One year anniversary

This November we celebrate one year in our house! We know we still have plenty to do, but we are proud of what we have accomplished in one year. Last year we spent Thanksgiving weekend unpacking, trying to get settled, and figuring out how to make the best of our kitchen until we would get the new one. This year we celebrated the holiday with friends and actually cooked food (green bean casserole and dinner rolls) to contribute to dinner! Saturday we went to Ikea in New Haven to get a few furnishings for the house. We had a great time and got a new coffeee table and a bookcase for the office/sitting room. These are the new things.










But we didn't just shop this weekend! We also continued our long-term project of winterizing the house to improve energy efficiency (insulating walls and floors, insulating pipes, sealing off drafts..), and we worked on the pantry. We are almost done with it. We need to finish up the painting, install the tile backsplash, and finish the formica counter edge. Today Dave put shelves back up.




Last weekend Megan and Craig visited, and Dave and I enjoyed cooking dinner for them in our kitchen. We made Indian food (subcontinental). Here is Megan giving Dave a hand.















A little gray kitty enjoyed the evening too!

A new tree!

I mentioned in the last post that Mom bought us a tree for a housewarming present. While she was here, we went to a nursery and I picked out a pretty pin oak. Yesterday Dave dug a hole for it, and today we picked it up and planted it. Dave's student, Patrick, came over to help. I don't know how we could have done it without him! It was so heavy! Here are some photos of the planting in progress and the finished product. We love the tree. It really makes the house look prettier. We are excited to have a hardwood in the yard too. The man at the tree nursery guessed it was ~12 years old.

The garden is exploding now. We have sunflowers blooming, and we are starting to get a ton of tomatoes. We are having a great time with it. Right now we have plenty of beets, chard, basil, and carrots.











In the past week or two, we have been dealing with various critters who think the ground beneath our breezeway is great for burrows. At first it was a skunk family. Dave never saw them, but Columbo and I saw them multiple times. A mom and three babies! When we came back from Vermont last week, the skunks were gone and a woodchuck had moved in! We have been spraying critter ritter (Dad's idea) around the hole lately. I haven't seen Chucky for a few days, so it might be safe to fill in the hole now. This is the hole. We will try to get back to working on the house soon, but we are having more visitors in August so things will be busy!

July news

It has been a busy month! Annie and Jay visited in the beginning of July, and most of my family visited last weekend. It has been wonderful, but of course we haven't made a ton of progress on the house. Here is what we have to show:

In anticipation of the family visit, we bought a futon for our office/sewing room. We had been planning on getting one for some time, but the visit pushed us into action. Here is the futon spread out as a bed. As you can see, the kitties are big fans.


Also in the week before the family visit, Mark installed drawer pulls and knobs onto the cabinets. He did a great job. The pulls and knobs are brass with a "chesnut" finish. I was nervous about getting them straight if we did them ourselves, so I was relieved when he offered to do them for us.

Our next goal is to finish the pantry. You may recall that, way back in March, the plumbers cut a hole in the pantry wall in order to vent the kitchen and pantry sinks. Dave drywalled over the hole recently, and I think it looks better already. We would like to add a tile backsplash around the pantry sink. Fortunately, we have a bunch of beautiful tiles sitting in the garage waiting to be used. Jess and Glen, our friends from when we lived in Socorro, gave us a bunch of seconds from the tile-making operation that Jess's family was running at the time. Lots of the tiles are in great shape, and we are sorting through them to choose the best ones for the pantry. Mom helped us out with this task when she was visiting. This the tile sorting progress on the floor of the garage.

Finally, the garden is growing at full speed these days. Within the next week or two, we will have more tomatoes than we know what to do with! Mom bought us a garden hoe when she was here, and now we have been attacking the weeds like never before. (Mom also bought us a tree for the front yard- I'll post a picture when we plant it next weekend.) Here are some photos of the garden:

Speakers and sewing

I mentioned at the end of my last post that we did some other fun projects on Sunday, but I didn't have time to post the photos. Dave installed a speaker in the kitchen ceiling that connects to the living room stereo system. Being the loyal Tigers fan that he is, he wanted to be able to listen to the games while cooking me dinner. The bonus was that he used a ceiling tile that was damaged from the original light fixture, so we didn't have to try to fix the hole or replace the tile somehow.

The other project is the curtains I am sewing for the dining room. The dining room receives a lot of afternoon sun and gets pretty warm, and we really needed to cover the windows somehow. So Ann generously let me borrow the sewing machine that her mother given her and I got to work. Some nice people at Joann's helped me figure out the material measurements to keep them easy. I have not touched a sewing machine since 7th grade home ec. class with Mrs. Pagel, but luckily the machine came with instructions for setting it up. I am about halfway done with the room now, and I am still considering some options for the best way to tie them back. At first, Columbo struggled to figure out where the windowsill went but he seems to have figured it out now.

