Thursday was spent with a U-Haul, a modest 11-footer manned by Pete and both of our dads. It was a one-day effort to move anything in from the house that we suspected Pete wouldn’t be able to carry or maneuver independently, and big ticket items that would fit easily in our cars, like the couch, mattresses, tables, etc. They moved lots of boxes that I had pre-packed too, and made serious progress while I watched on, continued to pack, and helped orchestrate. Not being able to physically help is the hardest thing about being pregnant so far, since I know I’m perfectly capable of carrying boxes or slinging a 35-lb bag of dog foor over my shoulder. It was pouring rain and an exhausting day, but we were able to sleep in our new house for real that first night. We learned a few things in those first 12 straight hours at home: The living room and dining room are not carpet covering hardwood like we expected, only the bedrooms are, which seems backwards. The shower drain sounds like water dripping into a dungeon, the bedroom ceiling light is operated by an old school remote control, and around 6am, an bird tenaciously pecks at our bedroom window with all it’s might for two straight hours, until you wake up and tap back furiously, or until you begin rifling through boxes for your BB gun.

I woke up feeling like I was in a hotel, like we had a check-out deadline, with an overwhelming need to get dressed, and get out of the house as fast as we could to continue with Day 2 of moving. We spent the day navigating our personal cars, loaded to the brim, from the old house to the new house, and then spent one final night in the almost-completely-vacated old home with Julia, all three of us and the dog sleeping on the dining room floor on an old futon mattress the same way we had grown accustomed to having weekend movie night sleepovers. It was a perfect last night in the old house, the kind of fun thing that I want us to remember forever. I would like to forget, however, that futons are horribly uncomfortable, and this particular one was about 25 years old, and 50 lbs. heavier with dirt than any futon should be (handed down from my parents). We tossed it to the curb yesterday morning and I wish we were going to be around to watch the garbage truck with the chompers eat it up. New chapter, new sleepover futon to come.

We spent the rest of the weekend trying to make sense of this new house, figuring out how to utilize the kitchen storage and closets, setting up furniture and cheering as we slowly began to empty the cardboard boxes (12 boxes down, 30-ish to go). Julia spent as much time outdoors as she could, collecting slugs and frogs and picking wildflowers, and eagerly accepted the challenge of reseeding some thin areas of the yard while Pete cleared brush and I mowed the lawn once the skies cleared.

There’s still a lot to move, which I mean to imply that we have about 10 carloads of stuff that I know we’d both rather abandon because who really needs the fourth string trimmer, third lawn mower, or all of that scrap wood. We’re surprised in hindsight that we thought we could have had the house cleared and cleaned in just two days, when even now we probably have at least two more days worth of car trips to take care of our belongings in the attic, basement, garage, and shed.

This is the first time Pete and I have moved together, and we’re taking things a little bit differently than I did when I bought my first home, or any dwelling experience he’s had before. We have no paint colors picked out. We have no products on order to fill our enormous living room. We don’t know what the long-term plan is for 1950′s bathroom, or for the kitchen for that matter, we don’t even know if we’ll remove the wallpaper immediately. This home is a big evolution for us, and we both want to live here forever with our family; neither of us have owned a ranch, neither of us have had and been responsible for the kind of property that we have now, and the style of the home we’re envisioning is like nothing we’ve achieved before, so there’s a big freaking awesome learning curve ahead of us.

With this project, we’re inevitably going to take a lot of time to make it right, both in long-term aesthetic and function, and right for us. This home has to have a chance at standing the test of time, an evolution of its original 1950′s form, a place that’s very purposeful, efficient, and defined, a place that can withstand a lot of foot traffic, growing kids, furry pets, and all the while embrace the nature that we’re embedded within. It’s going to be so much different, and I’m so happy to be here. Until I start doing actual projects again – the how-to variety, I mean to say – I’ll be continuing to write here to share the progression of this house, the type of posts that really document the broad developments the home undertakes, so that we can look back on the before + after and all the in betweens many years from now. I’m so happy it has started, it’s going to be the best summer ever.

The post Our First Weekend appeared first on .

If anyone was as excited as we were to have the house, it was Julia. She hadn’t seen inside yet, given that we did our initial viewing, inspection, and final walk-through during the school day. We were only able to show her the perimeter of the property in the weeks prior to closing, taking quiet moments to sneak around and let her explore the yard with us. We didn’t mention to her that we would be closing yesterday, even though we had been pretty transparent about sharing information and timing as we learned about it. She asked us often when we would be moving in, but because we didn’t mention anything about it in the day before we closed, we had the unique opportunity to surprise her after school with the keys. Her reaction was priceless, almost speechless with joy, I almost cried, maybe I’m too emotional lately. We took her straight to see the house.

I had planned to do a walk-through tour for you guys, but the 7-minute video that I captured instead is way better. Pete and I watched it together several times last night, and we thought you’d like it too. Audio is necessary, it’s just cute to hear a candid 6-year old’s reaction to this new experience, or at least we think it is. Completely unedited, it’ll definitely give you a sense of our new home’s layout and design on Day Zero. Pete claims that he didn’t know I was filming the whole time (assumed I was snapping photos), and I’m sure Julia had no idea, so it’s candid videography at it’s finest. I’m just happy the camera auto-focused correctly.

Notes:

• All of our closets are like refrigerators. 
• All of our appliances are old.
• Doc Martens are an accurate measuring instrument.
• I told you our master bedroom was big.
• Somewhere towards the end is a reflection of a 17-week me, baby spies.
• Sometimes sneakers are hard to remove.
• No basement footage. I took a second video of us exploring down there but it didn’t focus.
• The tub “IS BEAUTIFUL.”
• I tried to keep the camera at waist level while filming, Julia’s eye level.
• It’s my favorite family home video ever.

