I have added a page that includes historical documents about the original house.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.
Two pictures from along Sudbury Road from my morning walk.
This first picture is actually someone’s driveway, with a deer giving me the eye.
And this picture shows our local herd of cattle who graze on Concord owned land at along Sudbury Road near Route 2.
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.
Yesterday the movers came and took everything to the new house. They reassembled any furniture they disassembled, but most of what they packed stayed in boxes. And boy, are there a lot of boxes. It will take us quite a while to unpack, and in the meantime we are having trouble finding things we need right away. (Where is the box cutter packed?)
Our computers are set up on our old desks, which will be replaced with new desks tomorrow. The old ones will go back to Cherrystones to be refinished and then they will be returned to be put in other rooms. We had to have the computers set up so we could connect to our new Sonos system and our new Unify Protect system. But also so we could order, from amazon, things we need real soon (cords the telephone, bumpers to stop doors from banding in the middle of the night, etc.)
Here are some pictures. The first is the garage with its new epoxy floor. The floor is still out gassing and we have to open up the garage during the day to help it air out. The vent hood in the corner is where I may eventually install a 3D printer. To the left of the vent hood is our only WiFi, which only turns on when we flip a light switch.
The kitchen is a mess with all the boxes packed by the movers for the kitchen. The dining room table comes tomorrow, so for now we eat on card tables.
Before the normal kitchen stuff gets unpacked, we had to transfer the contents of our chest freezer from our old house to the new house. I made a freezer run this morning with four large coolers and here is Daphne loading up the new chest freezer which had been cooling down all night,
The second floor family room is pretty empty. There are some boxes, but more are still in the basement. The reclining chairs we will put near the windows are currently in our living room until our new love seat arrives (later today).
Its the basement where most of the boxes are. The ones we packed and moved using my Prius over the last month are sorted by room. The boxes and other basement things from the movers are all over the place and need sorting.
Our A/V consultant is done. He installed our Sonos and internet infrastructure. Here is the cabinet in the utility room. Ignore the reflections in the glass. We have four Sonos amps, three sets of speakers (living room, kitchen and game room) and one soundbar for the main TV). We have an Ethernet switch in this cabinet and another one in a smaller cabinet on the second floor. We also have analog phone wiring for VOIP (the VOIP box is also in this cabinet), and a Roku (more on that later).
The plumber installed a water softener for the house. Our water is what he calls middle-hard. We now soften everything except the outside faucets (because the salt in the softened water kills plants) and a line going to a filter in the kitchen for drinking water. You can also see the hot water heater to the left. And against the wall, just to the right of the hot water heater, is the pump that circulates hot water to the master bathroom so we get instant hot (just in that bathroom, however).
Here are some interesting stories and tidbits from the move.
Spontaneous Sound
We have a soundbar in the living room, and ceiling speakers in three rooms. They are all connected to Sonos amplifiers in the utility room (see the picture above). When I was there two days ago, while we were working around the house, the soundbar started playing music, quite loud.
Well, I fumbled around with the TV remote and the electrical kill switch we have on the TV and nothing worked. Finally I was able to switch the TV to using the Roku and that stopped the music. Later in the day, the workers in the house asked if I could restart the music, but I had no idea how.
Then yesterday, it happened again, but this time the speakers in the game room started playing music very loudly. I did not know what to do. So I went downstairs and looked in the wiring cabinet and one of the Sonos amplifiers had a green indicator. I pressed it and the music stopped.
When our A/V consultant came the next day, he explained what had happened. The Sonos amplifiers were configured with the Sonos radio channel that the consultant was using for testing when he set up the units. It turns out that there is a very sensitive touch button on the amplifier’s face that start it playing. The electrician had been working in the utility room with the cabinet door open and if he bumped into an amplifier, it would have started the music.
So no chance it would happen in the middle of the night, while we were sleeping, thank god. And now the cabinet door is closed, so it should not happen again.
Roku Kill Switch
We use a Roku box for our TV (not a Roku TV, but the separate box). At our old house, the Roku would occasionally hang, and when that happened, we would turn off power to the entertainment plugs, which included the Roku, let it sit for a bit, and then turn power back on so it could reboot.
At the new house, the Roku is 30′ away, hidden in the cabinet in the utility room. Because of that, we included in the plans a light switch in the living room that would kill power to the Roku, and just the Roku, in the basement. Well, there was a switch, but it was wired to kill power to outlets under the TV, not in the utility room.
So we asked the electrician if he could fix that and he was able to run a wire down to a new outlet begin the cabinet in the utility room, which is now labeled “switched”. Then, the next day when the A/V consultant came, we asked him to move the Roku plug to that switched outlet.
Well, said the consultant, that was actually the wrong thing to do. It turns out, unbeknownst to use before then, that the A/V consultant had set up a web address where we could remotely reset any of the Sonus amplifiers or the Roku. No need for a switch. Sigh. We just wasted a bunch of electrician’s salary to wire up an outlet that we did not really need.
So now, if the Roku hangs, we will first try the web site to reset it, and only if that fails, will we use the switch. So for now, we have tape under the switch to keep it turned on unless we really need it.
