It's starboard and larboard on deck you will sprawl

Zoiks, I started this entry weeks ago and somehow haven't managed to finish and post it. It's really unfortunate, because it's such an exciting development and we've been enjoying it quite thoroughly in the interim (perhaps that's partially responsible for my lack of posting. . .?). So, as you may have gathered from my earlier preview, we have a deck! Tres's dad came up to stay with us a few weeks ago and the two of them gathered the materials and got it all up in about 3 days.

I wasn't able to get many process photos of this project (they were too speedy and I was too busy wrangling the small one), but it is quite simply a glorious thing. We've been eating outside most nights now and enjoying breakfast on the weekends out there too. 

facing west

facing south

facing east

We have grapes planted at each post, which will eventually grow up and be trellised (can I use that as a verb?) over the top for shade. At the moment, we have some garden shade cloth stapled up there (not shown in the photos above) and that's helping to cut down on the sun a bit. The finishing touch will be to construct a bench between the posts on the east and half of the north sides (that post in the middle will be cut down to the height of the bench).

Silas has been enjoying the deck too -

here he is doing so with our dear friend Matt

They're juicy and healthy and cute

sprinklers in action on the back "lawn"

Tres has been hard at work on our yard these past few weekends. Now, when I say yard, I should specify that up until this point we have done no landscaping, other than putting in the garden last year. After the house was finished, he put out some grass seed and we've had a lawn that's about the equivalent of an adolescent boy's facial hair  up until this point. Now that the weather's getting nice and it's a more appropriate growing season (and he actually has a spare moment), Tres is getting serious. For the past month, he has spent most of every weekend installing a sprinkler system, which will automatically water the lawn and plants around the house. It was  a pretty Sisyphean task (yay, digging in the sand!), complicated by the fact that he was working by himself, but he did a wonderful job and now we can get to the (mostly) fun part: adding plants! Our landscaping hopes/requirements are twofold: anything we put in should be easy to maintain and functional whenever possible.

 forsythia (up close to the house) and peach

Our first addition was one of my spring favorites, a forsythia bush. Aside from being just pretty to look at, I love that forsythia are one of the harbingers of spring, providing a burst of color just when you need it the most. They're also quite easy to maintain and do well in our climate. I've joked that buying our first plant from a nursery has made me officially feel like a grown up and (while I know that some of the other experiences of the past year  have been perhaps a bit more life-changing) I'm really only half kidding - there's something very adult feeling about planting things that will take years to mature and become useful.

 blackberries (look for the bright green tags)

 raspberries

Which brings us to our acquisitions of the past two weekends, fruit trees and berry bushes! Well, berry sticks, really, but, assuming all goes well, they should grow into bushes. These fit our requirements perhaps a bit better than the forsythia (although I would argue that improving aesthetics is useful too, so long as the plant is low maintenance) and we are really excited at their prospects. Of course, as I mentioned above, we will not be seeing the fruits of our labors (so to speak - heh) for a few years. We're looking forward to D'Anjou and Bartlett pears, Redhaven peaches, three varieties of cherry (Vans, Montmorencies, and Black Republicans - it's a  super neat grafted tree), blackberries, and raspberries someday.

 cherry

pears (D'Anjou on left, Bartlett on right)

Tres has done all of this work himself and it's been quite the job, made all the less pleasant by the fact that he'd much rather be working in the garden. I'm so admiring of his hard work and excited to do my part as harvester, preserver, and eater in the next few years.

Silas is excited too

What's new, pussycat?

Ok, finally something instead of recipes. Despite my lack of news on the blog, we have been working on things around here. While most of my time is taken up with baby-related activity and house maintenance these days, Tres has been hard at work on things outside.

baby-related activities are pretty sweet

As you may recall from a year or so ago, we've had a few incidents of neighborhood dogs coming to visit, one resulting in tragedy. The next-door neighbor built a fence which, when closed has pretty much solved the problem with their dogs, but there are others around and we want to feel more comfortable letting our chickens roam around. There is also a hope that, down the line, we'll be adding to our animal family and will want them to be contained as well. To those ends, Tres replaced the dilapidated fencing around our property and put up a gate in front of the driveway. It has special significance, as it is the gate from his childhood farm (lovingly rehabilitated by his uncle and cousin - thank you!).

