What Have We Done!?! (What we have done)

Home renovation has a lot in common with pottery or glassblowing or any number of skills where the creation of interconnected parts is core to the final product. Often times you find yourself needing to clamp on a new piece of wood or screw in a new support bracket that in no way will be part of the final product, but is vital in the moment to ensure that a physical structure has the integrity to last long enough to reach finalization.  That brings me to drywall.  We've been putting a lot of holes in walls. *** For those of you that watch the videos, you know that we employed a guy named Barry (not to be confused with the man named Kevin) to do some emergency electrical work at the time of move-in to remediate some dangerous choices the previous owner had made including 1) Not having GFCI breakers tied to the kitchen (this allows electrical outlets in the kitchen to function safely even though it's a wet zone) and 2) safely replace an instance where two live wires were twiste...

There's been so (clap emoji) much (clap emoji)  happening (clap emoji) with the house over the last 3 weeks that I haven't even had time for a post so here's a post about what happened just this afternoon. When we moved in January all our rugs got rolled up and taped for travel (as is tradition) and since the new place has carpeting (kinda sorta, nothing to brag about) we have been happy to have the rugs standing in the front coat closet as we tried to discern some sort of design layout for all this chaos. We're on the verge of turning one of the secondary bedrooms (which has been a box storage/tool room) into more of an office space for Brie to use but it's one of the few rooms without carpet, just some 60 year old asbestos vinyl flooring, so the rugs now seemingly have a purpose. HOWEVER These rugs all spent 4 years in a 700ft basement apartment with 1+ dogs and all but one of them came from Knoxville and a cat/dog situation. These rugs have earned their combined ...

The primary bathroom has/had a bizarre oversized, single-occupant shower that was clearly a MacGyvered-together personal project from the former owner. One of the tells that this was a stroke of genius from the Ghost of Home Owners Past is that water had clearly worked its way into the wall shared with the primary bedroom and there was water damage and mold along the baseboard. Further driving concern was that after about a week in the house Brie and I noticed a pronounced sickly sweet smell while in their (we had already decided to not use the obviously borked shower, but...everybody poops).  Bull by the horns we bought a pry bar and used the long weekend to our benefit. We found: A plastic shell glued to the pre-existing tiling. The shell overlapped awkwardly and odd gapping had been stuffed with wooden shims and aluminum foil and then caulked over to death. Some kind of open hole in the wall that I guess might have been a previous shower head, but that doesn't track. Whatever it...

 I bought editing software to create art for you all! Please enjoy this tour of our property and the weird creepy room the previous owner made.  Worth noting that I recorded this a couple of weeks ago and since then we've had major snow and rain storms that did end up overwhelming the yard. Regrading part of the yard, burying some gutters, and digging the swale deeper are all on the menu going forward. S.

 Part of the over-arching design goal for the house is going to be embracing an eclectic , warm feeling without officially bridging too far into maximalism . To that end we're toying around with some comfortable, but slightly off beat flooring options. Cork floors tend to retain more heat than other engineered flooring, offer natural patterns, and are typically half the price of other tongue and groove engineered wood floors, and are much more eco-friendly. What you give up is a level of durability, but that's fine by us.  Brie ordered in some samples and we've highlighted 3 of that batch that we could see going with. Note that this is about styles and each square would have their individual markings, but in the style of the sample.  S.

 Today is moving day, though there isn’t really a single moving day, it’s more like a moving month capped off by a military style mobilization. That’s partly why I hadn't posted this week, but a reader by the name of *reads notes*  'Carol Ann Coyle' somehow got a hold of my cell number and demanded more content. Oh well, the life of an internet celebrity is grim at times. While I finish editing the next video (yes, real movie magic) here are a couple of photos from today to tide you over.  The apartment was a welcome change from Knoxville and house debt and it allowed us to live in a diverse community close to the city. It provided a private back yard to help us help Walt become a confident adult dog and it was a bunker to outlast 2 years worth of pandemic. It's over, we did our 3.5 years. Time for something different. S.

I'm a pretty firm believer in process blogs/journals. They were a major part of my A to Z when I was directing and anyone unlucky enough to be trapped with me while I'm stuck in 'problem solving mode' has seen me go into a spoken word cloud of repetitive step-by-step recitations and verbal flowchart iterations.  Long/short: I find it cathartic to be able to see the incremental progress of a project that lives larger than the human brain can imagine all at once. Humans are notoriously poor judges of Large Numbers and equally poor at estimating unfamiliar concepts (Not me of course, I'm amazing) and Brie and I are standing on the edge of a very large number of very hard to estimate concepts as we try our hand at domestic alchemy. A house shall cease to be one house and then be a different house, but not all at once. It'll be the Ship of Theseus by way of Bauhaus bathroom tile and mid-century/eclectic Hygge. We also are very aware that people like to follow renovat...