best month, with multiple friends flying in from Seattle and driving up from Denver. With crockpots and tacos and frittatas and lasagna and coffee and whiskey and a big bonfire dug out of the drifts in our backyard. The snow has been great, the frigid temps have eased a bit, no one broke any limbs while staying at our house and there was only one trip to the ER. Altitude sickness...boo. We have one month of ski season left, the last two weekends of which are full of free concerts so we'll be taking advantage of those in Breck and Vail.

I've hit over 100,000 vertical feet this season (our ski pass includes a free iPhone app that tracks this, as well as posts photos like those below from professional photographers at all resorts) and I wish I could double it before our mountains close on April 14th but I doubt I will. We got a very late start due to our well-below-average snowfall. I'm still trying to catch up to Curt who has about 30,000 more feet than I do, but he also skiied more days than I have this season. We have a friend who works on Beaver Creek who had nearly 500,000 vertical feet over a month ago so I can't imagine how many he has now. Jealous! I've gotten a lot faster on my snowboard, but not THAT fast. So, our next month is going to look a lot like the last month and that makes me happy. We're both hoping our family members follow our friends' lead and come visit us soon :)

Then, once we put our snowboards away, we will get back to tackling a few odds and ends around our Breck house and maybe start finishing the basement. In addition to that, we're about to start a new project - still TBD - but our townhouse is under contract and we are in full house hunting mode in Denver. We aren't making money on our sale but we aren't losing any either. Our neighbor was interested and the timing just worked out because we'd been thinking about moving and either renting or selling anyway. Avoiding the hassle of constantly cleaning and showing to potential buyers (while dealing with our dogs) was a huge bonus.

It's a terrible time to buy because the market here is so hot, and houses are getting snatched up the first day they're listed, often with multiple full price offers. Luckily we don't close on our townhouse until the end of May, so we have some time and we'll need it. We aren't getting to houses quite fast enough, and there aren't enough houses out there to meet the demand from buyers, but it's a fun, exciting challenge and we're both ready to go back to living in a house with a yard in a new neighborhood. Probably a small, old, crumbly house that needs renovations in the kitchen and bathrooms but nothing too major. We have the time now to devote to those types of projects not to mention a little bit more experience, more patience with each other and some money saved in the bank, at last.

Moving will be much less of a pain because we've already moved so many of our belongings to Breck. Part of the goal was to be able to downsize and be more nomadic in Denver, or maybe to eventually not live in Denver at all, but at least for now to able to easily move every couple of years which I think we both just like to do and, looking back, have done the entire time we've been together. I guess that makes us both a little crazy. Where our last move was stressed and rushed and full of anxiety waiting on a short sale house we didn't end up being able to purchase at the very last minute, this move is more relaxed and our parameters are wider. We are both more open-minded about the area of town and style of house and types of projects we will undertake. There aren't even many short sales or foreclosures on the market for us to try to buy and stress over.

Best of all, even if we have to temporarily rent again before we close on a new house, we still have our other house to escape to every weekend, with most of our belongings there and plenty of space. That was the worst part about renting two years ago - being crammed into a tiny townhouse with none of our belongings and nowhere else to go. Even though looking at lots of houses and then watching them go under contract is frustrating, house hunting is still an adventure because we get to day dream and brainstorm and talk about different ideas and projects and eventually, we will find our next (9th) one!

Fall Down 7 Times, Get Up 8

2013-02-15T19:56:00.000-07:00

One of my yoga teachers started off an early morning class a few months ago with this Japanese proverb. It has been stuck in my head ever since. Coming from a tennis-playing and tennis-loving family, it immediately reminded me of one of my all-time favorite quotes in tennis:

After losing to Jimmy Connors in 16 consecutive matches and then doing the unthinkable by winning, Vitas Gerulaitis commented: “And let that be a lesson to you all. Nobody beats Vitas Gerulaitis 17 times in a row!”


Vitas finally beat McEnroe, but I don't think he ever got around to beating that guy in the middle (Bjorn)

I also recently saw the photo below on Olympic ski-racer Lindsey Vonn's Instagram feed. Ignore the Redbull ad. It was her caption that I liked. "When you fall, get back up!!" I will spare myself (and you) the rewatching of her horrific ski-racing fall a few weeks ago by not posting the YouTube link, but what she did to her knee, and at the speeds it happened, are the things I imagine in my worst nightmares.

I'm going to make an effort to keep thoughts like these in my head all year. I am not always the most confident or fastest learner, and a frequent physical faller - while snowboarding, biking, walking my dogs or even just getting out of bed - thanks to general clumsiness, laziness, not paying attention or not even trying. But I can fall mentally just as easily, and the reasons are probably exactly the same. There's no reason to talk myself out of my ability to learn things (something I do maybe not all the time, but too many times).

Vitas again, after falling in the bushes (it's not just me)

A different yoga teacher said in class two nights ago that most of our obstacles are put in front of us BY us. She talked about the Hindu "Lord of Obstacles" called Ganesh. From Wikipedia, he is popularly worshipped as a remover of obstacles. My yoga teacher's point though was that we can remove our own obstacles. Or maybe it would be more efficient to not put them there in the first place. I'm writing this down, here, so I don't forget.

I am surrounded by people who do amazing things in spite of hurdles. Some are big hurdles, some are small. They're all hard. Some examples: My husband, who has never taken no for an answer or listened to a naysayer in his ENTIRE life. My mom, who just received a masters degree and turned 60 in the same year (it's not too late for me, eh?). My dad, who just took a scary leap into retirement - something that sounds easy, but I doubt is, in a lot of ways, after spending 38 years as a civil servant. My other mom, who somehow survived being the same house as me and my dad while I grew up, not to mention my little brother - none of us made that a walk in the park. And she still loves and supports us anyway! As freely and generously as one ever could. That has been one of my most important lessons in life. My little brother, who is planning his third trip to Europe with his band while slaving away at two jobs 7 days a week. My husband's littlest brother, who is raising a three-year-old girl as a single dad. My friend Wanda, who is learning to swim and training for her first triathalon at age 40. My friend Meaghan, who is about to have hip surgery - something that seems unfair to me for a strong, healthy athlete at her young age of 30, but will probably not stop her from doing another Ironman. Because why wouldn't she?

I won't list more family and friends, though I could go on and ON. I learn a lot from and am inspired by all y'all, even if you don't know it or I don't say it! It makes me a very lucky girl every single day, but I especially appreciate it today, the day after my 34th birthday :)

The World's Most Interesting Marketplace

2013-02-13T22:36:00.002-07:00

My mom sent me this article and I found it interesting and inspiring. It was also a little reassuring to read, because it mirrors our own experience so much.

http://www.thenewstribune.com/2013/02/11/2470224/the-house-that-craigslist-built.html#emlnl=__Home_and_Garden

For starters, my own boss calls my husband "Craig" as a joke because he is well-known for being a Craigslist junkie. Before we started our house project, we were already fairly heavy CL users, having bought and sold numerous cars, furniture, tools, building materials, sports equipment, a boat and my favorite - firewood from the Free section for our wood-burning fireplace in our last house in Seattle. But Curt's time on the site, or more often the free iPhone app, went up considerably when we really got started working in Breck. Many an evening, Curt would arrive at home with some weird purchase he picked up from CL that I did not like, understand or see a need for. Most of the time, I would eventually realize why he bought what he did and how it would help us. Certainly not ALL the time though, since plenty of our CL buys have been duds - both services and materials.

