Well, Colin’s house (the Badship), is basically ready to sell, as of a couple of weeks ago. We were starting to believe that it would never happen, but indeed it did. Here are some pictures of the finished product. Note the:
New inside paint
New carpet
New vinyl
New roof
New gutters
Landscaped front
Painted porch and deck
Pressure washed outside
Cleaned up everything
Cleared out everything
A million little details that took 90% of the time
So, it’s all done. Disappointingly, when we got together with our real estate agent, we learned that the market is so slow that it doesn’t make any sense to put it on now. Houses are sitting for months. Since there is more of a surge of buyers in September, we are going to wait to put it on the market then, so that it doesn’t look “stale” when the buyers come around.
So, the ordeal isn’t done yet, but at least it’s not taking up all of our spare time anymore. If we’d known how much work getting that house together was going to be, I don’t know if we ever would’ve got up the gumption to start, so I’m kind of glad we didn’t know.
Losing steam and starting to get a bit frustrated with all of the endless projects over at the Badship. Frankly, part of the problem is that there is really little left for us to do over there. Most of what’s left are things other people are doing.
The biggest is that a new roof is getting put on the house. We’re in the very first stage of this, trying to arrange for roofers to come over and give us estimates. It’s an old, crumbling, cedar shake roof, getting replaced with composite.
The other last big thing is the carpeting of most of the house, and linoleum in the kitchen. This should have been done by now, but there have been a frustrating series of delays. Right now we’re in a 2-week backorder period. Sigh.
Then there are a list of other things our awesome painter Bobak is going to be doing – repair some broken window panes, fix up some rotting and falling-through boards in the back deck, paint the back desk, paint the floor of the front porch, fix up the gutters. And then there are runs to various places to drop things up that Owen is taking care of (clean wood run, metal run, concrete run, hazardous run).
After all THAT is said and done, we probably have a good solid day or weekend to do the last of the cleaning to get ready for putting on the market. It’s starting to feel like we’ll never get there!
So, we’ve turned our focus to unpacking. Which is also slow going. I can’t understand how there can still be so many boxes left!
And we’re intermingling with things that we CAN make progress on, like weeding and mulching the back garden. And yesterday, we pulled out our stove and discovered the corner to replace a shorted-out piece of stove wire, and we discovered where a mouse had been hiding to come up and eat scraps from inside of our stove top, and to cover the entire area with the smell of mouse poop/pee. The funny part is that Sage had been pretty obsessed with a dead end corner by her cat dishes recently, and we thought she was losing it. When really, it was on the other side of the dead end wall where the mouse was hiding! The mouse was so fat and slow by the time we chased it out, we thought that for sure Sage would make short work of it, but somehow she lost it. So we’re off to buy a mouse trap today. Anyway, cleaning out mouse poop and having a stove element that works again were an accomplishment. We take ‘em where we can get ‘em.
I love long weekends. We had a great, productive one, here at the Badship and Dinghy.
We started events off with a lovely family dinner in our actual dining room. We had Justine in from Portland, Noah in from Silverdale, Mum in from Issaquah, and the whole Bru family. What fun.
And I must include a video showing Colin telling Flynn his new favorite joke. This one’s been doing the trick now for a few weeks, and can sometimes cause Flynn to laugh so hard he almost chokes.
The big advance on Friday was that Flynn started telling the joke himself, with a slight variation. While Colin’s joke goes “Bah!”, Flynn’s goes “Dah!” At first we weren’t sure if Flynn was really telling the joke, but it sure seemed like it. He would look right at you, say “Dah!” and then stare pointedly at you, waiting for you to laugh.
Saturday and Sunday were major Badship working days. As he did when we were moving, Noah stayed with us and helped us out for the full two days! He was amazing. It made a huge difference to have him there, and we got an amazing amount of work done.
Saturday was sunny, so we dedicated to the day to the backyard. I won’t go into details, but the yard had basically done whatever it pleased for years, so it took quite an effort to get it under control. We couldn’t believe it, but with lots of back-breaking labor and a lot of yard implements, we managed the whole back yard in a day. Noah was totally instrumental in that. Witness some before and after pictures.
Before:
After:
Sunday it rained, so that made it basically an inside day. We got a ton of stuff done. Notably, 1) we thoroughly cleaned the dreaded Badship basement bathroom, where many have feared to tread. What a difference. It’s still not the greatest bathroom, but not scary anymore. Noah cleaned the stove top until it gleamed. Colin vacuumed the cobwebs full of sawdust from the basement ceiling. It may not sound like a big deal, but picture yourself stretching your arms over your head for several hours with sawdust and cobwebs falling in your face. Noah and I cleaned out the side yard, including dredging a little pond full of muck-covered rocks, washing everything out and putting it all back together.
All this work may not sound like much fun, but it is actually pretty great in a lot of ways. We punctuate the time with eating out and movies, getting completely exhausted in between, each time.