Today and tomorrow, we move. Enthusiastically! Hurrah! Follow me on instagram (and #merrymove2013) for more throughout the day.

The post Welcome Home appeared first on .

IT’S OUR BEST DAY EVER. Thanks SpongeBob.

If you’ve been following the buying/selling/renting series, you know it’s taken a lot to get to today. Even after filling you in on our decision and ability to go conventional with our mortgage, the bank underwriters still demanded a lot of us and our mortgage teams and lawyer. Every day they seemed to need something else, an addendum, a new statement, a confirmation, and every request pushed our closing date out a day or two. We knew that buying a home as freelancers would be hard, and it was. I think we’re all pretty sick of hearing from each other and nagging one another, and I hope Pete and I never, ever have to buy another house again. I hope this is it.

We had our final walk-through of the property yesterday. We’ve really loved watching the property evolve from early-to-late spring (we saw the house for the first time in early April and here we are closing in mid-June), especially in how the property went from barren of leaves to completely engulfed and barricaded in its maturity. The lawn had grown to about a foot tall in the past few months, and we were glad to see yesterday that the sellers finally gave it one last mow-job for us; it’s lookin’ all fresh and proper and healthy. We explored more around the backyard during this last walk-through, completely enthralled in the privacy of the property and the natural wildlife setting that we were buying into. That’s when I posted these two photos to Instagram:

Because so many of you have been eagerly asking for photos/something/anything, I whipped up a little floor plan for y’all (when I move I get all Southern drawl-ly, I guess). It doesn’t do the house justice, no floor plan can, but I’m excited to share it. The exterior scale of the overall home is spot-on thanks to measurements taken at our home appraisal, so I duplicated that in floorplanner.com and built the guts from there. The room breakdowns are only about as accurate as I could guesstimate with my own eyeballs, from my own memory, based on the exterior shape of the home, and there are probably little nuances that I haven’t even noticed yet, like an extra window or a deeper-than-expected closet. A few notes about what you see are detailed below:

• Click on the image to make it bigger in your screen.
• The house has a perfectly modest ranch floor plan, I hope you weren’t anticipating something wildly different from what was ordinary during the 1950′s. The orange area is just over 2,000 square feet. What I don’t think is well-represented, even with the measure for scale, is how big the rooms actually are. It was a great selling point, and if I can post a video and some photos in the next few days, I hope you’ll be able to see what I mean.
• 3 bedrooms, 1.5 bathrooms, which means it’s technically only a half-bath bigger than our old pad.
• There are a lot of closets (which we don’t currently have) and all of the closets have doors (which we don’t currently have)
• I think the builders went door-crazy, evidenced by the fact that there are two doors leading into the kitchen for reasons we can’t determine.
• There’s a light gray box shown on the right side of the living room. This is a half-wall stone indoor garden planter, so ’50′s cool.
• Our bedroom feels about as large as the whole second story of our old house. The living room is gigantic too. I need to master large-scale furnishing.
• The full bathroom is just about as big as a bedroom. That’s not an error.
• There are several picture windows, and cute little corner windows to boot. I love them all.
• There is a full unfinished basement, worthy of a tour of its own. It’s huge, its footprint sitting directly below all of the orange areas on the main level, meaning that it’s another 2,000+ square feet of potential awesomeness.
• The garage is really wonderful,  spaciously wide and deep for both of our cars. And it’s attached to our house, which neither of us have ever had, ever, ever, ever, in the history of our lives. Cool.
• Summertime is going to mean sunroom time, so you’ll probably be seeing me chillin’ out there a lot if you visit.

P.S. The first house we had an offer in on still hasn’t closed according to local listings. It’s the house we wanted for ourselves badly for about 5 months, but we’re glad to have moved on. I won’t be sharing the 4,000+ photos I took of that beautiful (ransacked) property, but for as long as it’s publicly available, you can see the listing and photos for that house right here.

The post Your First Glimpse appeared first on .

From our current-old yard, berries are one of the things we are dead-set to transplant. There are many berry plants that are well-established, producing an array of blackberries, red raspberries, and wine berries, all of which were themselves transplants from our parents (and one from a sneaky sampling taken a few years ago from the side of a countryside road, shh). All of those plants generate plenty of offshoots every spring (like the ones popping out of the planter boxes, they’re a lot bigger than you saw a few weeks ago), so we’ll help ourselves to those and let the big bush in the back left unharmed. It’s lush with blossoms.

Late in the winter or early in the springtime (I forget) a local nursery offered a Groupon ($40 of merch for $20) so we each bought one (do the math, $80 of plants for $40). At the time, we actually intended the splurge to help out our current backyard – whenever it was that the deal was offered was actually before we had found our almost-home – with good intentions of buying up a lot of perennials and hostas. With the recent-upcoming-exciting changes in our housing situation, we decided to treat ourselves to special plantaloons for our new abode instead.

It didn’t take us long to agree that we wanted to establish some additional berry plants to accompany the ones we were going to transplant, so we brought home these: two blueberry bushes, and two raspberry plants. And never mind the amazing welded steel tables for now – a friend of Pete’s surprised us with those hand me down’s last week and they’ll eventually have a home in our new workshop. I left them in the shot… because I couldn’t move them… but I left the Weber grill in the frame so that you could appreciate the scale of both the plants and the tables.

The nursery had many raspberry options, but none of the variety I really hoped to find, the Fall Gold raspberries (best berries ever, do it). Instead, we invested in a Latham Red Raspberry, and a “New Logan” Black Raspberry.