Floors and a new refrigerator

This week we had the floors in the kitchen sanded and coated. On Tuesday night we had to take the old fridge and everything else out of the kitchen and pantry.Then we had take out dinners on Wednesday-Friday nights. It is a relief to have it done at last! The kitties are relieved as well because we had to keep them locked in one room for most of the time so they wouldn't get on the floors.

With the floors done, we finally got to move our new refrigerator in! We had to be super careful not to scratch the floor, so Brandon and Kathy came over today to help. Below are some pictures of the inside. (We also moved our food in after I took this picture so there is not just beer in there anymore.)







We did some other projects today, but I will post them later this week.

Memorial Day Weekend

The weather this weekend has been awesome, so we have spent a lot of time working outside on the garden and cutting the grass. The azaleas are almost done blooming:














The rhododendrons out in the front are coming into bloom:














Today we added some poblano and anaheim chiles to the garden. We are still waiting/hoping for the seeds to sprout. Last week we planted some crop cover grasses, buckwheat and winter rye, in the tilled, non-garden area. Winter rye is often planted in late summer/early fall, but I was assured at the store that I could go ahead and plant it now.

And here are the hop plants, beginning their climb up the ropes Dave tied for them:















Finally, we are still hard at work on the kitchen painting. Once we are finished painting, we will have the floor redone and the new refrigerator installed. Here it is feeling left out in the garage:

Yard work, light fixtures, and rangetop hookup

Sorry it's been so long since the last posting. Spring arrived and all of a sudden there was a lot of yard work to do! Dave's parents came for a visit in the end of April. They were a huge help and we are very grateful to them! They helped us get our yard work on track, and Dave's dad showed Dave how to hook up light fixtures and dimmers. We also went to Rhode Island two weeks ago to visit Megan and Craig and to run a 10K on Block Island. Block Island is beautiful and we had a wonderful time.

We are excited to have a functional gas range. The downdraft system is awesome and we are really happy with the rangetop in general. The downdraft is amazingly quiet and effective. This morning Dave made sausage and pancakes on the griddle: Note the downdraft, now you see it...

now you don't!












Here are the light fixtures that are installed courtesy of Dave's parents:



































Dave and his dad also hooked up our dishwasher! (We are waiting to take off the protective plastic until the kitchen is done.)

Last week our stools arrived. We are excited and relieved that the stool height works perfectly with the island. Dave was particularly excited about the stools because they are made from retired wine barrels. I was nervous about kitchen looking like a bar with these stools, but I really like them too!

Up until about a week ago, we had a weedy sideyard on one side of our house that we were prepared to just ignore for a long time. But then one of the neighbors from down the street, Joey, came by and offered to mow down the weeds and rototill the area so that we could plant a garden. The area is way to big for us to plant the whole thing, so we offered space to our next-door neighbors- unfortunately they already had a garden in place. Today we planted in a portion of it that we thought we could handle, and we will let the rest of the space do what it wants. We planted some vegetable seeds that Megan gave us (swiss chard, beans, carrots, and beets), herbs (dill, chives, cilantro, basil, sage), flowers (sunflowers and something Megan gave us), and tomatoes. We put in more tomatoes than we can eat but we can always share them with friends (and visitors). Our dream is to someday plant a ton of green chiles out there. This is Dave hard at work.


I also took some pictures recently of the sunset sky from our house. We love the views from our front 3 rooms and the front porch. We found out recently that the farmland around our house is designated as protected farmland, so we do don't have to worry about big housing developments around our house.

Counters!!!

Today we got our counters installed! I was a little nervous because I had no idea how the granite would really look in the kitchen. But we both love the counters! Right now, we think it's an igneous rock but we are still working on our mineral identification. It may also be metamorphosed- really hard to tell right now!

Here are some photos- sorry about the glare!

Cabinets and paint colors.....

Last week our cabinets were installed! We are really excited about them. Yes, the cats really like them too, as you can see from the photos. Electric really seems to enjoy hanging out in the drawers. You can see the rangetop in these photos. We are getting a gas line installed for it soon. What you can't see in these photos is the downdraft system that will vent the rangetop. Installing a ceiling hood turned out to be excessively complicated and prohibitively expensive, so we picked a rangetop that has a downdraft. All we will have to do is push a button and the vent will come up between the rangetop and the window, and it will pull the fumes down and outside beneath the window.





























We now have a sink and a formica countertop in the pantry. It is great, especially right now since we don't have sink in the kitchen.


This is the island: We will have a sink, dishwasher, and garbage in the island. The counter will overhang towards the wall for some stools.




















Last weekend and this weekend we worked on putting primer on the walls in preparation for paint. Choosing colors has been tough, so we bought some sample-size containers of colors we liked. Today we tried them out.

























Finally, we also ordered new light fixtures for the kitchen. This is the light that will hang over the island: