Why join the gym? Just come help me put in landscaping (carry rock and dirt, use a pickax and shovel to dig holes, walk up and down stairs–a full body workout!)
Our frontyard now has a white-blossomed crape myrtle ($10 at Home Depot!), hostas, lariape, purple coneflower (echinacea), Alberta spruce, millet, anise hyssop (the lavender-colored flower in the island of the Zen stream–the bees love it!), a bridge over the “stream,” and lots more (but not too much).
Those of you who know me know that I LOVE to garden. To date I have been neglecting our front lawn in favor of working on our living space.
But the prospect of letting a second summer go by without planting any flowers seemed pathetic. So a few months ago, I sketched out a front yard that combined summer color and winter interest, got Emily’s buy-in. and waited till one of the summer’s hottest days to start.
One of the first steps was to build a few dry walls: dig a trench for a foundation, line it with landscape fabric, pour in road base, compact it, the lay in field stone and backfill with gravel to promote drainage. It sure helps when Merrifield Garden Center will deliver a pallet-load of rock:
Arches in kitchen.
Powder room color and ladder
Yea–Jose is alive and well. Turns out, he was working so many hours at his day job that he didn’t have time to get over to the phone company and pay his bill in person–so they cut him off. Anyway, he’s back on the job with me, every Saturday. We’ve laminated sheetrock on the dining room ceiling and are starting to mud it.
Even if I lost Jose, I would have hard workers like Paxton! Graciously volunteering to hang sheetrock for a few hours, he was subjected to everything I know about the trade. Notice the intense concentration:
I’m in mourning. My trusty helper, Jose from Guatamala, is missing! He hasn’t contacted us for two weeks now, and his phone seems to be disconnected. Was he deported?
Now, there are a hundred guys in the Home Depot parking lot that would love to take his place, but turnover is expensive and time-consuming. I would have to teach the new worker all the English words I taught Jose. Plus, he was so dependable and worked hard (and never once took a bathroom break!). I needed help last weekend hanging a sheet of drywall on the ceiling and broke down and hired “Martin” (also from Guatamala). He has six kids; he calls home almost every day, etc.–but it just wasn’t the same.
Adios, Jose.
About 2-3 weeks ago, we had new cherry floors installed. Wow! The room looks livable again! If anything, I was stressing because we didn’t have a threshold in place, and I had to take steps to protect the floors from errant rain water.
Back behind the cabinets, in the space where a window once hung, we stuck a ziplock baggy with some artifacts for some future person to discover: Here’s what our note said:
___
To the person(s) who discovers this “Time Capsule” in the wall of our home, we are providing a little bit of information about who we are and what is going on in the world in 2008, the year we remodeled this kitchen. When we were moving in, we found some old pictures of who we thought were previous residents—we wished we knew more about the people who lived here before us. Maybe you have that same curiosity.
This is our first home and we were very excited about renovating. We saw, and were repeatedly told, that this house had “great bones” but had just been neglected. The previous owners purchased this home in 1977 but didn’t occupy it after 1981. Instead, they rented it. During that time, it appears that it was quite neglected with water stains on the ceiling from leaky toilets and a leaky roof, and a stove which only had two operating burners. We could go on and on—the place needed work!
Steve and Emily met in July 2004 via Match.com, an online dating website. Emily had moved here from New York City to work for Discovery Communications, the parent company of Discovery Channel, a cable network. She grew up in Warren, NJ and spent time prior to NYC in Chicago and Winston-Salem, NC. Steve was in Washington, DC for two internships. He was attending Vermont Law School and worked for the Air Force and for Holland & Knight practicing environmental law. Steve returned to Vermont to finish his degree and after taking the bar exam in Colorado, he returned to DC to work for the EPA. Steve grew up in Littleton, CO and spent most of his post-university life in Boulder, CO. Prior to buying this house, we were living in a rental apartment on Vermont Ave. NW, in the new “trendy” Logan Circle neighborhood of DC.
We decided that we should invest in some real estate and looked for a new home. This place was a great space at a reasonable price. We closed on the house at the end of September 2006. Over Columbus Day weekend of that year, Steve proposed on top of Mt. Marcy, the highest point in the Adirondacks. Along with getting architect plans in place, Emily now had a wedding to plan. She pulled in off in short order and on March 3, 2007, Steve and Emily married in Keystone, Colorado, in a winter wonderland wedding complete with horse-drawn sleighs and a group skiing day after the wedding.
As part of this time capsule, we are including two pieces of tile. The 2” hexagonal tile we believe is original to the house, which was built in 1910. It was the floor in the small bathroom on the 2nd floor, which was the only bathroom for approximately 70 years. The other tile which is a mottled pink/beige combination was in the entryway. Unfortunately, the tiles were very cracked due to settling caused by a rotten support post in the basement so we had to replace them. At the time of writing this letter, we do not yet know how we will replace them. Modern replicas can be purchased but are quite expensive.
The renovating that we are doing now will be completed in a few stages. First, we are working on the back of the house – finishing the downstairs laundry room, renovating the kitchen and adding a powder room on the first floor, and renovating the original bathroom on the second floor. The second phase will be reconfiguring the master bedroom (front-most on second floor) and the bathroom behind it to a master suite. The third phase will be opening the third floor space to be one room. It currently is two “rooms,” one being a trunk room just four feet wide. We will also be redoing the backyard which currently has a “deck” which covers the egress from the basement. We like to garden, and will be expanding the beds accordingly—maybe some of our trees and plants will still be here to greet you. We are only currently completing Phase I so the rest will take probably the next year or so. We are serving as the general contractors and need to manage cash flow so things are moving more slowly.
As far as what is going on in the world, we have provided a section of The Washington Post. The big news right now is the Beijing Olympics with Michael Phelps becoming the most successful Olympian of all time winning 8 gold medals to add to the medals he won in Athens. In addition to sports, the other big news event is the upcoming Presidential election. Barack Obama, the first black man to win the Democratic nomination is running against John McCain. It should be very interesting to see what happens in November. The U.S. still has troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Scientists think humans are causing global warming.
If you want to contact us after this is opened and the internet and email are still a working means of communication, please email us. More likely, we’ll be long gone; instead of the Internet, you probably use laser beams between brain cells!
Enjoy the house! May it bring you many good memories!
–Steve and Emily
August 22, 2008
New floors are in (picture coming soon), cabinets are hung, and the trim is going in. Some small glitches–one of the cabinet doors is a quarter inch too long, the soffitt has a small gap for a few feet, two light switches had to be moved a few inches for the 4″ wide trim (which means more sheetrock mud, sanding, primer, and repainting. Still, it’s starting to look like a kitchen.
New cabinets
Steve and Emily's DC Renovation 