While we have lucked out with many great short- and long-term workers/contractors using the Gigs section, we've also had no-shows and less than desirable folks give us bids we didn't like or start work that we didn't want them to finish. We have had great success buying and selling appliances over the years, though we recently bought a dishwasher that didn't clean our dishes. It happens. We took it out and bought a new one from a real store, not wanting to press our luck. I still have no complaints about how the law of averages has favored us over time. My two favorite things in our house - the bowling lane countertop from Celebrity Lanes in Denver and the bright green tile in our powder room - both came from CL and were steals.

Countertop and tile from CL, lights and towel ring from Amazon, sink and faucet from eBay, mirror from IKEA

Cabinets, shelf, oven and lamp from IKEA. Fridge, bowling lane countertop, microwave and range hood from CL. Tile from Floor & Decor Outlet. Quite a few thrift, Ross and TJ Maxx finds in this photo too!

As the home builder in the article noted, selling materials and tools no longer needed was also a huge bonus to us. Curt has many times bought a specific tool he needed for a very specific use, and then sold it soon after. He bought things on eBay like our PEX spooler and plumbing, and then sold the little bits and pieces and extras we didn't use. We've sold scraps of tile, and bought tiny lots of scraps of others' tile from projects already completed. He bought portable heaters for when we slept in our house last winter in well-below-freezing temps, and then sold them to others who were embarking on a similar difficult winter project. He sold the concrete forms and floor joists that were leftover in our house before we even starting working on it ourselves. He bought a wood chipper to clean up our yard and we're about to resell that. He bought a pedestal sink for a bathroom, put it in and we decided we didn't like it, so we just bought a different sink and will resell the pedestal.

And I'll be honest, he often makes a profit or at least breaks even. Hey! Buyer beware. It pays to do your research before buying or selling anything in a marketplace like CL. He has also given plenty of things away for free or loaned them to people. Karma works both ways. The point of using CL is not just to be cheap. Like Freecycle, it is more about taking, using and giving things back to someone who needs them, when they need them, at prices that are mutually agreed upon, negotiated and mutually beneficial.

We have friends who make fun of Curt, who is always recommending that people check CL for almost any question or advice they ask of him. However, we also have plenty of friends that use CL like we do, and have found labor, tools, materials, appliances and more while they plow through their own house projects. We have built a unique house and spent probably a third of what our neighbor spent building his just down the street (he's still not finished!). We have eBay, CL, IKEA (mostly the discounted As Is section), Floor & Decor tile outlet, Habitat for Humanity Restore, The Lumber Guy, Appliance Factory Warehouse, a few pawn shops and dozens of thrift store visits to thank. You probably wouldn't know it by walking through the house, but even if you did, I wouldn't mind. I'm not embarrassed. Not everything on CL is even used. Not everything is junk. Not all the people looking for work are meth heads (though some will be!). Not everyone is trying to rip someone else off. By using so many used and recycled and affordable materials, and putting back into the marketplace the things we no longer need, while taking advantage of the local labor resources, I hope we have made as positive an impact on the environment and the community as our bank accounts.

Using Up More Scraps

2013-01-29T21:33:00.002-07:00

A few weekends ago, Curt built us some shelves in our previously empty and unused pantry, and then I painted eveything the same color as the walls. He did order the flat boards that made the shelves, but everything else was built out of scraps we had laying around our garage. I had been using a single cupboard to hold our food items in the kitchen and it was nice to move everything into a bigger area so it wasn't so crowded. I can't imagine how we will ever fill up this pantry. Never say never. This room has a locked door in case we ever rent out our house to vacationers (so do our master bedroom closets and wine room - though two of those three rooms are currently completely empty).

It only took a couple of hours to build these shelves and it's the same process he used in all of our bedroom closets and the mudroom, which now have rods and a shelf on top in each. He used some additional scraps as braces to support the shelves here, though I'm not sure it was needed. They look good though. It's not anything like the "dream pantry" photos I see all over Pinterest, but it's definitely roomy and functional and that's enough for me.

Right before Christmas, we finally hooked up our washer and dryer. We bought the washer back in August and the dryer in November - both from CL for $150 and $350 respectively. The washer was only a year old and I think the dryer is about the same age, and a steam dryer at that. It's red - fancy! I saw some tutorials online for building a wooden stand that sits underneath the appliances so you can slide laundry baskets underneath, which seemed genius to me. So, Curt ignored the instructions and used more scraps to build something to the size we needed. We couldn't put a shelf on top because they are different heights so storage underneath seemed smart. The stand was not pretty at first due to the bad shape the wood scraps were in, but after we put a few coats of paint on it, it didn't look half bad. Three $5 IKEA laundry baskets slide underneath. Being able to do laundry has made our car trips a lot lighter because we were carrying our clothes back and forth, towels, bedding and and rags - lots of rags. There is always something to be cleaned and many messes to be mopped up. And now we don't have to fill up our car every weekend with dirty rags.

Lemonade Out of Lemons

2013-01-23T21:05:00.001-07:00

Otherwise known as how we came to have two awesome beds made out of recycled and/or reclaimed wood. Back in August of 2011 when we had just started working on our house, we had a guy helping us build the deck. One Saturday morning, we arrived at the house to see some huge posts already concreted into our yard. They were all the same height. Curt was not happy. Two of the posts had been delivered at 20 feet long, but our contractor cut them to match the 12-foot posts, in spite of our plans showing the taller posts and the short posts combined to make our deck. The long posts were meant for the little roof over our front door. Not only were the bigger posts $300 apiece but they took awhile to get in, so then we had to wait for another delivery of them. Not to mention, the contractor had to dig up the posts he'd already concreted into the ground. It was not a great start, but we kept the posts and hoped we'd be able to use them for something else.

You can see the two tallest posts supporting the roof over our front door in this old photo, as well as the shorter posts in the back supporting the deck itself

I found two photos of beds I really liked on Pinterest, and Curt and I talked and talked about how to make these beds using our beams. Many napkin sketches were drawn. We argued a little bit too, because what I wanted was very simple and plain, though sometimes the reality of construction (even in furniture) is that more is required than meets the eye. What looked like a few beams laying across each other did not jive with Curt and what he knew would be needed to build either bed that I liked. But finally we hit our limit of sleeping on the floor (not that I was keeping track of the year+ or anything...) and Curt went for it.

A few posts down are the photos of the huge reclaimed wood beams we bought back in September at The Lumber Guy, with the intention of building the first big bed to fill up our ginormous, empty master bedroom in Breck. Things just got too busy and we didn't end up building the bed until a few days before Christmas. I cleaned and sanded and smoothed the beams and then Curt cut them to the sizes he wanted before bringing them up from the garage into our bedroom. The bed came together in less than an hour after that point. It was much faster than the other beds he's built, because with those he had to actually build the parts and then build the bed. Here, the beams were so big, they WERE the parts, they needed nothing else.

Everything was arranged in the room and measurements were checked before he started drilling and adding bolts. We used a $10 metal piece from IKEA in the center of the bed to support the slats (pine beetle scraps from our floor!).

I gave the bed another scrubdown and then stained it with natural Minwax wood stain - the same thing we used on our window trim and ceiling beams.

Then, my favorite part! Curt was going to have the guy who made our railing create two metal poles to support the headboard which we had resting on the back of the bed. But he found two scraps leftover from that railing project in the garage and just drilled holes into the back piece of the bed and used them to prop up the headoard. It's exactly what I wanted - simple, rustic, chunky and with some metal detail from the bolts, washers and headboard posts. I am in love with it!

