Two weeks ago the game room was officially broken in by playing “The Captain is Dead”. Or almost. The game room has a set of shelves for board games on one side, and puzzles on the other. I’d been too busy to do any puzzles before, but I finally did today.
I always love puzzles that don’t have regular pieces where every piece is the same. I much prefer interesting shapes. Sunsout is one of my favorite brands even though it has the worst puzzles. The puzzles aren’t well cut. The paper rips from the back. There is cardboard dust everywhere. But their pieces are not square and much more fun to put together.
This puzzle was a decent compromise.
Though the shapes if this puzzle aren’t as interesting as some of the Sunsout pieces, they are at least fairly unique and the pieces don’t fit together in a square grid. They are also very well cut and very little cardboard dust.
Even though we have moved into the house, we have still been busy finishing up turning the house into a home.
Lets start outside. They still need to landscape the front yard and put another layer of pavement on the driveway; for now, they have taken the next step by installing our walkway.
Here are two pictures of the walkway, one from each direction. The first picture was taken while the stones were wet and the second taken a day later when they were dry, which is why they look different. The paving stones are blue mist granite, the same as the front stoop.
Do you see that lonely rock along the path. We will actually have six rocks placed next to the path. In fact, earlier in the week, Daphne visited the landscaping company’s rock pile to pick out the rocks she wanted.
Also outside, Daphne has been doing more planting. Here is the area around the backup generator (which has still not turned on for its weekly lubrication run).
To the left is a coral honeysuckle, near the red flag are wild strawberries, around the soaker hose are winterberries, and way in the back are some sedge.
Last week we have the construction team address some things on the punch list. We finally got the screens installed on the porch. Here is a picture of them, although the screens are intentionally almost invisible (even if I was able to get the camera to focus on them).
We also got door stops installed everywhere. Here is an example from the guest bathroom.
The master bathroom door no longer squeaks and the master shower no longer leaks in the basement. The latter was because the plumber over tightened the plug in the trap and it was cracked.
Lots of furniture has arrived and been assembled and placed. Here is the south side of the game room, which is now a reading corner.
On the second floor, we just got the table for the family room delivered. I call this the “Space Alert” table. Space Alert is a cooperative board game that is quite loud when it is played, so we force the players to use the second floor.
Here is another angle on the second floor family room. The couch is now usable. When the movers moved the couch from our old home, they removed the center leg and when they carried it upstairs, they did not reattach that leg. After a few phone calls, they found the leg (it was not in our house), brought it over and installed it so now the couch is usable (although its is far enough from the window that you do not really get a good view when you sit down).
The guest bedroom has been set up. All of the furniture is from our old house, except for the bed frames. That chair does have a great view.
And that’s my update. We are still hanging pictures on the wall. And I still need to finish unpacking and sorting the tool bench in the basement. We are still waiting for the coffee table for the living room, and we are about to order some blinds for the bathroom windows.
I have added another two months worth of progress pictures to the photo timeline of the house construction. If you have only occasionally been following the progress, that page is a great way to get the whole story in a single sequence of images.
I have added a page that includes historical documents about the original house. These were submitted to the town during the process of getting a demolition permit.
We got the last batch of furniture from Cherrystones this morning. Two pieces were our old desks which had been refinished. Daphne’s old desk went into the family room and my old desk is now in the corner of the guest bedroom.
If you look closely at the side of the desk you will see that we screwed up. The electrical (and Ethernet) outlets were too close to the corner to be accessible when the desk was placed. So the furniture installers had to cut holes.
But the star of the show is out new cabinet that divides the dining room from the living room. This piece has drawers, which will be my “desk” drawers since my desk is no longer close to the tall cabinets on the far side of the living room.
If you look closely, you will see wheels under the cabinets. The two halves of the cabinets can be separated and wheeled away if we want more space for parties. Separating them does require removing some drawers and using an Allen wrench, but it is doable.
The other thing you may notice is that the wood is lighter than a lot of our other cheery furniture, especially the chairs and table behind it. This is simply because it has not aged in the light. Our dining room set is 16 years old and has seen plenty of aging sunlight. The new cabinet just needs some time to catch up.
Also, last week we got our porch furniture delivered. Here is one side of the porch with the new couch and rocking/swiveling chair. The is a second chair on the other side of the porch (not in the picture).
No screen on the porch yet. But they are sitting in the garage and will be installed this coming Monday.
