New van, old van

When after 20 hours of researching, shopping, and test-driving, HF was today purchasing the van that we now own, the dealership guy nodded knowingly when he learned that he was a New Englander. It explained his reasoned and well-researched approach, his willingness to overlook minor flaws, and perhaps most -- his expert haggling. He did an awesome job. And thus I now present our 2008 Toyota Sienna 8-passenger van (purchased at a great price, and in nice condition). Isn't she a gem? 

Six and a half years ago we bought our first minivan, 6 days into our new life in California. In tow we had a nearly 3-year-old boy and a 10-month old girl; our youngest two were not even yet a twinkle in our eye. I describe the whole episode here, in my first month working at this very blog… I admit that it makes me feel a little nostalgic to ponder that time and all that's happened in our lives between now and then. Nostalgic and also thankful. Faithful God.

Living room is (virtually) finished!

Contractors finished on Wednesday evening... The rooms are finished, minus power, trim and (in the case of the den) flooring. But we are virtually there now! Huge improvement on what we had before. Especially love having real walls and not having random windows leading awkwardly to other rooms...
Stay tuned for furnished, finished rooms - that part is still a work in progress...

End-of-the-weekend house update

End of the weekend house-update... The contractor worked two days here so far and HF spent two very looong days working on his components of the jobs over the weekend. (We're talking 7 AM - 8 PM with virtually no breaks... which means I spent two very looong days with four squirrely kids...!)

Here's how things are looking now:

Living room (with dancing-girl embellishments)

Stairway area looking into den (sans walls now, as you can see)

Hallway at top of stairs

Stairway looking down 

Upstairs guest room (from landing)

Whew.

Full-scale house renovation all of a sudden.

And guest room makes 3....

HF was working on some necessary updates over the weekend, things that need tending while the walls are open. His intention was simply to cut into the wood paneling slightly in the guest room for access, but the paneling was so old that it just ripped off. When I returned from church with the kids, I found the guest room walls looking like this...

(As a reminder, till Saturday the guest room looked like this, more or less a finished room.)
So. Our total rooms with walls off is now three. Getting a bit intense, to say the least. So we agreed - with me as the instigating party - that it was time to call in some help.
Happily HF had met a local contractor he liked back in February when he bought a heap of cedar posts off craigslist - which, incidentally, are still lying in the same pile where they were first delivered. We called him Sunday and he came to give us a quote on Tuesday. He just had a job cancel, and after giving us a quote, he is here today with three additional guys, two of whom are his sons. They're tearing down the termite damage in the den, doing insulation and blocking, adding necessary support to the living room ceiling, and hanging drywall in all three rooms - wall and ceiling.  This will be over the course of the upcoming three weeks... Sizable amount of work which would have no doubt taken diligent HF months and months to complete.
After they leave, HF will still be adding trim, replacing the banister, flooring the den, and other sundry jobs that will need tending to.

Here are the before photos of the living room and den, taken this morning--

Living room:

 Den:

Will post after-drywall photos in a few weeks...

Big girl-- new bed, new room

Little Miss Goose has finally and officially transferred to her big girl bed. Long overdue, I must say, though she continued to love her Phil and Ted's travel bed (perched atop her mattress) right up till the end. It was a great transitional piece for her, as it was for Roo, and I did love the "zip her in and still get to be in control" feature. However she had clearly outgrown it and is now certainly old enough - more than old enough, really - to manage a bed of her own. Her wonderful Nona sponsored some new big girl bedding, and we went with a purple dragonfly theme to match the new color scheme of the room. She adores it, as you can see from the photo, and has done exceptionally well staying in her bed. [Go Goose!]

We are now almost completely done with the bedroom that Goose and Mouse share, and it is such.such.such an improvement. By way of review, here is what the room looked like when we first viewed the house last fall, right up through mid-Feb:

 And here is virtually the same shot from the doorway:

Prized spot in the house

Adding onto my recent kitchen makeover post, I must say that I'm really liking how this part of the kitchen is coming together... So thankful. Rainy night this evening and this is just feeling so cozy. And we're finding this layout--

works so much better for us than this one did--

In other news, a fellow elementary school mom backed into our van this afternoon when I was inside picking up all four children. Hood is dented and will need repair. She kindly waited for us to return to the car to point out what she'd done (for which I am very thankful)... We stood in the rain for nearly a half hour, each with a car-full of kids, talking to the insurance and the cop who came over to scope it out. Never a dull moment around here.