Word on the street (a.k.a. mom) says that the raspberries will be fine in our deer-filled backyard, but we’ll have to take extra precautions with the sweet blueberries. Here comes learning!

Speaking of the blueberries, one is a traditional plant (an O’Neal Blueberry), but the other is one neither of us had tried before, a Pink Lemonade Blueberry that actually/allegedly bears pink fruit. It’s the plant that stands the tallest of the bunch in the above picture, and it already shows signs of summer berry lovin’. Needless to say, we’re pretty excited to have them.

Meanwhile, the irises, poppies, and peonies opened in the past few days and it’s a delight to have the fresh cut flowers in our living room while we pack.

How does your garden grow?

The post Bonus Berries appeared first on .

To see more of my writing from the last few weeks, check out these posts:

• Mother Nature’s trauma being endured by families in other parts of the country is far from what many of us can begin to imagine. How prepared are you and your family if a natural disaster were to strike? Do you have photocopies of all of your important documents? Extra sets of keys, extra medical supplies, extra bottled water? Get a kit ready just in case; you can have it ready in a day, and it doesn’t have to take that much space. Learn how I made ours (and find out what a kit needs to contain) right here.
• Pretty paper alert: I made this gift wrap out of tissue paper and RIT dye. It’s watercolor-y perfection.
• Buying a pressure washer can be complicated. But it doesn’t have to be. The PSI, GPM, spray settings, learn what you need to know in this post.
• It’s garage sale season, and with that comes awesome furniture finds at a steal of a deal. Find out how to refinish some of your treasures, like my mid-century sideboard, right here.
• I’ve seen a lot of DIY clocks cross my path, but I always wondered how hard it was to assemble them, and where you could find the parts. Looking for tips like this too? This post will help with shopping, buying, and assembly (and give you a few creative ideas for installation in the process).

The post DIY Network: Whilst Planning and Packing… appeared first on .

I don’t really have any tips for when it comes to packing, other blogs can give you more creative ideas than I can. While I like to be organized, I also like things easy, and sometimes it’s easier to shove all of your vases into a box with bubble wrap and jam some soft cover books on top because they fit. I try to keep like-items in the same boxes for ease of unpacking (i.e. all of Julia’s boardgames from around the house are in one box), but whatever works is OK with me, because I’ll be damned if every single box isn’t getting unpacked and recycled once we get settled. It’s enough for me to label the strip of tape sealing the box shut for content recognition, “pillows and DVDs,” “Julia’s art supplies and planters.”

We’ve planned to have a mega garage sale soon after moving to the new house, and I’m trying to pull double-duty and simultaneously pack away stuff that we know we won’t need in the next few weeks (towels, linens, office supplies, our bulk supply of toilet paper that would make you think we’re a household of 10), while dividing out items we no longer want into boxes clearly labeled as GARAGE SALE (excess decor, odd pots and pans).

Our books are stored away too, all in small-sized boxes for easy transport. As conveniently as they pack, I’ve always regretted the times I’ve fit 100 hardcovers into a single box, so I expect that it’ll be easier to carry 10 boxes of 10 books. And it’s actually a whole lot more than 10 boxes, but you know what I mean. Light lifting, this time around, since we have the small boxes available. Not that I’m doing any lifting in my pregnant state, but I’m damn good at filling boxes and leaving them covering every surface in our home until Pete relocates them.

Our workbenches are somewhat of a different story, and are undoubtedly going to be the hardest thing to pack. Fortunately many of the power tools come in their own carrying cases, and we have a lot of plastic bins in which to organize all of the loose items so they can be organized once we have a space set up at the new house. The workbenches will come with us; Pete had designed them in such a way that the carriage bolts could be removed and the framework could be easily disassembled to fit up the stairs. But we’re obviously still a long way from tackling this. I’m waiting for another unbearably hot day where standing in the basement for hours will feel good.

My main goal is to have all of the loose items packed away, not just in the basement but throughout the whole house, by the day that we recruit my Dad to come help load furniture into a rental truck. Let’s get it done.

The post Packing It Up appeared first on .

As we read through it and everything that it carefully outlined, it was apparent (for the first time, to me, which doesn’t mean that it wasn’t outlined and something I should have noticed before) that we would be paying an extra $200+/month in our monthly mortgage payments by getting an FHA loan, regardless of our downpayment, because of mortgage insurance.

That’s like, a lot of money, right? It made me want to vomit.

The terms of the FHA mortgage we secured state that even if we put down 20% of the home value at closing (reduced the LTV to 80%), we would still be stuck with these insurance charges for 5 years. It wasn’t this way when I bought my house originally, not that I was able to put 20% down by myself, but I was more aware of the rules of the loan and knew what I was getting into. This time, I assumed wrongly that it hadn’t changed, figured we could avoid it all together or at least within reasonably short time of buying our home, and ended up being very surprised by how things had changed.

In a small way, by securing a FHA mortgage loan number earlier in the year, we were “lucky” to have the opportunity to drop these insurance fees after 5 years if by that point we had paid off 20% of our home’s value. I mention that because as of today (quite ironically), FHA laws change again and mandate that any FHA loans initiated are stuck with those insurance charges for the life of the loan regardless of the LTV ratio. What a price to pay, it totally and completely blows.

What I’m getting at here is the day that we received that stack of paperwork including the Commitment Letter, we immediately started researching how we could go about getting our mortgage conventionally, not an easy feat considering all that we had been through so far just to get a loan with cosigners, but one we felt worth exploring and pushing for. It was like starting from scratch, trying to get Pete a conventional mortgage loan without cosigners, and without me, since we still hoped to use our house as a rental property.

