Fun with Ikea

I have gotten some comments about the lack of updates, so I'll try to get back on track here. 

We returned Sunday night from Thanksgiving with Steve's family in Southern California. So we ended up spending most of Monday evening getting caught up on the usual household drudgery... grocery shopping and the like. We did want to accomplish something around the house, however, so we assembled our latest Ikea acquisitions.

First, Steve installed the rail and hooks he picked out to hang cooking implements above the stove. 

Then, work began on a small dresser I selected to house my jewelry and some of my clothes. I was impressed by the number of small parts. While Steve started the assembly, I laid out and organized the pieces. I resisted the urge to straighten and face them all... although I did start to do so before I realized the silliness of such an endeavor, given that Steve was rapidly using the parts in the building process. 

That's all I've got for now. I took a "mental health day" and stayed home from work today. I spent the day organizing and continuing the endless unpacking process. I'm really loving our little house, and it's coming along quite nicely.

When Mom & Dad come to play...

... walls come apart.

My parents offered to drive up and help us work on the house. I gratefully accepted and we accomplished a great deal over the three full days they were here.

We (that's the royal we... meaning my dad with help from Steve) painted the kitchen green. I absolutely love the color and think it turned out amazing (in person, the green is much richer and not as bright as it appears in these pictures taken with flash). My mom did a lot of trim work and paint stripping.

These pictures of Steve admiring his work amused me (note our awesome new light fixture in the center of the room):

Then I asked for some consultation on a door that was sticking. And we found this:

Close up:

If you know what's wrong with this picture, you would probably make a better handyman than whoever did this. To be perfectly clear, this was not our contractor's work. It was done by the previous owner.

The header in the picture above has two big problems. One, it wasn't supported by anything; it's full weight was just resting on the door since the jack stud was cut too short. Two, the header wasn't doing it's job because there was no blocking between it and the structure above. So not only was the header pressing down on the door and throwing it all wonky (technical term) it wasn't doing anything to support the weight of the roof... which is the kinda the point of big chunks of lumber like that. Definitely needed to be fixed. And to top it off there was an improperly done electrical connection above the door as well (not our electrician's work). Which meant, of course, taking the door and surrounding frame apart.

I really like this series of pictures of my dad and Steve working on the door, so I'm going to post several. It ended up being a pretty involved endeavor taking basically an entire day. Steve even got to crawl around under the house to install some missing support structure (hence his coveralls). A fun time was had by all.

My parents also helped us repair much less serious problems on two other doors, put up curtains and run errands to Home Depot and Ikea. I wasn't feeling very good and was pretty stressed, and thus was pretty useless, but they did an amazing job and we were fortunate to have the help. Hopefully the next time they come up we'll spend less time on construction and more time on the fun decorating-type projects.

In Between Yawns

I've been exhausted lately. In the six years I've been at my job, I've never had an audit season like this one. Usually fall is pretty calm for me. We have around a dozen audit clients, but they get their information ready at different paces, giving a natural spacing between gigs... usually. This year, everybody got their stuff done at once. In just one hour this morning, I had three clients drop their files off to begin the work. And I already had eight audits open.

Anyway, point is, I've actually been working like a normal person. Then I come home and work on projects around the house and end up going to bed later than I intend... then I'm tired when I get up in the morning and the whole thing snowballs. Let me be clear: this is not a complaint. It's an excuse. The last thing I've felt like doing is blogging about the house. But here we are.

So, on to some recent pictures of what's going on around here...

There are many layers of paint slathered on our walls and trim. In this picture, you can see my attempt to strip paint from this redwood door frame. Saying it's slow going is a serious understatement, but I don't want paint stripper fumes in the house, so I continue to chip away with a putty knife and some marginally effective non-toxic paint stripper.

We finished painting the bathroom. Other than a few small touch-up projects, it's done.

We finished painting our salvaged kitchen cabinet, placed a countertop on it and attached new hardware. The countertop has a bit of overhang, but as this setup is not meant to be permanent and the old cabinet is unusually shallow, we didn't want to cut the countertop to size. We used an adjustable table/desk leg from Ikea at the end and put our microwave underneath. I think it looks pretty good anyway.

We really like our new kitchen island. We have chairs we found for a great price in Ikea's as-is for it in our storage unit... hopefully I'll get a chance to fish them out soon.

Another view of the kitchen, showing the rehabbed cabinet, island, pantry and fridge in the background.

Moved In

The camera disappeared at some point during our move, so I don't have any pictures with this update. Hopefully I will unearth it soon. For now, a text-only update on the house project.

Moving and Construction Wrap-Up
Steve's oldest brother Ed and Ed's wife Tiffany drove down from Sacramento last Saturday night to help us move. All day Sunday, they worked tirelessly to move all of our furniture and many heavy boxes to our new house. We really couldn't have done it without them. Some finish work was still going on around the house, so we basically stacked everything up in the center of our rooms. Electrical wrapped up on Friday, so we were able to start making things feel a little more like home Friday night. We have the computer and entertainment center set up, the kitchen is in working order and the bathroom (complete with absolutely awesome heated tile floor) is done.

This Weekend
Steve and I picked up parts for our closet organizer today (to be installed tomorrow). We finished sanding the kitchen cabinet we're salvaging and put the first coat of beautiful black paint on it. It looks so much better already. We'll do another coat tomorrow, put the hardware on and attach the countertop. We would have gotten farther in our to-do list today, but I was completely exhausted. I fell asleep on the couch for a couple hours this afternoon. But as far as I'm concerned, there's no hurry on these things. It's our house now... there is no deadline.

Living Downtown
Santa Cruz goes a little crazy on Halloween. Something like 15,000 people gather downtown. It's basically a street party... informal parades, elaborate costumes, public drunkenness. Steve and I decided to go out to an early dinner and then do a lap around the major downtown street to see the costumes. It was so nice to not have to worry about where to park and then feel like we had to stay out later than we'd like to make the trek downtown "worth it." We could just wander a little, then walk the few blocks home. Quite an enjoyable little outing.

Last night, we wandered over to our local ISP, who was hosting a few gourmet food trucks during Santa Cruz's First Friday art celebration. Traffic was a mess and parking nonexistent, but Steve and I just walked through the chaos and had a delicious meal.

Preliminary verdict: living downtown is pretty great. I expect we'll have our issues with the local transients and drunks in the future, but as one of our neighbors put it, living downtown is "99% awesome and 1% scary." Probably a worthwhile tradeoff. And hopefully with us fixing up our house, we'll be able to improve the vibe on our little street. Another neighbor says we've already helped tremendously in that regard.