Shamesless brag for my $300 Michael Kors duvet and shams purchased for $29 on clearance (more than two years ago - I knew I'd need them someday!)

For the other bed, we finally got around to those annoying, expensive, too-short posts. To get them out of our way while we finished the house for over a year, they had been lugged around to every room inside, outside on our patio, back in their room and then finally downstairs to the garage where Curt cut them to size. Again we washed and sanded them and brought them back upstairs. For these, Curt used some leftover black metal brackets from our deck along with the bolts and washers, and they look amazing! Again, it was exactly what I wanted. Again, it barely took over an hour.

After it was assembled, using another $10 IKEA piece and more recycled pine beetle kill wood from our flooring, I stained it. We haven't build the headboard for that one yet, but we're thinking about doing something fabric covered, maybe twill, to soften the sort of industrial feel of the bed. That's Curt's preference - I like how it looks now!

So now we have two completely cool, handmade, recycled (every part and piece - all scraps except the metal IKEA center slat supports) huge beds that only cost a few hundred dollars in solid wood TOTAL and I couldn't be happier. These beds will be staying in this house forever. When we sell, they will stay. There is no way to get them out! Ha ha. I was pretty impressed with my husband's ability to achieve my vision on these two beds - in fact, far better than my vision - and with nothing to go on other than two pictures I had saved and my stubborn insistence that my beds look similar. Some days he can work miracles and then some days, like Sunday, he can't figure out how to install a $30 IKEA towel bar and he throws it on the living floor. From upstairs. And then has to drive all the way back to IKEA and buy a new one ;) And that's how I know he is human. I was appreciating that while I was on my hands and knees regrouting a bathroom floor that I had mistakenly done in two different shades of white. Whoops.

And while I had the stain out, I stained the ledge we just built as well as our mantel. It really brought out the grain though it doesn't look like it got that much darker in this photo.

Raw

2013-01-16T18:10:00.001-07:00

That refers to my nose (I'm getting over a cold), our weather over the weekend AND the new shelf on our half wall in the living room. It is exactly what I wanted, and I took a bunch of pictures of it! Unfortunately, I didn't take any photos of how the shelf was made. A wide, square notch had to be cut into the bottom of the wood plank. It wraps over the ledge and overhangs on both sides. When we had our fallen tree cut into planks and made a mantel out of one of them, I knew I wanted to use the same wood on our half wall. Maybe not for symmetry, but because I just love how it looks. Last Sunday, it finally was put in place. We still need to stain or somehow treat the surface, but I think we'll leave the raw bark edge, well, raw.

before

after!

matching mantel

That's a Wrap, 2012

2012-12-27T12:05:00.001-07:00

I'm very behind here and have many updates to post - mostly for me to remember them before too much more time passes! I wanted to enjoy the break we had from house projects without trying to document anything, though that didn't last too long (the no projects thing, at least). We've been busy working on both our townhouse in Denver and up in Breck over the last few months and though some of the work was just WORK, some of the projects were smaller, more fun and more interesting (to me!). So I need to put them on electronic paper before I forget.

I'm a little bit relieved - and a little bit sad - that 2012 is almost over. It was fun, hard, rewarding, exhausting, educational, exciting, unsettling, eye-opening and probably more celebratory than any other year has been for me. But unlike last year, when we entered 2012 with a lot of uncertainty at work and a huge amount of manual labor ahead of us, we are both going into 2013 in a good place with our jobs and a dwindling list of house projects in our future. That means we're both a little more well-rested, a bit less stressed, with more money in our bank accounts and ready to find something new to do! Possibly a new (old) house in Denver that will bring us some more fun projects to play with.

We still have a few small loose ends to tie up in Breck but we are mere weeks away from tying a bow on that house (until we tackle finishing the basement next summer) and just enjoying it for ourselves, as well as listing it on VRBO to see if we can recoup any of our spending on it. Curt's punch list gets shorter and shorter each weekend. We have had our share of new and continuing headaches - losing water (again - and just a few days before hosting a houseful at Thanksgiving!), losing heat (when temps outside plummeted to well below zero), pipes freezing/leaking (causing some panic and unfortunate drywall/insulation destruction after finding a flooded room in our basement just last weekend when we thought our water woes were far behind us), issues with our snowplower and plenty of other things we are learning about life at high altitude in our first real winter - but we've also gotten to enjoy two amazing holidays, one with a bunch of friends and my little brother, and one with just the two of us and our pups. Both were perfect in their own way.

On New Year's Eve, I'll be toasting with friends and to friends and especially to my family, many of whom I got to spend time with this year on some of my favorite vacations I've ever taken. I'll be smooching my two favorite red-headed monsters and also my husband who I am absolutely positive will be providing me with many new adventures in the coming year ;)

Curt carving his smoked 15-lb turkey

Our Thanksgiving dinner table

This year's tree

Snowshoeing on Christmas Eve

Nesting

2012-09-28T18:33:00.001-06:00

After finally getting our house to a comfortable point that could be enjoyed, Curt and I spent two of the last three weekends in Denver. This was partially because we have both been traveling for work every week since Labor Day, and early Monday morning flights are tough after getting back home from Breck late on Sunday nights. It was also because we had a bunch of errands to attend to. The first weekend, we went to The Lumber Guy to buy some huge pieces of reclaimed lumber to build a rustic king sized bed for our ginormous bedroom. Our king mattress looks puny in our room and Curt has a vision to build something larger to take up hopefully a lot of the space.

Unfortunately, our bed-making weekend didn’t get too far. Curt called every rental shop in Denver to try to find a large saw to cut the pieces of wood to size before hauling up to Breck. He only found two shops with the band saw, and one was broken. We picked up the other saw, took it home, tried to make our cuts and found that the blade was dull. Lame! We also took a trip to the dump to pay $50 and drop off some construction debris that had piled up at our house – lots of plywood and other junk that we couldn’t reuse. I’m pretty sure it was my first trip to a dump and it stunk. I saw so many recyclable items piled up, it made me sick. Someone paid to drop off recyclable items that could have been recycled for free. Why?

The second weekend, we had a ball driving around to thrift shops taking advantage of a Goodwill 50% off sale. We also hit up every garage sale we passed on our travels. It had been a LONG time since we’ve done anything like that but it was an adventure. At the very first garage sale, Curt bought a router for $80 and I bought a deluxe camping stove plus three bottles of propane for just $10. Pretty sweet.

After stopping at three Goodwills and an ARC, we had a decent haul. My favorite purchase of the day was a Reidel crystal stemless wine glass for 39 cents. It’s a viogner/chardonnay glass that happens to fit a set I already have – a set of four but down a glass that someone (Curt) broke a few years ago. I didn’t even see the Reidel label until taking it home and ripping off the tag. Score. My second favorite purchase was an apple green teapot for $2. It was filthy and disgusting and I wasn’t sure I could clean it up, but a $1 can of Barkeep’s Friend made all of the burnt-looking spots disappear and look almost new. We used it for heating up water for making coffee last weekend and it worked like a charm! Curt found a pair of suede military boots that were in good condition, along with a North Face fleece and a brand new Oregon Ducks Prefontaine Edition Nike track jacket, both for $3.50.