An FHA loan has been the fall-back plan all along, we knew we were walking a fine line in being able to do a conventional lon, but after nearly 4 weeks of back and forth with our mortgage team, more paperwork, more financial reviews, and more headaches, we finally received word on Friday that we would be able to proceed conventionally (and save over $12,000 over the course of 5 years, plus save several thousand dollars in extra closing costs). While getting to this point has held us up a little in the process, and happens to be the biggest reason we haven’t closed yet, it’ll be worth it.

Holy mortgage drama, yo. I’m sharing these details knowing that there are others out there going through similar battles to achieve homeownership. It’s often a lot harder than it seems to buy a home, at least neither of my experiences have been easy, but with organization and a lot of persistence, it can pay off. And with all that said, if anyone is looking for a solid team of mortgage specialists, please email me and I’ll share contact information. They’ve worked really hard for me to secure my mortgage 4 years ago, and again with this new loan, and I would highly recommend them.

The post It’s All About The Money appeared first on .

I realize this announcement is a little bit out of nowhere; you knew we were planning for it, but probably hadn’t realized we started on the process. The lease was signed just last night, so we feel pretty comfortable in shouting it from the rooftops!

I thought a lot about sharing the details of getting started as we were doing it in real-time, but held off until it was said and done for a few reasons: We haven’t, and never intend to disclose our actual home address. As we rent the home out to tenants, keeping the address private for their needs is as important to us as was keeping it private for our own peace of mind. Secondly, keeping the rental process streamlined and qualified was important for us (and our sanity) this first time around. I figured that if I put it out there, our Craigslist post (with address) would have circulated, curious followers might have shown up just to look around, and we would have had more distractions than we would have liked. What’s funny is that we showed it to some relocating non-locals who had seen our home on the internet before, on Apartment Therapy specifically, and they said they didn’t realize that it was familiar until they were standing in our living room. How weird-cool?

In keeping hush-hush over the past week, I realized that you’d probably be curious about the whole How To Rent Your House process without the help of a realty company, especially from our first-time ever landlord perspective, so here’s how this all went down:

1. I started the process of making our home rentable by doing my research with the City of Rochester and applying for a Certificate of Occupancy for our home, which has always been a single family unit, never rented. The City advised online that landlords should do this about 40-days out from when they planned to have tenants inhabiting the house to allow for inspections and paperwork to be processed. The process of applying required nothing more than filling out a form at City Hall and paying $60, which will cover our home for the next 6 years.

2. I also conferred with our personal accountant to learn more about how rental properties are reported in tax situations, so that we knew how to account for all expenses related to our home-slash-new rental property. We also obtained documents from fellow landlords so that we had rental applications and legal-certified leases to build from. Having this background as a starting point felt so much better than downloading documents from the internet (which you can obviously do, or have built by your own lawyer, but make sure that they suit your needs).

3. We did a lot of snooping on local rental property pricing. We’ve both had experience renting from city units and had some frame of reference for how much a single family home could fairly be rented for, but looking more closely at the pricing of homes for rent in our immediate neighborhood shed a lot of light onto what our home might be able to fetch. We chose a median price, based on the fact that we could offer a private, fenced-in yard, and would be pet-friendly. I don’t care where you are, those few list items are good selling points.

4. As part of our Certificate of Occupancy approval, a City Inspector was scheduled to review the condition of our home and approve the property as a certifiable rental unit. Never mind that I’ve lived in many “certified apartments” that were utter disasters during my time in Rochester, I was still nervous about this part. Fortunately for my blood pressure, we passed with flying colors.

5. With the Certificate of Occupancy approval under our belts, we moved quickly to get an ad listed because we hoped to have tenants by July 1st. This happened about 10 days ago, which goes to show you how quickly we went from zero to success. Referrals from other landlords in our little network had previously advised us to advertise in small print publications rather than Craigslist, which I can completely appreciate, but as a first ditch (and quick, f-r-e-e) effort we went the Craigslist route, gave ourselves a short timeline in which to test it out (i.e. if we were getting a lot of weirdos, we would have stopped and advertised the rental through a more credible publication; I had to try, because I always found my apartments through Craigslist, and I had to assume there were other non-weirdos like me out there looking innocently).

6. Craigslist worked! We couldn’t have been more excited/relieved. It worked so well that we spent the better part of last week corresponding with potential tenants, and chipping our way through a calendar of showings. We kept the house clean. We abandoned most of our out-of-the-home plans, especially in the evenings, to accomodate after-work showings. I felt that it was important to have all of these prospective tenants looking through our house while it was furnished (i.e. we haven’t done substantial packing yet!) so that tenants could envision the house and room layouts.

No one was more surprised than us that we attracted so many only normal people. That’s lucky, right? And when I say normal, none of the stereotypical Craigslist creepers that make me think I should have a police escort, everyone was chill and happy and the types of people we would want as our neighbors and friends. We expected to have our fair share of oddballs, college students, beer-pong-addicted troupes of frat boys, and I was surprised that we had none of them in all of our showings. We had interest immediately, and found ourselves handing out applications at every showing. Within 3 days, we had a short list of three capable, friendly, and totally we-love-them-so-much desirable tenants that were fully in the realm of possibility. Some prospects were willing and eager to do yard work (which we had committed to maintaining), others were happy with the current paint colors (which we had planned to neutralize), everyone was thrilled with the location (it’s certainly a great ‘hood), and overjoyed by the yard (perfect for families and pets).

7. Signed, Sealed, Delivered. Having a signed lease is a huge relief for us. With this stage of the process behind us, and our plan of closing on the new house creeping nearer and nearer, we’re embarking on this possibly one of the most exciting months of our life.

