Where Has the Year Gone?

Tomorrow is the last day of work before the holidays. I'll be off until January 4. I love being able to use only two days of vacation to get 11 straight days off. If the furloughs had gone through, we would have been off for three weeks. I'm a little sorry that didn't happen, but I realize it would have been an economic hardship for a lot of people around here.

We picked out our tree on Saturday and it stands unadorned in the dining area of the rental. We tried the living room, but it was just a little too tall and scraped the ceiling. Because of the way renovations were done to the house, part of the dining area has a very low ceiling and part of it is higher than any place else in the house except for a peculiar aspect of the master bedroom bath where there's about a 4' x 4' cathedral height area. I figured we couldn't really open presents in the bathroom, no matter how big it is (the size of a bedroom, actually.)

Our Hallmark ornaments were living with a friend since the fire, so I picked them up a couple of weeks ago along with my Lenox Holiday china. On Sunday, my son and I headed over to our house to get the rest of the decorations and lights from the garage. I'm sure I'll get the tree decorated by Friday.













The house rebuild continues along. We've picked out tile, carpet, counter tops and cabinet doors for the kitchen. The drywall has gone up, so there are rooms again and not just bones. The first picture of the house shows the view from the kitchen through to the living room. The mantle above the fireplace was put in after the 1994 earthquake and it was pretty much the only internal wall left standing after everything was stripped out after the fire. The windows and door to the right of that, which look out onto our eastern yard used to be a pair of French doors. Now it will be a single door with windows on either side, which you can see a little better in the second photograph.














No more floor to ceiling windows anywhere in the house, which is just fine with me and the fire marshal. Also a concession to the fire marshal is a solid sheer wall to protect against the shaking we got in the 1994 earthquake. That's the solid wall on the right of the picture. It has been moved to take over space that was a narrow extension of the garage which was pretty much worthless to us for storage. It jutted out from the front of the house and did little more than collect a lot of leaves from the tree or serve as a vantage for cats who would climb up there and look into the windows which extended in a huge triangle from side to side in the front of the house from about the 8' wall level. We'll have less light streaming into the living room this way, but we've gained about 3' of length to the living room.














The third photograph of the house looks back toward the kitchen area and you can see the open front door on the left and the door out to my kitchen garden. There's a lot of change going on here. There used to be a wall blocking most of this view. When we did work on the kitchen three years ago, we added a pass-through window, added a range with a big oven near where the window is (in addition to the wall oven that used to be just to the right of where the door is going to the garden), and had pull-out shelves in the bottom cabinets under the sink. In the new version of the kitchen, the sink will be under that window, the range with oven will be perpendicular and to this side of where the sink will go, the placement for the refrigerator is blocked by the wall on the right (behind which on the far side will be a pantry and on the near side with be a closet with the washer and dryer), and jutting out from that same wall will be a base cabinet with counter top to serve as a lunch counter and work space. The chairs will tuck in facing toward the kitchen. It is so much more open. And there will be a lot more storage space in the kitchen because of it.

For comparison, you might want to take a look at the blogs I wrote in 2007 when we were renovating the kitchen--something that never quite got finished. Here's a link to what the view from the kitchen through to the living room used to be before/during the make-over. That wall will be gone, replaced partially by a base-counter about 4' long. If you look to the upper right of the picture, you can see the windows that used to be in the upper part of the front wall above the door area. Here's the old back of the kitchen area where the refrigerator will now be in about the center of the wall surrounded by cabinets. The wall oven on the left is gone and the washer and dryer will be moved to their closet in the hall toward the bedrooms. And this lovely area of clutter will soon be the pantry. We only used the laundry sink to empty the washer's water and that will now have proper plumbing. I think things will be much easier to organize and put away with a proper pantry.














In the fourth photograph of the house is the space that used to be my office. It has had quite a bit of rearranging. When we tore up the carpet, we saw the artifacts of a wall that did make the room a fourth bedroom. When Len bought the place, those walls had been removed and the room was open to the hallway and used as a den or dining room. We used it as both at different times, but mostly it was my office. I used filing cabinets to take the place of a wall. It was crowded, but it was mine.

The room had a large closet along the left side of this picture which is no longer there. We took that, and what had been the linen closet in the hall and rearranged the support walls t enlarge the master bedroom's bath. I told Len that I would no longer live in a house where I did not have a separate vanity and storage area in the bathroom from his. While I think the bathroom in the rental is larger than necessary, I do appreciate the two sinks and vanities and I can draw a line down the center to keep his crap from invading my side. It is heavenly. The bath in our house will not be any deeper than it was, but it will be much wider, and we've shifted location and orientation of everything in it to make it a nicer space than it was.

Now the office has a closet (right) and a window-seat (left) for storage, and it still has a nice big window to look out on the side yard. I imagine some little girl sitting on the window seat with a favorite book taking her off to some imaginary land. That's what I'd do there.

We are told the house will be done in February. We'll see.

This Old House, Part 4

O.K., so now it is Tuesday and no work has been done on the kitchen since Saturday. After a brief panic, the fluorescent lights went in and my husband says we are the only house in Woodland Hills which can be seen from space. Visit his blog and see what else he's saying.