Later that day, we drove down to a distant Denver suburb to pick up some box springs from Craigslist for our bed project, but they were the wrong size (who doesn’t know the different between king and California king?). Since we were in the area, we stopped in IKEA about an hour before they closed. We found a rug for the living room for half off ($99) in the As Is section and I bought the hooks I’ve wanted to hang on our metal Grundtal shelves in the kitchen. We finally hung the shelves last weekend, along with my hooks and some other things – green coffee mugs I recently found at Ross and a vintage measuring cup set that I found at Goodwill about a year ago. We also found a big black pot for boiling pasta at Goodwill last weekend which I put on the top shelf. I also put up a gorgeous wooden salad bowl set that was recently handed down to me from my grandparents – they came from Coos Bay, Oregon which makes them even cooler.

We finally spent a weekend in Breck this last weekend, and it was so much more relaxing than our two weekends in Denver that were spent running around all day, each day. Though it was relaxing, we still got a lot done – Curt painted and hung some baseboard and door trim, I stained some PBK window trim, we sanded and stained both sets of stairs inside, he stained our deck to prepare for the winter, hung a tv and a bunch of towel bars, mirrors and toilet paper holders in the bathrooms and hung all the hardware on the remaining kitchen cabinets. Lots of little details that just take time due to the sheer size of the house. This weekend we’re bringing up a wood chipper to tackle the numerous trees that fell down in the last year from wind. Most of them are laying across our neighborhood’s yard and she’s anxious for us to clean them up, even though technically they fell from her yard into her yard. But it’s probably the last weekend before we get enough snow to make yardwork miserable. The inside can wait!

42" tv looks ridiculous

Found two more green chairs on CL so now there are six!

Rod and shelf in the master closet

Snowwwwww

2012-09-12T18:27:00.001-06:00

It's coming down right now! Not in Denver, but all over the mountains including in Breck. Probably just a dusting today, but awesome nonetheless. It's that time of year when a snowy morning or afternoon may appear out of the blue. While this is not ideal for all of the grass seed we have spread four times now around our property to help prevent erosion, it's ideal for ME because I recently bought a new pair of snowboarding boots from REI. They are truly hideous looking (day-glo leopard print...why? hence their ridiculous price), but were on super clearance for $55 down from $220 from REI. They have fancy easy-pull laces unlike my other boots which are impossible to tighten. Breck opens in just 57 days. By then, I hope to have mastered putting on the dang boots due to their fancy (but confusing) lacing system.

I had a sneaking suspicion it might snow when I checked the forecast this morning and it looked like this:

I could not be more ready or more excited for this ski season to start.

Sitting and Slowing

2012-09-09T11:45:00.001-06:00

I did just say I don’t care about furniture. It’s true that it was a much lower priority than our kitchen. Not to mention, we moved out of a 4-bedroom house last year and into a small townhouse, so we do have some extra furniture sitting around. However, we had our eye on a specific couch that was planned to be our first (and pretty much only) real furniture purchase. I even managed to find the couch, two of them actually, on Craigslist and talked the sellers down in price by a couple hundred dollars before we even saw them. But they were fabric, sort of a cross hatch/linen-type material and while the light gray color fit into my Nordic lodge vision, the fabric was not dog friendly. Not only do both our dogs run, climb and jump all over our couch, but they lay on top of it like cats, and Greta likes to claw the cushions like crazy when she gets excited, which is every two to three minutes. Our Natuzzi is a super soft uncoated glove leather and her scratches wipe away pretty well with leather conditioner. So it was either leather or something heavy like twill or canvas.

Long story short, after some more CL searching, this couch landed in our living room last Friday. Originally around $3k (seller even had the receipt!), we paid $750. We didn't even bargain with her because she had so many other interested parties lined up. It was in practically brand new condition from being unused in someone's basement game room. It's not the type of Natuzzi leather that won't scratch at all, but hopefully it'll hold up better than an IKEA couch, which was probably never a great idea. It was not easy to find real leather (and a chaise on the correct side plus a storage ottoman), not bonded leather, which doesn't fare any better than fabric if you have rowdy pets. So even though I also just said we were at the end of our budget rope, we are also no longer shelling out thousands of dollars on a weekly basis, and we have the luxury of seeing our paychecks sit in our bank accounts for more than 24 hours. It had been a long time since either of us had $750 in cash laying around.

And thus begins the season of our slowing down. We have spent over a year working in our house with no chairs, nothing to sit on, nothing to relax on, because we did not sit and we did not relax. We couldn’t, literally and figuratively. But last Friday night, we sat on the couch in front of the fire and sipped whiskey. On Monday afternoon, we napped on it with the pups while taking a break from Labor Day I-70 traffic. There will be a LOT more of that to come! We will probably hang our tv over the fireplace next weekend, and while we won't be getting cable anytime soon, we may restart our Netflix subscription or at least be visiting the Redbox again.

This was not the concert-going, kick-balling, camping, cruiser-riding summer that I had envisioned for us (maybe somewhat optimistically, less realistically)...but we're about to have the fall and winter that we missed last year, when everyone we knew was sleeping in, skiing, going to brunch, traveling, cooking, cleaning their houses, having holiday parties and doing the stuff I would have rather been doing. No more sawdust sandwiches, fireplace-warmed burritos, stinky jet engine gas heater, sleeping bags, porta-potty full of snow, early mornings, late nights, wearing ski clothes inside the house and feeling terrible watching my shivering pups huddle together on their dog bed. Now those are just memories, and if I didn't have the photos to prove it, I'd hardly believe it happened.

In the Wise Words of Michael Franti

2012-09-05T21:46:00.003-06:00

"Don’t let nobody ever tell you that it couldn’t be done"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kf-l8I3tWiU

Last Friday, we passed our final inspections and were signed off to be cleared for Certificate of Occupancy!

OK FOR CO!

Kitchen Progress Part II

2012-08-28T21:05:00.002-06:00

Things are looking good in our kitchen! That’s an understatement. I’m beyond excited about the current state of our kitchen. I’m cooking inside the house on real pots and pans. We’re drinking out of real glasses. I’m making toast and tea and eggs and biscuits. This is what I have been waiting for. Many months of waiting! The most common question I have gotten in the last year from any of our friends and family who know about our project is: “How are you going to furnish this place?” Well, the truth is, I don’t care! I’m not interested in furniture. I have spent all of my spare time, efforts and extra dollars on outfitting the kitchen. I have combed the aisles of TJ Maxx, Ross and Goodwill to make sure I have what I want to use when I am in my kitchen, on the off chance I ever need to feed and entertain an army. I have enough plates and silverware to make sure I can feed eight people dinner and breakfast the next morning without doing a load of dishes in between, in case I forget to turn on a load (like Saturday! It was only six people, but still, we emptied the cupboards between two meals). I’ve been slowly acquiring a couple more pots and pans of the extra large variety, as well as some basic utensils. Still looking for the perfect can opener and salt and pepper grinders, but our camping can opener and shakers are working for now, haha.

The appliances started getting put in a few weeks ago. Unfortunately, the only non “scratch and dent” appliance – our fridge, a CL purchase that was brand new – was of course scratched AND dented on the front during its move into our kitchen. Sigh… Not only that, but when I moved everything from our tiny borrowed dorm-sized fridge into our new big one, I put two paint brushes that were used for varnish into the new freezer. They were wrapped in plastic bags, but apparently not tightly enough, because that varnish smell and taste seeped into everything I initially stocked the fridge with. Luckily, not the beer.

