Happy 1st Month-a-versary

Today Marks Our 1st Month In Chez 3.0

I thought I'd put together a little list of things about the house now that we've lived here a month. So, no particular order my thoughts on Chez 3.0.

1. 
   
   Its big! and I'm old, we've never lived on more than one level before and this place has 3 levels of real living space....its a lot harder to go up and down 2 flights of stairs constantly...


2. 
   
   I hate all the toilets...they are all these weird cheapo 3/4 size toilets..not super comfortable to sit on.


3. 
   
   You can hear the bee's when sitting on the toilet in baby MadScientist's bathroom.


4. 
   
   There is never a light switch where you expect there to be and when there is a switch, it never controls what you think it should...I don't get it, why would the PO's of even bothered taking all the wall outlets, and switches? If you had fancy lights I guess I can see taking those, but the outlets and switches? weird..


5. 
   
   Living with forced air heat isn't as horrible as we thought it would be...the air is surely a lot dryer than we're used to.


6. 
   
   Having that big concrete driveway and parking area is both a boon and a bane. A bane cause in general we hate yards covered in concrete but a boon as it gives baby MadScientist plenty of space to ride her scooter-which she absolutely loves to do.


7. 
   
   Funky bathroom without a shower and low ceilings on the top floor is a perfect spot to give baby MadScientist a bath.


8. 
   
   We've got slightly less than a month to get all the plans finished and turned into the city....that timeline seems insane now...


9. 
   
   Love having the sorta private kid space and family room in the back of the house.


10. 
    
    We never use the front door! Well, except to get the mail...we go in and out of the back door and that area and bathroom has turned into a mudroom-landing pad space for all our stuff.


11. 
    
    Definitely need curtains on the main level as sitting in there feels very fish bowlish now.


12. 
    
    Kitchen is still way to small and poorly laid out. Though now after using it for a month we have some ideas on how to make it better.


13. 
    
    Cleaning this place is a HUGE PITA!!!


14. 
    
    We really, really love the place and it feels perfect for us.

Our first house-iversary!

That's right.. a whole year has passed since we bought Chez Neumansky! After closing up the very last gaping hole in the side of the house, I thought I'd spend some time outside on this gorgeous spring day and take stock of where we are.

From here, I can actually see a lot of our progress:

• There's not a giant pile of trash or weeds filling the yard, the porch or the house.
• The crumbling pile of bricks has been replaced by a modern, strong foundation.
• The other, taller crumbling pile of bricks has reconfigured itself into a driveway (which I can sorta make out through through the open fabulously gorgeous garage door)
• The back porch, which we had to duck under to get to the back door, is now 9' up, and the back door is in a brand new earthquake-resistant shear wall.
  
• The ground floor, which had about 4 different levels - some of which were concrete, some dirt, some linoleum - none of which would conform to modern height requirements, is now a nice, flat, 9' tall rough space.
• I can see the cleanout for the drainage, which runs all the way around the perimeter and under the slab to a sump pump, which has been doing a great job of keeping everything dry through this very rainy season.
• The beginnings of our first floor are framed in: a bedroom, bathroom and hallway, and then our garage/workshop.
• And finally, our awesome patio, which I'm sitting on writing this!
  

Now for the stuff you can't see from here:

• The house is fit for human habitation. I won't go into too many details.. let's just say it's clean enough to shower, eat and breathe in, and if you missed the time when it wasn't, take a look here.
  
• As I mentioned at the beginning, there are no more gaping holes in the side of the house - no more "walls" of tarp, no more 2' gaps at the bottom of the doors because we lowered the ground level.. Our doors should be here in another week or two, but until then, Dan made us some ghetto-fabulous plywood doors (you can see one in the pic above), which make a remarkable difference in how nice the house looks.. plus, we can actually leave a pair of pliers in the garage without worrying that there are 6 different holes in the house big enough for a person to get in.
  
• The radiant heat for the first floor living area is embedded in the slab, and Dan's inside now finishing up the floorplans for the top 2 floors so the radiant plans for the rest of the house can be generated.
  
• The main sewer line from the house to the street has been redone, which is a city requirement when a house is sold - we have another 25 years (once the plumber gets the papers into the city, that is) before we have to have it inspected again.
  
• We have 200 sparkly amps of modern electrical service coming into the house, with a subpanel on each floor.
• We have new front stairs that are not in danger of disintegrating under a person walking up them.

Looking at the plans for 2008, we're making pretty good progress. We still have 3 1/2 months before the anniversary of actually living here.. by that time we hope to have a functional bathroom downstairs, which means all the plumbing, wiring, and heat for the whole house has to be in place so we can close in some walls (as willing as our friends are to dive into anything for us, they still seem to be a little finicky about wanting walls around the bathroom.. go figure).

And here we are.. one year down, 65 to go!!

late posts, bona fide anniversaries, and sap..

sorry nothing got posted this weekend..

Saturday we cleaned and got the last bits of debris out from the first floor, plus Dan sprayed another coat of magic bleach/vinegar solution on the few spots that still smelled. I spent the whole day scrubbing the room that is soon to be our bedroom.. I got everywhere but the closet, which I'm afraid of.. but after vacuuming up more rat poop and spider egg sacs than I care to think about, I realized that was going to a project unto itself.
Plus, we had to knock of work early to go down the street to CasaDecrepit for a grand tour, plenty of inspiration, good food, and sake flown in fresh from Japan!

We came home from a lovely evening to a dead hard drive.. Sunday we got the computer to start up, but we need to take the dead drive to a doctor to try to recover all our files.. like all the houseplans.
And then I'll start practising what I constantly preach about backing up files!

The rest of Sunday was spent getting our old place ready to sell. A friend of ours is going to buy it - which is fantastic for so many reasons: We can come to parties in our dreamy backyard AND go home to sleep while someone else cleans up! We can come visit (and probably take care of for awhile) all the fish. We can sell it to him for much less than it's worth and still walk away with more than we would've if we had to pay commission to 2 realtors. And we don't have go through the whole staging/open house/is-it-going-to-sell-today? hassle.
All around, very exciting.

And finally, anyone reading for more than a week knows that we like to celebrate anniversaries to an admittedly corny extent.. well, today is officially the first one that is universally accepted as legitimate: Dan and I were married a year ago today, exactly 7 years after our first date.

I can't imagine life without him, I'm amazed at the things we've accomplished together, and I'm looking forward to all that's still to come.

We're planning on moving into our new house at the end of May, so for the next 100 years or so, that's where we'll be.

/sap