Speaking of Monday, the landscaper returns next week to do the walk and front yard, although not the plantings yet. We want a native meadow, but it is currently impossible to get seeds for it, so we may be forced to put down seed instead. However, there are lawn watering restrictions in place so we may have to wait until spring. The porta-potty was delivered late last week for the workers. Its sitting on the side of the garage, out of the way.
View from the porch this morning. The screens get added to the porch next week, so I may not get a chance to take such an unobstructed picture again (although the view from the deck is almost as good).
This picture is unmodified, straight from my phone.
I could commute to work by bicycle from my old house. The whole trip was 8.5 miles, of which 3 miles of which were on the Minuteman Bike Path. The whole trip, home to work, was 269 feet of elevation up and only 66 feet down. So while there were hills (one bad one in particular), there were no unnecessary hills.
Today I tried to commute to work by bike from my new house. The route recommended by Google was also around 8.5 miles, however, there was 380 feet of elevation gain and 290 feet of elevation loss. This means lots of hills, including two really bad ones. And the whole route was along a busy street without a shoulder.
Here is the elevation profile from my old house.
And here is the route I tried this morning from my new house. The gray lines are alternate routes. That first hill was a killer, but it was the last two hills that really did me in since I was pretty tired by then. Total uphill — 384 feet.
On the way home, I tried a different route that was longer, but less hilly. If I reverse that route, you can see that it will only have 207 feet of elevation gain, but it will be a half mile longer. And there is still a steep hill at the end.
I suspect that I will still commute to work, but less frequently. Probably once a week until it gets too dark in the morning to travel safely.
It has been almost two weeks in the new house. We are mostly unpacked and I have a few pictures for you.
First, on Sunday evening we played the first game on our new gaming table in our new gaming room in our new house. We did not finish (The Captain is Dead), but we can leave it set up for the next time since we no longer have to game on the same table we use for meals.
When our old next door neighbors came to visit, they insisted that we post a picture of the Instant-Pot corner, which is the North wall of the dining room. These Instant-Pots used to be spread around our first floor in the old house.
On Sunday, we went kayaking on the river once the rain stopped. But more importantly, we started working on unpacking and arraigning the basement. Here are three basement progress pictures. The area in last picture used to be filled with boxes to unpack.
Our poor dragon, which used to live on top of our living room cabinets, needs to be refinished. The two lonely boxes in the above picture need to wait for another piece of furniture to be delivered in a week.
Anyway, the house is livable, but there is still work to be done. For one thing, the front walkway needs to be added, and the front yard needs to be landscaped.
The porch is stilling missing screens — they should arrive this week. The master bathroom door still squeaks and needs some shims under its hinges. And the deadbolt in one of our outside doors can not be closed (or opened) using a key. Two cabinets need to have a fixed shelf removed so they can be used to store brooms. And there is some other minor stuff awaiting attention.
Anyway, I will keep up with updates, but they may be less frequent. At some point, I will summarize the whole build and probably switch the focus of this website.
We have been living in the house for 5 days now. The last 5 days were filled with unpacking, breaking down boxes, putting things away, and doing some minor installations (like mounting my monitor on an arm).
I have pictures for you. Lets start with the game room. The games and puzzles have been unpacked but not organized. We have a brand new gaming table as well.
Also in the game room, we have installed a Murphy bed and cabinets above it where we will store the party chairs and bedding for the Murphy bed. The bed is partially open so you can see it.
In the game room, we are stacking all the boxes that did not come from our moving company, sorted by size.
The boxes from our moving company that have been emptied are in the living room, also sorted by size.
Speaking of living room, we now have furniture.
We are missing one critical piece of custom furniture that is still being built and will arrive in 2 weeks. In its place, we have four boxes with a grey blanket over them. In front of the fake furniture, you can see the remaining boxes for the living room that have to be unpacked. In the background is our dining room table, freshly refinished.
The second floor has a bunch of boxes yet to be unpacked. We are also missing a table (not yet purchased) that will go with the chairs stacked at the right.
It’s the basement which is a real mess right now. Almost nothing has been put away and things are stacked in a couple of different piles.
In the picture below you can see our stuffed dragon, which normally goes on top of the cabinets in the living room, but needs to be refinished.
The movers used paper to wrap everything when they packed us up. Once we unpacked, we straightened out all that paper so it would take less space. Here is all the paper from the boxes we unpacked so far.
This all gets recycled and friends of ours have allowed us to fill their recycle bins to try to get rid of it.
Finally, I leave you with this early morning picture of the river from our living room.
