Cost

One of the (many?) factors we did not anticipate when moving to a new home was the increased cost of shopping at the grocery store. Our new local store is Raley's, which, while locally owned, is more expensive than our usual Safeway when we lived in Midtown.  Example: Pasta Barilla is on sale for $1.40 at Raley's, and on sale for $0.89 at Safeway.  Pretty much everything we buy is more money at Raley's, and they have fewer, and less deep sales as well.  A pity.  Now we have to either drive back to our former Safeway, or pay the toll of convenience. 

In other news (really news this time), we are working on the fence.  Should be done in a week or so, which will be nice.  Working in the garden will be more enjoyable knowing that it is not on public display. 

Tour gone wrong

Moving in to a new place is an exciting time, a time that you want to share with your family and friends. We had been so busy with getting things ready and working on the house that it was hard to find the time to invite people over. Also, I must admit that the control freak in me wanted to make sure that everything was at least done and clean and put away enough so as to not be embarrassed. Once we finally moved our stuff in and started living there we kind of forgot that it was now time to start inviting people over, hosting dinner, movies, games, etc. It kind of made for an odd time, like a new store that flips their sign to say 'open' but no one comes in. It made me pretty sad actually because before we moved we were kind of on a roll of having people over. It felt a little lonely with all this house and no one to share it with.

Finally we hear that my grandmother is coming to town for a few weeks. We are excited that finally we can show the house to a new person. Lists are made of things to do before the big reveal (of course not many of those things were checked off, but a list was made none the less.)

My mom makes the plan that I will pick my grandmother up and bring her to the house then my mom will come to the house when she gets off work to visit then take grandma home. So I pick up my grandmother and bring her to the house. It is just the two of us because David is at work. So I take her inside and show her the kitchen and the dining area and the living room, then I decide to take her out our sliding glass door to show her the back yard. She walks outside, then I follow. Because it was so very hot that day and the AC was on I slide the door shut. It sounds louder than normal when I shut the door but I don't think much of it because our house can be very loud and creaky.

So I show her a little of the backyard and then I go to open the sliding glass door and it wont open. I am confused. I try again with no luck. It is then that I realize that the sound I heard was the wooden bar that we use to secure the door at night falling back into place and has now locked the door. My head starts to spinning because I know that we just walked in the front door, which I always lock when I come inside, and we weren't there long enough to open any other doors or windows. So I start going around the house trying all the doors and windows anyway because you always have to try. All locked. I have locked myself and my 83 year old grandma out of the house on a 98 degree day. All purses and phones are inside.

Well now I am kind of freaking out because although my mom should be here in about 20 minutes, the carpet guy was on his way to install our carpets and we had already "rescheduled" with him too many times to miss this appointment. Besides, I pictured myself with my poor grandma sitting outside on the front porch when the carpet guy pulls up and me telling him "sorry you can't come in, I locked myself out of the house. Can you come back again another time?" It was just too embarrassing a thought.

So I realize that our only hope is one of the windows in the master which was not locked. I pull on it, but it doesn't budge. What you must know is that we have those roller crank windows that are surprisingly locked in place at any given angle of openness. This window's angle was wide enough to pry my fingers in but not wide enough to reach the crank device.

At this point I can tell my grandma is getting hot because she has been following me as I run around like a chicken with my head cut off trying to break in to my house. I instruct her to sit down in the shade in the front and wait for my mom. While I wanted her to cool down I mostly didn't want her to see what I was going to do next, which was pull on my poor window with all my might.

I pull and pull and pull and finally get it open enough to get the screen out. Now the problem is that the window is too high to pull myself up on my own. I find a chair that we had outside and try to stand on that but the ground is too wobbly to put too much pressure on the chair. By this time my grandmother has come back around to the backyard and is witnessing my desperate attempt to break in. She tries to hold the chair steady but isn't strong enough.

Luckily at this time my mom shows up in her cute little work outfit. She immediately hops up into the window with me holding the chair. So now she is sitting indian style like in the window trying to bend her long legs enough to squeeze in. She is just pulling on her foot and trying to shove it inside. Then I try to help her by bending and shoving on her foot as well.

Finally she squeezes in and goes around to unlock the door. We all go inside and offer them a cool beverage which they gladly take. When the carpet guy shows up a few minutes later my grandmother blurts out the whole story to him. So I definitely did not avoid embarrassment.

All in all it was a very traumatizing first house guest. We have had better luck since then, but I always remember to remove the stick from the door completely and not to just stand it up inside.

Also I completely broke the crank mechanism to that window which now will no longer open but has to remain shut and locked. At least I know the house is not easy to break in to.

rumpus room

It is hard to know when to post things to show progress because hardly anything is ever DONE done. But for now I will show you the progress of the rumpus room floor, which is DONE done, even if the rest of the room is not and still has no furniture in it.

