These Orders are Killing Me

August 12, 2016

Remember how we ordered these front doors?

We ordered them almost 7 weeks ago. And they were supposed to take 4-6 weeks to arrive. They still have not arrived. It’s not like I’m purposefully hiding the finished paint reveal, but I WANT THOSE DAMN DOORS CHANGED! I don’t want you guys to see the new plaint in all it’s splendor with these super ugly front doors

And then remember how we ordered these lights?

We ordered those lights OVER TWO MONTHS AGO and as of about 10 days ago only one of them had arrived. I emailed my trade contact, customer service, their general email….all to check on the status of our order. Nothing. So I called. Oh, they were on back order and NO ONE told us. Then we got the lanterns, but not the wall lights. But when the lanterns came EVERY. SINGLE. ONE. of them had broken glass. Jesus. So then I had to call back again and ask, “Where the fuck is our 4th light that was supposed to come a month ago after being on back order?” and “We need some new fucking glass, damnit.”

I realize I may be a bit of a brat, but I really don’t like when companies don’t follow up, or just downright don’t tell you information. When I ordered the lights my confirmation said they’d ship in a week. So I figured they’d come in about two. If something turns out to be on back order and doesn’t arrive for 2 months, I feel like it’s the company’s job to let you know what the hell is going on. Needless to say, they got an earful from me.

And our door? Same thing: phone calls and emails went unreturned when I contacted them to ask where the hell our doors were. So I went there yesterday and asked in person, “Where the hell are our doors?” The good news…they might be here TODAY! And if not today, then Monday! Please, let us all pray. I want a bright green door to walk home to, and some lights hanging from the porch when I get home at 11pm after an A’s game because it’s currently nearly pitch black.

But in the meantime, I’ll give you a LITTLE sneak peak

BRIGHT DOORS!!!!

Ripping the Gazebo Down

August 10, 2016

There’s this really awesome gazebo in our front yard

Can’t see it? Oh, here it is

Totally awesome, in this case, means super shitty. You can’t tell 100% from the picture, but it’s a total piece of shit. Like, I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I could totally blow that house down.

My step dad CBH LOVES to tear things down, so after he and Celia dug the post holes for the future playhouse in the scorching sun, I asked him, “Wanna rip the gazebo down?” To which he gleefully replied “YES!” (in as much a way as CBH is gleeful : )). Chris’s mom was over at the house by this time in the afternoon, so she, CBH and I removed all the landscaping equipment from underneath the gazebo (there was about twice as much as what is in the above picture by this time). Once it was all cleared out we got Chris to remove some of the top of the gazebo so it cleared the cable lines

Then CBH went to town. Although, he’s not a wild man wielding a sledgehammer, he is a very methodical man wielding a sledgehammer. And crowbar. Seriously, this was a very well thought our removal

Can’t you even just sense his pondering?

It honestly took him about 15 minutes to get the whole thing ripped down and in a nice rubble pile. It was put together with FINISH nails (the horror) so we could literally just push on certain sections and it came tumbling down

We’d like to reuse the same concrete pad for a future landscape shed we’ll be building. We had a small metal shed at the old house, but this one will be about double the size. Which is pretty awesome because the last shed was super cramped. And then cool thing about getting to build it ourselves is we can customize it a little bit. It will probably be very simple construction like the playhouse because it only needs to serve as storage, but it will still be fun to make it our own a bit.

And speaking of the playhouse, we’d like this shed and the playhouse to sort of match in paint to the house. We thought about painting the entire thing, but let’s be honest, that’s slightly time consuming, and we’re trying to get a lot of projects done over here. I designed the playhouse, but Chris had the task of choosing the materials for it. So far we have this bookmarked

The “Iron Gray” is a fairly close match to our house body color Cavernous, so that will save us a lot of time because installation will check off painting it as well. Neither this or the playhouse was on our 2016 House Goals list, so naturally that’s why we’re deciding to do them now. Including maybe the front yard landscaping…

Planning for a Playhouse

August 8, 2016

Because of course 🙂

It’s not on our to do list or anything, but of course we have to build a playhouse. OF COURSE. We just need to add all sorts of projects to our list.

It all started on Pinterest. That’s where most of my problems start. I get caught in a rabbit hole of problematic creative inspiration and soon I feel like all our future kitchen cabinets should be emerald green (I have a couple years to convince Chris to get on my train). You see what Pinterest does? This post is supposed to be about building a playhouse and somehow I got to talking about our kitchen (holy jesus I still want to re do it so bad).

