Moved!

After a week of 65 degree weather, our moving day, of course, had to be 104. With the help of 3 strapping young men, we got out of our apartment and into the house in no less than 5.5 hours. All 150 boxes, most of which are still on the 3rd floor and will be there for some time. But we're in! We're Dorchester all the way now. Now if we could only get our paper delivered...

Floored.

After some prodding, our Vietnamese flooring guy made good on his promise to get the floors done in 2 days. Not in our greatest or even most realistic hopes did we expect those dirty, black, gunky floors to look so good. Now that we know the potential...


After sanding



Ok, so there's stuff in the room so you can't see the pristine beauty of the floors, but you get the idea.

The finished look.

Paint History

Our house has been yellow for a long time. We have been able to scientifically verify that. Reagan has only taken a few paint samples of the exterior, but where she has, yellow yellow yellow. Except for a couple early layers of drab, variations on a theme of yellow. Even in the trim.

Totally delving into the nerdiness of her new profession, Reagan took advantage of the microscopes at her office. Here's what she found:

This sample came from the front door frame. The colors don't come out so well, but in the lower left corner is the wood, then a primer, a couple layers of a taupe/drab color, then a peachy color, then several layers of yellow.

This tiny piece (not the best sample) came from the underside of the front porch, at the cornice. Again, lots and lots of yellow, except for a little bit of blue peeking through. Bright blue! It may be spill-over from the porch ceiling, which is commonly painted a bright color...haven't found blue anywhere else.

Goodbye parquet, hello pine!

The wood floors in this house are generally in excellent shape, except for 2 rooms: the guest bedroom and the study. Blocks of parquet flooring were popping out all over the place - you could've lost an eye! So, we decided to act fast. Reagan spent about 3 hours pulling up the cheap parquet to reveal dirty, gummy, tar-like glue on original pine boards. Incredibly, we found some guys who were willing to deal with them and get them all refinished by Friday, just before we move in.


Rooms with parquet (and dust and paint chips fallen from the ceiling)


Rooms without parquet (but with their dusty outline and lots of black goo, I mean glue)

Close up - purty, ain't she? Photos of the finished floors to come...after Saturday.

Bedroom done! (Almost)

Mary and David were silly enough to volunteer their help this weekend, but we got a gargantuan amount of work done, thanks to them. The bedroom is now complete (with the exception of a second coat of paint on the trim). Even the closet got a fresh coat of paint (well, 65% of it)! We are ready to mop and move in (into that one room, that is).





We're happy with it. Though the keen observer may start to notice a theme - yellow house, yellow bedroom, coming soon, you guessed it, yellow living room. Then there is our dog.... say nothing of the jaundice Adam has been suffering from.

Now we've started on the living room, and Adam and David spent the day scraping and sanding and patching and priming that room. David is an artist with a wall paper steamer. And while he initially objected to our obsessive standards, we had to pry the detail brush from his hand at the end of the day.

After preliminary stripping of paper. Note that the pull out couch will be free of any bed bugs by the time the room is done.

Primed! Walls, you're ready for some Acadia White (yeah, it looks yellow).

Rock On.

So there was this little corner of granite sticking out in our backyard, and we decided to investigate (Reagan indulging her archaeological urges and Adam his macho urges). Maybe it was a nice block that could be used as a porch step? Maybe it was a nice centerpiece for a garden? Maybe is was a tombstone, indicating that we were about to relive Poltergeist? No, it was closer to a footing for the Brooklyn Bridge. The photo below shows only the proverbial "tip". The neighborhood kids suggested we call in a wrestler to help us take it out. Seriously, when asked to suggest someone strong enough to help us move a 2000 lb. rock, these kids came up with "pro wrestler." Our poor, poor, misled youth.

So what will become of us with this hulking thing in our yard? Perhaps it's full of stars.




We spent about 2 hours uncovering this thing. Now what?

Bring us up to date, please.

We weren't very quick to get this blog up and running, even though we had talked about it before we even bought the house. We're already in week 3 of homeownership, and we're exhausted. Let's start from the beginning.

We bought our yellow house on July 27. Directly after the closing, we went to the house and Adam immediately punched a hole in the wall. Not with his fist (we love our house), but in eagerness to open up the kitchen. Some before and after shots:





Our kitchen, as it is, looks like Home Depot puked in it. Well, it's not that bad, really, but it's not much to look at. We're going to change that right up thanks to the brilliance of inexpensive Ikea designs. Also, Adam braved the 50 years of accumulated mouse poop to bring down the dropped ceiling, and he revealed some lovely old wallpaper showing Colonial scenes on an olive green background. Nice.



Next but equally important is creating a livable bedroom. It hasn't quite been achieved yet, but it's now a very happy yellow color...excuse me, "Kansas Grain." We came to this conclusion after realizing that a rainbow of swatches would not be so attractive (see photos). Reagan has gotten a little carried away scraping and scraping and scraping the old paint, but she's managed to get somewhat close to being done. The process:


Bedroom before


Decisions decisions...

Kansas Grain it is! And Reagan's almost done with the trim.