Happy weekending! Time to start packin’.

The post Well, That Was Easier Than We Expected appeared first on .

Now that I’m in my second trimester, I’m starting to get my energy back which hopefully bodes well for all of the summertime DIY plans we have for our to-be new home. Who knew it would be so hard to write posts every evening when you fall asleep at 8pm? I hope to be back to a more regular routine soon.

Photo created with the help of the Penultimate app for the iPad. I couldn’t find our stylus to do a precise type design, but my own finger worked A-OK.

The post More Good News appeared first on .

Switching a doorbell is a piece of cake, but the list of things we need to do is still a long one, even after having spent last week and the better part of our three-day weekend getting down on most of the rehab.

(3) Regrouting the kitchen floor was one of the bigger jobs at hand; we’ve had trouble with the grout that I used between the vinyl tiles in the kitchen, and I when I wrote about the issue, had basically relegated myself to the plan to fully replace the floor with a non-grouted vinyl tile. What a surprise it was to hear from multiple readers/commenters that I should try a grout that was polymer fortified first, that it might have a little more flex in our still bouncy kitchen floor, and we might find it to hold up better, or at least not crackle away like stale cracker bits. At $4.98/container, we spent $15 on 3 of a neutral gray color. I did not search high and low or shop around for brands, and the tile expert at the store didn’t know from experience if it would hold up any better, but it’s worth the try and really appreciated the recommendation.

Pete followed through with making even more floor repairs before we got started to lessen any remaining signs of bounciness, just to make sure that we were putting the grout in the most solid floor that we could. As it has involved before, marking those bouncy spots requires one of us to stand in the kitchen and bounce around a lot to get the subfloor to squeak or visibly bounce against the joists in the basement ceiling so that the problem areas can be shimmed. It’s really not a one-person job, and it’s most effective if you weight yourself down while you hop… think, carry a bag of cement, potting soil, your kid, whatever.

Removing the old grout was easy, in part because it had mostly been swept away or at least loosened itself between the tiles. With a flathead screwdriver and a Shop Vac, we made our way around the room clearing out every gap to make space for new grout.

The new polymer fortified grout went on smooth, and having to pause and remix each of the three containers every so often was actually a good thing: sometimes when you make too large of a batch of grout (or mortar, or cement, etc.) it can dry out before you have an opportunity to use it all, meaning waste, or a poor working product. Tiny portioned containers meant that we always had fresh grout at the end of our putty knife.

And so far? So good. It might be too early to tell if this is going to be an issue again, but we felt good for trying it once more and spending $15 instead of having entire do-over and spending $200 on tile. It’s one of those things we’ll monitor closely for the sake of our tenants, even though the flooring in most apartments I rented was utter filth.

Also in the kitchen, I got around to (4) finishing the backside of the basement door. Remember when I created a faux-detail on the front of our basement access door to hide a massive pet door hole? I mirrored the same treatment to the backside of the door (since the hole was also visible there).

The panels were actually added sometime in late November, which only further proves that all of our in-progress projects fell into a black hole vortex in December, the month we got married. Further evidence to the left, where you’ll notice that the drywall is missing from the ceiling as we spent time repairing the squeaky stairs. That baby took 7-months to work its way back up, because sometimes we don’t care about finishing what we start in a blog-gonna-impress-you-worthy timeline. (Real-life high-five.)

I only just got around to painting the paneled door white, so it’s our future tenants that will definitely enjoy its finished work more than we will, but I’m thrilled that it looks completed. We had leftover primer and white paint from other projects, and were able to prime it one day, and then paint it the next, so it was el cheapo and easy to complete. Cody bomb.

(5) We changed the batteries in all of the smoke alarms, and added a new (talking!) smoke alarm-slash-carbon monoxide detector in the hallway outside of the bedrooms. Fancy pants.

(6) We also got around to transplanting Myrtle into the garden beds surrounding our backyard patio; the patio is in a very shady part of our yard, and I had actually set out to buy a bunch of hostas to fill in the beds this spring (we have some great LivingSocial coupons to a local greenhouse that we’ll have put to use another way) but the myrtle was f-r-e-e, transplanted in part from the front garden where it was starting to rage out of control, and from the sheer acres of myrtle at Pete’s parents house, wherein you can shovel a few pails worth of the stuff and still not notice any gaping spots in the garden. I’ve mentioned that flats of myrtle at the gardening center can cost upwards of $35, right? Whoa. Thanks for saving us $100. If it fills out as well as it has in other spots in the yard, we can expect the circular garden surrounding the flagstone patio to be lush and beautiful by next spring. It may appear from this instagram photo that we are burying evidence of some sort, but I can assure you that we are not. Also, we did have permission to transplant the stuff, so don’t think we’re just covertly stealing it.

(7) We painted a lot of trim, too. Inside, outside, upstairs, downstairs, you name it, we touched it up, and Cody promptly rubbed his body against it. He is very white-blotchy, and very not concerned about his lack of coordination around wet paint.

We upgraded some hardware throughout the house, namely, the two products that I was given to use/review during my sponsorship with Delta Faucets: (8) the kitchen’s Touch2O faucet, and (9) the bathroom’s shower head.

When we upgraded the plumbing in the bathroom, we had purchased a new valve and because of how companies bundle products, when you buy a valve, you’re also buying the handle, tub spout, and a coordinating shower head. That spare shower head that we didn’t use immediately, we saved, and I was able to screw into place in a pinch. It’s the nicest apartment shower head, like, ever. Of course we are totally cool with tenants swapping it out for their own, that’s the nice thing about a shower head being so easy to alternate with a little bit of PTFE tape.