Kitchen, before and after

Without a doubt, the kitchen is one of the best features of our new house... And yet it photographs poorly. I noticed this when I took pictures when we first saw the house, and the same was true when I tried to capture the kitchen as it currently stands - not 100% done, but probably 90%. It's a bright room, and yet somehow the colors come out strange. (For example, our yellow in the third and fourth photo are completely off.) Anyway, here's my best shot at a before and after:

Before:

 After:

(This yellow is not at all true to the true wall color)

Yellow color also not true to actual look of wall

Guests! And guest room

This evening we will have our first guests at the new farm! Happy day. Aunt Katie, Uncle Mac, and daughters Caroline (5) and Sophie (3) will be arriving from NJ to spend 48 hours with us. [Last time we saw them was our drive down, at which time we were practically puking on them.] We managed to get the guest room in reasonable shape for the grown-ups to sleep in (whereas the den where Caroline and Sophie will sleep is basically still vacant, but that's another story). Before and after pictures:

Before (these were taken when we first viewed the house in Dec):

And... after:

Curtains and art still leave something to be desired, but it's a great start...

Post-CA at one month

We left California one month ago today exactly... and it feels like a lifetime. In a bout of sadness and friend-missing this weekend the monkey said, "It's only been a few weeks since we left California, but it feels like forever." My sentiments exactly. We have made a lot of headway here since we arrived, but we're still very much at the front end.  

But onto the progress. It's definitely there, and on many fronts...

--Social. Our old friends the Johnsons whom we've known for well over a decade (since our Boston days, pre-NH), live an hour away in Richmond. Dave and Amy have three kids, none of whom we'd ever met... Till last week. Our four greatly enjoyed playing with their crew - Summer (6), Luke (3), and Caleb (1). And I was so, so thankful to see a friendly, smiling face when we visited them last Monday. Excited for many more visits.

Summer's girl legos were a big hit with our two oldest girls

The kids are making some headway socially too. Today is day 6 of school for the oldest two. Monkey's favorite school friend so far is a girl named Audrey, and a couple of boys named Seth and Caleb have gotten a few mentions. Roo especially likes a girl named Mikaela - and her wardrobe (about which we hear every day). And today Goose had a milestone of her own - her first day of preschool! She loved it - no surprise there, with our socialite of a girl. My sense was that we would all need to get ourselves plugged in and connected to our town somehow as quickly as we could, which was why we chose to enroll the three oldest kids in some form of schooling... and it was a good call. I'm so glad we did. The routine and continuity is helping everyone - certainly including me.

--Wildlife. When we arrived here at the farmhouse, we found that a black rooster had attached itself to the homestead. The kids named him Poppy because he just 'popped up,' and they have been enjoying - and feeding - him ever since.

We saw our first ever eagle the other day while we were driving the kids to school. It was eating roadkill alongside the road about a mile from our house - looked like a crow but for the white head and tail feathers! Very exciting.

And a bird got trapped in our screened in porch, so Monkey caught and released it:

--State of the house. Moving into a farmhouse is full of surprises. The main part of the house (the living room) is 100 years old; most other parts are much younger. However, none of it is truly and fully 'up to date.' Many switches and sockets are erratically or strangely wired. One bedroom lacks electricity to half of its outlets - one whole side of the room. One bedroom has no working heat in it. Other rooms have one or two smaller oddities. So that's been an interesting situation to uncover. 

Another interesting situation is the heat: the central part of the house (living room/kitchen) - is heated largely by propane fixtures, a stove and fireplace. But the rest of the house is heated by electricity. That means that every room has its own electric radiators and individual thermostat, left off except when we're using the rooms. A lot of cold pockets to navigate. Managing this type of heating is new to me, but I'm learning quickly - especially since we moved at exactly the coldest time in the year with the temps typically in the 20's.

Even with the oddities, we are pleased to find that we really like this house. The homey feel that came through to us when we saw it back in early December remains. This place feels like home to us (or is starting to) in a way that we haven't felt - and have craved - in a long time. For that we are so thankful.

The biggest project that's been undertaken so far is HF's reverting the upstairs floors from the 70's shag that was on them when we bought it, back to their original hardwood. He took 4 days to do this after he and Angus pulled up in the van after driving cross-country -- before the moving truck, the kids, and I arrived. And it paid off. See?

Monkey & Roo's room before...:

And after:

I'll post more photos as we progress... We are preparing to install a dishwasher into our now-dishwasherless kitchen, and the old cupboard was pulled out over the weekend in anticipation. Also I am painting the kitchen wainscoting white - it was formerly wood colored - and the kitchen walls a color TBD. So those will merit before and afters before long...