Mystery Black Marks on Floor
When we were unpacking our clothes, there was a mystery stain on the floor. It looked like black streaks and it took some scrubbing to get rid of it. One feature of the luxury vinyl tile flooring is that it is rougher, meaning less likely to slip on the floor. But those ridges mean that dirty can get stuck easier and it is harder to clean, as we just learned.
Well, we really wanted to figure out where those black streaks were coming from. As it happened, we noticed some black material under the shirts, which had not been smooshed into the floor yet. We also saw some read and green material mixed in.
What we thought at the time was that some piece of clothing which had been in our old closet for a long time was breaking down and shedding material. We looked at everything and could not find any likely candidate. Then, Daphne noticed that some of our hangers from previous visits to the cleaner had a foam protector on them. Like the hanger below.
Well, it turned out we had a few hangers like that and when that material ages, it breaks down and drops black, green and red stuff onto the floor. Mystery solved. We looked at every hanger we had and removed all the hangers that had that foam. Hopefully, that will be good enough.
Broken Phone System
At the new house, we town internet service. But the town does not do telephone service. Therefore, we have switch over to using voice over IP (VOIP). I ordered a service and a few days ago the connection box (ATA) came in the mail and I added it to the internet cabinet the way I was instructed by email from the A/V consultant. Then I tested the phones upstairs. No dial tone. So I took a phone and plugged it directly into the ATA and it worked fine. Then I took that phone upstairs and pick a different jack and plugged it in. No dial tone.
So I contacted the A/V consultant and he suggested that the electrician look into it since it was probably the electricians wiring that was at fault. The next day, we added it to the electricians list. He poke around for quite a while (translation lots of hourly billing) and finally figure out that the cable from the ATA to the first junction box was bad. He replaced it with a cord from one of our phones. That fixed it.
The next day the A/V consultant apologized. He had use an old cord he had handy and it was bad. He did not test it. Sigh. Now we just have to wait for our phone number to transfer from the old house.
Anyway, today is unpacking (as will be the case for many days to come). We also got some furniture delivered and will have more tomorrow, so pictures will wait until then. In the mean time, here is a picture of Daphne at Fairhaven Bay looking at the aquatic flowers. This is from a morning hike.
Its Sunday evening right now. At 8am Monday the movers come to pack up the house. Then on Tuesday then they pack the truck, drive to the Sudbury River House and move everything into the new house.
We have been preparing for the movers. Some things we have packed ourselves. Much of it is already at our new house (in the basement), but some things, like our computers, will be packed up by us and moved to the house house first thing Tuesday.
In our current house we have sections marked off with yellow tape, which is trash that will be picked up by a junk removal company on Wednesday. Sections marked off with green tape, which means we are leaving it for the buyers (for example, they want all the gardening supplies and some furniture we did not want). Things marked with pink tape should also not be touched by the movers. Those are the things we will move ourselves.
We have each packed a bag with 3 days of clothes and toiletries. Its like we are camping. We also have some eating utensils set aside because the rest of the kitchen will be packed by the movers. We will also move some of the food ourselves. The new house main refrigerator is cold and can be filled. Unfortunately the new chest freezer was dented and the replacement one will not arrive until Tuesday, so our frozen things will be manually moved on Wednesday (after the new freezer cools down).
They will be working at the new house on Monday, finishing things up. Some annoying things will wait until we move in. For example, the basement stairs need another coat or two of finish. Once we move in, we will have to find a time to get that done.
Replacement appliances show up on Tuesday. The new living room furniture shows up on Wednesday. Cherrystone furniture shows up on Thursday, except for one piece, which will come a week later. My new bed frame shows up tomorrow. Ben’s bed frames do not show up until the 18th. Daphne’s bed frame is custom from Cherrystone, so it shows up on Thursday. Until that, mattresses will be on the floor (we have all the mattresses, including my new one which is already in the master bedroom).
We have a temporary phone number for the new house, but the phone wiring is not working for some unknown reason, so we will have to run a phone cord up from the basement to have a phone once we move in (until they find the problem). Once we move, I will transfer our home number to the new house.
First I will update you on the occupancy permit process. We have successfully passed all the necessary inspections. Two documents need to be given to the building inspector on Monday morning, and he will turn around the occupancy permit by end of day Monday. Tuesday, we move in.
Let me show you progress pictures. First they fit the electric oven into the cabinet by widening the opening.
Outside, they put gravel on the walkway, which is only temporary until the landscaping is done. The gravel will keep the movers from tracking dirt into the house.
On the second floor, we positioned and then had them install, the pull up bar. It is positioned for Daphne and me. Tall people may find it mounted too low.
The media consultant finished their installation. Here is the living room TV and sound bar.
Here is the second floor wiring closet where we have an Ethernet switch.
And here is the main rack with an Ethernet switch and the doorbell and camera equipment.
The plumber has installed the water softener.
I do not know how to use any of these things, but I will be trained in the coming week.
I forgot to get a picture of the new garage epoxy floor, which will be drying until Monday. Inside the house, on Saturday, they will put the final coat of finish on the hardwood floor and stairs. On Monday, the construction crew removes all their equipment. The dented appliances get replaced on Tuesday, the same day that the movers arrive.