To update the kitchen sink, I bought a comparable faucet to fill in the void left by swiping our Touch2O. To fit the two holes that the hired countertop crew had drilled into the countertop last fall, I chose the same faucet style that featured a pull-out sprayer and stand-alone soap dispenser. While I had expected/hoped to be able to get the identical Delta Faucet model that we had before (the Lewiston) it was no longer being carried locally, so I chose a close #2, the Cicero in a Brilliance Stainless finish.

Having just installed the Touch2O faucet last fall, it was easy to recall how to uninstall/reinstall and made the swap quick. I don’t actually mind working in the tight spaces beneath the sink, so long as water isn’t spraying at me.

Short of being non-touch sensitive, we actually like this faucet model a lot. It’s handle is a little easier to turn on and off at your desired water pressure (the Touch is always set to flow how you pre-set the water, which can sometimes be frustrating), and the spray/jet buttons are located on the top of the pull-out handle rather than being hidden beneath. Easy to use, and looks pretty.

There are still several things on our list, but we’re getting closer to completion which is good, because we’re also getting closer to knowing a certain closing date for our new house. Fingers crossed!

The post The Countdown To Landlord-dom appeared first on .

There’s actually quite a bit of cool new content to browse over there; these etched oil and vinegar bottles turned out so well, and would look great in my own home, and this tequila bottle turned hummingbird feeder would be a great accent to our backyard. (You haven’t lived if you haven’t enjoyed watching the hummingbirds feed in your own yard, pure joy.)

If you’re looking for more of my writing and projects, you can see it for yourself in these posts. New tools, new toys, and new home decor accents means a little something for everyone!

• How to make your own bud vases. Inspired greatly by my love of small vases on windowsills and on our office desk where space is limited.
• Personalized wedding gift ideas. Ideas pulled straight from wedding gifts we received ourselves! Our friends and family are so thoughtful.
• What plants to grow in your shady landscape? I thought for a long time that we were out of luck in this department, but I’m trying hard to learn more about gardening options and finding that there are plenty of beautiful–even flowering–options for shady gardens.
• Using our brand new pressure washer! Best toy ever, no question. Want to come over and pressure wash everything with me?
• Getting my safe on with brand new respirators. You could probably stand to breathe safer too.

The post DIY Network: Lots Of Updates appeared first on .

I always took it as a good thing when I lived alone, an ain’t-no-intruders-going-to-kidnap-me-from-my-bed-while-I-slumber kind of peace of mind, but once we moved Julia into the house last summer and were needing to sneak upstairs to the bathroom after she was asleep early, we knew that the staircase squeaks would need a lot of attention, because there was just no avoiding them. I even tried to record the sound in the home tour video I posted here, documenting it knowing full well that we were about to try and reduce or remove the same squeaks.

The squeaks weren’t easy to access, of course; the stairs leading to the second story are stacked directly over the stairs leading into the basement in this house, and the underside of those stairs had been completely drywalled over for a more finished look.

We could see the problem areas in the runners just by watching each other march up the stairs. And again, Pete was the one who was able to make the squeaks and shifts in the stairs the most obvious, if you’re doing this at home you’ll appreciate using your heaviest family member in this part of the project. There was a definite bounce, and we spent an afternoon marking with tape each of the problem areas with hopes of repairing it from the backside correctly. In some areas, we could see that the riser wasn’t shifting the same way that the runner was under pressure, and that’s actually the situation that we found to cause the most squeaks. And because it’s an older home, we even began to notice some shifting in the runner, as if it were sliding out of place backwards by a few millimeters. Never fear.

So, we did what any other person who watches too many home improvement shows does, and gutted the ceiling of our basement staircase to fully expose the underside of our main stairwell.

Working in a small space meant that I got to take photos of Pete awkwardly wielding oversized drywall bits while I took pictures. Sometimes it’s better to just let him run with his game plan and stand back and help make sure that he’s not going to knock down the stairwell sconce.

It’s always interesting to see your home’s bones, and seeing the inner-architecture of the staircase was no different.

The most fascinating part, actually, was the rounded area that is at the base of the staircase. See up close how the board needed to be cut from within to allow a curvature? It makes me appreciate this little home so much more. I’m not the only one who finds these little details beautiful, right?

I should mention that we started this project in early December; we had all hopes of getting it done in just a few days, but once we started making the repairs, we found that we liked to “live” on the staircase for a few days and walk around, jump up and down, and put it to use to make sure that 1) the shims and braces we installed were holding in place well before we patched back up the drywall, 2) make sure that the squeaks weren’t returning, and 3) pray to the DIY gods that new squeaks weren’t forming. We found a lot of all three situations happening in the first few days, and spent a lot of time bouncing around on the stairs to put our repairs to the test, making more repairs, putting the new repairs through the rigors, making more adjustments, and so forth. It wasn’t a quick process, but it ended up being pretty effective and by taking our time we ended up catching a lot more squeaks than we might have if we had closed the ceiling back up immediately.

While all of this bouncing was happening, we were also finalizing the plans for our winter wedding, and the stairwell to the basement started to get pretty cold (the basement and the staircase leading up from the basement are not heated), so we put off finishing the drywall until this spring.

The stairs are much improved, although certain steps especially towards the top of the staircase still have audible squeaks, mostly caused by the risers having a vertical movement against the horizontal runners. We couldn’t repair it all, but we can tolerate a minimum and tread carefully on those runners when creeping around at night.

Happy days, happy household repairs! Now that the ceiling is back up, we’re almost done with taping, mudding, and repainting (5 months after we started)!

How’ve you gone about repairing staircase squeaks?

