Happy Halloween!

Mmmm...

Apparently Trader Joe's has it's own reserve wines (kinda like Charles Shaw), but instead of $3, its about $8 I believe... probably the cheapest Pinot Noir I've ever found, and I have to say it's better than I thought it would be. Perfect for a night at home carving my pumpkin...

end of the season

Harvested this last bounty of tomatoes from our yard this week just as the rains came in. Man we lucked out this year... for how bad the weather was this summer, we sure seemed to do well with our tomatoes and other vegetable/herbs.

I also learned a trick last year... you harvest all the remaining tomatoes at the end of the year (before it gets really cold and rainy) even the green ones. Put the green ones in a couple pieces of newspaper wrapped up... and they end up turning red and ripe also!

Basement Subfloor

Now that all our insulation is in, the crawl space is finished, and the last bits of the furnace are done... its on to the next project, putting in our new subfloor. This layer of floor will go down on top of the concrete, and provide a layer between that and the future carpet we will be putting down.

We are also using a cool product (I actually heard of it while watching various DIY shows on HGTV...and then we checked it out and bought it at Home Depot) called DRIcore. It comes in square panels which we can snap together, and has plastic with ridges on the bottom of it (this is in case any moisture gets in, it wont get up to our floor/carpet, and can drain under our subfloor). We thought this would be a great extra precaution for our basement just in case there are ever moisture problems in the future.

We got started on it this last weekend, and its going pretty quickly. I think it will just take another weekend to get it done. (fingers crossed)

And we have heat

After having our furnace replaced a few months ago, we now finally have heat! We technically could have turned it on long ago, but there were a couple projects we wanted to finish first and it hadn't really been cold so there was no need. The basement crawlspace door (leading under our front porch) needed to have a new door built around it and insulated... no point in turning our heat on if it would all just flow right outside through that).

We also had to have the final duct work finished (which wasn't done before since we had to rebuild the stairs first, as that ductwork comes upstairs from up under the staircase). The stairs were finished about a month ago, and so we scheduled the guy that did our furnace and duct work originally and he came in this week and it all got done!  P.S. we used James Heating & More (he is a local guy in West Seattle) and he was great... very nice and easy to work with, and we felt very fairly priced.

The last week it turned a bit chilly, nothing we couldn't handle... but it is so nice to have heat again and know we will be warm and cozy (and energy efficient) this winter!



Matt after a long day working on the basement

New crawlspace door and insulation

It even has a lock... nothing is getting in here. =)

Here is the new railing/half wall around the staircase upstairs, with final duct work put in. Our house/furnace will now circulate air throughout the upstairs & downstairs (before there was only an air in-take vent in our basement, so the furnace was just pulling air in from there and then circulating that throughout the house), which will keep it even warmer & more efficient

Seasonal decor makes me happy

Like flowers, I have a soft spot for pumpkins. In fact I have to restrain myself or I would buy one everytime I see them at the store. When they first show up at our neighborhood vegetable stand (Tony's) it makes me just giddy. And when I found some of the really cool "Harvest Pumpkins" (the only way I can describe them is they look like heirloom tomatoes kind of) at Trader Joe's I went about crazy. I'm limiting myself this year to 2 large pumpkins on the porch this year, and a small one with a green gord as centerpieces on our table.

"Flowers always make people better, happier, and more helpful; they are sunshine, food and medicine for the soul."  ––Luther Burbank

(ok, so I found this quote on the Trader Joe's website and stole it. I think its great though and expresses my love for flowers and other seasonal arrangements!)

Structural upgrades

This is a bit delayed, but wanted to share a picture before this all gets covered up with walls. Once the basement was demolished down to the structure and concrete, we realized we needed to do some structural upgrades to the house before we could tear out some of the walls that we wanted to.

One large beam for example... at one point had large cuts made through it (we think there may have been duct work going through there at one point, but not anymore). This was pretty much fine since there was a wall under it supporting the beam... but since we wanted to tear out that wall and make the room larger we needed to do something. We could've replaced the whole beam, but that would have gotten expensive quickly. So Matt talked to some of his friends (convenient when you have friends that are engineers) and they decided if we added support on each side of the beam and bolted it together this would do the trick. We had a few other places throughout the basement we did similar things like this as well, but this was the big one.

Picture of the beam afterwards, with added support on each side and all attached together with some huge 12 inch long bolts.

Seeing Pink

I had Columbus day off as a holiday from work last week, and spent the day finishing most of the insulation downstairs.... And now the basement is all insulated! Matt went through and used cans of simple spray foam to fill in any larger cracks, and now all that is really left is to tape the seams.