The oven and range hood are in, though the range hood isn’t vented outside yet. We hung two pendant lights over our peninsula and Curt happened to find another matching one for $10 in IKEA’s As Is section so we hung that over the sink. It’s too bad we extended the bowling lane a little further than we expected, and didn’t hang another electrical box over it, because the space is just perfect for three lights. And we have three matching lights. Bummer. Our peninsula is looking pretty cool now that it’s paneled in PBK. Our stair rail guy also welded a small steel beam to support the bowling lane at the very corner, since it’s somewhat flexible if you push really hard on it (people do that, I don’t know why). The beam matches the other steel beams in the room which is very cool. We still have plans to build a kitchen island using some leftover bowling lane, and I’d like Geoff to weld four legs for us. Or we might get cheapie metal legs from IKEA. I guess that depends on how patient I am.

I love our black stools ($60ish for both from overstock when I ordered – what a steal) and I’d like to order a couple more. We still need to do a backsplash but I can’t find the white glass subway tile I want at the price I want, so we will sit on that for awhile until the bank accounts are replenished. We have undermount lighting to put in under a few cabinets and we need to paint and install our toe kick plates. We have two open metal shelves to hang to the right of the range hood. We also have some trim pieces to put on the edges of the upper cabinets. We have to paint and install trim around our windows. Not to mention, we haven’t even put hardware on every door and drawer. So, it’s still a work in progress. But it’s a working kitchen and it's huge and I’ve been dreaming about it for a long time. You may not be able to sit, sleep or watch tv in my house…but you can eat.

If At First You Don't Succeed

2012-08-27T21:09:00.000-06:00

We had decided a few weeks ago to schedule our final inspections for this Friday, August 24th, but we actually got a little ahead of ourselves with finishing the items left on our list, so we had our first attempt last Thursday, August 16th instead. Curt called in 7 of the 8 inspections required for our Certificate of Occupancy – the 8thbeing related to landscaping and we were waiting on some dirt to be delivered - so we held off on that. We easily passed our first two – the septic tank system/leach field and the fire mitigation inspections. Off to a good start. And then Jeff showed up. He started writing things down in his notebook practically the minute he got out of his car. His notes were not good. He ticked off errors while walking all the way around our house and continued once inside. It was daunting and depressing and not a great end to the day.

Just a sampling from his walk around outside: the steps leading up to the front door needed a hand rail, as well as a tiny guard rail opposite the main guard rail. We needed to put blocking in between each step so a child could not crawl through them. We needed to finish/seal the walls around the entire perimeter of the house – parts were exposed, just a few inches, which we thought we could put gravel and dirt up against. But for the fire code, we had to add siding and/or rocks leftover from the front garage wall everywhere. Our concrete deck steps were not the right rise or run or had too many steps, I can’t remember. Probably all of the above. Our outdoor lights had to have motion detectors or sensors or timers for the sustainability code. Our outdoor outlets had to be replaced with weather resistant outlets even though they are enclosed in plastic covers.

Curt built an exact match on the left to the right

Handrail

$300+ wasted on this dumb deck! It looks pretty good though

We put up leftover stone veneer along the patio walls

More stone along the base of the house

Then, inside. A few of our hundred-plus outlets (that's a wild ass guess) didn’t work or were reversed. Two outlets on the garage ceiling didn’t have faceplates. Our indoor lights also had to have a few motion detectors. We were supposed to already have bought a washing machine (high efficiency and front loading) and we also needed to have a clothes line or drying rack. One of our CO2 detectors needed to be hard-wired rather than plugged in. We needed one more smoke alarm. Our steps up and down all needed to be made just a hair longer because they weren’t all long enough – we had measured them out before adding the pine beetle kill, so they were off by less than a quarter inch.

Hard to see the super-thin strips glued and nailed to the edge of each stair

We had to wrap some of our plumbing in the boiler room in foam as well as brace some pipes for extra support (Jeff called our boiler room "messy" while I've all along been absolutely amazed that some how all of the pipes and wires in our entire house end up connected in this little room, all functioning). Curt had to pull out a bunch of PEX and replace it with a different kind that included an oxygen barrier (luckily nothing in the flooring/ceiling, just the PEX that was visible and easily accessible in the boiler room). A few sinks needed their plumbing modified. We needed signs made for our “recycling center” in the garage. All of the breakers had to be labeled and a few needed to be replaced.

There were things I’m forgetting, but a lot of the items seemed extremely detailed and nitpicky and mostly related to the sustainability code buried within our plans. Of course I would think that, though…I’m no expert! Jeff is probably the toughest inspector at the Summit County Building Department and he ran us through the ringer. He even mentioned to Curt that he could have walked off the inspection due to the number of corrections needed. He seemed to have a little bit of a chip on his shoulder about Curt being the home-owner builder. I commented to Curt, right as Jeff was getting ready to leave, that we “almost passed 50% of our inspections today!” and Jeff kind of mocked me for being optimistic.

I was so impressed that Curt took it all in stride. We spent the last two weekends attacking the list of corrections so we could schedule our re-inspections as soon as possible. A lot of the items caught us unprepared for the sole fact that they were expensive. While we haven’t gone over our total budget too much (maybe by a few grand, we think), we are still basically at the end of our budget rope. Things like purchasing a clothes washer (new enough to be HE and front loading), multiple $50 weather proof outlets and $50 motion detectors, $300+ of redwood to build a deck over our back patio stairs as well as complete the guard rail and hand rail out front, hundreds of dollars of additional dirt/grass seed/hay, a septic tank alarm, new PEX tubing and various parts…all added up to a big list of things to purchase in a very short amount of time. So, I found a $250 washer on CL (less than a year old!), Curt bought some things on eBay, we reused siding and stone veneer that had been saved in our basement (I cursed Curt for keeping all of the leftover siding sitting around in "junk" piles in our basement, but we used every last board including some pulled from the wood pile in the backyard meant for the fire pit and every last piece of stone, I couldn't believe it!), and somehow we cobbled it all together.

What amazed me the most is that Curt finished most of the items listed on just the first day, two Saturdays ago. We probably could have gotten it all done that first weekend if we didn’t have to wait for some things to arrive from eBay. And when Curt said he planned to have the re-inspections scheduled for the week of the 27th, Jeff said "October?" Eat that, Jeff!

Saturday night after our first day tackling the list of corrections

Our friends commented this weekend that our house is built entirely from CL and eBay purchases. It’s not that far of a stretch…but that’s how it has to go when you have a set amount of money to spend and someone like Curt managing the job, who is 110% motivated and dedicated to accomplishing it for that amount. No bank believed we could build our house for the amount he estimated himself, and here we are: almost done, and very close to our budget. And pretty darn close to our original schedule, too, in spite of many delays both anticipated and unanticipated. It has been hard as hell. While I don’t count myself out of this equation entirely, it is purely because of Curt – his personality, his attitude, his experience and his sheer tenacity – that we have survived. He has left me in awe many times in the last year throughout this process. He has also left me frustrated, pissed off, exhausted, angered to complete silence, near tears and wanting to yell (okay, I did yell), tear down walls, quit and walk away. There were also times when Curt yelled, tore down walls and wanted to walk away (just twice), and I was able to talk him down or we were able to work through it together. But as a testament to how much freaking fun we’ve had during the last year, we’ve also talked non-stop from day one through day 400 about our next house, our next project. I can’t wait for that!

Curt actually went back up today for the inspections – hoping to do five re-inspections plus the landscaping – but he found out that the electrical inspector was off today (as Curt was already half way up to the house - awesome!) and that fellow impacts the whole list of items, so we will have to go back on Friday. Another delay and another wasted day off for Curt, who has far fewer days of PTO to burn than I do. Fingers and toes (and eyes) are crossed for Friday.