Rumor has it they've moved the pipes in the way of my window, so I will get the window into the living room. I'll believe it when I see it.

Meanwhile, I can use the sink, which is only temporarily hooked up. The counter was cut wrong and is 3/4" too short. Bill is having it recut. The sink and fixtures look great and I love having a spray hose. Someday I'll get to use it.

This Old House, Part 3

Victory can be so short-lived. Len agreed to the window to the living room and we open the wall to discover a pipe and a supporting beam in the friggin' way. Looks like the end of that plan, much to my disappointment.

For a brief point, it looked like we were back to track lighting again for the kitchen, but I think we dodged that bullet. Len got carried away with the decision to go fluorescent and bought units which were in frames that matched the spice rack Bill put in last fall. I had really expected him to go out and buy utilitarian versions which would permit Bill to do whatever needed to be done to make them work. My big concern was the mounting, but I figured Bill could insert cross-supports if necessary. Well, the expensive units Len bought have a box which needs to go on top and would normally be set into a dropped ceiling, which we don't have. Sigh. But Bill's figured out a work around, after the passing panic that they needed to go back to Lowe's.

The new fan/light combination is very bright.

I wonder if I will have a sink again by the end of the day.

This Old House, Part 2

After reading my brilliant blog, I guess, the spousal unit relented and is willing to permit Bill to open a window over the sink into the living room. Hooray!

I can't believe how much bigger the kitchen looked with the cabinets out. It still looks pretty good with no top cabinets installed yet. My friend Karen and I discussed this and she said that she realized even tiny British kitchens looked large because they did not have upper cabinets. I need the storage space, so that is definitely NOT an option.

We went to the Lamps 'R' Us last night and almost immediately agreed on the new fan for the living room which has lights (the current one does not.) It will go over the area where we have our dining table. Then we spent a hour trying to figure out a solution to the problem with lighting the kitchen.

We didn't have enough head room for hanging lights that would offer diffusion (the high point of the exposed rafters is in the living room and reaches to a 12' or so point.) The track lighting just doesn't light evenly enough and is pretty warm once you get enough units in to light the room. Eventually, we gave up and went on to Lowe's to see what they had to offer.

I decided to look in the kitchen area of the store when inspiration hit near the counter samples: large fluorescent units which can fit between the rafters. So we'll put 2 2' x 4' daylight balanced units in and that gives me skylight without skylights. Len immediately agreed that was genius and when we got home, we chose the two spots for installation. They should also be a lot easier to keep clean than the track lighting has been.

The elves will be very busy today. Bill says he has to get the job finished so he can go on to other work.

This Old House

My kitchen is the the back yard. And the side yard. And the garage. And the living room. And my office.

After a six-month wait, the handyman finally arrived with my new kitchen cabinets and:

1. I can't have the low to the floor toe-kick drawers because the support wall won't support the unit and now he's got to drill through the cabinets into the slab--no room for low to floor kick drawers.

2. I won't have two pull-out cutting boards because he missed that in the discussions. THAT I know we talked about--even Len remembered it. We will have one large one now, and possibly a smaller one right next to the range in the top of the smaller cabinet that will hold drawers there.

3. Len won't let me have a window over the sink into the living room. I gave up on my hopes to have it open under the upper cabinets into the living room and have a dining counter on the living room side where our ugly, big-but-not-big-enough dining room table sits (which we almost never use because Len's never met a surface he doesn't insist on covering with stuff.) But I did hope he would see reason and logic and let me open up the window over the sink. I HATE standing at the sink looking at a wall. It is so friggin' claustrophobic. I love having a sink that has a window looking outside, but we can't reconfigure the kitchen to do that, at least not without tens of thousands of dollars in plumbing work and a long construction period. Besides, Len would never stand for it. So, I will continue to stare at a wall. In my house in Virginia, I looked out into the front yard and the street. Where I grew up, we looked into the back yard, as did my grandmother's kitchen. This would be so much more cheerful. I guess he doesn't mind because boys look at the wall when they use a urinal. They like the comfort of boundaries. Very limiting. He won't even let us put it in with shutters, so he can close the window if it makes him feel more comfortable. You'd think he'd like to be able to watch TV while he does the dishes (the window would give a clear view through to the televisions, but no. Since Bill has to take down the sheet rock to make way for additional support and to enclose wires, this modification is a no-brainer and would definitely increase the value of the house. No woman would have bought the house we live in because of the way the kitchen is laid out.

The other problem with our kitchen is that it is very dark. It is lit by two track-lights, a small florescent over the sink, and an inefficient sconce in the corner by the old oven (it still works, and isn't that old, but I got my new range with a HUGE oven for Thanksgiving), but if you open one of the upper cabinets there, it blocks the light! So I will get to look at new kitchen lighting and a light for over the dining room area tonight after work. Bill wants to add skylights, but that doesn't add light at night, when I am most likely to be in the kitchen. I'd like a skylight over my bed, but I don't need one in the kitchen. I've heard they are prone to leak, anyway.

With the new cabinets, I'll be able to get my Kitchen-Aid mixer on the counter-top (the old upper cabinets were a tad too low for it to fit.) And I should have enough room for my glassware. If only we could get rid of more coffee cups.