Let There Be Light

Unlike in the book of Genesis, our light was not separated from darkness on the first day; in the creation of our forever home, light will be one of the last things created.

All good things take time.  I will admit that choosing lighting was one of the hardest parts of this entire renovation; lighting and tile (and tile isn’t completed yet either by the way).  We definitely wanted the lighting to be something special – the “bling” in the house.  Nothing like a little extra added pressure.

It’s not that we didn’t have an idea of what we wanted.  If anyone knows me, they know I am a magazine junkie and have many years’ worth of pictures torn from various magazines.  I pour over Houzz pictures.  I have thousands of pins on Pinterest.  I have a library of decorating books.  No, lack of ideas wasn’t the problem.  Narrowing the ideas down, and then finding a light similar to the “idea” light that didn’t cost as much as a small car – now THAT was the problem.

My Library.  It’s currently our storage area, too, so don’t think we are slobs.  And, yes, it’s arranged by color, don’t be judgmental.

The myriad of websites to peruse through was no help either.  Just google “pendant lighting” and you’ll know what I am talking about.  Even after finding a website and filtering the 77,182 choices down you are still left with hundreds of pages to browse.  Yes, even when we were out having a nice dinner we both were looking for outdoor lighting, our heads bent over our phones.  Sad.

The bright spot came when we enlisted some help.  We were fairly stubborn throughout the process (both Taurus) about making our own decorating decisions, but sometimes it’s better to get help.  I spent one stormy afternoon in the lighting showroom nearby and had found my relief.  Looking back, I guess we still made the decorating decisions ourselves, but now had help finding what we wanted, at the cost of a motor scooter.  (A very nice, fully loaded motor scooter).  Bling is expensive.

So, lights were ordered the beginning of October, delivered the end of November, and are now in our garage, patiently waiting to be installed.  We have learned patience.  We know that somewhere in the future there will be light, and it will be good.

Lights and fans being patient

I am excited about this one – it’s going in our master bath (not upside down, of course)

And we are both excited about our exterior lights!

I even like where they were shipped from!

I thought this was very fitting – my inspiration for this post – our sunrise this morning.

Happy New Year!

Welcome 2016!

Wow.  It’s been awhile.  As I write this I am sitting in the sunroom, looking at our partially dismantled Christmas tree, and at a wet, gloomy day.  (Disclaimer here; we ALWAYS have a real Christmas tree as “the” Christmas tree.  Now that we have a room with a 14 foot ceiling we have been able to dig our 12 foot tree out of storage – an additional tree for the sunroom, glad to be out of hibernation.)

“The” Christmas tree

Sunroom tree – out of hibernation

It’s been an unusual winter so far.  No snow on Christmas, which is not right for a girl who grew up where there are 8 months of winter and 4 months of bad snowmobiling weather.  On Christmas Day there was a hardy old soul water skiing on our lake – or one crazy person.  I think it was probably a bucket list check off.  We’ve had snow, but then we have rain.  Two days ago it was 6 degrees with a wind chill of -12.  Today, it’s 39 degrees, feels like 35.  Typical.

I feel like I should explain my lack of blog posts.  We sort of went on a self-imposed hiatus.  In the fall it seemed like we had too much going on.  We were needing to head off somewhere every other week, for business or personal reasons.  We had gotten to a point in the construction where we could spread out a little and start “living” in some of the new spaces – Yay!  We were actually further along than we had originally planned (as our daughter reminded us when home in November).  The original plan was to build the frame, drywall and a few other things and then work on the rest piecemeal, doing some of the work ourselves.  Ha!

Once you get going all you want to do is finish.  So there was a real push and pull going on.  We kept making decisions and getting things done here and there.  We fell off of our builder’s schedule, through NO fault of his.  We just weren’t ready to move on with some things.

Now, we are ready and the engines are firing up again!  Watch for upcoming blog posts on tile, lighting, the upstairs office. . .lots of new things going on.  It’s getting exciting again as we make the final push to be DONE!

Here is what I leave you with today:

THIS YEAR

Live in the Moment

Start Each Day with Gratitude

Laugh More

Create Meaningful Connections

Meditate

Focus on the Positive

Believe It All Will Fall Into Place

Stick to Your Goals

Be Generous

Choose Happy

 

HAPPY 2016!

