Pack, load, haul, unload, repeat...

Hey, this part of the house almost looks like we're living there already, with the new rocking/swivel chairs and some things stuck up there on the mantle! Yeah, I wish!
We drove 2 more van loads of "stuff" to the house today and packed up the van with one more load to go over tomorrow. DH and DD took the first load over and emptied it while I packed up the kitchen. We loaded up another load and DH and I took it and emptied it. This is a photo of some of the things that have been moved into my sewing studio already...

And the kitchen is full of boxes because we moved all of the kitchen things ourselves...
And more boxes in the kitchen! You might also notice that we angled the lights over the penisula to open up the center, give it more interest, and to move the right-hand lights away from the wall a bit more. I think I like it this way better!
Here is a shot of the master bathroom so you can see how the granite looks with the rest of the stone in the bathroom.
And here is the tub side of the bathroom. There are still several things that need to be done in the master bathroom - some of the tile in the toilet area isn't grouted, the shower door is hinged on the wrong side, there is a pull missing from the cabinets, and a few other minor things...
Tomorrow the movers arrive bright and early. I think DD and I will head over to the house with the food from the refrigerator and freezer and spend the morning unloading the van and attempting to put things away in the kitchen. We might even take DS with us to help unload. We'll come back here on Wednesday to do some cleaning and to move the cleaning supplies, vacuum, etc. over to the house.

I can't believe this is the last night we'll be sleeping in this house - we've lived here for 11 years. That's the longest we have ever lived in any one house since we were married 26 years ago!

Countdown to move day: 1 day and counting! (or, more accurately, 10 hours and counting!)

Well on our way!

DH and DS did an incredible job getting things moved this weekend! I had stacked most of the things they were to move in the dining room, and the dining room is now empty. They also took everything from the garage and a bunch of things from the basement over to the house.

Tomorrow is more of the same - I need to pack up the rest of the kitchen and we'll move the kitchen things, small musical instruments, and clothing on the hangers (and probably a bunch of other things I don't even know about!).

The movers come on Tuesday to move the furniture and the non-breakable things that I boxed up.

Countdown to move day: 2 days, and counting!

Progress at the house, and another birdbrain!

DS and I headed out to the house after I spoke with the bathroom floor tile guy. He said that there were "tons of people" working out at the house today and it made me curious to see what had been accomplished.

My sewing studio cabinets have been delivered, but were scattered about the house instead of being upstairs where they need to be. These two tall cabinets which will house fabric were in the entryway.
Most of the rest of the sewing studio cabinets were in the family room...
The painters have been hard at work staining (and leaving a horrid smell in the house from it!). These are the bannisters for the stairs...
These are the mullions that go between the double-pane glass of the patio doors in the family room...
The patio doors were also stained...
Here are the newel posts for the stairs...
And these are some of the spindles for the stairs...

The master bathroom floor is looking awesome!
The keystones for the medallion in the center of the floor are cut and placed. I think the tile guy said he is doing a herringbone pattern in the center, but don't hold me to that.
My sewing studio closet doors have been installed...
and all the attic and garage access doors are in place...

I was very pleased with all the work that has been done over the past couple of days. I hope it continues at this pace!

Around here, the shelves are looking very bare...
and the amount of stuff that has been boxed up for the move is increasing...
The cabinets are looking empty...
and the boxes are stacking up higher and higher...
So, if you happen to remember back a couple of months to the post about the robin that kept banging into our dining room window, you might also be interested in this. Yesterday and today there has been a bird (not the robin) flying against the French doors off our deck over and over again, and then flying to the kitchen window and hopping along the ledge, pecking at the glass as he goes. I don't know what his problem is, but he is driving me batty with the tapping!

Inching along...