The weather here has been steadily warming (as in most of the country, it seems, we have had a very mild winter in general this year) and our minds, especially Tres's, have been turning to this year's garden. A few weeks ago, our neighbor brought over his tractor and he and Tres cleared everything out and spread a layer of manure. Now we have a beautiful blank slate, ready for this year's first planting in (probably) just a few weeks.

oh, the possibilities

A couple of weeks ago, we made our first major inside improvement: we built a bookshelf and moved our books up into the house! This may not sound like much, but it felt like a major accomplishment for us. Almost all of our books have been in boxes since we moved here in June 2010 and many have been boxed  up since we moved into our house in Seattle in August 2008. 

unpacking and organizing

It sounds cheesy, but it really did feel a bit like reuniting with old friends. Books really are such an important part of our lives; I hadn't realized how much I'd missed them, until we had access to them all and could see them on a daily basis again - I may have bitten off a bit more than I can chew with the resultant pile on my nightstand. . . While we still have a long way to go in making our house feel comfortable and home-y (and organized - ha!), this was a very satisfying first step.

and filled

Tres likes books

The root of all evil today

In what I hope will be the last of the sagas involving our house (hah!), we are finally the proud owners (signers?) of a mortgage, which means that we have officially entered the world of home ownership. Scary? Yes, but at this point more relieving and glorious than anything. This all started several weeks ago, only a week or so after we'd moved in, when we had our appraisal. The bank requires an appraisal to "determine" (I use this term loosely because, as you will see, this is far from an exact science) that our property is worth more than the loan that they give us, so that there is something in it for them if we end up defaulting. So, the appraiser came, he seemed nice enough, we waited a week or so, and he sent the bank his number: $70,000 less than the appraisal for our construction loan.


After some significant freaking out - seeing as an appraisal that low would essentially make our obtaining a mortgage impossible, not to mention undervaluing our house and land to the point where we'd have essentially lost all of the money we invested in the property ourselves - we examined the appraisal more closely. The way an appraisal is calculated is by closely examining the house and property, then comparing it to the selling price of other similar houses and properties in the area. To this guy's credit, we have a pretty unique situation here, in that our neighborhood is rural (everyone lives on 5 - 10 acres) but still within the limits of a fairly sizable city. None of the houses around us have recently sold and there's not much else like it around. Finding comparables (as they're called) was likely difficult. Unfortunately, the comparables he ended up choosing were not comparable in any true sense. None were within our city, none had as large a property, and, most outrageously, two were sold in unusual circumstances (one was a short sale and one a relocation sale). If Tres could find this information in under an hour, how had it escaped the appraiser's attention? It all seemed pretty strange. Tres collected all of this information, as well as finding some other comparables that seemed more reasonable to us, and typed them up as a rebuttal, to be submitted to the appraiser and the bank. The appraiser refused to reconsider, even after Tres called to tell him he would be filing a formal complaint with the licensing board.


At this point, we weren't quite sure what we should do. We were pretty sure the appraisal was ridiculously low, but our confidence was a bit shaken. Should we simply order another appraisal? What if it came in low too? Were there options available to us if our house was really worth that much less than originally thought? What were our alternatives? Would we lose the house? We discussed some options with our broker and even met with some other banks, but it was hard to get our hopes up. Ultimately, we decided we would order another appraisal and go from there. The appraiser came out two weeks ago and we waited with bated breath. I am happy to say that we got a call a week or so later that his appraisal came in at $8,000 over our original (construction loan) appraisal, which is to say more than high enough to qualify us for our mortgage and finish up this whole silly process. To say that we were happy about this news is a significant understatement. I would like to kiss that appraiser. Really. So, while I think we are right in claiming the first appraiser negligent (he clearly chose properties that low-balled our property, for reasons that I can't understand), this process also illustrates how unscientific the art of appraisal can be. All I can say, is that I'm glad we came out on the right side of it in the end. 


And now, for a bit of levity, here's 8 months pregnant me (this was a few weeks ago - I'm now almost 38 weeks, so getting close!) with a giant watermelon from the garden; I'm not quite the biggest thing around here!

I know some of you will maintain that I

often make this face in pictures but, in

my defense, this was about the 6th shot

he'd taken and that watermelon was heavy!

We don't need no piece of paper from the city hall

Actually, we do need that piece of paper and I am happy to say that we are now the proud owners of a Certificate of Occupancy! Again, a bit anti-climactic, as we've already been moving in for the past couple of weeks, but it still feels good to have everything settled officially. Now, we can get down to things like starting garbage service, figuring out where to put our mailbox, and other such affairs.

kitchen

living room

As aforementioned, we're into our second week of unpacking and setting up house. It's been slow, partially because it's mostly me working on it during the week and I'm big, pregnant, and tire easily but mostly because everything that's been sitting in the dusty shop for a year needs to be cleaned before it can be put away. Still, we're making good progress; we have probably 80% of our stuff in here and most of it put away (with no shelves for books or records, they are still sitting in boxes, but we will try to remedy that in the next month or so). I've made a trip to Goodwill, done about 12 loads of laundry, and innumerable dishes (I can't even say how much I'm enjoying the modern convenience of a dishwasher right now) and feel like we can see the light at the end of the tunnel. There's still plenty to be done (the shop is in total disarray and needs a serious cleaning of its own), but we are making progress.

