Welcome to our blog. We'll be writing about the highs and lows of remodeling our first home.
I'll start with a overview of the past year and a half.

June 2004- Terry decided to jump into the real estate market and buy a fixer upper. We reluctantly started looking outside of Seattle knowing that Seattle was way out of our price range. We wanted an old neighborhood experience like our beloved Wallingford and Fremont with its Craftman homes and paved sidewalks. I wanted space for a garden. Terry wanted a yard, a garage, a fireplace and a manageable commute. We discovered the beautiful neighborhoods of North Tacoma. With the advent of the Sounder Commuter Train to Seattle, we found that Tacoma had everything we were looking for.

Terry's patient and good-humored real-estate agent, Ryan, found a perfect fixer-upper opportunity. A 1920 Craftsman kit home. It was a dark drizzly evening in June and we raced down to Tacoma to see it. It was creepy, dirty, smelled of old dust, had 1950's paint inside, and had most of its windows painted shut. It was still filled with the former owners' things. They had apparantly been from the generation that never threw anything away. There was scrap wood and old fishing stuff piled up everywhere in the yard. Terry immediately thought "cool free kindling for the fireplace." I liked the corner lot that had great Southern and Western Exposure. I saw that a Wisteria vine was trained onto the front porch and thought it was a good omen (a gardener had lived here.) We recognized the charming craftsman features and its potential for restoration. Terry made an offer. In mid-July he became the proud owner of his first house. He got the keys and immediately ripped out the nasty old carpet to expose the old fir floors.

The first 6 weekends were spent making the house ready to move into. This involved removing the caulked on storm windows(according to the neighbor- they had been on for more than 30 years!!!), learning to replace copper pipes (the shower hardly had any hot water due to corrosion in the pipes), pulling carpet tack strips out of the wood floor, setting up appliances, washing down all the surfaces, painting the bedroom and bathroom, and getting the fireplace fixed.

Terry moved into the house in late August and life was never the same. No longer did we have free weekends to go play in the mountains or run around town, suddenly all our weekends were devoted to giving this old house a new life.

The paint in the house was absolutely awful. The living room, dining room, and hallway were all turquoise. This included the trim, radiators, doors, and windows. The kitchen and breakfast nook were all bright yellow including cabinetry and ceilings. One bedroom was all blue and the other was all pink (with pink curtains also). It was hideous and the old paint smelled like 50 years of dust and dander. We gradually got the bedrooms, nook, and kitchen cabinets painted.

Fall 2004- our first load of firewood (my first experience chopping and stacking), tearing down a old rickety shed extension, trapping a squirrel in the attic, laying black plastic over a bank of Hypericum (a hard to exterminate groundcover), re-painting the bedroom (Terry didn't like my choice of color), many trips to Lowes, and countless hours dreaming up ideas.




Winter 2004/2005- We got a break from the house by going to Alabama for Christmas. It was a wonderful trip- I got to meet Terry's family and we got to see the Gulf Coast and New Orleans before Katrina. After our return we started browsing the Humane Society for a dog. Terry has wanted a dog ever since he left home for college. He finally had a home and a yard. We put up a fence in the back yard in anticipation. Mid- January 2005 he met "Oso" and instantly knew he would be a good dog. He called me and we ran down that afternoon after work to pick him up. It was so exciting to load him up and bring him home (on the way we had to stop at PetSmart and buy a ton of stuff, of course). We let him scope out the house and he immediately thought the couch was his (big no no).

Suddenly the house was not such a high priority- now there was a special 4 year old in our life. I spent more time down in Tacoma to be with him (and withTerry too). Terry found Oso to be quite needy and we thought it would be good to get another dog to be his buddy. In the Spring, we took a trip to Las Vegas and after we returned we started visiting the humane society again. We wanted a medium sized dog and found a 7 month old Rotty/Lab mix. He ended up being a large dog too. So, the Spring months were spent tearing down an old fence and extending the dog fence, removing the black plastic over the Hypericum (rats were living under it), removing our compost pile and bird feeders (rats and mice were feasting), and enjoying the dogs (dogs parks and hikes).

Late April and May 2005 were spent trying to prepare for Terry's parents to visit in June. We started sheetrocking the ceiling of the dining room. That was a pain and was a real test. (We didn't know we should have rented a drywall lift.) By the end of the day I wanted to kill him. Progress was really slow and we realized that the dining room would not get finished for the visit. We needed to get the guest bedroom furnished and the house cleaned. We also needed a higher fence and a larger area for the dogs to run.

During this time Oso also fell ill. He stopped eating and drinking and was getting weaker. He had always been a bit lethargic, but we thought it was from a lack of exercise with his previous family. He was put into the Pet ER. After a few days and many tests we found that he had Addison's Disease. He was put on the correct meds and was better than ever. His illness put life into perspective. We decided not to kill ourselves over the house. We bought him fancy food. For a couple months we fed him the raw food diet. Terry would saute ground buffalo meat to add to his high protein kibble. I put in my notice at my job that May. I knew that I was ready to move into the house and also my brother/roomate was moving out into his first house in June also. I spent June preparing for the move and we also got some of the fence posts dug in. Terry also got his first lawnmower. The weeds were a foot high and going to seed.

Terry's parents came in late June and we had a great time showing them around. They had lots of wise advice for us and even helped Terry put up a the larger dog fence. They also were here to help us harvest our Blackberries.
The Summer went by very quickly. We abandoned the dining room project to take advantage of the nice weather to tackle cleaning out the shed and painting the exterior. The shed project was pretty gross. Racoons had been using it for their bathroom for years. A lot of the kindling was encrusted in coon crap. We had to dispose of two-thirds of it.

The exterior painting project was quite the marathon. We spent many weeks (most of July and early August) preparing for it. There was so much scrapping and sanding to do. I experimented with paint strippers (very messy). We replaced a couple sections of broken shakes. In August, the weather was starting to change and the big push happened. We got the paint and spent a very long day priming and painting the house. The day started with the rented sprayer malfunctioning and shooting paint about 20 feet across the backyard; splattering the dogs and the picnic table (The dogs were spotted for a couple weeks until we cut out the paint). We had to run back to the store and get another one. (Nothing ever goes smoothly- despite our best intentions.) We spent the next several days working on the trim painting. It was a huge relief to get it done. We kept going across the street to enjoy it.


We did take some time to relax during the Summer, we went camping with the dogs near Leavenworth- they loved it as much as we did. They really liked sleeping in the tent with us. Also, in late August my brother got married.

In September, I cleaned up the front beds and finally got to put some of my plants in the ground. We also got back to working on the dining room. My next entry will pick it up there.