So I was on Pinterest looking at something about backyards (I don’t even remember) and then I started looking at pictures of playhouses. I had the pipe dream that we would build a playhouse, but wasn’t really sure if it would ever happen. I started paying closer attention to what I was liking about the ones I was pinning: simplicity

This one

And this one

They were not overly designed, overly built, unnecessarily show-y. I liked ones that were very straight forward. I thought, “we could build that pretty easily…” So one night while I was at work at the A’s I drew up a really quick plan

I brought it home to Chris and his response was, “why don’t we buy one?” Because I have a terrible time paying for something we can fairly easily make ourselves and because a nice wooden one is actually kind of a lot of money. So I decided it would be my job to convince Chris that it wouldn’t be too much trouble to build one ourselves. Obviously that means I brought my graph paper and ruler to work again at the A’s. I think I came up with a pretty good plan

I only drew a front elevation because I wanted to just give Chris a quick summary as to why our playhouse would be awesome up build 🙂 We didn’t settle 100% on the building plan, but I was able to convince Chris that we could build it fairly easily, hooray! How did I do it?

1) it would be built fairly close to the ground, so no steps

2) the trim for windows and the door would be 2 x 6’s with a 2 x 4 stacked right against it so that the siding can be easily nailed to the 2 x 4 and the 2 x 6 extends slightly past

3) a simple corrugated metal roof

4) a rectangular, single floor design

I was excited to get it built, but didn’ know how soon we would do it. I came up with my plans about 2 weeks ago and this past weekend we had a work party at our house where my dad, step dad and his girlfriend all came to help out on projects while my step mom, grandma and Chris’s mom came and played with the girls. I thought we’d work on projects mostly for the garage (the disorganization is really getting frustrating), but Chris had it on his to do list to dig the post holes for the playhouse, yay! So we all went out to the back to plan out exactly where it would be. We had a general idea based on the backyard master plan we did last week, but we obviously needed to nail down exactly were it was going to go for the post holes to get dug. It took us a good 15 minutes of hilarious arguing – there were 5 of us trying to plan it – but we finally figured it out. CBH and Celia spent about an hour digging for the 4 post holes. It was hot and it was hard: they were basically digging in clay soil.

The final plan?

The first back left post is 10′ away from the tree. A header will extend from the playhouse to the tree and a tire swing will hang down. The back and front walls of the playhouse will be 8′. The side walls will be 5′. There will be a front door about 30″ wide and about 5′ tall. All windows will be about 18″ x 18″. The top will be pitched towards the back (7′ tall in the front, 6′ tall in the back). A portion of this will be open to add more light. All openings will not be truly open – they will have chicken wire or something similar allowing things to appear open but make sure no animals can get inside. We will have a “front door,” but it will be more like the gate of a fence with just a simple wood frame and chicken wire opening that will most likely latch on the door trim. And we’ll paint it all to match the house.

Of course there are MANY more important details to sort out (the piers, posts, siding, etc), but it’s good to have our rough idea sorted out. We’ll build it here and there and hopefully not have too much trouble along the way – I feel like the projects you think are going to go fairly simply always prove to cause the most headache. Let’s hope that doesn’t happen!

A Facade Restoration

August 4, 2016

It is no secret to anyone that this facade needed a lot of work

And that experience has been super exciting. And terrifying. And challenging.

As is usually the case, when the market is hot, it’s tough to get contractors. I called over 10 different people to try and get this siding removed. It was a clusterfuck of who would get it done, what amount of work they would take, blah blah blah. It was quite an adventure. Why wouldn’t we do the work ourselves you ask? Well, it’s a shit ton of work, and it’s at least an hour away from our house. In shit ass traffic. So it would make for not great time management and the project wouldn’t move very fast. Plus, the exceptional carpentry involved would make it pretty hard. We finally settled on a painter and the painter gave us the contact of a great contractor they’ve used for projects like this.

That process started literally over a month ago. Like I said, it’s been an adventure. And we still haven’t really even started. Well, started construction at least.

First off, we had to hire someone who would be willing to take down the siding and who also had the skill set to rebuild a porch with paneling, install columns like the original had, add paneling, add moldings, reliefs, water tables, repair the siding, install curved glass windows… it was going to be a BIG job. And we didn’t really know where to start. My brother gave me a budget and told me, “Get it done.” He wasn’t that rude because I call him about every 36 hours because I’m slightly terrified because this is the biggest project I’ve ever managed (inside and out). I’m pretty annoying, I must say. I lack self-confidence and because I’m spending a lot of investor’s money I want to make sure I AM DOING EVERYTHING CORRECTLY. The awesome thing is that we’ve brought Chris in to help with the coordination of things and to help manage construction and do some quality control. I know a good amount, but Chris knows about 17 times more than I do, so having him help on the project also is giving me a little push. My brother having so much confidence in me is giving me an additional push. But, holy crap, it’s still scary.

