B: 10,000 Uninvited Guests

When you have a new baby, you expect a few house guests.  It did however come as a surprise when we got home from the hospital and the baby's room had a few dozen bees in it.  Apparently while we were out, a swarm decided to move into the wall cavity through  a small hole that I had opened up on Friday....

 

Dude opened the wall up and vacuumed the bees up. He then tranfered them all to a new hive which is next to the house right now waiting for all of the bees to return for the night. If the queen is in the new hive, all of the bees will go find her and we will be bee free when the guy picks them up tonight. If he missed the queen, then the fun will continue! 

kitchen

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On the kitchen front, things have been moving forward at a slightly quicker pace. The cabinets are in, some are painted, the butcher block countertop is in, and the countertops have been decided (and maybe even purchased, but I’m not sure of that yet). We’ve decided to go with soapstone – it’s more expensive than the marble we were looking at but you can do the fabrication yourself (and when I say “you,” I mean “my super cool husband”). So we’re having the major cuts made before delivery, but we’re saving a ton of money on installation and fabrication. Yay!

Now the remaining decisions include whether or not to oil the stone, and what color to paint the walls. We found some super retro-cool wallpaper underneath some painted-over wallpaper/paneling in our dining room, which is kinda attached to the kitchen.. It’s probably the original wallpaper from the 50s and it’s in good enough condition that we’re hoping to keep it up with a little bit of an “antiqued” look. That’s all the rage these days, right?

I know we’ve been talking about how much we’ve (and again by “we” I mean “B”) been working in there and how much has been done, but we haven’t been really good about documenting with pictures. We don’t have an after photo yet, and I couldn’t find a before picture but I took a couple “during,” and I mocked it up a bit with my totally awesome Paint skills.

You can clearly see the wall oven on the left, the super wide electric cooktop in the middle, and the low-hanging mighty ugly broken hood above the cooktop. While this did afford us a good amount of cabinet space, we were left with no countertops. (The area to the right extended a few more feet into a dark corner, so that was pretty much unusable.) And not to mention the cooktop was straight out of the 70s and the oven couldn’t even fit a baking sheet.

So enter B and his mad DIY skills:

Okay, well that’s just a lot of demo, but we’re getting there. And now there are brand new cabinets above the range and to the left, and small cabinets on either side of the range. One is a pull-out spice rack, which is great fun for the Little One. We’ve got a new hood and B’s going to put that in just as soon as we finish painting.

So there we are. I’ll try to get some more pictures of the “during” phase, but really I’m hoping that we get to the “after” pictures pretty quickly. At least now there’s a light at the end of the tunnel!

**Updated! The soapstone was indeed purchased and is in fact in the driveway right now!B is making mad progress on the sink cutout and we hope to be able to install it soon! YAY!

B: Something there is that doesn't love a wall

My neighbor and I met one on a side to mend our wall...
or fence as our case is. We had some rotten posts and the fence had managed to stay standing for a while simply by the application of some cross braces and luck. It was time to repair it before winter storms and wind were upon us, so we two men met in a timeless way to replace the posts and rebuild the fence and repair our wall.

But for a time we had torn down the wall and moved freely between our two domains and shared tools, and knowledge and sweat in the sun as we set about working side by side. At the end of the day as we set to mount the final planks in place we shook hands through the gap and it set me to a bit of melancholy as I thought about that old poem and the question of neighbors that maintain walls.

Something there is that doesn't love a wall...

reason #462 why i love b

It's in.

(Ours is all black, but it's still very pretty.)

And it works. And it's gas.

Did I mention it's pretty? And gas?

B took off work all last week and spent the vast majority of it working on our kitchen. He took out the old cooktop and cabinets underneath, re-routed the gas line, did a bunch of electric stuff, put the new range in, took out the old oven, did some more electric stuff, fixed some walls, re-routed a water line for the refrigerator, and I'm sure there's a bunch of other things that I'm missing.

(I actually think we're writing simultaneous posts, so a comparison of what he did vs. what I think he did could be interesting.)

And oh yeah, he baked and frosted his own birthday cake because I was too sick to get out of bed to make one for him. (The fact that he's not mad about this is reason #481.)

and no, not that kind of piece

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I've had a crappy Ikea dining room table for years. I think I bought it for less than $100 when I moved up to Seattle and realized I didn't have any furniture to put in my apartment. It's been moving around with me ever since. When we moved into the house here in Sac, we wanted something a little more unique and ended up buying a nice picnic table to have in our dining room. It was fun, but not quite what we were going for and if you sat too close to the edge of the bench you'd fall over when the other person on the bench stood up. Not so good.


