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Okay, fine, we're still here.

And we've been working on a variety of projects lately.

Some of our storm windows had damage on the frames due to some unexplained oily liquid on the floor of our garage (a "gift" from the PO that we thought we had taken care of) and of course we're repairing them instead of buying new ones or rebuilding. The process can be picky (apply epoxy, let dry, repeat, repeat, and repeat yet again) but it's worth it to have storm windows that work nicely and are true to the house.

We also installed a piece of slate in our kitchen. Ron picked up a large piece of slate a few years ago, and we finally have a use for part of it--yay! No, it didn't come with the blue dividing line, we just couldn't wait to start drawing on the thing.  (We may also use some of it in the kitchen counter backsplash.) We even mounted a piece of steel on the back of it so it's magnetized.

The magnetized chalk board will come in very handy with our next big project which won't be fully realized until September :-)  (For those of you eagerly awaiting this belly shot, I definitely have a watermelon not a cute basketball!)

Updates.

There's still lots of kitchen planning going on here at TtoB--finalizing cabinet design, deciding whether or not to include a transom above the new door, getting in touch with the soapstone fabricator, pricing out mini split air conditioners, things like that. In addition to planning, we've done some miscellaneous things as well lately...such as...we installed a pot filler!!!!!!! Here it is in action.

When the walls are finished and the range is in it's final resting place the pot filler will reach to at least four of the six burners. Yes, it does seem like a luxury item in our fairly undersized kitchen (really, the sink is darn close to the range), but I love it nonetheless. It wasn't too difficult to install and it is, after all, shiny.

We also managed to finally get rid of our old boiler (by the by, our heating bill has been cut in half since we installed the new boiler and insulated). Our boiler wasn't one of those giganto-monster things that scares children. In fact, it was relatively petite compared to some we've seen. So anyways, it wasn't huge, but it was still taking up valuable space that Ron can now fill with a piece of equipment. Here's the nice new concrete where the boiler used to sit. Not pretty and polished by any stretch, but it's a workshop in the basement, so there you go.

What don't you know?

We were tagged by StuccoHouse a while back to reveal five things that other people might not know . Okay, I'll play, and try to make it about both of us.

1. I used to swim competitively. Ron can't swim, he flails. I don't know why, but this amuses me.

2. I'm bionic. Doctors put titanium in my cervical spine about five years ago. It was a freak, random thing really. My doctor told me that it's more something that happens to men in their 50s. Nice. No accident or anything (in fact I saw a show at the Uptown bar the night before...), but somehow I had a ruptured cervical disc. Turns out, I have an abnormally narrowed spinal canal which made me more susceptible to nerve involvement. The surgery worked well and I've been fine ever since.

3. We are HUGE formula one racing fans. Not to be confused with Indy racing or that other strangely popular race league in the U.S. My favorite driver is/was Michael Schumacher. Ron really hates Schumacher. We both like the Finnish drivers.

4. We keep a box of hockey pucks on our front porch. They're always ready to go in the winter for a pick-up game or just good fun.

5. Ron can get around Venice (Italy) without a map. If you've been there, you know that's pretty challenging. He spent some time living their during graduate school. If the opportunity ever arises, we will move abroad. Topping the list would be Venice, somewhere in Portugal, or somewhere in the Alps (Swiss or Italian).

Post holiday goings on.

We've been busy, clearly not busy posting about our busy-ness, but well, right, no good excuse :-) Anyways, we had a pre-holiday frenzy to finish plastering the living and dining rooms. Done--no more cracks or textured ceilings, yay! The living room's been painted but we're still trying to decide on the dining room color. We're down to Benjamin Moore's Tuscan Red. Just one wall will be that color, others will be some appropriate version of white.

Here's a little glimpse into things at the moment while I'm sitting here at the dining room table with the laptop. Notice the hurriedly-decorated christmas tree (not my finest work on the lights this year), a Benjamin Moore fan deck in the foreground, actual furniture in our living room, and if you squint you can see the vent hood just outside the window in our front porch (which will relocate itself to the kitchen soon enough). It seems like the more areas in the house we finish, the less room we have for things yet to be installed (such as a vent hood), so those things get relegated to the front porch, back porch and garage.

Here's a shot of the almost-complete dining room in some morning light.

In other exciting news, our guest bedroom is no longer our living room (it's officially furnished and being used as a guest bedroom) and, although neither of us thought it would take this long, we're finally to a point where we can start adding art to the walls on the first floor. Good times.

New additions!

No, not puppies..appliances! It's like Christmas around here this week. Both the range and the dishwasher arrived yesterday.