But, back to the project….

Several weeks ago the began the process of tearing down the metal siding. I came out to the city after dropping the kiddos off to find this

Awesome!!! The siding that was left was actually in way better shape than I had thought it would be and it was the coolest thing to see the skeleton of what the building looked like

It was also SUPER depressing because it meant that someone stripped all that awesome trim work away, cryyyyyyyyy. It honestly hurt my heart. But there was a silver lining knowing that we would be giving this place love and bringing it back to life. We could tell that there was only ever one paint job on it – gray with white and yellow trim

Being able to see so much of that original skeleton definitely made me want to pay homage to the building and select colors really similar to the original color scheme. I love being able to be part of that discovery process.

The other amazing thing was being able to be outside of the building while the horrible metal siding was coming down and have SO MANY people in the neighborhood walk by and share so much excitement with us. People were so eager to stop and talk with us about how the building has been such a pimple in the neighborhood, and now it will start to be beautiful! 🙂

Once the siding was down, this is what we got to look at

The contractor elected to remove the last of the siding at the top when the scaffolding is up as they rebuild because it was getting pretty dicey on the extension ladder.

And that’s where the building has sat for about 3-4 weeks. Highly annoying, yes. And ugly. I feel bad that it’s sitting like this, but we had to uncover what was underneath so we knew how much needed to be repaired as we worked with a structural firm to draw up plans to submit to the city. The city of San Francisco has determined that any building over 50 years is considered somewhat historical. I’m not sure what trouble you have to go through with a 50 year old building versus our 100 year old building – but for us it’s a little difficult.

LUCKILY there are two buildings directly next door who were built at the same time: a father built 3 adjoining homes for his 3 daughters. This is #1, the one that is the ugliest as its been stripped of its glory. Building #3 though is pretty well intact still

The city wants you to bring the building back as accurately as possible. And we’ve got an excellent blueprint to work from because judging from the skeleton marks we uncovered while removing the metal siding, our building and this building looked almost identical. The Preservation Department wants us to closely mirror this building because we all assume they looked so similar. After going back and forth with the facade restoration designers, we all came up with this plan

Pretty fucking crazy, right? Ridiculous. It’s amazing to think that our shit ass ugly facade is going to look AMAZING – in a couple months 🙂 Our contractor and I have emailed, texted and had MANY conversations about exactly what corbels to use, what kind of paneling should be in the porch, whether the capitals should be ionic or corinthian (we chose ionic). I picked out what doors we would use, and I picked these Simpson ones

The great news is that our permit got approved and we just had to wait for our parking permit so their work trucks could be out in front. Sooooooon they will finally start construction on the restoration and I absolutely CANNOT WAIT.

But the next big adventure will be the inside. Creating additional bathrooms, opening the floor plan up significantly in the living spaces and still maintaining as much of the original amazing details as possible.

This project is a challenge for me. It’s forcing me to really be brave and tackle something I may not think I’m entirely ready for, but going for it. Adam, Chris all my parents – they are always telling me I’m capable. But I don’t like messing up and I really don’t like disappointing people. And because I’m not only spending my brother’s money, but other investors as well, it makes me feel an entirely more significant level of responsibility to make sure the project succeeds without a giant fuck up. So it’s about time for me to sack up and dive in!

Where Have I Been!?

August 2, 2016

Oh, hi! 🙂 I know, I’ve been a little absent lately. Lots has been going on in our house, lots of changes, not a lot of house progress though 🙂

First off, last week I didn’t post at all, but about two weeks before that I didn’t post at all either. What were we up to? Oh, we just went to Alaska

And it was AWESOME! Chris and I are finally trying to take family advice and give ourselves a little bit of a break every once in a while. We went on a long weekend vacation to Las Vegas last year when I was about 8 1/2 months pregnant, but before that it had been at least a couple of years since we took a REAL vacation. And since we didn’t do much when I turned the big 3-0, we decided to take an Alaskan cruise as a belated birthday present to me. WITH NO KIDS. Oh my god. 8 days with no kids. Our family is amazing for letting us go on that vacation. Seriously, beyond lucky. Don’t worry, that doesn’t get past me.

I’m hoping to write a post about it for later this week because we got to do some awesome things.

What else, what else?

Well, the house is painted! But it’s not done. I’ve really waffled back and forth about when to reveal it to you. But I REALLY want to have the new front door because the house looks awesome and the front door still sucks. It’s just not as exciting. I want to have that POP to show you. So I sit here patiently waiting till we get the call from the hardware store that our door has arrived. And then we can install and paint it. SO EXCITING!