The post Squeak-No-More appeared first on .

Last year I celebrated with a pretty cake, and this year, by making pancakes for the first time ever without boxed powder batter. It was this recipe, if you’re curious, and they were good. I subbed the buttermilk for vanilla almond milk with no shame, and no regret.

This year, the casual celebration hits the week we’ve identified as the calm before the storm, because hopefully by next week at this time we’ll have a closing date and be well on our way to renting our current pad and establishing roots in a cool new neighborhood. Holy hell, it’s exciting, and I can’t help but wonder where we’ll be and what we’ll be doing by this time next year.

At some point in the last year, Pete was filling me in on Alton Brown’s backstory, and it really struck a chord. If nothing else, it should remind you that it’s not too late to take up a new career or try a new path in life. In short, Alton owns the story of a producer and cinematographer who was let down by American cooking shows in the 90′s and decided to produce his own; in preparation, he sent himself through culinary school (he was in his mid-thirties at this point, people), and went about about an entire career shift in the process, becoming one of the most well-known TV personalities that there be (and one of the only that I can stand to watch), basically changing the way that ordinary people look at food and preparation. Cheers to Alton, now go make a change for yourself if that’s what you’re needing.

The post Taking A Breather, Eating Pancakes appeared first on .

All of this I learned after stumbling upon this beauty awaiting its fate on trash day. (Further evidence that there is always a big dog pacing around in my 5-foot radius.)

A little research–made easy by the fact that I knew it was a speaker and it read Norelco in the upper right front of the unit–helped me determine that it’s the Rembrandt Norelco ‘Exhibition’ Speaker Enclosure in blond, developed and Guild-crafted by Philips of the Netherlands. T-7 Loudspeakers, too. Pretty badass, right? Check out this product ad that I found online:

Based on the file name of the image, I’m led to believe this was a new product release in the year 1959, and I’m so pleased to have found it because, hello, it’s going to look delightful in our new home.

So, here I was, lugging the f-r-e-e curbed speaker into the back of my car in a Rochester suburb, squealing in glee that the robust scent of basement that it eminated might mean that it actually stood a chance of working or being repaired within reason, and settled in knowing that if nothing else, it’s cute little legs would be great to repurpose on a different piece of furniture. Really, so perfect for our new to-be 50′s ranch.

Its backside, I knew would need to be replaced as it left a trail of debris along the backseat of the Subaru, but since it needed to be removed anyways for exploratory measures, I knew it wouldn’t be a problem to replace it with a piece of luan.

With a prybar, I loosened the barely attached back panel to reveal… nothing.

So, the entire interior has been vacated, with the exception of a random box component that had been rolling freely with nails popping out of it while I drove backroads through our neighborhood (luckily, didn’t puncture the screen). We’re pretty stoked.

I cleaned the existing insulation and dust out of the unit and am left with a solid hardwood mid-century vintage shell of a speaker, not so bad, and it’s cool enough of an encasement to make us wonder if we can fit it with a new speaker (techies out there, advise away!). If not, we should use it as a place in the new house to store electronics, like the DVR, Wii box, and wireless-related gadgets.

Any awesome salvaged finds on your own hands lately?

The post Another Fine Mid-Century Find… appeared first on .

I loved these canvas bins the moment I saw them, just as much as I loved the Phoebe doormat that I hand-selected and “reviewed” (a.k.a. swooned over) here. Functional storage? I always need it. Great colors? Check. Ikat-licious and reversible? Perfect little details. I knew it would suit our current house as well as any future house that we found (this is something I had picked out and ordered even before we had found the house we’re preparing to buy, but I knew it would translate to any new house we would purchase).

Now living with us, it has become a great piece of decor in our bedroom, serving as a place to store–of all things–my gym clothes, which I never seem to have enough room for in my drawers. The new house has plenty of storage though, so hopefully this charmer will be able to take up residence somewhere less riddled by socks and running shorts, like in the living room, holding magazines or extra blankets for the couch.

Up close, you can get a glimpse of how the bag stays upright so well. Two thin plastic pieces slide into sleeves and keep it lookin’ pretty and not floppy, even when it is empty. (Side note: Good tip if you’re ever going to DIY some fabric bins, yo.)

I know we just barely made it through Mother’s Day, but with Father’s Day lurking just around the corner (we’re sure you didn’t get any reminders of that whilst spoiling mom), you might want to see what gift ideas Uncommon Goods has up its sweet little sleeves. My favorite? These dog blueprints.

The post Ikat At Uncommon appeared first on .

What is different about this casual celebration is that it’s (dear-god-hopefully) the last of the years we’ll celebrate in this little home.

State of moving aside, we never, ever should have put off tending to our planter beds last fall when the flowering and harvesting season ended, no matter how distracted we were by banks and house shopping, or our wedding, or whatever it was that we were preoccupied with. Shame, shame. We just about deserve to be having to look at this daily. Death and overgrowth in the form of dried out and leafless tomato plants, and weeds so big that we weren’t 100% sure that they weren’t actual plants.

What makes me feel especially lazy is that working together, our clean-up efforts only took about 2 hours, and covered much more ground than our little square planters. With a little bit of hand weeding, tilling, and edging with a flat edge shovel, we left the backyard looking like this:

If you’re wondering what it is we left in those planters, they’re raspberries that either shot under the ground and up through the planter holes (big mama plants are in the back left corner), or, more likely, we experienced some significant bird poop seed transport. The babies that seeded are doing really well–and by that I mean most are already as thick as my thumb–so we decided to leave them to flourish. Also worth noting, a bunch of plants along the left fence were perennials from last year’s deck planters. They survived!