Boy, things sure seem to be going slowly now -- maybe it's because we have a deadline for getting out of our current house and into this one and things just SEEM to be going slowly.
The roof area over the front door is finished. This is the area that was still leaking and hopefully having the siding and roof done in this area will eliminate the leaks. The basement seemed to have some very wet areas also and we hope they won't be a problem.
The vent has been put up in the peak of the roof...
We had a call from the KD's tile guy who will be installing the stone/tile in our master bathroom and he wanted us to stop by the house and look at the travertine and other stones that he is thinking about using on the bathroom floor, shower and wall trim. This is the latte travertine that we think we want on the floor. The orange veins look great with the stain on the maple cabinets and hopefully will also look good with the granite on the counters. (I'm not sure how accurate the colors are in the photos we took of the granite, so it's a bit hard to tell what might look good with it.)
He also thought this macchiato stone would look nice with the color of the walls. I'm not convinced that I like this stone. I like it OK in the small pieces, but I don't like the chair rail at all and I'm not certain about the larger sample piece. He's going to go ahead and get started with the latte travertine on the floor and then we'll figure out what we want in the shower and for wall trim.
We really liked the center stone below. I don't know what kind it is. The stone on the left would look good as a coordinating stone once it is sealed. Unsealed, it is a bit too white.
I've started packing up things in this house so we'll be ready to move in 6 weeks - it doesn't seem possible that it is coming up that soon! The movers dropped off 25 small boxes and 45 larger boxes. I used up about 7 of them just emptying the dining room china closet (with a few towels from the linen closet mixed in as padding)! Anyone have any boxes lying around that they don't need?

Not much done on the house, but the Pens won!!!

The painters were supposed to start on the interior of the house this week, so we were surprised and a bit disappointed to see that they hadn't even started. We also figured that the brick would be finished, but they still have quite a bit of work to do.

The fireplace is in, however, and they ran the pipe up the chimney.

They had to cut into the drywall in order to put in the chimney pipe - curious that they didn't work on the chimney before the drywall went in. This hole was cut in DH's closet...
And these holes were cut in DD's bedroom walls...
DD still has a view of the river from her bedroom, but it is quickly becoming blocked by the leaves on the trees.
It looks like work was done on the roof over the front door this week and that will hopefully stop the leaks that had developed inside the house.
Here is the office/guest room end of the house. The outside is actually coming along nicely...
The back still isn't finished. The area over the garage and the upper 2 floors of the angled wall still need to have brick added...
The patio side of the house and the back of the garage are done...
And here is a shot from the end of the garage looking toward the patio area...
We've been working our tails off on this house so that we can get it on the market. I finished DS's room, the guest room, all the bathrooms, the dining room, and the laundry room. I still need to dust and make sure the beds are made and dishes all done in the morning before our realtor brings the other agents from her office here on their "caravan". On Thursday, she will have an open house for agents from other real estate offices. The only room that still needs work is the playroom in the basement. There are some bookshelves and game shelves down there that really need to be straightened up and packed up, but that can wait a couple of days.

I haven't figured out yet where we'll go when someone wants to show our house. Perhaps for a walk? Or maybe to hang out at Ice Cream World? Hmmmm....maybe both of those!

I just finished baking chocolate chip cookies to mail to DD for finals week - can you smell them?

Hey, I won a pillow!

Back at the beginning of April, I posted a Spring party suggestion on the Create My Event blog in a contest to win a Thomas Paul pillow from 2Modern. I checked the website today to see who won the pillow, and it was me! What fun!

Here is the pillow...

And this was my party theme suggestion:

"How about a "Springing From Your Garden" party for your friends. Provide inexpensive, colorful flower pots, pansies or seedlings from a nursery, and some dirt. Let each person plant a couple of pots of flowers (or herbs, hot peppers, etc.) to take home with them. Serve simple hors d'oeuvres on spring themed floral plates and enjoy good friends and conversation. Send everyone home with the promise that Spring has sprung."

If you want to read the other party suggestions, you can find them here, in the comments section of the page.

So, I worked in DD's bedroom yesterday packing up her desk so the desk can go in the POD. I spent today in there also, packing up all the things that were piled on her floor, cleaning out the bookcase, moving the furniture around, cleaning out the closet, vacuuming and dusting, and using a scraper and Goo Gone to get a gazillion little spots of sticky stuff off her walls. She used to have a bunch of cork board squares on her wall and they didn't stick well. The double stick tape that was supposed to hold them up stuck very well to the wall, albeit not to the cork boards. After I finally got all the sticky stuff off the wall I had to touch up 2 shades of blue paint (she has 3 wide horizontal stripes in different shades of blue on her walls) where some of the double stick tape had pulled the paint off the wall.

So, it looks a whole lot better than it used to and this arrangement of her furniture makes the room seem larger, so I think it is ready for potential buyers to see. Oh, wait - I forgot the tape on the window that I need to scrape off with a razor blade. OK - it's ALMOST ready to show!