 

Rock On!

And, no, I’m not talking about the song covered by Def Leppard in 2006 (although it was a pretty catchy tune at the time).  We are talking about rock on as in “rock on” the retaining wall, “rock on” the patio, “rock on” under the deck. . .”rock on” everywhere!  In this post, I think I’ll let the pictures do most of the talking.  It is worth mentioning that the company we hired to do the heavy lifting with the boulders and river rock and rock slabs, and create something better than we could envision, worked their butts off.  And, they did a wonderful job.  And, on a project where everything seems to cost more than we budget for (not complaining, just a fact of renovating), their bid was a breath of fresh air.  No hesitation there.  And, we definitely got our money’s worth.  They will be back for more projects, no doubt.

Some of the work in progress

A long shot of the retaining wall.

Future flower bed

Another shot of wall

Stairs going down onto the lawn

Stairs curving up to the side of the house

I also want to add that the people who built the paver patio worked their butts off, too.  That would be us!

The beginnings of the patio; limestone and sand base

This is the pattern – made to look like it’s all random, but very confusing. Have to mark off each paver as we go. This is a small section.

Progress

Watching Notre Dame football while we work!

This is what you do when the forecast is for rain.

The view from the deck. Not quite finished, but most of the heavy lifting is done.

The view out toward the lake.

Another angle

Still another angle

The wide angle shot

I hope it’s okay to say that we are LOVING our forever home!  When we are sitting on the deck enjoying a gorgeous day, or on the patio enjoying a fire, it feels like we are at our own resort.

Resort:  A place used for relaxation or recreation

Yep.  That sounds about right!

Sticks and Stones

As promised, here is what we were greeted with upon our arrival home – a driveway!

Yippeeeee!

And, after a few more days of letting it “cure”, we could actually drive on it:

Here comes the car, backing into the garage for the first time. September 5, 2015

Home sweet home! This is the first time we have had a garage here in over 10 years, and the first time this car has ever been in OUR garage.

All of that is a big deal, if you like to take care of your cars, and we do.  No more bird poop, tree sap, tree branches. . .

On to sticks and stones.  A lot more is happening outside than inside at this point in time.  Living where we do, we know it won’t be much longer until we are shoveling that white stuff (can’t bring myself to say that four letter word yet), so we know it’s time to get things done outside.  First, we had to take care of some storm damage.  We had a tree break off about half way up and get stuck in another tree, all of which was hanging over our storage shed; don’t want to let that go for too long.  We knew it was too tricky for us to deal with, so we had the pros come in.  And they left us with a nice pile of sticks,

Nice sticks

and, a couple of piles of not-so-nice sticks:

not-so-nice

BIG not-so-nice

Not sure if the not-so-nice piles will be taken care of before the daffodils bloom. . . You just have to let some things go.

On to the stones.  We also have had several piles of stone around the house lately.  Boulders, river rocks, crushed limestone, pavers, and sand.  All sizes of stones, actually.  Here are some pictures to give you an idea of things to come:

A load of boulders

a pile of boulders

slabs of stone

stones-in-waiting

This is how the river rocks got from the street to the lake side of the house; very labor intensive

and all of these stones came down by wheelbarrow

This is what 15 tons of pavers looks like

Paver Mover. Thank goodness we have friends that let us borrow their toys

And I’ll leave you with one last picture of the work in progress, a glimpse of what is yet to come. . .

Exciting Things Are Happening!

Earlier this week, while I was working at my desk, I looked up and saw this:

The digger is back!

Whoa.  Now that’s a view!  It kind of scared me.  But, the good news is that this view means we are cleaning up the old driveway, and the “palm” trees, so that we can have our new driveway put in.  Once the driveway is in it will look like we have an entirely new house.  I hope.  Here are some more pictures of the old asphalt going bye-bye:

Here’s the view out of the front door

Another picture from my desk

And, while work is going on in the front (or, the street side – we can never figure out what is the front and what is the back), work is also going on in the back – or lake side.