One of the lessons I’m trying to take from all of these projects is that projects are feasible. Neither Colin nor I figured that we would really be able to clear out the back yard without professional help. And it may not look spectacular or artistic, but we cleared it out with the labor of our own (and Noah’s) brows. Lots of the projects that seem beyond my grasp at home probably really are doable if I put my mind and a good chunk of time to them. All day is a long time, but it’s just all day.
I exercised this lesson on Monday. I’d been basically avoiding going out in the back yard, because of the terrible sight of the weeds that had taken over. But after all of the other projects we’ve tackled lately, I just went out there and pulled a bunch of them. And that’s all there was to it. Action just had to be taken; not such a big deal.
Last Sunday was the day we were supposed to work on the back yard at the Badship, but it was cold and rainy when we got up, and it stayed cold and rainy the whole day. So we decided it was a sign that it was a good unpacking day. We made it a goal this week to have one room – the dining room to be – cleared for our last-Friday-of-the-month family dinner. And we’ve done it! It was mostly by moving boxes and things to other place, but we have a room with a dining table set up, chairs around it, and we’ll all be able to sit together for family dinner. Everyone is going to make it this month, including Justine, who is visiting from Portland. So we’ll be a merry crew of 7 adults, 1 Flynn, and 1 Sagie-pants.
The Dinghy has actually undergone a lot of change in the last few months.
1) It all started when we bought a new bed, which wouldn’t fit into the attic bedroom (that’s the short version of the story). So, we moved the bedroom into the basement room that used to be the guest room. And the guest room got moved to the attic.
2) We were also quickly outgrowing the tiny office on the first floor. It was find to have a visiting guest in, but for two full-time computer nerds, it was just too small. So we moved the office down into the “den” or TV room. Now the room goes computer, computer, TV.
3) We recently replaced Colin’s computer with a mega-computer that is not only Colin’s main computer, but also the server for all of our websites, our local backup, and a music repository. We’re burning all of our disks to the computer, and we have a “squeezebox” and speakers set up in the living room as our main stereo. The CDs get played via the wireless from the computer in the basement. This means that I had to move my old 1980s stereo, and I put it in the kitchen temporarily.
4) Moving our office downstairs meant that we needed a place to put all of our microscopes and other mycology equipment and books. We moved all of this stuff into a corner in the basement by the washer and drier. It actually fits pretty well there, and there goes about the last unused corner of the house.
5) Moving our office downstairs also freed up the little sewing-room-sized room that was serving as the office. This, we have set up as the library. Rather, we have set up some bookshelves, and when it has books on the shelves, it will be a library. I think it’ll be really neat when it’s all set up. I put one of my Grandpa’s old chairs in there, and it reminds me of the tiny study he had at his W 85th St apartment. It reminds me of Grandpa.
We’re moving Colin in with me! Well, actually he’s been moving in with me for a couple of months now. Well, actually, he’s been living at my house for quite a while, and we’re just in the past couple of months getting around to getting his Stuff over from the Badship (nickname for his house) to the Dinghy (nickname for my house) and making the Dinghy ours communally.
Here’s the plan:
Move Colin to the Dinghy – check
Help Alissa get her Stuff and move it up to her new life in Port Townsend – check
Pack up Colin’s stuff from the Badship – almost all done
Pack up Owen’s tools and other stuff and find a new home for it – mostly done
Take loads and loads and unbelievable loads of stuff to Goodwill – mostly done
Take loads and loads of stuff to the dump – still in progress
Clean up the Badship and get it ready to sell – hella work, still in progress, but starting to look nice
Unpack Colin into the Dinghy, so we’re both home! – still got a bunch to do here
Whew! Every weekend, and some of the week, we work on work on bullet points above. Every day there is still more to do.
This weekend so far, we cleared out a room behind the outside of the house and took a load to hazardous. I always like going to the hazardous waste center. There’s something just a little off and wonderful about the people that work there. They’re dealing with all of the stuff that people accumulate that is just too dangerous to throw in the dump. They have to deal with mystery jars that say “cashews”, and have a bunch of residue in the bottom that might be cashew juice, but might just as well be paint thinner. They have to be scientists and risk-takers, and they have to wear practically full-body armor in all weather.
We also went to Home Depot and picked out some carpet for most of the house and linoleum for the kicthen. The inside of the house is almost done being painted, and it’s starting to look really nice.
Tomorrow, we start in on the back yard. By putting ads on Craigslist and a sign out on the street, we’ve gotten people to come and take most of the wood left over from the approximately 6 trees that the city cut down from Colin’s back yard. There are still a bunch of huge rounds of Cottonwood back there, and we’ve got to stack them or something. We’ve gotta get rid of a shed of junk, weed whack, and I’m not sure what else. Somehow make it not look like a jungle.
Well, that’s just a small taste of what I’m up to these days. My brain is full of the list of things to be done and things we have still to do, but I’ll spare you all that :).
