The above photos are the befores. It was right after we bought the house, before demo began and when we believed this project was not only completely doable but totally going to be worth it. On my optimistic mornings I still believe that but currently […]
When I opened my 32 week email, I had no idea what a jicama was (pronounced hi-ca-ma) but apparently its a large root vegetable, used primarily in Central America, and weighing an impressive 3.75 pounds. What this means is I have close to 4 pounds […]
We were in the house, admiring the sheetrocking and the framing of walls to come. I was comfortably in a camping chair in the living room while Matt wandered around, testing things, looking at things, trying to figure out how we were ever going to get ourselves to a point where we move in to this beast. The waters back on! came an excited shout from the upstairs bath along with the sound of running water. Yay! I responded, studying paint colors (who knew there could possibly be so many shades of white?) Thats so exciting! What the.? Was the next statement to come from upstairs, followed by things that Im not posting on the internet. Whats going on? I called. They didnt reattach the drain under here! So all the water was just going into the vanity. This after we were just discussing ways to salvage the upstairs vanity and make it at least sort of decent while waiting for our lotto money to come in. One step forwardhow many steps back? When pulling down things in an old house, you do expect to find things wrong, not well done, strange. I think that we were not expecting so many things to have to be redone. And I had definitely not thought through all the decisions we would have to make. For instance, door hinges, finishes on dining room fixtures, the insane price on dining room light fixtures, why is there a pile of dry wall in our backyard? Its hard to realize the scope of replacing so much in so little time. I feel like a lot of people move into a home, and then live there, and then realize that antique bronze is much better than oil rubbed bronze (ah ha- you didnt know I knew about the differences in bronze finishes, did you?) for the house. Its hard to get to know a house that you have just brought into your life. While I understand that for many people a house is just that, I get much more attached to homes. If you doubt that, just ask me about my studio in Greenwich Village- a 12×12 room that closely resembled Heaven. Or Chapel Hill. I loved my place in Chapel Hill, even with that crazy guy downstairs. Or the one year I spent in a sweet little house in Wilmington with a huge backyard. I love houses. I have loved them since I was little. Whenever we would go on vacation, I would spend a good part of it imagining how it would look if I lived there, what I would move, where my room would be. And of course the house we moved from. The house that nurtured the first part of our marriage, that we attempted to learn about each others styles and wants from a home. The house that we lived in while looking for a new house. This house seems more important than the others, though. Im not sure if its because Im pregnant (Hello, Nesting) or because I want to believe this is The House but Im super into this process. Today on the way to meet my parents for lunch, I studied the Sherwin Williams deck and thought about what should go downstairs. Homes are important. Maxwell Gingham-Ryan, the author of Apartment Therapy, and the Apartment Therapy Blog, and a person who lived with his wife and daughter in an apartment that was 265 square feet, says that people began focus on nesting in the 70s, post-Vietnam. People wanted to spend more time at home. Thats when the focus became family rooms along with or even instead of living rooms, of a more relaxed atmosphere, larger sofas, bigger TVs. People wanted to be at home. Now we are obsessed with our homes. There is a whole network devoted to our homes and gardens, and plenty of other networks that boast shows focusing on everything from finding the perfect home down to making the perfect yard work. We love our houses. But I think more than that, what we want, is what is in a really great home. That feeling you have when you walk in from a long day and take off your shoes and you are home. Or my favorite- when youve been gone on a long trip and come home to your own bed. Our home is currently struggling with walls, with plumbing, with electric work, with so many things. But what I am starting to see when I come home is what will be- a nursery that is clean and painted, a master bathroom with really nice tile underfoot, a kitchen that we can hang out in together. So while we wait for things like drains to be properly reattached to each other, and walls that are ready to be primed, and especially while we question the bizarre amount of wallpaper used in the house, we are trying to look into what it will be. At least we know it has Good Bones! If you doubt me, see below: Half Bath: 
Family Room: 
What you are looking at is what it looked like, and what it looked like last week. Don’t worry, walls are going back up, new photos are coming and I promise the demolition has a purpose- trust me, I didn’t believe it at first either.
