post-thanksgiving updates

sorry it's been so long since an update. but we surely have been busy around here.
here are some recent pics.
our grassy back yard: (planted rye seed which you can see, but the bermuda is actually starting to come through too!)

sean's man room: (still in progress)

ps - want a little rat update? the rats had made a nest above this back door. so the jamb was filled with rat shit, grass, plastic bags and bottle caps. i have no idea what these rats do with bottle caps, but it proves that the people that lived here before us were boozers.

our wallpapered dining room:

it's fun to look at the way this room looked before. see here: http://dreamhousephotos.blogspot.com/2011/08/new-purpose-for-this-blog.html

shepard's pie by the fire

more housework to come this weekend.

hours of work and some back pain later ...

i spent all weekend raking leaves and piling rocks to plant rye grass seed.... here are some photos of the corner i did the weekend before last!

isn't it dreamy? i raked the rest of the yard on saturday and planted grass seed over the rest of it. i think it'll be well worth the hours of back pain that i endured that night. i mixed the grass seed with bermuda seed, because the rye grass will die once it gets hot again. and the hope is that the bermuda will come in by then. this came as a tip from a lady that we bought something from craigslist off of. she had done this same thing and i fell in love with it.

here's some photos as it was in progress:

for some reason on sunday i woke up and decided that hauling rocks (our back yard has a lot of rocks in it) to the front yard was a good idea. here's the end result (as well as a few more hours of back pain - but nothing that a cocktail in the rocking chair didn't fix).

i don't know if you can see. but there's rocks in between the plants now. yep, that took about four hours of collecting and hauling.

you can also see the new columns on the front porch. they are all going to be framed off like the one in the bottom photo to the right, except the framing will be on the top too - and then they'll be painted white.

sean also rehung the front door and reframed it (it has been chiseled a lot so the door could fit when the house moved). see how the top of the door frame sticks out a little farther on each side? i love it, kind of gives it a country look.

and here are some photos of the progress we're making in the living room:

it's still pretty bare, but we're coming along I think.

I'm off to san francisco tomorrow so i won't be doing anymore house work for a week or so. but we'll see what sean comes up with! and maybe by the time i come back we'll have a whole backyard of grass!

help! wallpaper picking!

okay so we need help picking the wallpaper for the dining room. here are a couple of views of the dining room as it is right now

this is a picture of the two walls that we're going to wallpaper. the one to the right in the top photo is going to be painted the same color as the living room. or that's the plan anyways.

ps - i want to brag about something we've done - so here's a photo of the shelves in the living room as they are right now

cute, right? (well, except for that beam ... don't worry - we have plans)

so back to the wallpaper... (i have to be honest, i looked at them for so long earlier that they all were ugly and i was looking at stencils instead ... so help!)

here's ones we're looking at

which one do you like? or if you hate them all, just tell me they're terrible!

rodent war update

i forgot to mention in the last post that it rained both in and outside of our house. our roof needs some work. the house has an old cedar shake roof, and then somewhere along the way someone covered it with composite shingles. (and did kind of a crappy job). so we had a couple of buckets filling in the attic and around the house. which brings me to an update on the rodent war. because yes, with rain comes rats.

humans: killed a few more rats. and sean sealed up a lot of the spots where he thought rats were coming in (we could see pathways through the new insulation - which i will also get to later).

rodents: i went into the attic at one point to help sean with something. this area is off limits for me, but for some reason i was feeling adventurous. the first thing i see - just guess. wait, you'll never guess because it's so disgusting. a huge blood stain on the attic floor. i asked sean what it was and he just chuckled and said 'nothing' (im telling you, really discreet). ugh... the second half of this is not for those of you with a sensitive stomach. sean started cleaning up some of the old insulation in the attic. this was a job that we paid some workers to do, and instead of removing the old insulation, they just sprayed new stuff on top of it. when i saw this i went berzerk. (this i will also get to later). so, sean was sweeping some of it up and was planning on bagging it up. but ... and here's where i get to the gross stuff. (im having a hard time even typing it). the old insulation has so much old rat poop and pee in it that when sean stirred it up, it made our house smell like piss.  ugh. there i said it.

tonight i turned into get-things-done-and-stop-taking-shit doodie. one of the carpenters called me and was asking about getting paid. and then he was making jokes about one of the other guys. i went nuts on him - i had had enough. i think part of it was my adrenaline coming off of yoga, and part of it was me being so grossed out by the rat piss smell in our house. i told him that he isn't getting paid until he does all of the work that we're paying him to do - which includes fixing some of his dumb ass mistakes, and removing all of the insulation in the attic and replacing it with new stuff. at first sean thought i was being a bitch. but then as i kept talking, i won him over. im pretty sure if we went to court over this, we would win. not only did they not do all of the work, but they also installed these huge beams in our living room and didn't even ask first. and then took like a month to finish work that they said would take 2-3 days. and they weren't even here very much.

