Welcome to the Jungle!

I enjoy working in my yard and there is so much to do! My interests in horticulture derive from growing up in a family of gardeners. There was a vegetable garden each year and a yard filled with all kinds of flowers such as rhodys, hydrangea, tulips, daffodils, petunias, roses, and fuchsias at my parents house. My Grandpa Larson grafted his own apple trees and had a greenhouse on his property where we grew many hothouse tomatoes when I was a kid. At an early age I became all too familiar with a broom and a rake as well as trips to Watson's greenhouse.
When Darrick and I moved into 1214, the yard was an overgrown mess. I'm not exaggerating. The neighbors tell us that the original owners had a son who was an amazing gardener and our yard used to look like a park. But with no upkeep in over a year, a jungle emerged.

This was one of the first pictures I took of the back yard, showing the overgrown laurel. It was over 25 ft tall and had grown past our neighbors two story garage! The branches were so thick that my bow saw and pruners weren't cutting it and I had to invest in a chainsaw.

The front yard was pretty overgrown as well. Darrick cut down 4 trees and multiple bushes. The sun was able to shine into our yard and through our kitchen window!

This was the 25 x 10 ft pile that grew from the laurel and the front yard waste. This got chipped up and spread in the front yard. I plan to lay sod in the front yard this up coming spring until we make plans for a garage in the next few years.

Here are a few pictures of what the front and back yard look like now.










The Fall and Winter are a great time to tidy up the yard and prepare for the Spring. I can't wait to see what pops up then!

House Guest

We have our first extended-stay guest in our house. Say hello to Rolen Delroy, Lucy's new boyfriend/BFF. He belongs to Jamie, one of Sarah's friends. Jamie is down in California for the week so Rolen is staying with us. For those of you not up to speed with your dog breeds, he's a Pug. He and Lucy have spent the past couple days chasing each other around the house, wrestling and fighting for the rights to the red rubber ball they can't seem to get enough of. When he's not trying to steal the red ball from Lucy, he is knocking Sarah and I out with his vicious farts.

Oh, and since Lucy pukes when she gets really riled up, she has been puking a lot when they play. But it's okay, because Rolen immediately cleans up the mess by eating it. And as you can expect when you have a boy dog with a girl dog, Rolen keeps trying to have his way with Lucy. However, unfortunately for Rolen, he isn't a particularly skilled lover and doesn't appear to be too well-versed in the ways of romance. Sorry buddy, humping Lucy's ribcage at a 90-degree angle to her isn't going to get you very far.

Watching their shenanigans kinda makes me want to get a second dog...

The Plan

The remodel begins.

I wasted no time starting the remodel once we got the keys to the house. Once the last box hit the floor, I was upstairs planning my attack.

As you probably noticed when looking at the pictures in the last post, the three bedrooms are not particularly large and there isn't really a room you could call the "master" bedroom. On top of that, there isn't a whole lot of storage since the closets are pretty small, and well, that just isn't acceptable since Sarah and I have so much clothing. So, we are going to do a little rearranging of the floor plan.

As a review, here is the current lay out of the second floor:


Three bedrooms just don't fit well in this part of the house, so we're going to turn three rooms into two. Since we'll be adding two rooms on the first floor when we remodel down there, we'll end up with 4 bedrooms total after all is said and done.

Here is what the new layout will be for the second floor:


We'll be taking the wall out between the two rooms on the north side of the house. Then, we'll be moving the door from the third bedroom a few feet further down the wall so we can move the entrance to the master suite to make it a little larger. We'll also be removing the linen closet from the bathroom and adding a pocket door to that wall that will lead directly into the walk-in closet for the master suite. Yeah that's right, master SUITE. Oh yeeeah.

Here are a few pictures of the initial demo for the remodel.

Come Inside! (continued)

Welcome to part deux of the introduction to our house. In our last installment, we ended with an unexpected cliffhanger as we made our way up the stairs to the second floor. What's the second floor look like? Why are they remodeling it? Is it bigger than the first floor? Is there even a second floor? Why am I asking so many questions?

I'll start the tour of the second floor by posting another one of my impressive architectural renderings to give you an idea of the floorplan:


I'll start in the kitchen and work my way to the back of the house.

This is the kitchen (say hi Sarah!):


Just like the rest of the house, it's ugly and outdated. But it's pretty big, is laid out well, has decent storage and once we gave it a good cleaning it is actually quite usable. The big empty part of the wall next to the refrigerator will be getting partially removed and we will be putting a breakfast bar there to open things up a bit. The appliances are only about three years old and are pretty nice (except the microwave... who buys all new applicances but skips the microwave!?), so those will probably stay when we get around to remodeling the kitchen. However, the kitchen remodel is last on our list for upstairs, so that probably won't be until after the wedding.

Next to the kitchen is a good sized dining area that leads into the living room. The wall on the right side of the picture is the wall that is getting partially removed for the breakfast bar.


The living room is a pretty good size as well, and will lend itself well to entertaining once we get some carpet that isn't blue-ish/brown-ish gray (or maybe we should entertain everyone BEFORE we put new flooring in since we don't care if this carpet gets ruined...).



And now we head down the hall to the bedrooms.


