the apartment lament

All of the things I love so dearly about 219 W. 5th Ave.

The huge dark wood trim - original to the apartment, from 1920. This is around everything! Every floor, every window, every door, every entryway. And of course, the chair rails:


A fireplace. Although you can't actually have a fire in it, it's cool to have as a focal element of the room - and for Christmas stockings. Where, oh where, will we hang our 3 Christmas stockings this year? Our child will be completely deprived...:


The original doorknobs abound :

The extra sun room above our back porch. We hardly used it, but it was just so cute:


Something I didn't love about the apartment. I had to build a ramp from two 1/4 sheets of heavy plywood, attached with two hinges. I had to drag that heavy ramp and put it over the 3 steps into our backyard. I had to pull the scooter way back across the alley, and I had to get a running start to make it up that ramp - with barely enough room for me to squeeze through the gate opening next to the scooter while pushing it. Then I had to put the scooter cover on, chain it to the big cement post on our back porch, and go drag the ramp back up into the backyard. I had to do that every time I came back from somewhere. Here's to you, old ramp:


Another thing I didn't love. We had these caterpillars that infested this one type of bush that was on both sides of our staircase up to the front door. You can see that, although the damage was done in the early fall, the bushes have not been removed yet. (No, that's not political commentary, although it certainly applies...):

I intended the last photo of my lament to be an artsy photo of our front door with the street numbers - but I guess I didn't load it up into Picasa. So here's my alternate. A puff of smoke where the scooter used to sit (on another 1/4 sheet of plywood to keep the tired off of the wet/snowy ground). Magic!:

I thought I'd start this entry out with a beautiful image of what skin looks like after going through approximately 100 cheap plastic gloves, size XL, that just cjan't stand up to the chemical properties of Minwax stain. It's the reverse Michael Jackson:

Here's the floor after a coat of polyurethane. Note my grand taping job around the vent. Certainly no sanding dust contaminated our heating/cooling system!:

Two coats later! Done!:

And done: That's 10:39 PM. A HUGE improvement over our performance the night before! To be fair, we didn't start the staining process until about 10:45 the night before:

Dennis running up the basement stairs:

That's that. Unfortunately, we didn't have the camera handy during the moving process - so, alas, there are no photos of that. We'll snap some more of the house in partial order in the next week and post.

severe negligence

Here come the photos!

We closed on the house Friday, March 7. We then promptly left for Michigan to see Morgan's musical. This is what it looked like outside as we were leaving:

We had tasty pita chips for a snack:

This is us at a stoplight:

Me enjoying some coffee (yes, it's caffeinated. They say that 1-2 cups is okay!):

We arrived in Michigan many hours later. They had a grand reception for us.
Actually, once Mom, Dad and Jane arrived, they set up a whole great toast to our new house. That was quite convenient, since I couldn't figure out how I was going to get all of the adults in the same room to give them our even bigger news:

Mom and Jane shocked to hear that I'm pregnant - notice that they're looking at Dennis?:

Ellorie and Jason. Lucky them, I gave them a few more seconds for the news to sink in before getting a chance to snap their photo. I hear Ellorie's excited to be an aunt:

The girls entertaining us:

Morgan as Veruca Salt in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory:

We got home a few days later. Possession of the house was on Tuesday. Here we are - the beginning of the end. I'm sporty full safety gear:

Dennis the monster tearing out carpet:

Me the normal tearing out carpet:

Dad arrived just in time to start pulling out staples, a task that he completed the next morning. I swear, we didn't make him stay overnight!:

Next day, first swipe with the drum sander. It's impressive how much damage this machine does on the first swipe even:

After several attempts to use the edge sander to sand the edges, we were left with light scorch marks all over. Dennis called the place we rented the equipment from, and they informed us that there was likely wax on the floors that was melting, heating up, and burning. So we proceeded to scrape the wax and finish off of the edges of all of the room. This was second to staple pulling, maybe..., for worst task:

The staining begins! Obviously, I'm skipping many steps here:

The staining ends 3.5 hours later:

And yes, that would be 2:14 AM - I had to be to work at 8:15 the next day...man did that day blow!:

THE END, for now. More photos to come tomorrow!

in, night 3

we've neglected the blog. The camera seems to be either 1) hanging on the coat closet doorknob at the apartment or, 2) somewhere else.

No photos to post until we find the camera.

We finished the floors Thursday night. We moved half of the boxes in Friday. We finished on Saturday and spent our first night.

I'd like to give a shout out to our moving angels in this whole process:
Mom, Dad, Ellorie, Phil, Sarah, Molly, Tony


If Dennis and I had been on our own, we would have been in serious trouble...
I've been pretty fatigued lately - becase we're expecting an addition to our family in November.

Yep, the music room has become the nursery. Updates to come after my first appointment April 1.

:)

day 1 of possession

demonic? No.

We got word from our realtor that Andrea, the previous owner, was to be out by 5:30 Tuesday, so we scampered to get the supplies and start ripping out carpet.

Now, I knew that ripping out carpet isn't just ripping out the carpet, but I had no idea that it would take so long to remove the neverending staples.

Seriously - neverending.

My dad came down to help us. He spent nearly the entire evening, 9 - 12:30, pulling out staples.

We're all tired. I'm sure my dad is sore as all get out, and we've got more staple pulling, molding removal, and vacuuming ahead of us before we can start sanding. And by us, I mean Dennis and Dad, because I'm at work until noon today. I'll then join them, and I'm praying that they're done with the staples by then...

homeowners!

That's us! Friday's signing went swimmingly.

The rest of the weekend is another story...
We went up to Michigan to see Morgan's 4th/5th grade musical - Charlie & The Chocolate Factory. It was really cute and well done.

When we tried to leave on Saturday afternoon to come home, we discovered that half of our trip would take us through Level 3 Snow Emergency counties due to the uncharacteristic snow storm. Level 3 means you get a ticket/in jail if you drive.

We decided to stay another night. When we left on Sunday, about 5 miles into the trip, some interesting things happened to Dennis' car, resulting in the clutch needing to be rebuilt.

We took Ellorie's car back to Ohio - and here we are!

Tonight we'll be purchasing all of the needed supplies for carpet tearing-out. Even though we technically have possession tomorrow morning, we'll just head over to the house and start. I don't think Andrea, the previous owner, will mind if she comes to check the house cleaner's job and we're there. She can't - it's OUR house!

almost homeowners

Craziness! Three days and 15 minutes until we're signing the official papers and becoming homeowners.

I'm pumped.

Sunday we made our packing/doing stuff schedule for the next two weeks.

There's a LOT to do.

Dennis packed up all of our vases, candles, miscellaneous decorative things, and everything in the "china cabinet" yesterday. He also cleaned out the nasty underneath of the stovetop - all the gross grease drippings and that business. That was so so appreciated.

This morning he took apart our big bookshelf (from IKEA - it rules the world!). And this afternoon Dandy is going to the groomer for a little rear shave. (For those of you without long-haired cats, the hair on the rear end needs to be shaved every now and then to lessen the possibility/frequency of what we affectionately call "cling-ons".)

Today's packing/doing things consists of packing the rest of the stuff in my closet, calling to schedule internet hookup for the day before we move in...and there must be something else.

Coming soon - photo diary of everything I'm going to miss about the apartment.

Hasta la pasta!