Obama moves to the White House and the Kitties move to the Brick House.

Oscar and Toby have moved in with us. They seem to really like their new house - especially all of the windows.

We had a long, lazy and snowy weekend. With mornings like this:

Looking out of the window at this:

Oscar has been sleeping under the covers. He really likes the electric blanket.

Other creatures sniffing about:

I've been doing laundry! Here is an action photo of the first load of laundry EVER done in this 99 year old house:

We did get a few things accomplished. Some furniture was unwrapped and moved into the living room so we have a place to sit other than the bed. There's cardboard under the furniture legs to protect the floors. There will be rearranging and editing in the future - I don't want to get too comfortable in here right now because I still have to fix the moulding.

Thanks to my dad, a few doors were hung (with working doorknobs!) The water dispenser and ice maker in our fridge are also hooked up.

Fernando laid out that platform for the washer and dryer in the basement. It raises the machines a few inches off of the ground in case we have any more water. We still need to paint the surrounding floor. He also filled up some cracks with hydraulic cement. We haven't had water since but I think most of the ground is still frozen from the weather lately.

We finally decided on a much needed mirror for the bathroom. If it's in stock I should be buying it tomorrow.

This weekend we plan to get some of the light fixtures up. Oh how I'll miss the hanging bulbs.

The big problem with hanging lights here is that some of the wiring doesn't have anything around it to secure a fixture to. The living room is the only one ready to go but it stopped working a week ago. I think it might just be loose wires in the switch or a bad switch. I also changed my mind about the fixture for in there... decisions are hard.

2009

Happy New Year!
So far it's been a very happy one for us - we've finally moved in and now we're living amidst chaos. Check out the dining room:

Those are BOXES. I think we had around 250 packed up from our last move. There's even some furniture too:

It's not staying like this (I promise!) Some things are going and others will be moved around. The aluminum group chairs are not good on our floors - they've made that patch of floor over by the desk a mess. I don't know if it's because the floor was recently refinished or if it's because they are old or if it's just the type of wood they are, but they are soft.
We've been doing a lot of painting and most of the trim is done. Check out the stair risers:

More work was done to the bathroom. That's my Dad doing touch up to the plaster:

My Sister has been working on patching and sanding the bathroom window. It just needs a coat of paint. I still haven't decided on a wall color!
We now have our IKEA HÖLLVIKEN sink hung on the wall:

The plumbing is currently hooked up - that was taken just after it was hung.
And here's the new bathroom faucet:

All of our kitchen appliances have been delivered. It was hard getting them into the kitchen and after the first attempt failed, another date was scheduled, two doors (on our mud room) were removed and the appliances are now in the kitchen. All of that and only one huge scratch down the front of the left refrigerator door. Another door has been ordered and is on its way. Nothing ever goes smoothly.

Speaking of nothing going smoothly, I don't think I mentioned the footprint. There was a footprint in the final coat of poly right in the middle of our living room floor. The floor people have been back 3 times since then to "fix" it and it now looks like a weird 1 1/2' (yes foot) square patch in the middle of the living room floor. They are scheduled to come back and completely re-coat the entire living room and dining room next Wednesday. This means that all of that stuff you see in the first photo of this post has to be removed and found another home in the interim! And that the toilet from our miniature bathroom has to move upstairs this weekend (yay!) and that we won't be able to put furniture in those two rooms for at least another week after they are finished. :(

We also have our new washer and dryer in the basement. When they were delivered we realized that the ground was too uneven where the plumbers put the hook-ups. We've also been getting water again in that corner when it snows. Everyone we've consulted seems to think it's ground water. We will eventually have to add a sump pump in the future to end the water issues. As for the washer and dryer - we had to move them over, under the basement stairs and that meant longer hoses (not readily available at most plumbing suppliers.) We finally found 8ft hoses at Sid Phillips. They are not hooked up yet.

Our kitchen cabinets were delivered at least two months ago and are being installed TODAY. I'm very excited to see the results...

It is official.

I neglect my blog. I could blame the holidays but I'm going to blame the house. The house is eating into my blogging time but I blog about the house. It's an endless cycle.
Here's the latest photo of our subbasement (sub-basement, sub basement?)

It's currently moonlighting as a wading pool. We must have a crack somewhere down there and that last rainstorm flooded the little room. Fernando tried to bucket it out but gave up after about bucket number 25. I hope it doesn't freeze. It's not a huge deal because we can't really use that room (formerly a coal chute) at the moment for anything. It doesn't have electricity and usually holds the day job of spider farm. It's just another project to get too - hopefully before it freezes and more cracks develop.

Our floors and stairs are finished!

I do love them. The finish is not glossy and just like I expected a satin finish to be, even though it's semi-gloss. This photo was taken at night and the flash penetrated the layers of poly, showing it to be more brown than black. It does read black when you see it in person. I can't wait to paint those baseboards and am actually looking forward to a little time off to get to paintin'.
As for the bedroom paint color - I think the swatch was lost in the clean-up. I know I should remember the name but we debated over two, the other being BM's "Calm" and this other color won. I need to have more mixed for the baseboards so I'll ask the name of the color when I get to the store.
We've also had some exciting (for me) things delivered - more on that later. I promise to add more photos of the refinished floor, painted bedrooms, and yes the forgotten upstairs BATHROOM hopefully soon...

i'm digging for dryer

Let me introduce you to our new moat.

It's not completely finished yet... but not bad for one person and two days of digging. It's not all in madness, we're digging down so that we can waterproof our basement. It's not a really damp basement but we do get water accumulating in one area when there are big storms. That one area happens to be the exact spot where we want to put our future washer and dryer. We've already installed the hook-ups and the vintage sink that we just added a drainage pump to is right there, so we can't change the w/d location. When we had the roof and gutters fixed we thought it might fix the problem but twice since then we've had bad storms and about an inch of water in that corner.

This is all the handiwork of Keith. Keith was once a grave digger. More excitingly he used to work on a tugboat. I have an irrational love of tugboats. When you love tugboats, St. George, Staten Island is the place to be... I get to see them every day. ;)

Keith's been having problems with finding a place to store all of the fill. It's already piled up the length of our fence and now we have an enormous mountain in our yard. I swear - the yard really was clean - right before we started our very own Big Dig.

from the depths of the basement...

Tell me you wouldn't run away screaming if you found this while cleaning your basement?