The Move

We moved into our house just over two weeks ago now.  The lease on our apartment was up at the end of March and we had no desire to waste any more money on that place so - ready or not, here we came.

We had a few goals before we moved in (a greatly pared down list from the list we made in January when we closed):

1.  Patch and sand as many holes in the walls as possible with an emphasis on eliminating all opportunities for the cats to get into the walls.

2.  Make way for appliances.

3.  Get at least one bathroom up and running in its entirety.

4.  Mop as many floors as possible.

I know that there were a few other things on the list, but I can't remember exactly what they were - probably because they didn't get done.  Patching walls went pretty well, though we realized that we have at least two different drywall thicknesses and only got one size to patch with - oops.  We also got a bunch of the spackle (or glop as my family calls it) sanded and cleaned up before hauling in the rest of our stuff.  Have you noticed that drywall dust somehow seems sticky and gets into everything?  I'll take sawdust over drywall dust any day.  So far, no cats in the walls.

We scheduled our appliance delivery for a few days before we moved.  We called our buddy Ed at Queen Appliance and he got it all set up.   If you're in the Philly area, and you need appliances this is the place to go - we went to the KOP location.  We got good deals on all of our appliances and Ed was wonderful to work with.   Our fridge was a scratch and dent - it has about an 1/8"x1" flattened spot on the freezer door handle.

See that darker spot in the middle - that's the dent.  And that's from about a foot away.

We changed our order at least three times and Ed had no problem with it whatsoever.   After talking to our good friend Janet, we decided to take another look at bottom freezer refrigerators - so glad we did!

Obviously after we moved.

(Lil' Bro - aka David - if you read this - yes, that is a bottle of Frank's RedHot in the door.
You were right, the stuff is amazing)

Then we decided that we didn't want to pay for laundry pedestals and instead wanted to stack the washer and dryer - also a good move.   Also we realized that there actually was a gas line going to the laundry room - so we switched to a gas dryer.  The appliances arrived with only one little hitch - they put an electric dryer on the truck at the warehouse instead of a gas one.  We'd put off going to the laundromat because we figured out that we could just make it until the delivery day, but thankfully the weather was good so we just put out a clothesline.  They delivered the dryer on Saturday morning.

The stove is lovely.  We are so excited to be back to cooking on gas! And it's level!!  No more eggs sliding to one side of the pan!  When we redo the kitchen we will have to do something about the gas line though, because we can't slide the stove all the way back against the wall.

Tom cooking dinner last night.

As for bathrooms, we mostly got one up and running.  We quickly realized that there was something or other wrong with all of them.  On the ground floor, the faucet needs to be replaced along with the plumbing to the tub.  The second floor tub faucet leaked.  On the third floor, we think that the seals in the sink faucet have gone bad as well as the seal between the base of the faucet and the top of the vanity.  The tub surround is also not particularly well attached to the walls and we haven't gotten to painting the new ceiling yet.

We decided to go with the second floor bathroom and just deal with turning it off at the cleanout in the next room to keep it from dripping all day long.  This plan worked only marginally - back to that later.

As for mopping - again it was Mom to the rescue.  We're pretty sure that she was off mopping things when we weren't looking.  If you're starting to think that my mom has been living with us, that's not quite the case.  It was two visits for a few days each in quick succession.  She came down first that Thursday afternoon before the lumber arrived, went back up with my dad on Saturday night and then came back down again the following Wednesday afternoon and headed back home again on Saturday afternoon.

We actually moved on Thursday - an odd day to move, I know.  We had to be out on the 31st but we wanted to make sure that we had time to clean the old apartment.  Tom also had Friday, the 30th off because he had to work that Sunday.  To complicate things a little more, I realized that the 31st and 1st were General Conference weekend at church which, as many of you know, is great but not a good weekend to try to move.