We are in the home stretch, officially. No turning back now. Last night Matt and I went to our first childbirth education class. They are offered by this nurse in her home, and 6 couples come in per session. Its amazing to me that you […]
At just over 2.5 pounds, the baby is all over the place internally. What Ive noticed thats strangest to me is that all the eating I was doing a couple of weeks ago has essentially ceased. There are times when I feel like I should […]
Real Conversation Friday Night: Me: “That’s weird. My foot feels numb.” Walk around some waiting for the feeling to come back. Matt: Hmmm. Me: What does that mean? Matt: Nothing. Me: Your face doesn’t say nothing. What’s going on down there? (sometimes I think he forgets that I can no longer readily see my feet) Matt: Your foot looks, I don’t know, different than the other one. It was different. Completely different than the other one. My first experience with swelling. I put my feet up and watched in amazement as, in fact, my left foot was completely different than my right. Up until this point, I actually thought (hold the laughter back) that I wasn’t going to swell. I figured it might be all the water I was drinking, but I was going to be one of those pregnant women who didn’t get swollen feet. Go ahead, you can laugh now. I also vaguely remember my friends complaining about swelling and thinking that it was kind of random and why didn’t they just put up their feet? Now I know. Having to put your feet up is not as pleasant as it seems. I lay there, feet propped up, while Matt handled dinner, getting me something to drink, etc, etc. The only one of us who loved it was Neko, as it became yet another opportunity to try and climb on top of the baby. What I thought about, as I lay there, was could mean trouble. that this could be a foreshadowing of my summer. Theoretically since it’s NC in the summer it’s going to be hot. Maybe really hot. And the baby will continue to grow. It’s blowing my mind every week that my belly can actually support both my normal internal organs and then this other creature. When I was a kid, I had this anatomical doll that had all the body parts in it. You were supposed to take each body part and paint it a certain color, including veins and nerves, then put it all back together so you could see what the human body looked like, where organs were located, etc. The female version of this model had a baby attachment. Essentially you could pop off the plastic front of the model, insert a fetus, then pop on a larger version of the belly. Actually, HERE IT IS!! http://www.amazon.com/Craft-House-Corporation-74623-Visible/dp/B00004W1DG 
and then it’s listed as having a “pregnancy option”. What isn’t listed is the way your other body parts have to shift. The way the anatomical model played it, I would simply pop off my original flat belly, then place a new belly around the baby. Which is exceptionally easy, even for the hands of a small child (I think I was around 11 when I was interested in painting and putting together a tiny model of a human). Of course the reality that is not expressed via the Skillcraft box, is that really the baby makes an effort to move your internal organs in order to create room, then stretches forward, to add a little “oomph” to the process. Unfortunately, there is not the option of me removing one belly to put another in place for just a short time. Because, naturally once that baby arrives, you could just switch the belly out. Maybe I could also switch out swollen feet at the same time?
I promise I was going to totally make this about the kitchen, but amazingly I couldn’t find any of the 1000 photos I took of the kitchen, so here it is- the Master Bath. When we came into the tiny space (5×4′, perhaps? Or is […]
I was originally going to post something huge about what’s been happening with the house, but then yesterday happened, and suddenly the house seems much less important for the moment. If I’m feeling super ambitious however, I will put up a bonus post tonight. The […]
When Matt and I got married, I just moved into the house he had purchased a couple of years before we even started dating and we went to work on it. The house was really nice; it just needed some serious updating, and for the first year of our marriage we painted and rearranged things and it was great. When we decided we were ready to move we did a lot more, then placed the house on the market and sold it. I think that the pride we took in fixing up our first home together and then selling it took over a bit, and we started looking for something different. I am always on the lookout for something different. Its probably genetic, but I tend to look at old houses and imagine what they could be if someone were willing to throw, oh, I dont know, half a million dollars towards it. I grew up in a restored home and know how much fun it is (even amongst the work) to live in something that has a story. Dont think for a second we picked up a Preservation NC house (but if youd like to see them, theyre here and maybe you want one? http://www.presnc.org/. My mom and I laugh a lot when we get the catalog in the mail. You can buy a 3000 square foot house for something ridiculous like $30,000, but then youll need to move it and restore it. Of course we love the phrase But it has great bones! I think Matt is done with me saying that. Over the course of the last year, I have viewed about 75 properties, and Matt went into probably 40 or 50. Its a lot of housing. We considered purchasing a