It's been a long, long time coming

Ok, I fully intended to post an update the weekend before last, but things have just been so busy around here that I never had time to finish my entry. Instead, I present something of a saga (sorry, I get a little verbose) of the past two weeks.
Week 1
It felt a bit like old times around here this week, as we were back to 90 degree days and the old crew was back out to work on the house. The inside is completed and our building company's work is done, so now it's up to us to finish things up and get ready for our final inspection. First up, getting in and out of the house. As of Thursday morning, the front and back doors looked like this:

front door

back door, with makeshift covered pallet step

My father-in-law came out on Wednesday night and started work on the front on Thursday. I went to work on the bathtubs/showers, soaking and scraping all of the drywall mud and other debris out of them.


My dad came out Thursday night and on Friday, while work on the outside continued, we got to work cleaning inside. We began by washing all of the walls, which were covered in dust from sawing and grouting, as well as splashed with black grout and tile cement. It was slow going and tiring, with lots of getting up and down and reaching; while the three dimensional bits came off, there remained a lot of staining that would have to be painted over. My dad cleaned all of the shelves and cabinets, while I continued with walls. Tres came home early and helped clean, which definitely made things move faster. To give you some idea of the scope of this project, here are the cabinets in the kitchen (each one is divided by a removable shelf through the middle, sometimes two):

By the end of the day, we had completed all but two rooms. In the afternoon, our construction manager came out and we went through our list of things that needed to be checked/fixed. It wasn't short, but many of the issues were cosmetic and none would be too difficult/time consuming to fix. He told us we should be ready for the final inspection Monday/Tuesday.


We finished cleaning on Saturday and moved on to touch-up painting. We spent the rest of that day painting, each room's stains needing 2-3 coats. I gave the floors a quick vacuum and Tres wrapped up the day by mopping the entire house. The floors were far from sparkling, but it got a lot of the dirt/dust from the grout up and moved us a step closer to having the house ready to move in.

the front steps

back steps

Sunday was time for more painting and cleaning. After a day and a half of painting, my dad passed on the last few rooms and moved on to filling nail holes in the trim and moldings and washing the windows. Tres and I continued painting and finished by the afternoon, moving on to filling moldings. His pop raked and cleared out debris outside (including hundreds of nails and screws and huge hunks of concrete he had to dig out of the sand with a shovel) and drove them out to the dump, put up our address numbers (required by the city, despite the fact that our house is not anywhere near the road, but I digress. . . ), finished the back step that afternoon, and then joined us on work inside the house. 

our snazzy house numbers

In other news, the sprinkler system (which has thrown us for more than a couple loops in this process) is finally completed! It still needs to be inspected, but we shouldn't need to have any more work done on it. It only took me 3 days to get the plumbers to send someone out to hook water up to it. Hooray!


Week 2
On Monday, the dads finished up the windows and put up the screens and Tres' pop loaded up the last bits of debris/garbage for disposal. I filled some nail holes and cleared a lot of our stuff out of the house, so there wasn't so much around for the inspection on Tuesday.


As predicted by our construction manager (and is typical), we did not pass inspection in the first go-round. Instead, we were met with a list of corrections. Most were neither difficult nor time consuming (stick up some insulation that was hanging down over the crawl space vents, post the length of the dryer duct, and revise the site plan to reflect the true set backs). He also wanted us to bring the grade around the house up about 6 inches, which was a bit problematic - I ended up calling him a few times to determine what exactly he wanted and how it could be done - but it was doable, with some extra work on our part, of course.

our dryer duct sign

The real kicker involved - big surprise - the bloody sprinkler system. You remember the sprinkler system, don't you? The one I said was finished just mere paragraphs ago? Every time I think we've heard the last of it. . . it's back! There seemed to be a bit of a disagreement about whose responsibility it was to inspect the system. The house inspector wanted an additional part installed, but when I contacted the fire marshal (who would be inspecting and officially approving the system), he said it wasn't necessary. This resulted in a few days of back and forth discussions, with no real resolution. Sigh.