watch out everyone! here comes pissed-off doot!

the good news is that im slowly getting over my fear of these rat assholes. i can now walk in the laundry room without banging the door first. this is an accomplishment.

a rainy weekend's accomplishments

it rained here finally. i kind of had forgotten that it actually rained, like it was some far off place you could only dream about but not visit. so we stayed home and worked on the house. well ... i worked on the house. sean watched football and worked on the house during commercials (shhh don't tell him i said that. he thinks i didn't notice). i do have to give him credit though - he did a job i would never do (ill get to that later though).

here are a few photos of my accomplishments

yep. we still have that hideous beam.

it was a lot harder than just painting because over the years the house had moved and the walls had cracked. and then some lazy person did a terrible job patching the cracks. so i sanded them down, re-patched the cracks, sanded again, and then sprayed with this can of stuff that adds texture to surfaces so the patched areas would blend in with the rest of the walls.

after about 15 hours of work, i finally finished. and then i treated myself with these little cuties

$2.95 each from anthropolgie. i thought it was a score considering the non-sale knobs were around $10+ each.

all in all, i would say a good weekend.

my handyman, mr. atwater

this whole process has made me realize how impatient i am. in the last couple of days, i have come up with four projects for sean for this weekend (things that i am unable or unwilling to do). he just looks at me like im crazy and keeps telling me that things take time. last weekend he rebuilt the porch columns - because if you remember, they looked like this. now they look like this:

next step: wrap them, and then guide the plants to grow up them.
project for today: start prepping the living room to paint it, and get sean on a project before the gator football game starts at 2:30 and productivity officially ends. my goal for him: seal some of the holes in the attic that critters make their way into our home through.

speaking of rodents - i think it's time for an update on the rodent war.
we haven't killed any new rats in about a week, though sean did ask me this morning if i smelled something funny (aka a dead animal) in our room. ugh. and yesterday morning i was sitting at the desk and above me i heard something running around and making lots of squeaks. after about 30 minutes of researching possum sounds on the internet, i convinced myself that a rat couldn't be that loud. oh, and on thursday in the middle of my bikram (hot and very sweaty) yoga class i found a rat turd on my towel. and then spent the next 30 minutes trying to decide if i should flick it off or leave it on my towel. ill let you guess what i decided.

tally: rodents are still winning.

phase one: complete

well the workers finished last week, and we have been enjoying our home. it's crazy how much we appreciate our home after living in chaos for what seemed like eternity.

after a couple of mishaps (which included drywalling our cat into the wall and covering three light switches), the guys are finally done. here are some photos of how our house is currently looking:

welcome to our home, E.T. lives here

for the majority of this week we were living in a scene from E.T. 

it was pretty terrible. the highlight of it all was the drywalls guys drywalling our new kitty in the wall. i came home for lunch one day to find the bedroom door (where i had locked the dogs and kitty), and the back door open. i didn't have time to find the kitty, so i just left and hoped that she would come out. in the back den there was a spot in the wall where the kitty liked to jump in and hide. by the time i came home at the end of the day the guys had drywalled over the spot where the kitty liked to hide and there was no kitty. after a (now hilarious) conversation with the guys (they don't speak english, so it involved a lot of hand gestures), they told me that the cat had jumped in the wall and that they hadn't seen her since. i then insisted that they take the drywall off and get the cat out. 12 hours later the kitty (now named lady olivia after olivia newton john from grease because she ends up being a bad ass at the end) came out of the hole no doubt traumatized. 

here are some pictures of the progress:

well that's all done, and we had a cleaning party thursday night. it feels so much better to have our home back. now on to the real work!

update on the rodent war

just a quick update. mostly because im grumpy and want to share my misfortunes.

i had a bag of bird seed in the outside laundry room and went in yesterday morning to find it open and a bunch of rat ('could be squirrel' - sean keeps saying) poop all around the bag. and i heard something rumbling around. so after hightailing it out of there, sean set a few rat traps. yesterday he came home and found a few that had been trapped. he was trying so hard to not tell me that he actually caught any, but i finally got it out of him. why i insisted on knowing the truth, i have no idea. so, with a few (im going to keep in vague for your benefit) dead rats, i have decided that we should keep a tally on this war.

here's where we are so far:

humans: killed a few rats, reset rat traps, going to get a free kitty off of craigslist tomorrow (name suggestions, anyone?)