downtown 1905 home that needed a total gut and remodel but then realized if we did we would become The Money Pit couple. Which reminds me, we need to watch that movie soon. Needless to say when I brought my dad along to view it, he shook his head pretty much the entire time. Raleigh has a ton of houses built in the 1940s, 50s, 60s, and 70s up for grabs. In the city limits, its split level heaven. Split levels are strange. They were built to be affordable options for families who needed space but didnt have the cash to pay for extra square footage. They are literally layered levels that contain strange nooks and crannies for storage, oddly designed floor plans, and walking into one you definitely have the feeling you have stepped into an episode of The Brady Bunch. Almost always a good amount of their square footage is tucked into strange nooks and crannies. Split Levels were, in the 90s and early 2000s at least, considered kind of taboo. When we began working with our realtor and I mentioned a split level we had already looked at, she just shook her head and said they were always hard to sell. You are going to be spending time in your basement, and there never seems to be a bathroom on the same floor as the living room, kitchen, and dining room. So we kept moving but because of the neighborhoods we were interested in ran across more and more of them. Some of them were already beautifully remodeled, some of them poorly remodeled, and many of them reminded us of the era in which they were constructed. Im really impressed that people chose combinations of burgundy shag carpet and pink walls, or elected to put down astroturf in their family rooms. Often when you walk into the front door of a split level (this could also refer to a raised ranch or split foyer style), you have to go up or down stairs to get anywhere. So you cant walk into an actual living room or kitchen or even office. You stand at the bottom or top of a staircase, depending on design, then make your choice about where to go. Its not a terrible thing, I guess, but I think its really important to have a welcoming entrance, if not for guests, then for yourself. So we kept on looking and looked at really strange houses and weirder design decisions and began to seriously consider just moving away from the neighborhoods we loved to get a more traditional or modern floorplan. Back in the late fall, we looked at one house in a neighborhood we loved. It was an empty split level (the woman who lived there had moved to a retirement community after the death of her husband) and had a ton of space. Not necessarily well used space, but space. When you walked into the front door of the house, you walked into a real foyer that could hold actual people and contained (go ahead, gasp now), a coat closet. Seriously. I immediately liked this feature, but was still a skeptic. Also from the foyer, you could walk straight into the family room, or another room. Two options on the same level as the door. This was something new compared to most of the split levels we had been looking at. Going upstairs you had the main living space, and a level above that were the bedrooms. But they werent unreasonable stairs. One house we looked at you literally felt like you were walking into a dungeon it was so far down. Then we saw the kitchen. Of course we had looked at pictures online but until you really see it you dont realize how crazy it is. The person who lived there before us really like blue checks and gingham, and used them everywhere in her kitchen, including on the ceiling. So immediately we knew it was a massive renovation project. The kitchen clearly had not been updated in several decades, and Im pretty sure they were not using a full size refrigerator in there. The bathrooms werent much better, the yard was an absolute mess, and there were too many cosmetic issues to count. But there were beautiful hardwood floors and windows, a big yard if it could ever be brought under control (English Ivy is one of the hardiest and worst plants known to mankind, in my opinion), and space for a little one. “I love it.” I said. “What?” said Matt and the realtor. “It’s got good bones. I like it.” Fast forward a few months, and the place is ours. It’s got a lot of “potential” and it “could be beautiful with some work”. So now, Matt is on the floor with a catalog of cabinet fronts, and I’m watching the baby move around and wondering what I was thinking. I know what I was thinking at the time- “We can do this!” but now I’m wondering if I was thinking that because it was true, or if I was thinking that because it was around the same time I had finished my morning coffee. The idea for writing about it came from, first and foremost, my inability NOT to write about things going on, but also because there just wasn’t a ton of information out there about modernizing split levels. And there are lots of split levels being modernized, at least around here. So we’re publicizing our project and putting it out there. And hoping for feedback, for people who are going through the same process, and maybe for people to get ideas about what can happen in a house that needs to be rewired, replumbed, re………nnnnooooovvvaaatttteeedddd. Be on the lookout for pictures (I just thought it was past time for a new post).
Yesterday was sort of enlightening. I say sort of because nothing necessarily happened that should have enlightened me but the more I think about it, the more I think about what its going to be like to be in charge of a small child. My […]