Deck beginnings

We have finally decided to go ahead and have the deck built with a composite material.  After going back and forth between the cost of building an 850 square foot deck out of composite, and building it the way we really want it and the way that will last the longest, we said the heck with it and went for it.  Might as well do things right the first time, right?  Now instead of cleaning and sealing the deck every spring we will be enjoying it.

Soon the planks will be in place.

Monday was a busy day.  People were swarming.  Along with the front and the back being worked on, we also had people working on the inside.  The plumbers were back and now we have this in the basement:

The “tank less” water heater is a tank!

Let there be hot water.

We did lose something.  The trim guys finished up last week, packed up their trailer, and, poof!, they’re gone.  Here are a few pictures of what they left behind:

Here are the windows in the sun room, all trimmed out

These are the pocket doors between the sun room and bedroom

This is the bedroom door and trim

And, some of the doors are painted. The trim will be painted the same color, as will all of the baseboard

And here is the railing around the stairs. This is special because the first house we lived in, and where we were living when both of the kids were born, had a combination of painted and stained stair rails.

And, although most of the floors are covered with cardboard right now, here’s a peak.

If you noticed, in the picture above, we have our dining room table in our dining room! We ate our first dinner there over the weekend – hot dogs and baked beans! In closing, here are the pictures I’ll leave you with.  Hopefully the first picture in the next post will be the completed driveway!

From the street

And, from the front door

Trim

Trim a tree; trim a dress; trim your hair; trim a boat.  “Trim” is a very interesting word.  It can be a verb, adjective, adverb or noun.  And, I also found this – “headscratcher for trim” – If you’re trimming something, you could be adding to it or taking away from it.  Trim can mean cutting off and getting rid of anything extra, such as branches from a bush, or it can mean adding decorations, such as to a present.  Huh.  Scratch your head over that one!  For the purposes of this post, trim will be both a verb and a noun; “The doors and windows are being trimmed with trim”; in the “adding to” version of the word.

It’s a joy to see the trim going up around the windows.  As I have mentioned before, we ended up going with lighter colors on the walls, hoping that would allow the windows and the trim to really “pop”.  Well, I’m happy to report that things are going as planned.  The windows and the trim are popping!  And, we have a power tool lover’s paradise set up in our garage.  Tim the Tool Man would approve.

Not much more to say about it, so here are some pictures!

Rows of doors. . .

. . .and more doors

Stacks of trim. . .

. . .and more trim

Power tools. . .

. . .and more power tools

And stacks of packing slips to verify (one of the reasons you have someone do this for you!)

And. . .the first windows trimmed with trim. And stained. We elected to have someone stain the windows for us; no need to mess up windows and have to live with it!

One of the banks of windows in the sunroom, stained and trimmed – and poppin’. And, yes we love it!

And, just a special picture to end with. . .

Once in a blue moon. . .

ROY G BIV

Ah.  Remember Roy G Biv from art class in elementary school?  Red. Orange. Yellow. Green. Blue. Indigo. Violet.  Hard to believe that all of the colors in the world come from combinations of those seven colors.  What’s even harder to believe is that there are billions and billions and billions of colors that come from those seven colors.  That is until you start trying to decide what colors to paint your walls.  Then those billions of colors become all too real.  Just walk into Lowe’s (our home improvement box store of choice) and LOOK at all of the colors.  Say you narrow it down to yellow.  Good.  Now you only have 5 million choices.  We thought we were smart.  We narrowed our choices down to 144 colors; the Williamsburg Collection from Benjamin Moore.  It has a wide range of colors.

Our color wheel; slightly used!

We felt kind of like Goldilocks – we made the right choice, not too few colors, and not too many colors.  Then, it was time to choose. . .

And so it begins.  Now in the interest of full disclosure, I must admit that I have more hours of watching home improvement shows under my belt than any person has the right to.  My default channel is HGTV.  I watched This Old House and Bob Vila when I was a kid.  I didn’t miss an episode of Hometime.  So I should have known to follow the NUMBER ONE RULE when choosing paint colors – get a sample, put it on your wall, live with it in different light, at different times of the day, etc.. etc., etc.  So, there is no excuse for what happened.  Just my stupidity and frustration and desire to PICK A COLOR and get on with it.  So, after a few failed attempts (yes, we did buy a few quarts and pints and test them), I went to the paint store and purchased a five gallon bucket of the paint we thought would be perfect, the paint that would go everywhere, the paint we DID NOT TEST!  Bingo.