Finishing the Flooring

2012-08-03T17:27:00.004-06:00

Last weekend, we sanded and oiled our pine beetle kill wood floors. We used both a small hand sander on small rough spots and a rental sanding machine on everything. I only did one room with the large sander because it was so heavy, it only wanted to go toward the right and I had a hard time keeping it from doing anything but that or moving in any other direction. So, I sanded our big bedroom by walking in circles, to the right, until I got to the very center of the room. And that was the last room I sanded ;) We used tung oil to finish them, which we also used on the dining table and coffee table Curt built last year. It should protect the wood a bit (not quite as effective as a poly sealant but hopefully better than nothing and a lot more environmentally friendly) but it also brought out the blue colors pretty intensely. More tung oil was delivered today so we can do a second coat this weekend.

I feel a little bit like it’s Christmas Eve because when we drive to our house tonight, our tile floors will be done! We bit the bullet and paid someone to finish the tile floors in the entry, kitchen and adjoining pantry, mudroom and wine room. My last tile job in the basement bathroom wasn’t instilling any extra confidence in my tiling abilities, not to mention the layout was going to be pretty tricky. There was also a high spot where the backerboard didn’t get drilled down far enough and I was worried about tiling over it and making things as even and flat as possible. So we had the guy who just finished a few of our showers go up there this week to finish the rest of the tile floors (and our master tub). He sent us a few photos but tonight we get to see it in person.

This means we can hang our range hood and hook up our oven and fridge! It means our kitchen is mostly complete (backsplash and DIY island to come later). It means I might get to cook a meal on something other than our grill, which we tested with a frozen lasagna last weekend to mixed results (we were just sick of hot dogs, burgers and grilled chicken breasts). I can’t wait! But if I have learned anything, it’s not to assume everything will go as smoothly as it seems in my head. After our well snafu last weekend that unexpectedly left us without running water again, I will just be thankful if we can flush our toilets. The person who put in our well and pump came to our house yesterday and found rocks inside the lines to the well, which caused our tank to drain and empty completely multiple times, the fuse to blow and the water to stop running. So hopefully since that’s fixed, we will be in business. Cooking, cleaning, flushing, washing business.

The last areas of our flooring that need to be finished are the stairs (more pine beetle) and the two upstairs bedrooms (carpet has been bought, we just need to put it in). Then we will start putting in what seems like miles and miles of baseboard trim. I've started painting the trim but have a long way to go with that. Luckily it's not required for COO :)

Heavy Metal

2012-07-30T21:20:00.002-06:00

Our railing fabricator Geoff came to our house Saturday morning to start work on our custom steel railing. I have wanted a metal railing like this forEVER and was excited to see it take shape. It adds a little bit of a rough, hard, cold, industrial element to all of the light colors and natural wood we've already got in the house, and it also ties into the steel beams in the kitchen and hallway. I'm already in love with it.

He started at the very top and first added a metal rim to the edge of the loft area which finished off the pine beetle wood flooring that was put down last weekend. It just so happened that we were all three standing in the living room looking at that area at the top of the stairs, and I asked Curt how he was going to finish the side where you could see the edges of the PBK above drywall. Geoff happened to have an extra piece of metal that was just the right length to make a cool edge that was bolted down. Then he built the railing for that top part in two different pieces, attached them, and started on the longest part. That also had to be built in two pieces and attached before he started in the lower rail. A few times, he actually took apart pieces he'd finished to tweak them or fix an angle, so his attention to detail should result in a pretty perfect and up-to-code railing. He did a bunch of work in the garage and then brought some of his tools inside to use in place. That was probably a lot easier because he had to go up and down two flights of stairs all day both days. No easy feat a mile high in Denver, but even worse at 11,500 feet.

He was almost finished when we left last night but still needed to do the lowest part of the railing as well as add the handrail to the stairs going to the basement.

Geoff was another craigslist find and not only was his estimate less than half of the others we received - which were between $4000 and $5000 and nowhere near in our paltry budget - but he even sent us a sample of his work which totally won us over. It was exactly what we were looking for! If he has time, he is going to add a towel bar to the bottom of the concrete countertop in our master bathroom. I also want him to add small metal posts at either end of our bowling lane counter because it overhangs so far from the cabinets that it needs some extra support that even brackets or corbels wouldn't provide. He may have to come up another time to do that though. We promised him hot water and a shower because he spent Saturday night with us, but unfortunately on Saturday, the pump in our well had some issues and we didn't get water back until Sunday afternoon. No water and definitely no hot water. He went to bed coated in a layer of black grime. Hopefully it wasn't too terrible, and we weren't much cleaner. We go to bed every weekend coated in layers of dirt. No big deal!

Pine Beetle Kill Pizza

2012-07-26T21:24:00.002-06:00

Now that our wood floors are mostly complete, we’ve ended up with quite a bit of scrap pine beetle kill. Not as much as I thought, because Curt did a pretty good job measuring and he was efficient with his cuts too (no surprise there!). So far, we've accumulated three boxes of trimmings leftover and we will probably have another couple boxes one we finish the stairs, window trim and some paneling we will put on the side of the peninsula in the kitchen. Tonight, we took our scraps to some of the nicest and coolest guys we know in Denver – the brothers that run the Basic Kneads mobile pizza empire. Well it’s not quite an empire yet, but they’ve expanded from a single hand-made, hand-welded wood-fired pizza oven that was towed behind a family-borrowed vehicle two years ago to now two big pizza trucks and another that will be finished tomorrow.

They plant themselves at breweries, parks, bars, clubs, office complexes, parties, festivals, farmer's markets and events all over Denver and even cater weddings across our fair state. In fact they are catering the wedding party of some friends in Denver this fall which I can’t wait for (Carly & Dave). I could not love them and their delicious pizzas any more! When we first encountered them two years ago, Curt was just starting to make furniture for fun out of PBK, and we found out then that Basic Kneads burns that type of wood to cook their pizzas. Yeah, it's very green and very Colorado! We unloaded our scraps to them then and it’s nice to have them take the wood off our hands again now. Our small amount of scraps probably allowed them to burn their oven for all of five minutes, but nonetheless it was a good excuse to eat one of their pizzas, try to talk them into helping us build our own pizza oven in Breck and drink some beer at a brewery that has been open for an entire year and that we hadn't visited yet.

Pretty Freaking Close

2012-07-25T20:41:00.000-06:00

Our house is looking so different! I don’t even recognize it. All of the sudden, our wood floors are in. Everywhere! The only spots left to do are both flights of stairs and two closets off our master bathroom. Curt finished our bedroom two weekends ago and finished the living room on Saturday and the dining room, hallways and upstairs office/loft area Sunday. I can’t believe he finished it all (with the help of Sam, our last laborer standing, and a little bit from me). The pine beetle kill still needs to be sanded and oiled which will probably happen in the next week or two once we figure out where to rent a sander.

I had lots of fun using a staple gun on this tar paper - took out some tension by smashing the floor over and over!

We're going to put PBK paneling on the outside of that peninsula underneath the bowling alley countertop

While they were doing flooring, I put up some more rocks on the front of the house until I was stopped by a crazy rain storm. I’m never going to finish these dang rocks! And now the patio is ready for rocks too… I guess I have my hands full this coming weekend. Putting up rocks. Yay.