On Tuesday night, Tres and I hit Home Depot and bought 15 vent wells and 6 bottles of caulk, to cover up the foundation vents, as the new grade would otherwise result in them being covered and subsequently filled with sand. While he removed our new front and back steps and generally cleared things out for the excavator, I went around the foundation and taped 3 inches under the siding all around the house, so the excavator could see exactly where the inspector wanted the grade to reach. The excavator came and moved the sand up and spread the rest of our gravel for the driveway on Wednesday and Tres came home early to finish putting up the vent wells. I cleaned some tile inside the house and tried to coordinate our various jobs to be sure that we could get everything done in time to have the inspector back out by Friday, as he was headed out of town the following week. By the end of the day, we were graded and vented and Tres' pop was back out to help us get things finished up. Whew!

 vent well, with finished grade

inside a vent well

Thursday was a parade of workers, as people from the company came out to do small fixes we had requested (the aforementioned insulation under the house, some inside cleaning, closet door adjustments, etc.). The sprinkler installer came out to test the system and everything looked good. The fire marshal met us for the inspection and . . . the bell didn't work. At this point, I really didn't have words. Everyone was super nice about it, but they wouldn't be able to come back until next week, which meant no certificate of occupancy or moving in this weekend. I was so disapointed and frustrated, I thanked them and had to sit for a few minutes in the shop by myself. I called the inspector and left a message, asking if he would be willing to pass our final inspection, even if the sprinklers hadn't passed. Next, I called the electrician and they sent someone out to look at the bell and the water heater, which had (excitingly) let off a large spark when the sprinkler installer had touched it with his wrench (not a normal or desirable occurrence). He worked for awhile and assured me everything was operational.


In the meantime, in order to fix the sliding door (which wasn't hanging properly), the workmen tore off the siding around the door, to adjust the framing. The day before our scheduled inspection. Holes in the side of our house. Oh, my head. My father-in-law put the steps back on the front and back and raked the grade up to the side of the house. I did some floor wiping and filled some nail holes, then headed out for a doctor's appointment. The inspector returned my call, saying he thought my plan was reasonable and that he would be happy to pass us on our final (assuming he approved our corrections), on the contingency that the sprinkler inspection passed next week. What a wonderful surprise!


I returned home happy and did a little more work in the house. The workmen had fixed the door and replaced the siding, although they had not yet sealed around it. I finally got a return call from our construction manager and he assured me that he would send someone to look at the water heater and that the inspector probably wouldn't worry about the lack of sealant around the door. He also mentioned that he hadn't called in for the inspection. WHAT? This was something we had been talking about all week. I had told him the inspector was going out of town. I had told him we needed to call in for Friday. What had happened? It was too late to call in for an inspection any more, so I reassured myself that the inspector and I had spoken and made plans and hoped that he would overlook the fact that I had not set up an official inspection.


We started off Friday with low expectations, hoping for the best. That morning, I received a call from the inspector. He didn't see me on his schedule: had I called in for an inspection? When I explained what had happened, he told me he had a busy day, but would try to fit us in, as we had so few items to be checked. I thanked him profusely and crossed my fingers. Lo and behold, just a few hours later, there he was. He went through our corrections quickly, but thoroughly and advised me to have a few areas of the yard (and when I say yard, I essentially mean sand dunes) leveled a bit, so they won't be an erosion issue. And that was that. Aside from the sprinklers, we were approved! While not as exciting as getting our certificate of occupancy, which would mean we could actually start moving in over the weekend, it was super relieving to get all of this worked out before the inspector left  for vacation.  The sprinkler installer stopped back out to check the bell and it still didn't work. Is anyone surprised at this point? A different electrician (read: one who actually knew what he was doing) came out and REALLY fixed the bell and the water heater, as in showed us what was wrong and repaired it, as opposed to saying: "everything looks fine, I don't know why you had trouble." We all did a little more work inside that day, then took the rest of the night off.


On Saturday, I worked on finishing up filling the nail holes while Tres and his dad moved the heavy stuff into the house. It's technically not really ok to do that yet, but there's no way we can move it by ourselves (seeing as I can't do heavy stuff these days) and we don't really have any resources here to help us, so this was the most convenient arrangement. It's pretty exciting to have even a few things in the house, as it makes this all start to feel a bit more real. It took us all about 6 hours to finish our jobs and then his pop headed back home. That night, we slept in the house for the first time. It felt a bit strange, both more enclosed (as opposed to the openness of the shop) and freer, as we weren't surrounded by all of our stuff. It's the first time we've been in our bed (as opposed to a mattresses on the floor) in over a year and it felt surprisingly more comfortable to me, perhaps just because it feels more permanent. Of course, being in the cool, well-ventilated house was really nice too.