Sample City

Ick.  In the process of already being painted over.  Couldn’t stand it.

More ick

So, we had this gold-yellow-orange color on our walls, just in the entry, for about a day.  I was so embarrassed by how horrible it looked I couldn’t wait to paint over it.  (Maybe it’s not really a BAD color, it just didn’t look good on our walls – wasn’t the look we were going for) I take full responsibility for the mistake.  I should have known better.  And I did all of the painting over it (Well, most of it.  Of course it was on the wall going down to the lower level, which is like painting a two story room.  Terry had to re-do that part.  Thank heavens we didn’t put in on the walls in the sunroom).

Before

After

Here’s the good thing to come out of our mistake.  We re-thought our color strategy, and now we are on the right track.  We wanted color, but in the end I think we were trying for too much color.  We will have dark wood flooring and dark trim around the windows, so we have chosen to go with lighter colors on the walls.  I think that will make the floors and trim really “pop”.  I just can’t believe I am putting pastel-ish colors on the walls.  I have never been a fan of pastels, but this will work.  So, here are a few pictures of what we have painted so far.  Still lots to go; we are working our way through 10 gallons of primer and 10 gallons of ceiling paint, and need to take ibuprofen every night for our aching bodies, but, yes, it’s worth it.  Painting was the one thing we felt we could do (putting color selection aside), so this is our place to save some money – money we can put into something else.

The sunroom, in a nice, soft yellow. (Look at the view out the windows – looks like a treehouse!)

The wall from the dining room down through the original family room; same soft yellow. The round window is Terry’s office!

The window wall in the original family room; soft yellow.

The entry. Where the gold-yellow-orange color used to reside. Now a soft blueish grey.

And, just so you know that I am hard at work no matter where I am, here’s my office today:

Suite 400 open for business

It’s all so I could post a picture of the house from the lake (Ha!);

Lake view on a beautiful July afternoon

Oh.  And if you’re interested, I have a barely used 5 gallon pail of wonderful gold-yellow-orange paint – it’s yours if you want it!

Milestones

Major milestone reached last week!  Tuesday, July 14th to be exact.  For the first time since we began our transformation we were able to flip a switch and turn a light on in the addition.  Yipppeeeeee!!!  We had an electrician come and work in the morning and hook some of the switches and outlets up.  (In addition to flipping switches, we can also plug things in!)  It’s a good feeling!!

We also reached another milestone, of sorts, the week before.  The trailer used by the exterior finisher guys packed up and pulled out.  You know what that means – the exterior is done!  (Well, pretty much, anyway)  And I must say, we did a pretty good job picking out everything that makes up the exterior.  As I have said before, it is very hard to pick things that will cover larger surfaces when you are looking at a 2 x 2 sample.  So, without further adieu, here are some pictures.  I hope you LOVE IT as much as we do!

Here is the exterior from the street. Still can’t park in the garage, but soon!

Getting a little closer. Imagine a sidewalk and a courtyard and lots of flowers!

The front entrance. The deck isn’t quite usable yet, so we spend a lot of time on the front porch.

Almost forgot our beautiful garage!!

Walking around the side to the lake. . .

The side of the house; good picture of the siding and stone.

Looking across the lake side of the house; sunroom, dining room, family room.

Close up of sunroom windows and trim. LOVE!

The whole shebang from the lake side. Someday the deck will have furniture on it!  (And the patio will be done, and there will be landscaping!)

So, there you have it.  A guided tour around the house.  We are moving forward every day.  The painters are here now. Us!  We have been painting every spare minute we have – that’s why it’s taken awhile for me to get another blog post out here.  My next post will be more about painting – and what NOT to do!

I’ll leave with one more picture – our Midwest palm trees!

Our oak trees have become palm trees!