Last night I made new curtains for the dining room window and for the French doors in the kitchen. The old curtains were getting tired after 11 years and the morning glory flowers on the fabric on the kitchen curtains went well with our wallpaper and border, but since those are no longer up on the walls the curtains went bye-bye too. I didn't replace the curtains over the sink, but the French doors have mini blinds on them to block the setting sun and I needed new curtains to cover up the ugly mini blinds.
We are planning to head out to the house tomorrow to see what's going on. I won't be here this weekend, so we'll go tomorrow and then again on Monday or Tuesday to check on things and take more photos (I love digital cameras - I can't imagine how much film I would be going through taking photos of this house if I didn't have a digital camera!).

Oh, and let's go PENS (for the hockey fans in our midst)!

New mantel and old cupboards

Not a great photo, but here is the mantel for our new fireplace. I didn't quite get all 6' of it in the picture! It is unfinished cherry and will be stained to match the kitchen cabinets.

We met with the realtor on Tuesday night to discuss getting this house on the market. We are having a POD delivered tomorrow and will load it up with all the boxes that we've been packing up. I cleaned out every kitchen cabinet and packed up everything that we can do without until we move. Here is the pantry - still full, but neat, at least.
And a couple of my kitchen cabinets - nothing falls out on our heads anymore!

This week I've been working in my sewing room. I haven't seen the floor and table tops in that room for a very long time! It had become a catch-all room this past year. I should have taken a before photo (on second thought, that would have been too scary to post). Here are a couple of after photos...

Now it's time to pack up some of the excess paraphenalia in the closets and DD's bedroom. What fun!

The walls in the new house are being mudded now. We haven't been out there this week, so I will take photos this weekend. The builder said that the hard surfaces (tile, wood floors) will go in about 3 weeks from now. I'm anxious to get out to the house to see how the exterior is coming along.

Kitchen design changes and granite

I met with our kitchen designer (KD) on Thursday to discuss the kitchen design. I've been reading the kitchen forum on the Garden Web a lot lately and, thanks to all the people who post there, I realized I didn't know the answers to some very important questions about our new kitchen. I also needed to let our KD know that I wanted to change the island to one level instead of the two levels that were in the design originally.

This is the original design of the kitchen. I kept most of the perimeter cabinets the same, although some of them have been changed to drawer stacks instead of regular base cabinets.
The cabinets in the island are now a bit odd in their shape! Here is a sketch I made of the new island configuration...There was a question a while ago on the Garden Web kitchen site that asked what people regretted most about their kitchen remodels. Many of the respondents said that they wished they had gone through everything in their current kitchens and decided exactly where everything would be stored in the new kitchen layout. So, to avoid regretting the same thing later, I made a list of my new cabinets and tried to figure out where everything in my current kitchen will live in the new kitchen.

I'm also really trying to keep the clutter off my counters in the new house. That means I need a way to lift the heavy stand mixer and the food processor out of the cabinets. The solution is to put appliance lifts in two of the island cabinets. The KD said that the cabinets need to have a minimum 24" depth for the appliance lifts, so there will be one 24" deep cabinet on the baking side of the island for the mixer, and another on the cooking side of the island (opposite the cooktop and oven) for the food processor. That leaves an 18"x24" deep 3-drawer stack on the baking side of the island - top drawer is for baking spices and utensils, and the middle and bottom drawers are for mixing bowls, 9x13" pans, pie pans, etc. - and a narrow 18"x12" base cabinet beside it. Beside the food processor cabinet will be a long, narrow base cabinet, 36"x12" where I'll store casserole dishes (and other as-yet-undetermined stuff).

I was having a terrible time figuring out where to store my spices. I've finally decided to store them in drawers (after seeing many photos on Garden Web of spice drawers). I changed the cabinet to the left of the cooktop to a stack of drawers so I can store cooking spices in the top drawer and pots and pans in the lower drawers. The baking spices will go in a drawer in the island. Here are some photos of spices stored in drawers:

On Friday, DH and I had an appointment to look at granite at the fabricator's that our KD uses. We have decided to go with the Verde Butterfly for the kitchen and Tsunami for the master bathroom vanities. I have never heard of Tsunami and suspect there may be another name for it. The photo we took doesn't show the depth of color very well.


Here is the Verde Butterfly... And here is the Tsunami...

This week it's time to attack all the stuff in my sewing room/craft room and get a lot of it packed up. Last week I packed up a lot of things from the kitchen and dining room that I can get along without until after we move (canning jars, a bunch of cookbooks, candles, etc.). I'm typing the contents of the boxes into my laptop as I pack the boxes, then printing out the labels, and taping the list right to the top of the box. It takes a bit longer to get the boxes packed, but will be worth it when I'm looking for something that hasn't been unpacked and there are a million boxes sitting around!