Want to see the front door hardware we got though?

It’s the Baldwin Seattle with a knob instead of lever (so many more contemporary levers out there, but I love knobs).

Then we’ve got to plant the succulents in the front, hang lights (which were on back order that they never told me about) and generally gussy things up.

I also convinced Chris that we should build a playhouse for the girls. Woo-hoo!

Not like there’s not enough on our plate at the moment 🙂 But I have a hard time paying for something we can do ourselves. Especially when buying a good, wooden one costs a kind of hefty price tag. I tried to design it in a way that we can construct it FAIRLY easily. Chris finally came on board, yay! 🙂 But of course figuring out where to put it in the backyard made us walk the yard and sort of make a master plan for things. So that’s exciting. We will of course not put any of the plans – besides the playhouse – into play for a while, but it’s exciting to have an idea of how we want to lay things out.

And speaking of the backyard….we cleared the SHIT out of the front yard and backyard. Well, I lied, we didn’t do it because, GASP, we paid someone to do it. The yard was a fucking hot mess, there was overgrown shit everywhere, there was poison oak (which I am incredibly allergic to) and there was a lot of green waste to get rid of. We got a good quote from a landscaper and decided to bite the bullet and just have them clear everything out. Let me tell you, it’s made me want to landscape the shit out of everything because there’s a much cleaner slate that is just begging for someone to make it pretty.

Work life has gone a little crazy, which has resulted in a lot of changes. In the last 3 months Merritt has had a bit of a whirlwind of change. She’s a pretty laid back baby, so we’re lucky about that. And all the change has happened with Zoe with her, and she loves her sister more than anything, so that helps a lot

About 4 months ago work was getting much busier for me and I was no longer able to just get my work done during nap time and with Merritt in tow. I have really liked taking both my kiddos around with me just about 100% of the time their first year of life. They have gone to meet clients, gone with me to showrooms and had site visits. I’ve tried to get my computer work done while they were napping. It worked for a while with both kids. But around that year mark I start to get a little crazy. And our business has started getting busier and my brother has started getting VERY busy. I’ve still got all his admin and bookkeeping work, and now he has purchased two properties that Chris and I are rehabbing. There’s still this one

We’re in the middle of planning the interior – getting drawings made, working on the scope of projects and putting together a budget. It’s turning out to be a fairly large project. Which is exciting, but time consuming. And the facade is about to start to be restored. That has been an adventure as well. I’ve never worked on restoring a facade so it’s been a big learning curve working with the restoration department of the SF Department of Building Inspection.

Not only that project, but Adam purchased another

Oh, sorry, is the tree in your way? 🙂

This project will not be as invasive (the facade will not be restored for example), but the interior will probably not be as large of a transformation as well.

But anyway, that was the HUGELY roundabout way of saying why Merritt has had such a big 4 months. 4 months ago my friend was coming 2 days a week between her morning and afternoon nap while Zoe was at day care so that I could have a larger chunk of time to get work done because I was feeling super stressed out. Then she made the switch to one nap at about 11 months. Once she had fully committed (sometimes she still gets tired, but she will just NOT take that morning nap) we stuck to the schedule for about a month, made sure she was good with it and then she started going one day a week to my dad and Wendy’s with Zoe. That went well, so then it was time to put her in day care. It was hard for me to pull the cord and have her away 3 days a wee- just like with Zoe it was hard. Here she is on her first day

But soon work got crazier (Adam bought the additional property for us to rehab) and he gave me an ultimatum – he wanted to give me more work because he and I feel comfortable working together and I think do a really good job, but that things were starting to get busier and busier, so he wanted me to put the kids in day care another day a week so that I could really commit to working more full time. I had to really think about what I wanted to do. It’s really important for me to get to hang out with my kids. I want to be with them and have time with just us. But I also get a lot of joy out of working. And both are incredibly important to me. I agreed with Adam – in order for me to be a better mom, having them in day care 3 days a week and at my dad and Wendy’s 1 day a week for 4 days total a week would be better: I would actually have the proper amount of time to get all my work for my brother done and all my work for our business done (and Chris has started doing more work for Adam as well). I would not feel so much like I was running around like a chicken with my head cut off because I was so stressed out that I was running out of time. And most importantly, on the day during the week that I do have the kiddos, I am actually going to be able to be a most present mom – no phone around, no stress about an email I can get off in the 4 minutes they’re occupied – we can just have FUN.

It was a necessary change for the kind of mom I want to be: a working mom who has a career of her own, but also has some quality time caring for her kiddos and making memories during the week while they’re at this young, formative age.

Phew!

