Homemade Touches for our Home

Our days are action-filled with a five- and two-year-old, and now seven-year-old furry member of the family. As a result, we rarely have time for house projects. We have been very fortunate to continue to add touches to our home, during more recent years with a number of beautiful quilts my mom has made for us.

The newest addition is a gorgeous Christmas quilt my mom gave us this past Thanksgiving. Brady, now allowed on the couch due to aging hip and joint issues, is happy to pose with it.

The Basement

After a couple years break from updating our house blog, we have a lot to share! This past January 2016, we finally started remodeling the basement, which was something we had planned to do at some point down the road when we bought the house in 2012.

To start this process, several years ago, Loren and I gathered up sledgehammers and knocked out the old makeshift walls that held the coal in the coal room that fed the initial boilers in the 1920s. We also hired out someone to rip up and replace the concrete floor. The floor was only a couple inches thick at best, was gravelly and broken, and had ground water occasionally bubbling up through it. At that point, winter air was billowing in the windows and we sealed them up with plastic until we also replaced them a few years back.

We also had a structural engineer come out a couple different times, both during our negotiations when we purchased our home and later to confirm we had no active movement in our walls. I learned much more then about lateral earth force and other related topics than I hope to ever need.

Below are photos that track the progression of our family room in the basement.

While our contractor team framed the walls, put up drywall, installed the ceiling, and coordinated electrical and plumbing work, work was far from complete when they wrapped up in April. Since then, Loren and I (with Loren taking on the major lead role) have installed the engineered hardwood floor, painted the walls, and put in trim work, among other many other things.

Our latest step, started over this Christmas vacation, is installing the brick veneer wall in the family room. We considered several types of reclaimed brick from different geographic areas and finally decided on brick from New England. The clay content and other local factors give it distinctive coloration, compared to, for example, the reclaimed brick we were also thinking about from the Baltimore area.

Twelve hundred pounds of cut brick pieces arrived a couple weeks ago and are now partially up, attached to heavy sheet metal fixtures Loren has hung on our wall.

We have been very fortunate to have so many family and friends help watch Jack while we do some things that our little helper shouldn't be helping with...we also make use of naps and bedtimes. Yesterday Jack and Brady were able to occupy themselves playing with the stud finder and watching Bob the Builder while Loren and I installed brick. We may have our own future little builder on our hands!

The Nursery

It's been a year since I've posted on our house blog, and a lot has happened since 2013! While we spent our first summer moving into our home and the following year building the patio ourselves, we devoted the most recent summer months to landscaping efforts, including putting in two gorgeous Japanese Maples, growing our vegetable garden, and planting many perennials, highlighted by some annuals for pops of color. 

Loren and I enjoy visiting the farmer's market together every Saturday--even now with the chilly morning temps and colorful veggies replaced by apple cider and wreaths of evergreen--and I love getting my hands dirty. This past year I learned about clematis, phlox, asters, delphinium, dianthus, illumination begonias, and many more beautiful living things...

Over the summer we also began work on our nursery, formerly one of our guest bedrooms. Now, as we're (still) awaiting the little guy's arrival any day now, the nursery is ready for this new family member to be here. 

Using a Noah's Ark theme, we wanted to stay true to the Arts and Crafts style of our home, including the color scheme and incorporating Craftsman-style touches here and there. 

We've incorporated a number of local Motawi tiles of animals, in addition to a baby quilt my mom made--her first quilt!--pictured above. I also created an appliqué/quilted Noah's Ark wall hanging to tie things together.

Brady, usually not allowed upstairs, has been allowed to hang out with us there a bit more often as we've been putting things together in the baby's room. He's made himself right at home.

We're fortunate, in our house this age, to have full closets in every bedroom. We still haven't replaced the shelving in this closet from when we put in the high velocity air system a couple years ago--which has created the perfect space for the friendly animal decorations from our shower that our good friends Jessie, Z, Teryn, and Loren's sister Julie, hosted for us last month. 

Another very close friend, Jose, hand-drew the image for the Noah's Ark invitations, which is framed below. 

 We've had a few major house projects since last summer when I last posted on our blog. In August, Loren and I spent a weekend with a couple of sledge hammers, axe, and reciprocating saw to tear down the walls in our unfinished basement. Amid grime, dead rodents, and rotting wood, we managed to clear things away so the basement was ready for the contractors to rip out the old concrete floor. Within a week, the crumbly old floor came out and the new, smooth concrete floor was poured.

More recently we finally had a chimney insert put in. One of the criteria when we were house searching is that we wanted a wood burning fireplace. Last fall, however, the afternoon after having our first cord of firewood delivered so we could begin winter fires, we also had the chimney cleaned and inspected--and learned then it was unsafe to use until we could have a liner put in.

Due to the size of and shape of the blocks and chimney itself, we weren't able to put in an 8-inch liner, but installing a 6-inch liner alone would have presented an issue with the way our chimney drew air. As a result, our only option was to put in an insert (essentially a wood burning stove fit inside our fireplace with blower to maximize heat output). Because our chimney is in the center of our house, rather than the outside, we expect it to be helpful in keeping the heating bill down. We've both really enjoyed having our fires again through these cold, wintery nights.

Brady is thoroughly pleased with the new "chew toys" readily available from the log pile we keep beside the fireplace, and I am constantly amazed by his ability to consume wood. Our next purchase may be a large wood basket with a lid.

Cozy fires have been a great addition to our holiday cheer, and we've enjoyed decorating for Christmas!

July 2013

This summer we often have a smiley face in the center window...

The Patio is Finished

And the patio is complete!

Last weekend...after a month-and-a-half, nearly 10 tons of paver bricks were in place on top of 9 tons of compacted gravel for structure, in addition to a couple tons of sand to help with leveling. Our friend Brian came to help the day we rented the wet saw to cut bricks for the edges of the patio. 

The project came to a dramatic and climactic culmination as a steady rain began to fall while we spread the polymeric (water-activated) sand, used to fill paces between paver bricks- the final step. In a frenzy we swept wet sand in the rain until we were soaked through...and the patio was finished, whether we were ready or not!

Brady is a happy boy to have the full run of his yard again, and we've been focusing efforts now on building brick walls for the raised beds.

This weekend, we hosted an outside lunch and officially broke in the new patio. Jose and Tim helped Loren and me dig the hole for our (very heavy) ornamental cherry tree for the back raised bed, before managing to roll it into the hole.

The Patio...Part II

Back in June, before the gravel went down, we dug, dug, and dug...then laid down landscape fabric and laid an electrical conduit under the patio, for when we run electricity out to the garage.  Loren's sister, Julie, was an all-start patio builder!

For awhile, we were laying the first layers of gravel for the patio, then compacting it with the 200  pound compactor we rented.

Then...we started laying paver bricks...

...while Brady supervised...

Laying gravel involved several sweaty, dirt-filled weekends. More photos to come soon of the now completed patio!