Well Finally...

I asked Eli what I should call this blog, and he suggested "Well Finally." I didn't think it was catchy enough, but it definitely embodies the spirit of the project.


For those of you who aren't familiar with our house I'll give you the 30 second at-a-glance. We bought the house 6 years ago, it was in pretty awful condition, and the price reflected that. We did a few quick repairs (every joint in the plumbing was cracked and the floor in the upstairs bathroom was questionable enough that we didn't want to walk on it for fear of ending up in the kitchen) and have lived in it ever since. It has always been the plan to gut the interior and rebuild it from the basement up, so other than building a back porch we haven't done any improvements since then.

But the time has come! Well finally...I must admit that I'm pretty fed up with living in a house with leaky ceilings, holes in the wall and exposed wiring.

So what you will find here over the next four or so months is the complete renovation of our house. It's going to be very "this old house" with me as Bob Villa...I will roam around and ask insightful questions like "Are those moldy 2x4's the only thing that's been holding up the living room floor?" and Eli will be the Norm Abram-capable-carpenter figure "Yes Jessy, they are, but have no fear we'll put it back together with 2x12 joists and a fancy-schmancy beam thingy," except he won't say beam thingy, he'll say something technical and I will smile and nod like I know what he's talking about. I'm trying to encourage him to use a quaint New England accent, but so far have had no luck.

As a good omen for the project let me leave you with a couple of pictures. This is the sink that I look at every day, wash my vegetables and dishes in...it's pretty hideous isn't it? And this photo doesn't even show the counter top that it's set into which is yellow with (I'm not kidding) orange paisleys on it.

Wow...it looks even worse than it does in person...either that or I'm just used to it so I've stopped noticing...the other thing that you can't see in this photo is that the supports under the upper right corner have either rotted away or fallen off, so if you fill the sink with water and dishes it sags ominously, threatening to dump dirty dish water and pots and pans all over the kitchen floor.

Contrast that with this beauty! She comes from the Habitat for Humanity Restore, which is sort of like a thrift store for building supplies. It's deep, it's made out of cast iron, and it's enamel is unscratched and lovely....and it was a third of what they cost off the shelf at the Home Despot. I think I'm in love:

Of course it will be installed in the kitchen eventually...but it the fact that it's on the porch makes it convenient for pointing out the cracked window in the downstairs guest room (it's been broken since we moved in), the sagging porch and the cracked cement board siding....all of which will soon be in a dumpster!