So that’s the “quick” summary of what’s been going on around here. Of course I’ll write bigger posts about the goings on (I can’t wait to share about the facade design!), but I felt like I had neglected you wonderful folks, so I needed to stop and take a second and share what’s been going on. So hello again! 🙂

And While We’re at it: How About Our Utility Closet Too

July 20, 2016

Clearly we’re on an organizing kick at the moment because after we got the foyer closet done it was finally time to get the utility closet done downstairs

There was crap everywhere because we had no place to put all our cleaning supplies. Because, hello, noooooooo shelving

It also made the laundry shuffle a little challenging. And when we needed to find cleaning supplies we had to go through a giant box or shit all over the floor.

Like the upstairs closet Ethan ripped out the old stuff in here. There wasn’t much so it literally took about 5 minutes for him to rip everything out

Then Chris got things patched, primed and two coats of white. Because it’s a utility closet we don’t need any fanciness. We opted for standards and rails with wire shelves, simple and inexpensive. And the good news is all the brackets were leftover from another project, so we didn’t have to pay for them, hooray

Once we got the standards and rails installed I spent about 30 minutes putting things together

It was simple – items we hardly use on the top and very bottom. The middle was all our extra paper towels, rags and the cleaning supplies we use frequently. The after isn’t glamorous, but it is finished and organized!

And there isn’t shit all over the floor anymore!

I know people probably find it a little ridiculous that we’re spending time organizing closets when we hate the kitchen so much, but honestly, getting shit put away gives us peace of mind. So many of the closets have literally NO shelving in them, so none of the items can be unpacked. Everything is just sitting in boxes or all over the floor and it makes it incredibly frustrating to find anything. They’re also relatively inexpensive makeovers, so it makes it easier to get done. And the fact that we can now find the 409 after shit has been spilled everywhere is very nice 🙂

The Perfect Front Door Color

July 18, 2016

Chris and I were really inspired by my dad and Wendy’s front doors at their house

Those orange doors POPPED and they get a lot of compliments from folks around the neighborhood

Remember how boring it was before?

We really loved that huge, bright pop of color. And we wanted to replicate it for our house.

Originally I thought about having a bright blue front door, but as I thought about things more and more I wasn’t super excited about it. It seemed really safe to me, and not the fun impact that we wanted to have. Then I thought about a BRIGHT Citron or Chartreuse. I Pinned colors I liked and inspirational images like this one

It just made me happy. Chris was a little on the fence about it, but also really wanted that bright impact that we loved about my dad and Wendy’s doors, so he was willing to let me try it. So week or two ago with a list of far too many paint colors, the girls and I made our way to HD to get samples

And I brought out my sheet of plywood and started painting on the samples

After one coat I knew two wouldn’t be enough

The colors were so similar to the plywood and light that to get good coverage that gave a better example of the brightness of each color I needed to use 3 coats. And when it was done it was soooooo pretty

From left to right, top to bottom the colors are:

Benjamin Moore Yew Green
Benjamin Moore Chamomile
Dunn Edwards Citrus Leaf (I wanted to try something a little more green but I hated this the second it went on the plywood)
Benjamin Moore Chartreuse
Sherwin Williams Hep Green
Benjamin Moore Exotic Lime
Benjamin Moore Citron
Benjamin Moore Eccentric Lime

Then I moved the board around the house to see what kind of impact it got. I really liked painting samples like this on plywood and then moving it around because it gives the best idea of how the color will look. Some people don’t buy sample colors and they just move the fan deck or sample swatch around. I feel like that little piece of paper isn’t ever really a true representation of the color. It also isn’t big enough for me. I wanted a larger slice of what it’s actually going to look like

Oh, and did you catch that deeeeeeeep base color on the house!? Yes, that means the house is painted too! I know, I know, I should share that with you too, but it is so fucking impactful that I really just can’t bare to tease it 🙂 I want everything to be DONE before I show it to you. But, don’t fear, it’s coming soon. We just need some finishing touches – stain in the porch, sealer on the bricks, lights hung up, front doors installed (they should be arriving soon]), succulent garden planted… okay, that actually sounds like more work than I thought. But I promise, it should go quickly! 🙂

Anyways! The most important picture was the one of the sample board in front of the front door

I texted the picture to Chris to see what he thought. I had a CLEAR FAVORITE, but of course it’s a joint decision 🙂 Luckily, his favorite was mine too! The top left corner: Benjamin Moore Yew Green

Hooray!

It is a bright, big impact. But I LOVE IT. And I really just love how happy my dad and Wendy’s doors make me every time we go to their house and I hope this color makes me happy every time we walk in the door.

The painters will paint alllllll of our exterior doors this color. And we have a lot: the front double doors, the side garage door, the side basement door, the door from Zoe’s room off the back, the double doors from the living room out onto the deck and the double doors from the big room downstairs out on to the backyard. That’s a lot of Yew Green 🙂 We won’t be painting the front doors yet because we need to wait for the new ones to be installed, but we’ll be getting a really good feel for how those doors will be looking soon 🙂

Happy Birthday Merritt

July 8, 2016

A couple weeks ago we celebrated this little cutie’s first birthday!

If you couldn’t guess, we went to the beach 🙂

Zoe loves the water, Merritt loves the water – so it seemed like a good fit. It was also enough of an outing that it felt just special for her, but not so GIANT. That little chick is pretty laid back so it seemed perfect.

My dad and Wendy met me at the beach and help set up a couple canopies while my mom and Chris got the girls ready to leave. By early afternoon the party girl was in the house and all our friends and family were celebrating

It was a lot of fun and I wish I had gotten more pictures of all of our friends. But everyone was having a good time and seemed to really enjoy themselves, so that made me happy of course. Who doesn’t like pizza and the beach?

It was really an awesome time.

I was actually surprised that Merritt wasn’t an into the water as I thought she would be

She was not very please with the whole situation, so she stayed getting held by everyone instead. That girl will push your hands away when you try to get her out of the bath, so I thought not liking the beach water was kind of weird. It’s incredibly shallow for a long way out at the beach we were at, so the water is actually very warm, so I didn’t think it was a temperature issue. Oh well, Zoe enjoyed it enough for the both of them

Merritt of course enjoyed herself with all the food

And the cupcake. Of COURSE she enjoyed her birthday cupcake

I just love her fucking enthusiasm when it comes to food. It makes me smile every time. She loves food just like her momma 🙂

Merritt had to go home a little before the party ended because she’s switching from two naps to one and all the excitement got her pretty tired by the end of the afternoon/evening

But we did get in one family photo before she left

And Zoe and my uncle kept the party going 🙂

If you can’t tell from the photos my Uncle Mike is pretty awesome. And Zoe could not get enough of him. When the party was over and we were loading the cars, she kept asking, “Where’s Uncle Mike? Where’s Uncle Mike?” every time we got back to the car. It was pretty cute.

A good time was definitely had by all. And I think everyone’s kiddos slept great that night – always the sign of a good party 🙂

And of course, don’t forget we had Merritt’s birthday dinner at Fentons too 🙂

God I hope that love of food never goes away 🙂

It was a wonderful week of celebrating the little lady’s first birthday. We had fun, we partied, we ate lots of food and we got to snuggle our little Squish. Happy first birthday Merritt!

We Are Primed and Ready

July 5, 2016

2 pieces of news: the WHOLE house is primed and ready to get painted!!! AND, we picked our two trim colors, hooray!

First, let’s look at our house all WHITE. The porch

The garage

The side of the house

The other side

And the back

Let me tell you, there are two conclusions I have gathered from this: 1) no more ugly painted red siding!!! and 2) I’m SO HAPPY we decided to go with a dark color. Because the architecture of our house is so simple and symmetrical (for the most part) I really think the dark color will make it stand out. The white (or a lighter color) would have felt so SAFE. Now the dark color is just going to POP. It also makes me so excited to take on the adventure of ripping down that deck and building a new one later this year (it was on our 2016 house goals).

Now, time for some trim colors!

About 2 weeks ago Chris and I got the paint decks out to make some picks

Chris actually got into the color selections, which was kind of fun.

Like I had mentioned before, we were a little confined by our fascia/window and door trim pick based on what colors we could choose from from our gutter sample deck

Some people elect to get their gutters matched to their trim, however, in my experience, this never ends well. The paint never sticks to the metal quite well enough and so the finish starts to look like shit pretty quickly. I would rather have a color that I maybe don’t like quite as much, but it has a good finish. To each their own. We went through the gutter sample deck and made a choice of a light brown/gray

Once we had that color selected we went through our decks and picked 3 samples for the post, eave and garage door color. Once we got all the samples at HD we put them on the house to see how they looked. Here is the window and door trim and fascia color (we looked in the paint deck and Benjamin Moore’s Willow Creek was a pretty exact match with the gutter sample)

Then we put some on the garage door trim and painted the three garage door, post and eave samples to see how they looked with each other (from top to bottom the colors are Benjamin Moore Steel Wool, Smoke Gray and Rock Gray)

Lastly we put a sample of the fascia color on the actual fascia, and the post, eave, garage door color on the posts with the color we chose for the house propped up against it so we could see how alllllll the colors would look together (the house color is the top right color)

The color we ended up selecting Benjamin Moore Rock Gray. I really liked the top one, but next to the house color (when I put the sample board next to it) it read really green, and I didn’t like that. The middle color was way too blue, so Rock Gray it was! (plywood color on the top right is our house color)

Here’s how the three colors will look together

Left: Dunn Edwards, Cavernous – main house color

Center: Benjamin Moore Rock Gray – garage door, front porch posts, eaves all around the house

Right: Benjamin Moore Willow Creek – all window and door trim, fascia

And what we’re THINKING for the door color (we haven’t even gotten samples yet, this is just what we’re thinking)

A nice, BRIGHT Chartreuse or Citron (this is Benjamin Moore New Lime).

What do you all think? Just as excited as I am that the house is about to be PAINTED!? And how do you like all the colors together?

Happy Birthday Zoe

July 1, 2016

OMGGGGGG this post is almost a month past due! But I’m finally getting to it.

For Zoe’s birthday last year and this year we didn’t have a big party. Instead, we think of the thing that Zoe is really into at that time and try to pick an event that has to do with it. We invite family and have a grand ol’ time. Then we go get ice cream at Fentons in Oakland in the evening. Fentons has been around since the late 1800s in Oakland. And that’s awesome. My grandma used to go there as a kid. And that’s even awesome-er. I love supporting an Oakland business that’s SUPER tasty as a birthday tradition for the girls.

Last year we took Zoe to the merry-go-round in Tilden Park (a great park in Berkeley that I used to go to a lot as a kid)

This year she has been SUPER into a show on PBS called “Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood,” (it’s the modern day Mr. Rogers). Every day to get around their town all the characters ride a trolley. I thought that was the perfect event for Zoe. SF has a trolley, but the cable car is much more iconic, so we planned a morning to head out to SF and ride the cable car! I was actually pretty excited because despite living in the Bay Area for 27 of my 30 years I have never ridden a cable car.

We got out to SF and met my step dad and his girlfriend Celia. They were awesome and were already in line (because of Copa America there were a lot more tourists than normal). I was a little nervous because the line was really very long and I didn’t know how good the girls would be at waiting

But luckily they were both totally awesome. Which is great because we had to wait almost an hour. It helped that CBH and Celia were there to help us entertain them. And the cable car coming every 5-10 minutes and getting to watch it get turned around was fun too

After our wait we got on and got an exterior seat. I was super excited that we were able to get a seat on the outside, because it’s definitely a lot more fun than the inside

We rode down to Fisherman’s Warf (a place I also think I may have never been to) and walked around. I never realized what a complete tourist trap it was. But it was definitely fun with Zoe in tow. She always loves looking at all the sites

We of course got seafood and planted ourselves on a great bench in the middle of everything. There was a man playing music and Merritt loves to “dance” so she was grooving with whoever was holding her. It was a lot of fun to just get to sit and hang out for a little bit and people watch

The way back was fun as well. We were able to catch the first cable car that came by which was good because Merritt was getting EXHAUSTED (she wasn’t quite at one nap yet, but we were pushing her to only take one that day). We got another outside seat – hooray! Merritt was SUPER into how the cable car worked

And the cable car operator was so touched by how excited both Zoe and Merritt were that he gave them fun little ear plugs Zoe kept asking about and even asked her if she wanted to ring the bell when our ride was over

The cable car was definitely a BIG success!

About a week later was our Fentons night

It was really fun to get to celebrate with so much of our family (all of my parents and Chris’ mom).

One of the awesome things Fentons does is when it’s someone’s birthday they announce it to the whole restaurant and everyone sings to you. It’s always a big deal and it seems like every time you go to Fentons there are sure to be at least 2 birthday songs to be sung. It always makes me so happy what a tradition it is for people. Zoe was a little intimidated by so many people singing to her in the beginning, but by the end of the song she loved it 🙂

And of course the ice cream was FABULOUS!

Zoe was so happy. It was a great memory. She was just smiling and laughing and talking and playing. It was a wonderful time. I love that little chickadee. And I love our little family

Happy 3rd birthday you crazy little girl!

Who Knew Finding the Perfect House Number Could be so Difficult

June 29, 2016

Part of working on the exterior of the house means that we need new address numbers. This is like the jewelry of houses to me. The exterior lights are the bold statement necklace, and the address is the tasteful pair of earrings. For me, I like the lights to be more noticeable and the address to take a backseat, but still not be forgotten. I want them to be beautiful, but not as much of an eye catcher as the lights.

So over the course of a few evenings I hounded the internet. And let me tell you, address numbers are fucking difficult to find. I mean, there are A LOT, but all the ones I liked were expensive. I wouldn’t look at the price first, but every single one that I liked the look of was OVER $30 PER NUMBER! And we need 5 numbers. That’s $100+ after shipping and tax. On 5 metal numbers. I couldn’t stomach that.

