My blue heaven...

We are porch people. The "new" house, as we are calling it, because at some point we realized that calling it the "old" house was just silly, has three porches. That's one porch for each bedroom, and one more than we have bathrooms. Okay, admittedly the third porch isn't really a porch, it's the flat roof outside our bedroom window, but we put in a sliding glass door so that we can use it like a porch.

When we were looking at siding colors I was distressed that all the "colors" available were actually beige. They had grey beige and green beige and brown beige, but the available colors were not really colors at all. So I'm made up for our boring grey siding by picking rather outrageous colors for the porch railings and doors. Hence the blue porch. I love my blue porch. The porch ceiling is blue as well, so now I'm having fantasies of painting gold stars on it.
Wow...it's amazing how housey something looks after you get a lick of paint on it. This is just the primer...there will be color on my walls! At least some of them. Actually there's color on my ceiling already (yes, it does appear to be beige, but it's not...because I would never paint something beige...it's, uhm...taupe. Yeah). I think our stairway turned out quite nicely, there is a funny blue triangle leaning against our bench (I also love our bench) which I could have moved before taking the picture...except that I didn't.
I have to slip in pictures of the baby of course. Walking and everything. I think he was walking around for approximately 3.4 seconds before he found something inappropriate to stick in his mouth, but one of the great things about getting this buttoned up is that we will have a house that is actually baby proofable to move into. No peeling paint, no splintery sills. Yippee.
Eli wanted to make sure that I talked about the basement stairway. This was the big bugaboo that slowed things down so dramatically. I could go into great detail about why we couldn't build it the way that we wanted to (flush against the wall) but suffice to say that we just couldn't, so it had to wind. Michigan stair code is quite specific about winders, and fitting it in and meeting the code was quite the pain in the butt, but now we have the grandest basement stairway you could imagine.
And here's a shot of the exterior. It looks a little "boxy" but there was no room in the budget for any exterior frills. Basically we chose quality of life (porches!) over style.

The home stretch! Here we come!

Just call me a slacker...

I could say something about how I'm really behind on updating the blog, except that everyone reading this has probably figured that out by now, so instead I'll just push right on to the part where I actually tell you all what's been going on!

Going through the photos that have just been uploaded to our flickr site, I realize that I don't have a good "outside" shot. So you'll just have to imagine for yourselves, the lovely siding (grey, it's the new beige) and the fancy shmancy porch railing. (if you click through to flickr you can check out a gratuitous amount of new baby pictures).

But the really exciting stuff has been going on inside:

Look! Insulation.No, not that kind of insulation, that was the "bad" kind. The kind you could still feel in your armpits and behind your ears after taking three showers.

I'm talking about the "good" kind of insulation.
And look! Drywall!

Freaky man. I have a bathtub, in a bathroom...with...walls. Whoa.

Long time no Blog...

We have had a busy winter here at ye olde house o' straw, but that doesn't mean that the house isn't getting worked on, oh no...in fact it looks like a house again.

Check it out, my new backdoor. A door with a weather seal so tight that you have to put a little grunt into it while pushing it open. And our siding. We picked the siding color long ago, when the house was still a house, before its brief stint as a hole in the ground. It seems like for weeks we were debating about different colors of beige...because that's the color that siding comes in. Sure you can get blue tinted beige, or green tinted beige...or as we picked grey-brown tinted beige...but really. You're fooling yourself if you think it's anything but beige.

This is an old picture...months old in fact. I have been meaning to update for at least that long. The house is almost entirely sided now. We ran out, so there is a tiny corner of the northside, and one gable end left to be covered in lovely grey-brown beige...okay I'll stop with the b-word, sorry.

A rather drunken picture of our porch. I gave the camera to Isis when we visited the jobsite last week, since it's a little hard for me to manage both the baby and the camera. Isis has artistic vision, and as a result it's often hard to tell which way is up in her pictures. Maybe it's the fact that she's closer to the ground, but everything in her shots has a monumental quality to it.
We have plumbing! We have an electrical service box. This weeks project was finishing the framing on the stairs, and as soon as that is done we will have the "mechanical" guys in to run the ducts...then wiring, finish plumbing, insulation, drywall, trim, paint...move in. Gosh it all fits in one sentence. How cool is that?

The week of pink houses.

If anyone besides me has been reading the comments (and I love comments by the way...) you'll know that our friend Ramsey has been putting up fan fold insulation on his house. By the way, three cheers for Ramsey who took time out from his busy schedule of remodeling and being a professional (ie one that gets paid) musician to come and work on our project. He didn't just come for the fun stuff either, here's the only picture I can find of him...bagging old nasty blown in fiberglass insulation.

This was one of the only jobs that I got to do (carefully respirated of course) before I became too pregnant to help out, so I know from first hand experience how much it sucks! But you have never had a better shower than the one you take after a day of dealing with that stuff.

But we are not dwelling on things that have passed! We are looking towards the future, and the future is rosy indeed...or at least pink.

Because pink is the color that fan fold stuff comes in. Yes yes, we are also getting ready for siding.

First though we must have windows, which will start to be installed tomorrow.

Plug it in baby...

Electricity, it's what makes the jobsite go round.

And while you are admiring our new electric meter, you can check out the lovely window wells. This is the side of the house where the new foundation wall went in, so as you can see everything is buried back in.

And the new mast, waiting to be hooked into the grid. (In response to Layne's comment about the number of masts on a ship, our one master is a sloop).

And this week is all about plumbing.

It's a bird, it's a plane...

It's a house!!
Or at least it's starting to look like one.

I was sort of into the idea of an open air second floor, sleeping under the stars, cool breezes...but it was pointed out to me that we live in Michigan, which tends towards drizzle in the summer and slush in the winter. So a roof we have, as well as a porch, and as of yesterday afternoon, a new electrical service!!

I was going to go and take pictures of our spanky new fuse box, but I spent this morning at home waiting for the washing machine repair man...apparently our old clunker wasn't up to three loads a day. It's back and better than ever though, and the repair man didn't even have to unload the wet diapers in order to fix it. What a pro.

Petoh is acting more and more like a person every day, so it might be possible for me to make it up to the wireless coffee shop more often...it's a goal anyway.

Downside up and Inside out....

There are always surprises when you are remodeling, nay rebuilding a house. Usually they aren't pleasant surprises. As you've no doubt noticed there isn't much of the "old" house that we feel worth saving, but one of the things that we were hoping to reuse was the foundation.

Surprise!! The north foundation wall just wasn't fixable, and even though we are well in to the second story, we had to go back to the bottom and replace it.

This is the wall that had the chimney on it. This is what the first story wall looked like behind the chimney:

You can see where the wood is rotted away? Well that water went right down in to the foundation as well. Plus this wall is only a few feet away from the neighbors house, and neither house has an adequate gutter system, so all that water just soaked into the ground. I didn't get to the site in time to take a before picture, but here's the trench and the big gaping hole waiting for the masons to come and wall it back up.

And here it is the next day after it's walled back up again:

Check out those swank glass block windows! In addition to the wall they squared up and enclosed the strange ledges around the outside walls.

If you have a good imagination you'll be able to see that the basement is actually going to be a very nice space, which is exciting since it used to be a scary dungeon full of mold and funk.

And another exciting development:

A truly historic moment, the last dumpster being hauled away!

We keep expecting a phone call to say that our trusses are here, but so far no word. We ordered them a couple of weeks ago, so they are overdue.