This was a surprisingly easy project! I mean, it still took time (maybe 2 full weekend days and a few week nights finishing up and doing the spray foam), but it was a pretty simple and low stress step that I'm glad we did ourselves.

Here were the basics. We are by no means experts, but these are the steps we took from the research we did reading up on the product and from asking folks at Home Depot.

1. Cleaned the cement walls of dust and debris (used our broom and swept them really well to get rid of cobwebs, dirt, concrete dust, etc).
2. Measured each section of wall from floor to the top of the wall (it varied by a few inches around the house since our house is so old and its settled and some additions had been made to the house)
3. Marked these measurements on the the large pieces of hard insulation, cut them with a simple razor blade, snapped them apart.
4. Applied ample adhesive to the backs on the insulation pieces (I think we went through about 20-25 tubes of it... there should be a picture of the type we used in a previous post)
5. Put the pieces up and pushed them tight to the wall to make sure they were secure.
6. Used spray foam to fill larger cracks around the crawl space and on the top of the walls (where there are spaces by our wood beams).
7. Tape the remaining seams between each piece of hard insulation to prevent moisture coming through from the cement walls.

Woo hoo. On to the subfloor next....

The happiest place on earth

We went over to Pullman this year for homecoming! Both Matt and I have not been back in 3-4 years, and I was really looking forward to it. We of course had to hit up all our old haunts, and we packed a ton into 2 1/2 days.

Day one included dinner at Rancho (our favorite mexican restaurant in Pullman), and then drinks at Rico's across the street. I also went over to the AXO house to meet with the other alums and see the new girls in the house. Afterwards we took a walk up on campus to see all that was new, lots of upgrades the last few years it seems to the CUB and Bookie.

Day two... we got up early (to Matt's dismay) so that I could make sure we got a table at our favorite bar in town, The Coug. First we went over to Crimson and Grey to check out the new coug gear, and I bought a flag for the front of our house to put up on football saturdays. We then headed over to Daily Grind for coffee.... and then got our spot at the Coug at 10am. The whole day was a blast, we met up with friends to Tailgate later, ran into some old friends at the game, and enjoyed being back at good old WSU. We ended the day over in Moscow at another favorite mexican restaurant with a big group of friends, and then after attempting the crazy bars... headed back to Kirstin and Tim's house for board games.

Day three.... we hit up yet another restaurant, Emerald! This was our favorite chinese place in college, and when Matt and I first started dating we went there often. And then... back on the road for 5 hours. The drive was worth it though and I'm so glad we went back, definitley something we'll have to do every couple years.

A few random pictures below... mostly from the road while I was bored.

A new addition to the scenery on the drive through Eastern Washington. Cool to see all the wind farms creating engergy. 

Chelan weekend

A few pictures from my weekend away with some of my favorite girlfriends from college. We went the first weekend of October which was "crush" weekend... although we never saw any grapes being crushed, maybe we didn't go to the right wineries, haha. We had a great time though, it's great getting together with friends who you may not see often... but when you do it's like no time has passed at all. We just laughed all weekend.

Checking out some cute decorations for sale at a winery.

Tsillan Cellars. We took a tractor ride tour of the vineyards, and even got to eat some grapes right off the vines. Super fun way to learn about all the different types of wine they make there.

At dinner, right before ...or maybe after we did "Saki bombs" with our chef. =)

More on the stairs...

We finally had our new stairs built this last week, we actually hired someone to do this, rather than spending 3 or 4 weekends of our own trying to do it ourselves.... and probably ending up with crooked stairs. =)

Pretty excited to have these in... even though they dont have all the finishings yet (they'll be carpeted once we get to that point in the basement and carpet the downstairs also).... they are great. We made them wider and deeper than the old stairs, so they aren't so steep going down the stairs. And like I've mentioned before, they are now facing the opposite direction going downstairs and now the bottom of the stairs will be into the living room in the basement rather than the hallway by the bathroom.

Matt removing the railing around the old stairs, and taking out the electrical.

Brand new stairs

I just can't wait...

...to pick out carpet and paint and decorations for the basement.

I'm constantly looking in magazines. Home remodel magazines, fashion magazines, fancy style and design magazines, oh and of course every single DIY blog that my friends pass along to me. And they all give me so many ideas its almost overwhelming! I just keep clipping things out though and putting them in a folder, and it will be so exciting the day when the drywall is in, we have electrical, and the design decisions really get to begin.

I keep telling myself to chill out and worry about finishing our insulation, walls, and electrical work before I should focus on colors and design. Which truly will be a couple months away. But all I can do is dream about light fixtures and the finishing details.... Ahhhhh soon enough. =)