At first we had an odd room with ugly ugly carpet.


At the inspection it was noted that the floor was uneven, probably poured concrete patio slab. We were anxious to get down to take a look at what was underneath the carpet. What we didn't really expect to find was more carpet. RED industrial carpet. We then started calling it "The Red Room". Here we is what it looked like as painting got started.


Even with the ugly red carpet, it was useful for storing all of our stuff as we got the rest of the house ready.


And our stuff waited and waited . . .


Finally we were ready to work on the floors. We pulled back the red carpet to find that the pad had been glued down to the concrete and was still very stuck.


So we debated at that point whether to do a quick fix it job or a thorough job. We ended up going with a nice thorough job because we don't like to do anything half-assed! This next step required Mr. House and his dad to scrape alllll the black pad off.



After some scrapping, we discovered that the unevenness we felt was from the wood forms that we left in, long after the concrete dried. So the good news was that there were no huge cracks in the floor. the bad news was that now we had to do more work to remove the old, rotten wood and fill it in with concrete.




When it came time for removing the wood we were in for an additional surprise. We pulled out the wood to find TERMITES!!!




This was a surprise to us because the previous owner had the house sprayed for us before we bought it. I called the termite guy who they had used and he agreed to come out at the end of the week. Well the end of the week was raining pretty hard, so the end of the week turned in to the beginning of the next week. Meanwhile we are living with an ugly concrete floor with huge gaps that extend down to the dirt. I was full of irrational (?) fears of bugs, spiders and/or snakes crawling up in to the house so much so that those fears entered my dreams. It was an unpleasant week.


Finally the very nice termite man came and sprayed - assuring me all the while that he was "using the good stuff this time". The whole spraying thing freaked me the hell out and I was quick to vacate the house while they were here (even though they didn't really mention anything). Finally we were ready to fill in the old frame with concrete.


In an effort to not do anything half-assed, once the concrete was dry Mr. House rented a concrete grinder and went to town smoothing out all the different levels. What a beast that grinder was!


Then, furthering out efforts to do as much work as possible, we washed the floor to get it ready to be sealed.


To seal we went with Dry-lock. It was supposed to seal from water, etc. We bought it in blue because it was a few bucks cheaper than white - yay cheapskates! Now we have used some awful nasty smelling chemicals in this house remodel, but this was by far the WORST. It smelled horrible. I quickly put on my respirator to help block the odor and toxins. Bleh, really really glad this part is over.



Here is what the floor looked like when we had it all prepped and ready for carpet. Initially I wanted to paint the whole floor, but I hated that stuff so much we only ended up covering up the new concrete and feathering out from there.


I went and picked out a nice carpet from wood brothers and we planned to use our same installer because we had pretty good luck. Well to make a long story short (too late) the carpet guy flaked on us not once but twice which put our finished floor even farther back. Something about losing his phone at a bachelor party, a story which he told to myself and my mother and my grandmother. You can see I am trying to forget the details. So now after reading this whole long story you can see why this is what I did when I saw the carpet for the first time.


HALLELUJAH!!!

killer cacti

So one of the things that we disliked very much about out front yard is the giant cactus in the center. It is an odd sight. We decided early on to dig up that old cacti and replace it with redwood trees. Because really who doesn't like redwood trees? Even Mr. House who insists ever tree bear fruit or nuts wanted the redwood.

The other benefit to planting redwoods is that we have a seemingly endless (and free) supply from my family who lives in the Santa Cruz mountains. This past weekend we decided would be a good time to obtain our first redwood tree. I don't have any pictures of the process because we were running late for a wedding, but needless to say we had our pick of the trees.

We shopped around their property for the right height tree, with the right number of branches and the right thickness of trunk. We found it a little ways out in the back or front of their house (depending on who you ask). We dug it out and put it with some more dirt and water in a garbage bag then loaded it in the back of the empty van. It fit perfectly! Then we got ready and drove to the wedding where our new tree waited patiently for us to return.

After some delicious cake and a little dancing we returned to the car and drove home. We arrived home just before 8:00 and began digging our hole right away. The ground seemed really hard and we soon realized that there was a layer of gravel on the top. Once we got under that layer we thought we were home free, only to find another layer of gravel, this time about a foot deep. Poor Mr. House kept on digging and eventually he dug through all the gravel and quite a few random roots. We plopped our new tree and some new dirt in the ground next to the cactus for now because we didn't have the time to transplant the cactus it into a pot, nor a pot to transplant it in to. Soon we hope to dig up the cactus and get two more redwood friends.

Rebate

Our (sizable) tax rebate came in the mail today, so we immediately started dreaming about what we could do to upgrade the house with the money.  leading contenders are windows and solar hot water heater, since those will payoff as rebates next  year as well. 

Well, one of us was dreaming about upgrades.  The other one started planning a trip to Vegas. 

What would you spend money on to upgrade your house?