rats: ate bird food and made it so i am scared to go into the laundry room
denied me a restful night of sleep for now 3 nights
made it so i can't have a chicken coop because rats like chickens
and caused me to scream out loud four times last night because i thought i saw a rat (including in my full bath), which then led to sean being on edge

the rats are still winning. but just you wait. by the end of this, im going to be spearing those assholes with my own hands.

piers and beams and hedges, oh my!

hello everyone! our major house repairs have been on hold because it turns out (to our surprise) our ceilings look like this:

pretty huh? our ceilings were really sagging, which we thought was due to the movement in the house and the old drywall. our solution was to replace it. sounds easy, right? house lesson #1: nothing is ever easy. the guys came to start the drywall work, and they found this below. they were kind of stumped on what to do. it wasn't just the drywall that was sagging, but the wood below too. a previous owner removed a wall at some point that was a major support for the living room ceiling. they just plain took it out. which leads to house lesson #2: don't remove a wall without asking a professional first.

to solve our sagging ceiling problem, our foundation guy, the drywall guy and his carpenter decided to pour some more piers (things that support the house from a couple of feet in the ground) and then build supports from there, eventually going up through the walls and to a beam that would go through the middle of the living room. i was imagining something beautiful like this:

but to our surprise we came home and found this

hideous, right? the one in the bedroom isn't so bad. but definitely not dreamy.

we have been standing around in the living room a lot looking at the big hunk of 14" wood that is hanging (off-centered) in our living room. sean last night thought of an idea - he is planning on framing out the piece of wood, and then boxing it in with nice wood. so we will potentially have a very large (but rustic) piece of wood going through our living room. and im also trying to talk our man douglas into putting one more beam through the dining room so it won't look so off - and because our dining room is still sagging (so it will serve a structural purpose as well).

while all of this has been going on i one day decided to take my frustration out on our hedges. they previously looked like this if you remember:

they were all thin and overgrown. so after lots of research, and asking sean a million times if i should do what the experts say, i did this

yep, i cut them down to 1'. they're so so sad now. in an attempt to make our porch not look so naked, i planted some flowering bushes in between where the hedges used to be, and some vines that will hopefully grow up our columns (and texas lavender and oregano). ps - like the column that is just a couple of 2x4s? that one kept falling down, and eventually just rolled itself down the hill and into the garbage. and after a couple of funny looks from the contractor, he decided to replace it temporarily himself. ha!

the most horrible, awful

im going to keep this brief for those of you that have sensitive stomachs ... the rats that previously ran this house had established our oven as their master bedroom. which i discovered after i tried to broil something. ugh, just thinking about it makes my stomach turn. after bribing sean to clean it out for me, and doing some rat poop shoveling myself, i went to buy a new oven on sunday. it's nothing glorious, but i absolutely adore it. it's most important quality: it's never had rats living in it. hooray!

nevermind, it is glorious - look how it glows!

the rest of the weekend was spent doing things that aren't too glamorous: hooking up a water heater and building a room for it, hooking up the washer and dryer, and cutting down a tree. speaking of, anyone have any suggests on how to cut the rest of this tree down? it's leaning pretty far over the house, and sean's kind of stuck on how to not have it go through our roof and/or windows.

the contractors are arriving this morning to start their work. hopefully by this time on friday, our house will no longer be crooked and have a kind of large crack running through the middle. ha!

here's a glimpse of what the middle of our floor looks like now. i don't know if you can tell, but it's pretty wonky. cheers to the paid workmen!

our first two nights

well, we finally moved in! and i have spent the last two nights having nightmares about rats marching around the house. in my dreams, the rats are wearing capes and crowns. when we first moved in, there was rat poop in the kitchen, and we heard several squeaks that sean keeps telling me weren't rats. yeah right. michael is coming over tonight to help us strategize on how to win this war.

we have been having such a hard time sleeping because our a/c doesn't work. to-do list item #1: get a/c working so we can survive this 110 degree heat! the dogs were even stir crazy last night before they plopped down right in front of the fan. they're no idiots!

 despite the rats and the no a/c, we are loving our new home. cheers to no longer having roommates!

our new home

so this blog started out as a space for me to collect pictures of houses that i loved in the hopes that some day sean and i would build our own home. the plan has somewhat changed as it always does. we just recently purchased our first home together. it has already been quite the fiasco, so im not expecting anything less when we move in. the house needs a lot of work, which is what we wanted. in all the weeks of waiting for our house, i decided that i wanted to keep a blog of all the work that we do on the house. so here it goes ... starting with pictures as it is right now.

wish us luck!