There are these ones that are at HD that are perfectly acceptable

They’re only $7ish each. But I see them EVERYWHERE when people want contemporary-ish ones. So you know how I am – CAN’T DO IT! 🙂

Then there are these of course

But they are soooooo boring. They’re only about $2 each so it’s hard to not get them just to save money. But I don’t want to fall in love with the outside of the house, only to see the address and think, blehhhhhh.

So I searched for something more fun. More clean. More bold. But not TOO bold. You know what I mean? Sometimes I can’t explain myself very well.

I loved these

From here. They were in the running at first, but I still couldn’t stomach paying $20+ for a number. A 4″ number. Sigh.

But I kept at it and kept being drawn to clean, contemporary fonts (I am not a serif girl)

from here

Cryyyyyy. All too pricey for my cheapness.

And so of course my brain went to: how could I make our address numbers? And then I remembered this totally awesome picture I pinned many, many, many weeks ago

from here

OOOOhhhhhhhh, ahhhhhhhh. LOVE.

And I realized that I could make each number ANY height I want and go to fucking town on dafont figuring out WHATEVER font I want for the address

from here

Chris of course skeptically rolled his eyes at me when I told him of my plan 🙂 It’s not like we’re not busy right now or anything 🙂 But this will be a super fun art project for me. And very reflective of our personalities. And that’s really my goal with this house. I want it to feel like US. So what do you think??? Super cool? Yes! 🙂

Time to Makeover the Foyer Closet

June 27, 2016

I love having a proper size foyer closet. At Picardy we had an incredibly shallow closet that didn’t fit a hanger. As a result we had our jackets in a hall closet and there wasn’t much room to fit gym, work and misc shoes. But our closet now is a great size. Can’t you tell from this incredibly fuzzy picture?

Foyer closets are hardly ever organized in a way I find that’s efficient. It’s usually a rod all the way across with a shelf above it. This drives me crazy because there is so much wasted space and so much stuff on the ground. I really don’t like stuff being on the ground in a closet, it makes it feel so messy.

Every closet is different in how you need it organized because we all have different crap. For us, these are our needs: not too much hanging space, drawers for hats, scarves and the like, lots of shelves for lots of shoes (gym, running, work, boots…) and some hooks for items to hang off the floor.

It wasn’t too difficult for me to set up a plan. It included an Ikea pax with wire baskets (half the cost of their wood drawers) and shelves. This would be put against one wall. Spanning the length of the other wall to the pax would be a closet rod (leftover from another job) with a shelf on top. Easy peasy.

With the plan, it was time to get to work.

Our friend Ethan ripped all the old stuff out. With Merritt’s supervision

Then it was time for patching and priming. We threw two coats of white on the walls which were leftover from other rooms. I like white in a foyer closet. Sometimes people like to paint a bold color in closets. I think that can be fun, but for a foyer closet I just like clean and classic white

While Chris locked himself in the tiny closet to get it painted without interruption from children (literally) I got the pax built. I had a lot of interruption from children 🙂

At this point I feel like I can built a pax with my eyes closed though, so it wasn’t difficult with the kiddos running and crawling all over it.

Once it was built it was a really easy process of installing everything. Merritt had become obsessed with crawling inside of the built pax while it was sitting, waiting to be installed, so obviously as we were working on installing it she needed to crawl inside it as well

Zoe gets excited to help on projects as well so we used her desire to be helpful and had her hand Chris tools as he was attaching it to the back wall

Then it was just time to get it organized. And soon…Ta da!

Yay!

In the pax we have drawers for scarves and warm hats, my bags, Chris’s hats, and my hats

On the shelves have all our work and work out shoes, a bigger bag for when I work at the A’s and a bin for flip flops and small umbrellas

Then we’ve got the hanging rod for jackets with a shelf above for infrequently used shoes and a bin for hats for other folks to borrow if they come to help on the house on a hot day and need a hat (which has happened pretty frequently)

Then we’ve got a couple hooks for my purse (still my everyday purse almost 3 years after getting it)…

…and broom and larger umbrellas.

Hooray! A finished space in the house! Let’s look at the before again

And after

Love. So much better organized! Hardly anything is on the floor (besides the vacuum), which is the way I LOVE it. Because we’ve rearranged things and really focused on what we need, we’re able to fit much more in the closet, and in a way that we can actually find everything.

And the cost? The pax was about $175 for the unit and the organizing items, we were able to use a leftover closet rod so we only needed to buy the shelf, brackets and some hooks. The grand total came in at about $225. Score.

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