P.S. You can read about my second home-a-versary here, and last years, here.

The post Backyard Laziness + Home Anniversaries appeared first on .

I had been not-so-patiently waiting for that taunting “for sale” sign to change its status, and as a result of the home inspection repairs and appraisal that had happened in the days prior, the change in signage happened lickety-split.

Regarding the much awaited FHA appraisal, the report we received on Tuesday morning is so much more comprehensive than either of us imagined; the property is rare one in the city, which already knew but were thrilled to have confirmed, and challenged the appraiser to find six homes (they had to expand their reach to include a 3-mile radius, and this part of town isn’t remote by any means) to compare home values and validate our potential home’s worth. Every property chosen needed to be discounted or credited in its own way; all of the homes cited in the report were still quite different, like, waterfront, where ours is not, or on a small lot, where in ours is almost 2 wooded acres, or having drastically different square footage, number of bathrooms, or a different home style (colonials and ranches were most commonly used in our case).

The assessment of the property thoroughly impressed us, and broke down the home value compared to the value of the lot itself, which was a surprisingly huge part of the overall assessed value. It identified most of what we already knew about the house and its specs, but shockingly did not ask for any repairs to be made, hallelujah; we were almost certain that we would be required to update the electrical box (it’s on fuses, not breakers!) and repaint some areas of chipping paint on the windows and doors just to be able to secure our loan.

The home was appraised for our contracted price, which was really something that we weren’t expecting. The previous appraised price that was linked to the sale of the home was actually $30,000+ below where our offer stood, and we were more than a little bit nervous that we wouldn’t be able to afford the home if we couldn’t get a solid loan from the bank. The good news is that the appraiser matched the home value to our offer, a.k.a. was able to prove based on comps that our offer was valid, meaning that we will be able to get the loan we hoped for, but on the bad side it means we can’t negotiate the price of the home down a smidgen more (we optimistically hoped we could shave off about $10,000 more with a low appraisal). And let’s not talk about how this is going to affect the tax situation–taxes are crazy in New York–let’s just relax and reiterate how totally safe we feel in in that we aren’t radically overpaying for this gem of a house, or trying to make up its home value with home improvement projects.

We’ve had a final few rounds of signed papers to deliver to our underwriter this week (how they could need to know any more about us is unfathomable, they practically know our respective underwear sizes), and hope to hear of more progress in the coming days.

In regards to other things, now that we’re this far along in the buying process and feeling pretty confident that we can make it happen, we’ve let our minds wander back to other projects, things we’ve been meaning to do, update, clean, etc. before we rent this house, so hopefully you’ll be back to seeing posts from me on a more regular basis.

Happy dancing all around!

The post Im(PENDING) Excitement appeared first on .

I’ve received a lot of emails over the last year inquiring about how we like them, how they’re holding up, etc., and for all the times that I’ve always been able to enthusiastically share that the vinyl resilient tiles themselves are holding up really well (are easy to clean, nice to look at, nice to walk on, add a lot to the room with their 12″x24″ span), I’ve had to disclose that the grout has been another issue.

The vinyl resilient special order tiles that we bought at The Home Depot were actually first used (tested, if you will) during our bathroom remodel. During that effort, we had done a lot of prep work to the bathroom floor in the way of installing subfloor in spots and underlayment all over. With it stapled within an inch of its life, we had a nice, solid even surface to be tiling on. While we’re having problems of mammoth proportions in the downstairs kitchen, the bathroom tiles and the grout have held up nearly flawlessly, which is kind of amazing considering that as our only bathroom, it gets a lot of foot traffic, and because it’s more inclined to get wet post-shower.

The main difference between the bathroom and the kitchen has to do with the condition of the floor, and more specifically, the bounciness of the floor. The kitchen, a wider span, has a definite case of the squeaks caused by gaps where the floor joists and the subfloor no longer sit together. The same can actually be said for the whole first floor of our home, and the bedrooms too. Squeaky place. Every little flex in the subfloor has had an impact on the condition of the grout in our tiles, because unlike the tiles themselves, the grout can’t flex without crumbling. And once it crumbles, it’s swept up and away, leaving me with… nothing except un-sweepable dirt in the gaps.

The damage is mostly in the areas that experience the most foot traffic, so it hasn’t been as bad in areas along the wall or near appliances. This is about as OK as it gets in our kitchen. When you aren’t so macro on it, it doesn’t look bad at all.

We’ve thought a lot about how to correct this. Our first mission (last fall, actually) was to do serious floor repair on the floorboards that we could access in the basement. Pete would stand in the kitchen and squeak the floors (he weighs more than I do and can make the squeaks happen more effectively) while I would stand in the basement with a piece of chalk and mark exactly where the squeaks were happening. I could usually see some bounce in the subfloor even if there wasn’t an audible sound. By making shims and installing them into the problem areas, we helped our squeak-and-bounce situation a lot, well enough to get through the winter without feeling so much compelled to repair our damaged grout, and probably well enough to keep the rest of the grout from loosening so easily, but not well enough to cure the problem entirely. And anyways, we had already lost a lot of grout by this point.

We talked about removing all of the grout and applying new, hopeful that the reduced bounce would serve us well and keep the floor in a better state, but that was before we were seriously talking about moving and hopefully renting the house.

Funny how something can change your course of action so easily, because now we’re talking about ripping the floor out entirely and replacing it with something that won’t be subject to grout crackage. Something cork, or something vinyl resilient that isn’t groutable.

Anyone else with groutable vinyl resilient tiles experiencing the same breakage that we are? Any tips for fixing that we haven’t thought of?

The post We Have Grout Issues, Yo appeared first on .