“See You Later”

While this blog post is not specifically about progress being made on our home, it is about our lives and about the trials and tribulations of our family during our renovation.  Therefore, I would be remiss if I did not write a blog entry about my dad passing away.  He lived with us for almost a year, and lived through the noise and dust of the construction right along with us.  I am sad that he will not be here to see it finished, and will not be able to live with us in our completed forever home.  He passed on June 28th.

And while, yes, it is sad, I can find comfort in knowing that he is with my mom, and they are looking down on us, continuing to watch the progress together.  The word “passed” is a good word to use when talking about death.  For when we die, I believe we truly are just “passing on” to a different life.  There is comfort at a time like this when you can draw strength from your faith.  I still have the refrain going through my head from the song we sang in church the morning my dad passed:

     “We will run and not grow weary;

      for our God will be our strength,

      and we will fly like the eagle,

      we will rise again”.

The day after we arrived at my dad’s house we were all sitting on the back deck, enjoying a beautiful summer day.  We looked up and saw this strange circle around the sun:

Perfect ring around the sun

We all felt that is was my dad saying, “Hi, there. Everything’s going to be alright.  I’m in a good place”.  That rang even more true when I learned that this ring around the sun is called a halo. . .

I thought it would be good to post some pictures of my dad’s home, the home I grew up in; the home where we spent hours reminiscing about the good times we had with Dad.

We were greeted with yellow roses bursting in full bloom; I have never seen them like this before.

The house from the street

The wonderful deck on the back of the house.

My room growing up is the window on the left

The backyard; lots of land that has been home to corn, potatoes, blueberries, Christmas trees. . .

The “lower lot” as my parents liked to call it. Once home to raspberries, now home to wildflowers

More wildflowers

White roses growing along the deck

Pink roses, also along the deck

Blueberries in the back

Hope the neighbors enjoy the blueberries before the birds and chipmunks do!

Wildflowers growing in the old flower bed

Happy daisies!

You were always welcome here

As a Navy Mom I have learned to never say, “Goodbye”.  When your Sailor is leaving to go back to their duty station, or leaving on a deployment, you always say, “See You Later”.

So, I’ll just say, “See You Later, Dad”.

Lawn Mowing and Dimmer Switches

What do lawn mowing and dimmer switches have in common, you ask.  Well, read on and find out.  Yesterday I mowed the lawn, with a push mower, and it hadn’t been mowed in almost three weeks.  So what?  Remember what our “lawn” looks like:

Not very pretty. . .

It’s a hill.  And while it is downhill 50% of the time, the other 50% is a b*%@h, especially now when there are many obstacles; dirt, rocks, plastic fencing stuff, sprinkler heads, wires. . .So, I mowed.  And it took awhile.  Now, here’s where dimmer switches come into play.  Ever since about the second year we had our lake house, we’ve had someone do the mowing for us.  Let’s face it; we’d just come out on the weekends, and who wants to spend precious lake time mowing?  We even sold the riding lawn mower that came with the house.  Enter the renovation project.  Exit paying someone to mow.  So here’s what I tell myself as I am mowing – every time I mow, we are saving enough money to pay for one dimmer switch!  (Give or take a little; we had a great rate for mowing, and installed dimmer switches are more expensive than you would think).  So far I’ve mowed enough for two dimmer switches.  I’m also thinking as I am mowing that dimmer switches are highly overrated. . .

Now, for the exciting news – and pictures!  After months of agonizing over the stone for the exterior, it is finally here!  And, being installed!!  In the morning it was delivered, the installation crew showed up around 1:00 in the afternoon, and by 4:00ish, look at what they had done!  I’m betting they’ll finish today.  (By the way, do you “install” stone?  Or, is there a technical term?).  Here are the pictures:

The stone truck. We thought the entire truckload was for us. NOT!

Delivering pallets

We did get our fair share of boxes. These four and two more. This picture was taken after they left for the day, and used up quite a bit of the stone.

Stone-in-the-box

Stone staging

Stone tools

Stone on wall. . .

Stone close up

What they had done in 3 hours

I must admit, I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE it!  This was another one of those decisions where you look at an itty bitty sample to pick something huge.  Thus the agonizing.  Now I can sleep again at night!