OMG Progress!!

It's cold and miserable out there, folks, but here's a little ray of sunshine to brighten your spirits: there has been progress made on our house! We know, we know, it's kinda like when Jim started dating Karen - that was it, he and Pam would never get together! But lo and behold, we have started "dating" a competent contractor, and we hope that like Jim and Pam, we'll eventually live happily ever after in our new addition, although we are praying it doesn't take 5 seasons to get there. Of course, we are on Season 4...

Season Two Grand Finale: Which Side Are You On?

It occurred to me, only after someone asked me where the siding photos are, that I held out on all of you on that front. So let's do a little flashback to August 2008, when last you saw the outside of the addition:

What you are looking it is the jerry-rigged gutter and downspout, the gorgeous windows, the glass door, the temporary power, and the mudpit that was our yard. What happened next (sorta):

This is our lovely copper siding from Tegola, mentioned in an earlier post. The siding folks came and finally got started with the kind of union-worker vigor that would make Billy Bragg proud. Sadly, things sat like this for a several weeks while we tried to sort out some problems we were having with the downspout design and the door. Once solved, we put in a new door (we'll be back to that project in the future), the siding guys came back and worked some magic on the gutter, and Voila! A Kickin' It Addition:

As you can see, the copper that was put on earlier was darker, which made me wonder when, if ever, that would even out. The answer was "not long." It was also not long before the neighbors started talking to us about our Shiny Happy Addition. Thankfully, our (70+ yr old) next door neighbors love it, but another neighbor down the block (40+ yrs old) asked what we were going to put over it. Which goes to show that being young doesn't necessarily mean being hip.

Season Three Grand Finale: Back Yard Man

Season Three got off to a rocky start while we tried to end the basement water wars, then took an absurdist turn mid-season into Waiting for Dominion Through the Looking Glass. But finally, three months later, our new contractor was able to resume his work on re-installing the back yard concrete. I say re-install, because the Original Incompetent Contractor poured the back yard concrete back in 2007. Except that he poured it in such a way as to render it impossible to open the back door and so had to rip it all out. This didn't stop him from billing us for all his work on it, though.

Take two on the outdoor concrete and the first try on the shed and fence went beautifully. Our new contractor even had the wisdom to question the usefulness of a shed that would only be 3 feet deep, so made a slight design change to give us a far more practical 5 foot-deep shed. He also cleaned up the messes from the two previous contractors, moved the pipes that they had buried on the neighbor's property, re-did the shed once on his own volition to ensure that all the lines matched up, and still came in on time and on budget. I have written to the Archdiocese reporting this miracle, but haven't heard back from them yet. So here it is - the newly finished, brilliant outside of the addition (by the way, it's wet from the rain, not weirdly streaky):

I'll walk you through this 18 x 15' space, to point out the lovely details:

First, check out the cool matching shingles on the roof of the shed. These were leftover from the siding project. They were leftover, because the OIC miscalculated the total we would need for the sides and the inside of the two parapet walls, leaving us a parapet wall short of what we needed. Thankfully, our fabulous siding guys gave us - as in for free - some leftover bronze aluminum taking up space in their warehouse to use for the parapet walls. As you may also have noticed, the existing siding all now looks the same color, so I'm sure the shed roof will catch up pretty quickly.

Next is a close up of what we refer to as the mini-monolith, which is a smaller version of the one inside (and vastly improved in quality). This will house the outdoor refrigerator. You can't see it from the picture, but the conduit for the power was put in before the concrete was poured, so everything is nice and tidy. Also notice how the bottom corner of the fence by the door has a perfect cutout for the valve that sends our runoff water to the underground cistern (a more expensive and voluminous version of a rain barrel). This attention to detail would not come as a surprise to those working with competent contractors, but I don't take anything done right for granted anymore.

Another close up of the shed and the door - look at those lines!!

Once the fence and concrete are stained, this is going to look dope. Someday, The Plan is to put a built-in grill area where that wasp-filled Weber now stands, but who knows when that will be.

I close with a before vs. after, to give us hope as we enter into our next season:

vs.

Posting Something Cool

Per my husband's request, I am posting something "cool." It's the outside of the house.

This was actually sided last summer and now it's all dark and moody looking , which is probably even "cooler" than the way it looks in the photo - all bright and shiny happy. But I have to say, being an architect, though trying, must be one of the coolest jobs out there. When I complete a project, there's a piece of paper (or thousands) that gets filed in some courtroom or archive somewhere; a check is cut, and someone hires some consultants to start putting in control technology. And that's cool, don't get me wrong. But a lot of the point of what I do is in my head - I imagine the children who don't have asthma attacks anymore, I picture the tadpoles and river otters that thrive - it's lucky, in other words, that I have an overactive imagination since the truth of the matter is that I never get to actually see the result of my endeavors. But as an architect, one day, you walk over, and you get to look at this - this thing that you thought of, that popped into your head out of thin air - brought to reality. I wonder if the god of architecture is Pygmalion.

When All Else Fails: Ikea

I have to say, I absolutely adore Ikea. I am a fan of Swedish design sensibilities (and according to that Facebook app, I am an inner Swede) and bringing good design to the masses in a semi-sustainable way is to be commended. Ikea is like home improvement magic: for a surprisingly small amount of money (and a few hours of labor), you can turn shabby into chic.

The long-term plan is to turn the front room into a library because (a) once there's a new family room in back, the pretty tiny front room will essentially become a hallway and (b) i have ALWAYS wanted a library. I could care less about a den or a rec room or a dressing room. To me, heaven is a library, and i'd like a little slice of heaven in this hell on earth we call our house. So, as mentioned earlier, when we learned that there would be yet even more chapters to the basement drainage woes, we said f*** it - we're going to Ikea, gettin' us sum book cases, an' buildin' us a G. D. library - yee haw!!

As usual, we got to Ikea around 5pm on Saturday, ran through the store, made our selections under duress (this actually totally cuts down on time spent debating - consensus comes a lot faster when you're running against the clock), loaded up the cart with what looked like an impossible amount of boxes, and loaded up Marsha (the car) in the rain (because it always rains when we go to Ikea). And, as usual, we celebrated by going out for tacos and realized on the way home that we really needed to paint the room before we installed these monster bookcases.

So the next morning, we were at Home Depot by 10am and (again, under a time crunch) spent about an 45 minutes presenting our respective cases over the paint color, got home, cleared the room, and started painting by about noon. Painting of the walls on which the bookcase would go was done around 4 pm, and more arguing about how dark the paint was went on until about 4:30, when I decided for possibly only the 2d time in our discussions about house design, to just shut it and let my husband win; we do, after all, have pretty similar taste, and I loved his old apartments. Yes, the paint is darker than I would like, but it looks great, and as the song goes, you have to know when to fold 'em. Ikea de-boxing then commenced in earnest and the deluge of cardboard, weird metal pieces, and allen wrenches flooded the house. By the end of the week, after another set of arguments on how to place the cabinet doors, we were done with the arguing, the painting, the building, and the trim!

So, thanks to Ikea (and a gallon of Coastal Beige Ralph Lauren-colored Behr satin paint), we have gone from this:

To this (a sharp eye will also catch the change in the chairs from the earlier post):

Oh, and the top lights (also picked out by the DH), change colors:

Dearest Husband also took out the candle holder of my college lantern and put one of the lights in it to keep the flame lit for my alma mater:

And our lovely wedding gift from India is now properly displayed. Oh, Ganesha, please bless this house and start removing obstacles to the completion of our little nest!