On Sunday, Tres did a bunch of much-needed work in the garden and I took the day off. I didn't want us to move a bunch of stuff in, as we still didn't have our certificate of occupancy and the building company technically didn't want us moving in until we had signed closing papers with them. At this point, I really didn't want to rock anyone's boat.


(technically) Week 3, or this week
Monday dawned with high hopes. The sprinkler installer and fire marshal came out in the morning and we passed the test! I waited a few hours for the information to get entered into the system, then called the city to find out about getting our certificate of occupancy. The woman there was extremely nice and checked with several of the involved parties, before regretting to inform me that the inspector hadn't entered us into the computer. We could have someone else come out the next day to re-inspect . . . After some consideration (what if they were pickier and gave us other corrections?), we decided to wait until he returns. We met with our construction manager that afternoon, filled out our closing documentation, and got the keys to our house. Wow, we were really done! Upon returning home, we brought up some essentials and made dinner in the house for the first time.


It feels fairly anti-climactic to be this close and just short our certificate of occupancy, but things should get resolved early next week and I'll try not to spend too much time worrying that someone will change their mind or that we'll get in trouble for moving in before it's technically allowed.  Ok, that's my story. I'm off to fill up the car and  start moving stuff up here.

Didn't we almost have it all. . .

I wrote this post the week before last (June 20th) and forgot to post. We were away last week, but we're back now and I'll take some more photos and do some proper updating here this week!


I'm a bit behind on my house updates, but I was able to pop in yesterday and take some photos. Last week they installed all of the cabinets, trim, and counter tops and hung the doors.  

kitchen cabinets

dishwasher (can you tell I'm excited about this?)

dining room

guest bath

water heater

master bath

The tilers actually came over the weekend and finished up the tiling, so the floors are done too. So far this week, we've got plumbing fixtures installed and attached and most of the electrical done (they'll come back for the work on the outside, as the siding is getting replaced, due to some defects in the paint). Yesterday, the heating and cooling guys came and installed the heat pump. We're getting close now!

Signed, sealed, delivered

Well, friends, we are getting down to it. The living room, hallways, and dining room were tiled this week and parts were grouted. They will come back in the later part of this week to finish up.

tiles grouted (and, obviously, not washed)

They didn't finish the tiling because our truck of "everything else that goes in the house" arrived on Thursday (and it was agreed that it made more sense to install cabinets before tiling the kitchen and bathrooms). They left the trailer here and unloaded most of it on Friday.

cabinets

kitchen cabinets, in place



doors



water heater, dishwasher, and miscellany

toilets and faucets

stove and light fixtures

moldings

Tres and I made a trip to recycle all of the cardboard they've discarded from unloading thus far (which felt a lot better than going to the dump!), but otherwise haven't had many house responsibilities this week. There are a few still to come, but it was nice to have a little breather before the last push to finish.

Someday I'll be a farmer, working the land

After our action-packed weekend/beginning of last week, things were pretty quiet around here for a few days. On Thursday, they started to install the backer board for the tile (basically like cement sheetrock for your floor, as far as I can tell) and were here all weekend finishing that and starting to lay out tile. Seeing it go in really brings home (no pun intended) the fact that we're getting close to finishing the house.

subflooring installed

all of our tiles

tiles in bedroom 3 (they're stuck down, but not grouted)

Tres and I spend Saturday and part of Sunday loading up the truck with debris (sheetrock, painting stuff, and other miscellaneous scraps) and taking them to the dump. It was more than a little depressing to have throw out so much garbage, but it felt good to get it out of our yard (and it was necessary, as the semi that will deliver everything else that goes in the house - cabinets, appliances, doors, toilets, sinks etc. - will come this week and they need to be able to park as close to the house as possible).

the garden (this is a composite of 2 pics, so it

looks a little wonky, but you get the idea)

But, that's not what I wanted to focus on in this entry. Our garden is going gangbusters, despite the unseasonably cool weather we've been having for the past couple of months, and I wanted to show off all of Tres' hard work. We are in the greens in a major way, along with some radishes.

lettuces

my favorite: Esmeralda (a butter lettuce)

mustard and turnip greens

The peas are flowering and growing some small fruits - they will be ready in the next few weeks - and carrots are also ready to start picking this week.

 snap peas

field peas

carrots

Then, there are the up-and-comers:

wheat

cabbages

fava beans

corn

eggplants

garbanzo beans

turnips

potatoes

peppers

quinoa (probably the prettiest plant in the garden)

quinoa close up

tomatoes

tomatoes close up

And those that have finished up.

arugula, gone to seed