We went with Blue Star for the range and love love love it. Our model is 36", six burners--two ultra high heat burners, three regular heat burners, and one simmer burner. It has a convection oven with an infrared broiler. I've been a little under the weather this week, so haven't yet broken in the range, but am excited to get started with it.

The dishwasher, to the left of the range, doesn't look like much now, but it's a cabinet-front KitchenAid. It has a third tray for flatware! It will be missing it's cabinet front for a little while..cabinet building has yet to commence.

View from the top :-)

There's more than one way to remove stairs...

but we chose the industrial option. As part of our kitchen redo, we're rearranging the back wall of our house--moving the back door and adding/rearranging windows. Because we're moving the back door, we had to remove the associated stairs--a rather large chunk of concrete. We thought about renting a jackhammer and tackling it ourselves...hmmm, too much heavy labor, lots of jarring physicality, not a lot of personal reward. That, and after talking with someone who knows about these sorts of things, we determined that a commercial-type jackhammer was better suited for this job. We thought about hiring someone with a commercial jackhammer to come out and bust it up. While we were trying to find someone who could do that, Ron had a random conversation with someone with a big forklift. In the end, we decided the forklift was the way to go. They stopped by a couple of hours later and made our stairs go away. We didn't want to reuse the stairs at the new door, so they not only yanked them but also took them away on their flat-bed trailer. Woo hoo!

The most gigantic marigolds, ever.

Are these not the hugest marigolds you've ever seen?

These particular marigolds we planted in holes that were in our front sidewalk--why not make the best of a bad situation??  So, yes, we did temporary gardening this year...the marigolds were part of that plan. Because we plan on tearing up the front yard and redoing everything next year, so we didn't want to spend much time or money on the front yard this year. We started these marigolds from seed. We bought the seed packets...we didn't notice that they said the plants may possibly to be three feet tall. Turns out, they're slightly taller than three feet tall. In fact, they're taller than me, even taller than our car. They're actually a little scary, and kinda stinky too.

Stripping woodwork.

      

Since our weather has been cooperating, I've taken it upon myself to turn our front porch into a noxious stripping environment! With all the windows open and cross breezes blowing, I've set to stripping some woodwork. We're lucky--we only have a little bit to strip. In our reconfiguration of the kitchen-1/2 bath area, we ended up needing to strip two long baseboard pieces for the hallway and a number of miscellaneous trim pieces for doorways. I've heard and seen nightmares of stripping adventures, so was putting this task off (and off). I was soooo dreading it that we even looked into paying someone else to do it...okay, for us that's drastic. But, like many things DIY, once I got into it, it wasn't so bad. There was only a coat of paint and primer, so my two-step approach worked pretty well.

Step 1: Use heat gun to remove the offensive color layer.
Step 2: Apply chemical stripper to remove the residue, using a toothbrush and small metal tool to get tenacious bits out of the grain.

Believe me, we realize how lucky we are that there was only one coat of primer and paint!
Here's the outcome. What once was pink (still can't get over that color...), is now unadorned red oak ready for stain and finish.

      

      

Yikes, another housaversary.

      

Today is our second housaversary, and we celebrated by savoring a very productive week and weekend. We've done so much work on things that aren't readily noticeable--electric, plumbing, other systems--it feels great to do some things that people can actually notice! After a long selection process, we decided on a color for the foyer and stairway (ICI Prairie House). I don't have a photo of it at the moment, but it works nicely with all the woodwork in the foyer and stairway.

But the action did not stop with paint! This week we had an electrician stop by to do the rough electrical in the kitchen. We also had a plumber move our upstairs tub drain to a better location. Ron got a hold of a floor sander (his first time with that machine) and sanded the floors in the half bath and kitchen area. They sanded out nicely and allowed us to do what we've really been waiting to do...<drum roll>...we framed in the half bath/kitchen area!

      

For our listening pleasure.

      

We saw tapes 'n tapes at first avenue this weekend. The loon is in our regular rotation lately. Seems they'll be on Letterman on Tuesday, according to this.

And back to our regular programming...plenty of work going on here at toptobottom. We managed to successfully grow sod in our boulevard -- woo hoo -- in spite of the hottest temps of the year in the last few weeks, nasty hot.

We're also busy planning our new boiler system which means a new boiler, along with a tank for the water heater, lots of pumps and stuff that work with our infloor radiant and radiators (Ron will post more technical details on that as we progress). Of course we're still plastering and priming a bunch of walls (foyer is done and now we're working on 1st floor hallway area).

We have a small amount of indoor woodwork that we need to strip and are considering having someone do it for us. Anyone local have a source for that?