About a month ago we stumbled on a very cool furniture store in Sac and were walking around looking for bookshelves/toy storage when I saw it. I immediately turned to B and said "that's our new dining room table." There's something about the dining room table that needs to be big and sturdy and welcoming. We love to eat. Good food and a good place to eat it is important. We need a good table. A table that you can sit around with your family and eat good food for 100 years. A table that our children can grow up on and eat Thanksgiving dinner with grandma and aunt 'chele. A table that looks as good on Christmas day as it does covered with homework papers. But unfortunately they don't make those tables anymore.


Oh but we found that table. Built in the late 1800s out of solid French Oak. Can't you just picture it living in a farmhouse in the french countryside?

We're pretty happy with it. It could probably seat 8, but we got 6 chairs with it. It's definitely got personality, and it could use a little bit of love, but we can handle that.

The only problem with all this is now we've got this beautiful oak "piece" in our dining room and the rest of our furniture is still mostly ikea-ish. I suppose this means we're going to have to start looking for more "pieces"? This sounds expensive.

did you steal my sunshine?

Apparently we don't have summer here in CA anymore, we've got Fire Season. Sat afternoon started to smell a little smokey, and by Sunday evening there was a distinct haze in the air - I got on the internets to see what was afoot, and apparently all of northern Cal is on fire. Today smells a bit better but the sun is looking eerie and orange. It'll make for a good sunset, that's for sure.

Reason #576 why I love B:

Sorry for the crappy photo, but it's our new dishwasher! And it's in our kitchen! And it works! I'd oddly enough gotten used to our nice new kitchen appliances hanging out in our garage, not being used. But our old dishwasher kept breaking and not getting things clean and being absurdly loud, so B got fed up last weekend and decided to just install the new one now instead of waiting for the entire kitchen remodel. One afternoon and only minor amounts of cursing later, we have a pretty new Bosch that is crazy quiet. Next step: cabinets.

B: N* and LMTFAD

I had a great day before LMTFAD up at Northstar doing some sick epic totally rad downhill mountain bike riding. The resort doesn't really have it totally figured out yet, the trails are a littel awkward with jumpsa that are too long followed by jumps that are too short. They have 5 foot drops to flat landings that are already dished out, and more loose rock and dust than they know what to do with. It was fun, but they are definitely feeling some growing pains and not quite in the same league as Whistler.

Other than that, I spent the actual LMTFAD sanding the kitchen cabinets. They are coming out pretty good, and I am about half done. I think we may be able to stain these rather than paint them, so I am super stoked.

Hope everybody had a good "fathers day".

PS - Funny thing happened up at Northstar...I ran into Amanda's roomate from freshman year of college. Yes the one that I dated for like 3 months. Totally awkward! I hadn't seen her in almost 8 years, but I have the feeling that I am going to continue to cross paths with her forever. Too many similar interests. She is just as crazy as ever.

i fought the ivy...

(not quite sure who won.)

Back when we lived in the northwest, we spent a couple Earth Day weekends pulling ivy from the local state park - it was an invasive species and it was killing the trees and all that other hippie crap. This year, we inadvertently spent the weekend before Earth Day pulling ivy, this time from our backyard. And this was some serious ivy. Serious. Root balls the size of four pregnant watermelons. Bugs and spiders and snails and mold. And the occasional pool toy from the next door neighbors. Needless to say, it was A LOT of work. Above is the before picture - this was actually taken before we even bought the house, and it's kinda hard to tell, but the ivy had pretty much taken over the whole yard. We now have most of the ivy out, but I'm still sore. We'll see how much comes back next year...

After. It's hard to get a perspective, but that pile is less than half of what we got out.

But we did manage to get in a few tomato and basil plants! And we also found the solution to our yard waste problem - after two months of diligently cramming our yard waste bin full every two weeks, we found out that we can just call up the county and they'll come out and pick up our giant pile free! Why didn't any of our neighbors that gave us crap for the giant pile in our driveway mention that? Did they really think we wanted that there? Whatever. At least it'll ALL be gone next week.