that brown house

we made the final payment to the bathroom contractor on may 1st, exactly 1 month after he started work…which is exactly twice as long as his estimate for how long it would take…we did, however, request a few additional services (the laundry room hookups, a vent for the kitchen sink…) and we are very pleased with the quality of his work, especially the tile. unfortunately, this does not actually mean the bathroom is finished. the electrician still needs to install the exhaust fan and poke holes in the wall for the sconces. once those things are roughed in and the existing ceiling light fixture is down, eric and i can, you guessed it, prime and paint above the wainscoting! i could have finished painting the wainscoting last weekend, but i’m still trying to decide if i want to try to strip some of the innumerable layers of paint off the door and window frames first (either way, the frames will repainted with the same paint as the wainscoting…and the areas of the wainscoting that are incomplete are the portions near the door and window and the top of the shelf). it’s also kind of silly to repaint the window frame before we repair the window. there are three windows with broken cords/counterweights and a few with cracked glazing–the bathroom window has both a broken cord and a cracked pane. it looks like these are things we could fix ourselves (though it is my understanding that reglazing can be tricky), but regardless of whether we do it ourselves or have it done, the windows need to be removed (to get to the access panel for the counterweights) and that means chipping away layers of paint and carefully removing the window trim from the jambs. this is the part that we’re both nervous about screwing up. of course, with the window and trim removed, think of what a professional looking job we could do stripping, sanding and repainting the window and frame!

the electrical work is still dragging along at the pace of a wounded tortoise (please note that it was also estimated to be completed by april 15th); however, the electrician assures us that we will be switched over to the new power by the end of the week (which is our insurance deadline). there are several aspects of the electrical work that we are unhappy about, but the bulk of our frustration stems from feeling forced into compromising what we want because neither pg&e (the utility company) nor the city inspector are going to compromise on anything. our desires seemed pretty simple: locate the new electrical panel and meter somewhere other than the front of the house and such that we can still park a car in the driveway. so, what are we ending up with? that’s right, a big ugly electrical service on the front of the house…and all the dickering back and forth about it is most of why the electrical work is so far behind schedule.

to the electrician’s credit, he did install it tight in the corner (as i requested) so that it’s mostly hidden when you approach the house from the other direction (which means *i* won’t necessarily see it on a daily basis). we’ll also try to have it (and that big conduit) recessed into the wall when we have the shingles redone.

the horizontal white stripe in the windows is the fancy new top-down-and-bottom-up shades. we won’t leave them like that…i was just trying them out. we got them for the dining room, mom’s bedroom and our bedroom. once i have a place to set up the sewing machine again, i’m going to make curtains for the living room (and possibly elsewhere).

our progress this past weekend isn’t very monumental either. i was grumpy and frustrated on saturday and eric seemed out of sorts on sunday. nonetheless, we managed to get a coat of paint on the kitchen beadboard & trim, finish painting in the laundry room (not including the little medicine cabinet we removed), and tackle a round of touch-ups in the dining room.

you can see another one of the broken cords taped to the upper window. aside from the blue (which is the same blue we’re going to use in the bathroom…it is lighter than the blue in the dining room…which is hard to tell from the photos since the dining room gets an amazing amount of natural light…), the paint in this room is the stuff left over from the previous owner. the washer and dryer are scheduled to be delivered in less than a week!

we also tackled some of the weeds that had taken over the mostly-neglected garden plot. i’m hoping to smother those that are left with a cloth weed barrier. the cloth weed barrier in the front had been doing a good job preventing new weeds in what i had envisioned being a flower bed, but neighborhood animals had dug enough of it up that it looked like trash, so i pulled it the rest of the way out from under the mulch and threw it away. i didn’t bother with mulch on the back yet…i may pull the barrier up and tackle the rest of the weeds next week.

i almost miss the oxalis (at least it was pretty). what has grown up in it’s place are these terrible sticky, prickly weeds that make me itchy and these huge mutant-looking dandelions that are about three feet tall. yuck. see the edges of the two small trees in the photo? the one on the left seems to be infected with something that leaves a white residue and the one on the right (which seems healthy) is fruiting what might be apples. also, the rose bush in the front has aphids, which i’ve heard is a bad bad thing.