On Sunday, I spent about 8 hours dry sanding our concrete countertops with a tiny block and three different grits of diamond paper. It was about as fun and fast as it sounds (not very). Imagine sanding a sidewalk with a chalkboard eraser all day. But it actually seemed to be more effective than the wet sander we used a few weeks ago. In retrospect, maybe we will skip that step because it took an entire day also, and sprayed a fine mist of wet concrete all over our cabinets, walls, outlets, light switches, floors and us. But I made enough progress with the sanding to finally be able to roll our countertops with the first coat of protective sealant. It didn’t look so great as I rolled it on, and I was thankful Curt wasn’t there to watch how blotchy it looked. He told me later that he knew it would look like that as it was being applied because he watched a video on it. Wish I had known that, it might have prevented some stress! I will apply another coat this weekend and we should be good to go. Luckily the sealer darkened the countertops a bit because they were lighter than Curt wanted, even after adding a little bit of charcoal stain to our mix. We’ll see what it all looks like when dried.

The three remaining showers were tiled, meaning all four are done and ready for their faucets. I wish I had taken a picture of our massive master shower fully finished now that it's totally covered in travertine because it looks like a big orange cave. We still need to do a little bit of sanding and cleanup work on the concrete countertops in our bathroom before we put our faucets in, but we did hang lights over our sinks and tub so we’re getting closer to finishing that room.

Pretty penny tile Curt bought at the Habitat for Humanity Restore

For the most part, we’re down to hanging doors (two are already at the house for us to hang and decide if we like them before we order the rest), painting and putting in trim, staining the wood window/door trim, putting carpet in the two upstairs bedrooms, tiling the kitchen and entry and putting our appliances in their places. We’ve picked a date for our final inspection – Friday, August 24th - because that’s also the day the pro cycling challenge will cruise over Hoosier Pass by our house. And we want to watch it! If we pass that inspection, we will officially get our certificate of occupancy. Curt is in a huge hurry to get to that point because it means we can take a small loan from our finished house’s equity (most recently appraised in February at about 50% completion for almost $500k) and pay his family back for the money we borrowed a year ago to complete our project. It would've taken us another year or more to finish the house if we didn't borrow that money, which was very generous of them to lend. The small mortgage we will have after we take out that loan combined with our current mortgage will still be cheaper than the mortgage on our last house here in Denver, which is great because that was our goal.

Just a few weekends left! WHAT?

The Arghhhh Before The Ahhhhh

2012-07-13T17:25:00.003-06:00

We had a bit of a rough weekend, after making huge progress the weekend before and getting a ton of work done last Tuesday/Wednesday when we had an extra day off for the 4th of July. The trouble started Thursday, when concrete was supposed to be delivered at 9am and poured onto our back patio, where we had two guys ready to finish the surface. But from the contractor arriving very late, to hitting the front of our house with the boom, to pouring wet mixed concrete all over our yard as well as our neighbors’ yard, to requiring us to pay our two guys for 12 hours of work rather than the 4 it should have taken, to the crummy consistency of the quickly-drying concrete…the day was a bit of a disaster. A week has passed, and the concrete company went out to our house to survey the situation, and ended up only charging us half the amount originally quoted.

The patio doesn’t look terrible to me, and it drained the heavy rain we got last weekend just fine with the drain in the center, so that didn’t get screwed up. I’m just excited to have real stairs to walk out the back door onto, as well as a clean place for our grill and now a table and chairs, rather than the pile of snow we had all winter, and rocks and dirt once the snow melted. There are only two concrete companies in Breck, these guys and the company we used to pour our basement last fall – but those guys were booked solid. I guess now we know why. What a pain. Yesterday we took the day off to go back to Fort Lupton to buy more tiles to put along the little retaining wall around our patio.

When we got to our house last Saturday, Curt found another water leak in the basement coming from upstairs. After some testing, he discovered that it was coming from the newly installed toilet in our master bathroom. He could see that the surrounding tiles and grout were damp. Once he took apart the toilet, he could see that the problem was caused by the wax ring not causing a proper seal between the toilet and the plumbing below. He had already noticed this on a different toilet a few days before, and had replaced it with a thicker, sturdier wax ring. So, at least we knew that problem would be easy to fix, and again, nothing was wrong with our plumbing. This has been a constant fear, even though our lines had been holding air pressure all this time. It was scary that we did most of that work ourselves – scary while we were doing it (to me), and scary now that we are putting water through the lines.

Late Saturday night, Curt walked down the stairs to the garage and heard water dripping on the floor. Once I went down there, you could see a line of water leaking along the roof of the garage. Curt was just livid, after dealing with water issues all day. Of course he first thought it was the toilet, and back up the stairs we went to see if anything was damp, which it wasn’t. After some serious panicking, thinking the water could be coming from anywhere and pooling on the foil sheeting on top of the drywall and all traveling to the same spot and leaking out, Curt listed all of the ways we could have caused a leak – from installing the cabinet last weekend and possibly puncturing a line, to back when we installed the foil sheeting and possibly stapling into a line - and nnone of these made sense to me since our air pressure had been holding in the lines. After Curt took a saw and hammer to our drywall (no nervousness on my part here at all! not!), and we watched more water pour out of the ceiling, Curt stuck a level up there to see where the high point was, and discovered it WAS the stupid toilet again. Same issue with the wax ring. Basically, every toilet we put in was leaking and has to have the wax ring replaced. Such a minor, easily fixable issue that caused downright terror and doubt that we had not done anything right up until this point (again, at least to me). Luckily the drywall and insulation that was cut out was in the garage and can be pretty easily fixed.

While Curt was working on the water lines all Saturday, I had hoped to tile two rooms – the laundry room and basement bathroom. Not too large, shouldn’t have been a big problem. But I started on the basement bathroom first, which became a big problem. I already knew the concrete floor wasn’t level because we had to jackhammer into it last fall to move the toilet drain. The concrete patchwork was very uneven. But I figured I could go heavy with the mortar to even it out. What I didn’t know was that all of the walls had been framed in poorly, and none were straight. Now, I am not a perfect tile layer by any means, but the tile I’ve done so far looks pretty decent, and it was beyond frustrating to be struggling to get my dang tiles to lay flat, straight, level, flush and all around jiving with the surrounding walls, while keeping an offset rectangular pattern between the door, tub, sink and toilet cut outs and a small nook in the back of the room. It was a mess. I’d hoped to get those two rooms tiled and we didn’t even get half the bathroom tiled by 7pm when I threw in the towel upon learning that even the damn doorway was not straight. Little did I know, our night was about to get much worse with pee leaking into our garage. Good times.

Luckily, we started with the laundry room Sunday morning, which went much more smoothly, so we could finish up the stupid bathroom, which again took until almost 6pm. And then I got to grout the upstairs shower which I’d been putting off. So now I have two big monkeys off my back. Curt was nice enough to find a cheap tile guy to finish our other 3 showers – one of which is over 150 sq ft – which will allow me to finish the entry, kitchen and adjoining rooms.

I didn’t take any pictures of anything described above other than the laundry room, well, because a lot of it sucked and we both had our hands full/wet/dirty. But on the bright side, Curt started laying our pine beetle kill flooring and finished one bedroom with over half of ours done too. Pretty exciting and it looks awesome! Very blue while also being green :) We paid $1.64 per square foot for this flooring from Rocky Mountain Forest Products. There will be a lot of sanding when we're done, and then oiling or whatever Curt picks to seal the surface. I'm aiming for low shine but high water resistance.