We'd already moved a ton of stuff.  We had been living the horrible schedule of- go to work > go work on the house/unload the cars > go back to the apartment > eat dinner > pack and load cars again - for the three weeks before we moved.  On Thursday, Tom's dad came up and brought their SUV.  We loaded that and our cars and came back for more.  A few folks from my church generously offered to help us (one with a pickup truck) so we loaded up the truck and our cars again and made the trek with almost everything.  We couldn't quite fit either our china cabinet, our mattress or filing cabinet.  The guys from church were surprised at how much we could fit in our cars, though - yes, my dresser  does fit in the Fit.  With all of the help, we got everything unloaded into the house in probably half an hour.  It was great.  A little bit later, Tom, Martin and I borrowed the delivery van from Meadowbrook and loaded up the last of it - and picked up the cats.  Martin even did a bit of a victory lap around our apartment with the vacuum.

That was the last time I saw it.  I went back to work on Friday.  Tom's mom came up to help that day, so she and my mom and Tom made that apartment sparkle.  They finished early, Tom picked up my keys from me at work and handed them in.

Tom and his dad got our router hooked up on Friday evening so I would be able to watch conference on the web the next day - Thank You!

This is what our house looked like when Mom went home on Saturday afternoon.  (See Mom - I took one for the team and put up the one where I closed my eyes).

The cats did pretty well with the move.  They were not happy about us being gone all the time and they were a little concerned as some of their favorite perches started to disappear, but they loved all the cardboard boxes and found some new places to play as other things disappeared (this used to contain our CDs - Bert took it over).  Jasper loved getting into our dressers as we moved the drawers over to the house. 

On moving day, Bert, of course, was his usual self - making friends and getting into everything.  He really is more like a dog.  Jasper just started getting more and more freaked out.  He hid in the tub until we took the shower curtain away and then hid in the corner of our bedroom closet for the rest of the day.

They settled into the house pretty quickly.  They still aren't used to all of the sounds, but they love the space, the stairs and all of the windows.  They still need to get used to the wooden floors, though.  Bert has slid into the dishwasher more than once because he picked up too much speed and couldn't stop or turn fast enough to make it into the shop.

After Jasper came out of hiding after Mom left (it's nothing personal - he's a cat), he found a new favorite spot:

He's going to be really sad when we put the couch back down on it's feet.  He started with jumping from box to box to get up there.  Now he just climbs it.

We'll be dealing with boxes and bulb crates around for a while, but we are happy to be here.  It's great to have our own place and to be in one spot.  Again, we are left grateful for great friends and family who have helped make a big move a lot easier.

Before the lumber arrived

We have a bit of catching up to do here.  We just posted about the shop, but before the big delivery arrived this is what we were up to.

We have discovered that for every seemingly simple project, there are usually 5 or 6 others that need to get done first.  Actually, we already knew about this phenomenon, but it has really come to the forefront lately.  That's what happened when we were trying to prepare for our final inspection so our contractors could get their final paycheck and we could move in.  Concurrently we were trying to make space for the lumber, prepare for the arrival of appliances and get ready to move in.  It can start to be maddening.

For example, in order to prepare for the arriving lumber and table saw, we determined that we needed to paint or else we might get stuck with a brown shop for the next ten years.  Before we could paint we needed to patch the holes in the walls.  Of course, the holes in the wall were big enough that they required drywall patches so we couldn't just spackle, we had to cut the drywall.  But before we could cut the drywall we needed to make the holes bigger so that we had studs or joists to tie into.  We did a good chunk of that during the week before the big lumber and saw delivery.  Thankfully we had a lot of help from my mom who came down on Thursday with (no joke) a suitcase full of rags.

We didn't manage to get it all painted, but we did get two coats of primer on two of the walls - what a difference that made.

Mom convinced us that we should get the laundry room painted at the same time so it would be done before the washer and dryer arrived.  Again, we didn't get all of it done, but made some serious progress (I think the second photo was taken before we got a second coat on).

Earlier that same week, I sanded down our countertops so that we could refinish them before we moved in.  Most of the sanding went well and I even saved the smallest section for last.  Then I started on that last little section.  See the little counter tucked in the corner?  That was the culprit.

I started in on it and promptly went through about 8 discs of sandpaper.  At first we thought that it was a different type of finish.  Then we thought that maybe they had used some type of wood-penetrating finish that they had done a really bad job of applying (it didn't seem too far out there given the state of other things in the house).  Then Tom looked at the counter-top, the range hood and backsplash and put it together - they did a ton of deep frying.  The worst spot was on the corner right next to the stove.  The oil had just soaked into it (you can see the really nicely oiled spot in the photo too).  At that point I decided that I'd had enough of the sanding - so we flipped the counter top.

