Direction Connection

So I should blog. But I haven’t blogged since the day we closed on our house, which was more than a year ago. So a lot has happened. I suppose I will provide a bulleted summary of house-related things. Then later maybe I will provide job updates, animal updates, gardening updates, and things like that. OK, here I go.

• We moved into our house.
• We paid someone to perform several home improvement essentials: Installing a dishwasher, converting the pantry into a laundry room; running a dedicated electrical line for our fridge so we could move it to a more sensible place; replacing the not-really-exterior-doors with actual exterior doors. Stuff like that.
• We initially thought that our kitchen was going to be the thing that bugged us the most and that we’d really want to upgrade as quickly as possible. But once we made some minor modifications (dishwasher, fridge, laundry room) and started using it, we realized that (1) it wasn’t nearly as bad as we’d thought, and (2) other stuff bugged us more.
• We did run into some kitchen good fortune last December. On Christmas Eve morning, I logged onto my computer to discover a neighborhood list-serve email, which offered a side-by-side fridge that was 2 cubic feet bigger than our freezer-on-top version, AND a dual-fuel range (gas stovetop, electric oven). FOR FREE. All we had to do was pick them up ourselves, before the donaters headed out of town on New Year’s Day to spend a month at the beach while their kitchen was remodeled. So we rounded up a few friends, rented a truck and a dolly, and picked the items up the next weekend. Then we upgraded our stove receptacle to accommodate the dual-fuel range, for approximately the selling price of our old fridge and stove. So that was pretty cool.
• Another time when Rebecca was out of town, I decided that the wood-look formica countertop that was all the rage around 1980 really needed to go. So guess what I did? I PAINTED it. Pretty cool, huh? You might think I’m nuts, but I researched it online, and others have done it. I think some people use spray-paint, but that sounded messy to me, so I rolled on primer, then some Ralph Lauren paint with some sand in it to give it some texture, then used a water-based polyacrylic finish (like polyurethane, which is oil-based, only the water-based kind is probably safer for food surfaces). The painted countertop was a surprise for Rebecca when she got home, but she may have gotten a little clue about what I was up to when I started telling her that I wanted to paint the kitchen when she returned (the yellow kitchen did not really look right with the charcoal-gray color I’d chosen for our countertop).
  • Here’s the “before” photo.
  • And here’s the “after” photo.
• Then we paid someone to build a fairly ginormous, multi-level deck, which we now enjoy regularly.
• We also moved furniture around several times, and bought some new furniture, and got rid of old furniture. In the end our second bedroom is not really a bedroom anymore, and is now Rebecca’s office. And instead of semi-gloss periwinkle (which was something to see, but not really our style), we’ve now painted it a nice burnt-orange color, which is a tremendous improvement. From the painting project I learned this about Rebecca: She has no tolerance for painting. It would be best in the future if we paid someone else to do this, or if I just do the painting myself.
• Next, we will be adding an exterior door on our addition, but I don’t know when we will do this, because Rebecca is having a job transition right now (Curious? I’ll write about it soon!). Then we will add closets!!! Because there are only three closets in this house, about which I have begun to complain regularly.

There’s probably more, but I think those are the highlights.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 20th, 2008 at 11:37 am and is filed under Day-to-Day Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.