Also on the bright side, our counters are looking good enough to seal after Curt ground a bit of the concrete around the sink hole to allow the huge sink to fit. There are two miniscule hairline cracks on the slim edges around the second sink. These showed up after exerting a lot of force on the concrete forms to snap them off the edges of the counters. Curt is going to describe the countertop process in more detail himself. We also brought up and installed our first dishwasher last weekend which ran its first load perfectly (found one $200 off retail for around $500 at Appliance Factory Warehouse). We are bringing up a refrigerator next weekend (a Craigslist find - brand new and pulled out of a flipped house - talked down to $900) and we have the range hood (another Craigslist find for $200 because of a few small dents, but at this point we don't have enough cash left to be picky!) in our truck to bring up tonight. We’re going to lay more wood flooring this weekend and next weekend I will tackle the last of the tile on the floor so we can put the rest of our appliances in.

We're headed up tonight for our first two-night stay, made possible by our hot running water and newly finished first shower. Our friends are spending a night with us tomorrow so we can go to the Breckenridge Beer Festival and relax for a few hours. My fingers and toes are crossed that our water issues are over.

Getting Close...

2012-07-05T21:09:00.000-06:00

Things are looking better in the kitchen now that all the doors, drawers, carousels, hinges and some hardware have been finished. A few lights have been hung. And our bowling lane countertop is now in place - I've sanded and varnished it five times with a couple left. Two weekends ago, the forms were put in place in the kitchen for our concrete and the big sink was dry-fitted.

On Saturday, we poured concrete into the molds that were put in place last weekend. Yesterday, we sanded the countertops, and ideally this weekend we can seal them, put in our sinks and have a real functioning kitchen. The concrete countertops deserve their own post so I won't go into detail about them. We already have our stove! A few weekends ago, we went to IKEA to buy a ridiculous amount of lighting for all the rooms, closets and hallways in our house. On the way out, we stopped in the "As Is" section where we found the 36” gas stove with convection oven we’d been eyeing for half off (about $900) due to a dent on the right side that will be covered by the cabinets. It's in the kitchen now but not yet in the right spot because we need tile underneath it. Can’t WAIT to put that sucker in its final home. We were struggling to find a 36” gas range after realizing our gas lines were too small to support a commercial range with higher gas needs. The IKEA model, made by Whirlpool, is the perfect hybrid between a residential and commercial model, and to make it even cooler, it’s counter depth like European appliances. It’s wider and easier to reach pots and pans on the back burners. We still need to find a range hood but didn’t like the style or the cost of IKEA’s $999 option. It was pretty sweet to check out at the register and see that our total was almost exactly the price of the original cost of the stove, but we also bought all of our lighting, bulbs, a bathroom sink and some other stuff for that same amount.

Our outlets, light switches and faceplates are all in. This turned out to be more stressful than we thought, because we couldn’t get any of the three-way switches in the kitchen to work, and it appeared there was no power at all upstairs. As soon as Curt started mentioning tearing out drywall - our insulated, finished and painted drywall - I wondered but did not say out loud…did we really not test these things before putting up walls and painting them?? After a full day with an electrician a few weekends back, everything is now working and looking finished. Lights are in every room, including a sweet Scandinavian chandelier from West Elm that I found brand new on craigslist for $90 ($400 retail, woot!). Four ceiling fans have been put up, including a massive one on our 20-foot ceiling in the great room that creates an amazing breeze. Our beams are done being sanded almost done being stained. I will probably finish that this weekend also.

Also on Saturday, water was turned on and is now running through our pipes. I grouted four bathrooms and we put in our dual-flush toilets. A couple of the bathrooms even have counters and sinks, including a piece of granite Curt put in upstairs on top of a craigslist vanity. I have one bathroom floor left to tile and then three shower surrounds which I’m not looking forward to. One shower is fully tiled (though it wasn't quite done when I took this photo).

Our $45 wall-mounted vanity from IKEA's as is section

The toilet in our master bath

Powder room with crazy green tile I found on craigslist

While we poured concrete in the kitchen, we also pour a countertop for our master bathroom. Two basin sinks were already purchased, as well as the faucets, so those could be all working by this weekend or next.

Curt had the crazy idea to use a steel I-beam and leftover glu-lam Alaskan cedar from our stairs to build our sink base in the master. It ended up being a little taller than we expected...

In the powder room, we used a piece of the bowling lane for a countertop. That basin sink and faucet are ready to be installed too. We had a little bit of panic Tuesday night when Curt noticed a water leak on the wall of the powder room that had seeped into the mudroom floor and was visible downstairs on the garage ceiling. After cutting out a bit of drywall, Curt realized the faucet we bought on eBay (from Hong Kong) was at fault - not any of our plumbing work. To his credit, he didn't freak out, even though we were up until almost 1:30am Wednesday trying to figure it out. think once a part is replaced, we can reinstall the faucet. Our drywall guys will be back in a few weeks to fix a few spots and they can fix the holes Curt cut to fix this problem as well as some of the various electrical problems we had. But since all the electrical has been fixed and our water is on, we even have hot water now! And that means heat.

Two weekends ago, we also had road base put in our driveway, plus three trucks worth of dirt delivered and placed/raked all along the sides of the house and backyard. Everything looks cleaner and less like a construction site. Yesterday, I seeded some of the sloped areas on our lot to protect from erosion and to pass our final inspection. Curt also cleaned up the small area of protected wetlands we have near our well, so hopefully that passes muster from the county too.

We had planned on taking a couple weekends off recently because of friends’ birthdays and a concert we had tickets to, but neither weekend was really “off” since we spent most of that shopping for the house and then Curt spent another day unloading everything in Breck while I worked. And on the other "off" weekend planned, we still got two full days in because we both took a day off from work and sold our tickets to the concert (it was 104 in Denver that day so it wasn’t a huge loss enjoying the milder temps in the mountains). I think we needed a little break that didn’t quite happen as planned, but we’re also both pretty ready and excited for things to get wrapped up, which almost overrides the exhaustion of working long weeks in Denver with a lot of OT for me recently and Curt being busy almost every weeknight with real estate clients, and then working two long 12-hour days at our house every weekend. Feeling a little scattered because so much is going on and it's hard to keep up. But the end is near.

Today, our concrete was poured in our back patio area. This weekend, we will start laying our wood floors in the great room, two bedrooms, dining area, hallways and two sets of stairs - the pine beetle kill wood is already waiting for us in our driveway. Then we need to put in carpet in two bedrooms and a couple closets. I need to tile our entry, hallway, mudroom, pantry, wine room, laundry room and kitchen - then grout, buff and seal those. We need to hang doors, install trim and baseboard moulding and stain the wood interiors of our window frames. We will probably save the trim and window staining until after we get our certificate of occupancy. We need to buy a fridge and dishwashers, which may happen this week. We need to put in a cabinet or two plus a sink in our laundry room (clothes washer and dryer will probably wait for awhile) and pour another small concrete countertop in there. We need to tile our fireplaces. Annnnd…I think that’s about it.

Because I’m so excited by the kitchen progress, I’ve already packed up a few boxes of things from Denver to put in our shiny new cabinets. Mostly glasses (wine, champagne, martini – all the important ones), a wine opener, some duplicates of cooking tools…and I may be jumping the gun here but I’ve packed up my hot cocoa maker, the mix and the handled mason jars I’ve been collecting from thrift stores in the last year. I’ve been slowly gathering things that fit the fantasy in my head of our cozy ski lodge. It felt a little silly to pull out my hot cocoa mix on another one of our 100+ days, but when the first snowflake falls in Breck later this year, I will be ready.