Tom started finishing them with Danish Oil that weekend.  They look so much better.  We still don't want wooden countertops, but they aren't completely disgusting anymore.

Before:

After:

`In preparation for our final inspection, Tom closed up the hole in the doorway between the kitchen and shop.  As it turned out, our FHA consultant wouldn't have cared if it was open but, for now, it is nice to have closed up while we are running around doing other things.  At some point we'll get to rebuilding that whole doorway and hanging doors so we aren't going to bother spackling.

Mom cleaning up around the open doorway.  What you can't see is that the entire panel on the kitchen side has been removed.

This came out of that door frame.

Newly enclosed.

So there was that picture of Mom cleaning up around the doorway.  Well, she went to town on the kitchen.  She scrubbed cabinets and floors and pretty much every other surface in the place.  It all looks so much better.  She also worked a miracle on the first floor toilet.  Our plumber had his doubts that it would clean up and even Mom did, but we can hold off on replacing it for a while longer - yay!

Here's a before shot:

I don't have an after, but I'm pretty sure you all know what a clean toilet looks like.

I can't really remember what else we did that week, but we got a lot done.  When we weren't at the house, we were back at our apartment packing and loading up the car.  Tom figured out that he could hop the curb with his car and park right outside our patio door - pretty sweet!  We got some strange looks from the neighbors - oh well.

More to come soon...

The Shop

We decided a while ago that a shop was going to be an essential feature of any house we owned.  If at all possible, we wanted to avoid putting it in the cellar.  With every house we looked at, we considered where the shop would go - would a sheet of plywood fit down those stairs? around that corner? was there any chance of natural light? how would dust mitigation work? sound?

For now, we have a bit of a compromise.  Our dream is to build an out-building on our property to house the shop where we can have good light and a chunk of yard as a buffer from the dust and noise.  Until then, we have decided to use the back room on the ground floor.  The noise and at least some of the dust will be up close and personal for a while since it is right off the kitchen and we'll have to walk through the shop to get to our laundry room and ground floor bathroom, but it's not in the cellar and there are some nice windows and a door into the back yard right next to the driveway.  We kind of figure that we'll be spending a fair amount of time in there during at least these next couple of years so we hope that the convenience will outweigh the mess.  We already found some really cool doors on craigs list that we will hang between the kitchen and shop.  Now we need to find something to fill the window opening.

As for tools and supplies, we are probably pretty good on hand tools and small power equipment.  We both had hand tools even before we met and Tom had some small power tools, but since we got married Tom has added a lot more to the collection (this is the tip of the iceberg).

We're both kind of amazed at how much stuff we managed to cram into our 1 bedroom apartment.   Of course, we did live with a set of bar clamps under the bed for the last couple of years.  Since we bought the house, we bought a band saw through my uncle's business,

 picked up the mini-lathe that was sitting mostly unused in my parent's cellar and then, a few weeks ago, we got another big load.

Of their own free will, my dad and brother made the trip out to my aunt and uncle's house in Cleveland on a friday night.  Dad took the bus from NY to State College, PA where he met up with my brother, Andrew.  They continued on to Cleveland that night.  There, they loaded up my brother's trailer with a bunch of lumber (mostly 12' lengths of oak with a bit of poplar mixed in) as well as a table saw and drove it back to our house the following day.  Shortly after we finished unloading, Andrew hopped back in his truck and headed back to State College and we drove my parents (Mom came down the day before to help us with things) to the train station so they could head home.  It was a crazy two days for them and we are still kind of in shock that they did it, but grateful.

Sometime in the next month or so, we will head up to my parent's house to pick up their jointer/surfacer which Dad offered to loan to us for a while.  With that, we will be able to use the unsurfaced lumber that Dad and Andrew brought us.  That will be it for us for a while.  The next thing that I would want to get would be a dust collection system, but I think that's a ways off.  For now, we'll be fine with dust masks and our shop vac.

So that's our shop.  It isn't fully put together yet but, thanks to a lot of help and the generosity of our family, we're actually pretty close.   We can't wait to put it to use.