And the view from the other end of the hall (say hi Lucy!):


The first bedroom is pretty small, and would probably make a better office than a bedroom. This will probably be a guest room for Bruce and Juliet (Sarah's nephew and soon-to-be niece) when they come to stay with Auntie Sarah and Uncle D.



Across from the first bedroom is the upstairs bathroom. Continuing our theme of "usable, but ugly and outdated", this bathroom is covered with blue tiles from floor to ceiling. This bathroom is second on the list of things to be remodeled after we finish the bedrooms and the flooring (more on this later). Check out the puffy toilet seat!


The second room (upper left corner of my amazing drawing above) is a decent size, but it's still not really all that large. At least the walls are painted a lovely shade of blue to match everything else...



The third bedroom is, well, yellow.



But, it leads out to the deck. Which is big.




And has this view:


Actually, that's only part of the view, this camera doesn't take wide enough pictures to squeeze it all in. It's nothing particularly spectacular, but it's still a pretty good view and we're only two blocks from Lake Washington and get AMAZING sunsets over the Olympic Mountains. Expect to find me out on the deck drinking an icy cold Coors Light or six on nice summer evenings. =)


And this concludes our initial tour of the house!

As I mentioned in an earlier post, the upstairs looks NOTHING like this anymore. Check back in soon for updates on the remodel.

Come inside!

Since not a lot of people had the opportunity to see the house when we first got it, I suppose it would be a good time to post some pictures of what it looked like when we moved in. Also, since I immediately proceeded to start gutting the second floor down to the studs, anyone who didn't see the house in the first 48 hours we owned it will never get to see the house in its original condition! :-D

We'll start with the first floor since that is where we are living while the second floor gets remodeled.

Here is a scan of the blue prints for the first floor of the house. As you can see, this is a very precise drawing and is absolutely to scale and is about as accurate as you can get:


When you enter through the downstairs entry, you come into a mud room of sorts with a kitchenette/bar area. This part of the house appears to have been originally set up as a mother-in-law suite since it has the kitchenette, it's own bathroom and entrance separate from the main entrance, along with a locking interior door to separate it from the rest of the house (sorry Susan, you won't get to live in here anytime soon!). This part of the house currently serves as storage and is where Lucy stays when she's home alone since the dog door is down here.


After this room, you have the downstairs bathroom, which Sarah covered a few posts before this one. It's all nice, clean and freshly painted now, but just like the rest of the house, this bathroom will be getting completely redone sometime in the future.

The second half of the downstairs consists of another great room, which currently serves as our bedroom. It's a pretty big room, so there's plenty of room for all of our crap (read: our ridiculous amounts of clothes). Unfortunately, all of said "crap" is in boxes because there's no where to actually hang it up down here...



The washer, dryer and water heater are also in this room.


Between the two rooms are the stairs which lead up to the entry way, then continue on to the second floor.


Next time, we head upstairs!

Everyone needs to learn a lesson sometimes.

This last weekend I fertilized our hydrangea and rhododenron bushes with the mix you buy at Lowes. When my parents came over on Sunday, my dad happened to mention that animals seem to like rhody food and to watch Lucy close. It wouldn't kill her, but it would make her sick. We put the dog door cover back on for a day while the rain disintegrated the granules and then let her back outside today. This morning she puked 4 times. Dirt, poop and fertilizer to be exact. UGHHH. And to top off my luck today, I accidentally sprayed her with Roundup weed killer. She got a bath stat. Poor Lucy.

Lucy gets the painting party started

We officially move into 1214 N. 32nd on October 13, 2009. Darrick and I decided to move into the downstairs while we renovated the upstairs and therefore needed to clean and spruce it up a bit. Low and behold the people who lived there before us had quite the ideas about what "color" could bring to their lives. One room was a murderous shade of red while the bathroom was a robin egg blue and the bedroom we would be staying in was a fairly normal gray. First things first, we needed the bathroom cleaned and painted! Painting this small room would only take me a day. Or so I thought...3 days in fact. First I had to wash the walls, let them dry, then tape everything off, apply the first coat and all be damned that white did NOT cover the blue. Coat # 2 came on the second day along with the new accent color of brown and day #3 was the 2nd coat of that. I learned that painting isn't fun. Bottom line. Therefore we are hiring out the painting of the upstairs. =)

Oh, the joys of home ownership

Came home to this lovely sight last Wednesday night. The fir tree in the front yard that had a little bit of a lean to it decided it needed a lot more lean and fell over. Currently, the only thing holding it up are the telephone/cable lines in front of the house.

I called Puget Sound Energy about it and they came out and took a look at it, and proceeded to cut ONE BRANCH off the tree that was very close to a power line. When asked why he won't just cut the rest of the tree out of the lines since he had his bucket truck and chainsaw out already he said "not our lines, not our problem." Thanks a lot buddy, I'm sure the coffee at 7-11 would have still been warm if you got there 15 minutes later. Jackass.

Next I called Comcast since the only thing holding up the tree was the main line for the entire neighborhood's cable/telephone/internet. Comcast's response? "Sorry, we don't deal with trees, call us when it falls done." I kid you not.

Luckily, I found a tree service who will cut the tree down and get it out of the telephone lines, they'll be here tomorrow morning to clean it up.

Lots more updates coming soon, we just need to get our internet hooked up at the house (again, thanks Comcast for making us wait two weeks to turn on our cable and internet!).