I got way behind…because we moved in, which mostly consisted of grabbing – and hiring people to grab – everything we owned, indiscriminately, in boxes or out, and piling them in vehicles and trucks and then flinging them into the house, or the workshop, or the barn, and the less said about the whole process the better. But we’re IN! And it’s the best house ever, which we HAVE to think, but really, it’s honest.

So a few photos, some before, some after, and I promise more in the future as we get pictures on the walls, things put away, lampshades straightened, and snow melted. This is not yet House Beautiful. Probably won’t ever be, but I can dream.

The living room before we moved in:

And after:

A bit of dining room with plenty of junk:

The stairs! The stairs have railings!

Yes, there is a blob of primer in the DEAD CENTER of the wall on the landing, which will be dealt with in the future. There will also be a wool stair runner which the carpet people seem to be in no hurry to furnish.

The view from our bedroom (sorry it’s blurry):

The kitchen, pre-move in:

It’s….different now.

The flying couch! We bought a beautiful sleeper sofa and then found it couldn’t get up the stairs. Lucky life in recent months has made us acquainted with all kinds of useful people; we hired a crane:

The couch in its new home; don’t worry, it’ll come away from the wall a bit and the belt holding the sleeper will come off. This is for extra people. You don’t have to sleep here:

You can sleep here, in the guest bedroom, and someday there will be fewer lamps and more window treatments (and less snow):

I forgot to put a photo of this window before, with the kitchen, but it wasn’t there when we moved in:

And here’s Christmas:

There’ll be more photos; more settling in to do and landscaping (later, later) and the in-ground hot tub to put in…so many things. We’ll keep you posted.

This is what we’ll see on the 2nd floor deck – green plants, not a grey roof. So far I haven’t been able to get a good sunny photo, but anyway…it’s very, very cool.

These are the plants that are on the roof – a variety of sedum. Sedums? Anyway, the white crumbly stuff is the planting mix, but the plants will fill in over time, assuming we can keep them alive.

This was never really in our wish list and the architect (Terrapin, in Port Townsend, if you’re wondering) brought it up as a possibility since this roof is so close to flat. So we were all like, ‘whatever, sounds good, okay’. We don’t really need some of the ecological benefits that these roofs provide in urban areas, but it does have some energy benefits and we just think it looks great.

Some other photos of stuff because I think I’ve fallen behind:

That’s a lot of shelves! Don’t worry, there are extra. We’ll be able to move them all over the place.

Work is progressing on the closets, which are too small to get a good photo of. The bathrooms are also too difficult to photograph properly but I’m working on it. Most other rooms are full of bits and pieces of stuff.

We are supposed to move in November 23rd. Stay tuned.

We haven’t moved in. We won’t, for a few weeks. We’re all doing fine, it’s all good. I realize as I start this that I haven’t been taking enough pictures and I’ll get more on this blog in a bit. In the meantime, here is this really beautiful built-in:

This takes the place of a railing at the top of the stairs, where the office is. It’s a lovely maple bookcase, and it’s way better than railings would be…plus we NEED bookcases. There are pegs, and shelves, that will make it actually functional, don’t worry….But see those square doors? This is what they are for:

It’s still maple, in the lighted niches, it just shows up as gold for whatever computer monitor reason. And no, the polish pottery chicken is not permanent. But HERE are the places for those Japanese vases, you know the ones you’re always afraid of breaking? This is so exciting. Here it is, unlit:

I’m so excited about it. In case you’re wondering, I realize that it totally DOES NOT MATCH any of the wood trim, I’m ornery that way and wanted a contrast. I’m fortunate that Jamie and the builder both go along with my crazed ideas.

The top of this bookshelf will be a piece of live-edge myrtle, we went to a warehouse and fell in love with a zillion pieces of wood and there is the winner for this location:

It looks huge, doesn’t it? I think it’s the same camera effect that makes me look fat in all the pictures of me. Anyway, it’s a perfect size for that bookshelf and will be sanded and finished and put on the top where Hayley can’t snuffle dog spooge on it as she seems to be doing in the photo.

Last, this is the live edge piece that will be our bar in the kitchen – as with any of the pictures I’m posting today, the picture doesn’t do it justice:

Oh! Wait, that wasn’t last. We got the railing installed on the 2nd floor deck, but the gate pieces are not here yet…so the builder made art:

And nothing to do with the house, but we have the most beautiful apples:

We should have been moving in the end of this month, but we’re not…this & that conspired against us – there’s always something. If only we weren’t so fussy, and if only we had the full attention of every tradesman in the county. At this point electricians and plumbers seem to drift in and out at random. Still, here are some pictures. Just letting you know, there is beer in the refrigerator.

This countertop took some effort and one piece had to be replaced after they all showed up to put it in. This stuff, Dekton, passes all Consumer Report tests except it can shatter (if you drop a cast-iron skillet from three feet up, apparently) – it is finicky and chips easily so has to be cut very carefully and slowly. So getting a replacement took days. Which delayed putting the faucet in…

But here’s the faucet, and it is…huge. I really like it, because the hose part doesn’t come out of anything, which seems to always be a problem over time with others we’ve had. It is held in place with that bracket. AND it has a foot control, which Jamie and I had great fun playing with. It’s just…bigger than I realized. That’s okay. I’m keeping it.

The refrigerator works! A big quality of life improvement – we don’t have to take a cooler down when we visit. The oven is in too, it’s the black think next to the fridge. The cooktop would be in, and I’d have a picture, but the wrong one got ordered.

Stairs. They need to be finished. We’re happy with the light fixtures, though.

Door hardware got on – this is a one-off chalkboard door, the others are not black, although I think it looks kind of cool. BTW Beth this is your bedroom door. We are still missing two doors, because Jamie and I jump at any newfangled thing and we ordered super-duper ventilated doors for the bedrooms. Of course they take longer.

We had a flush mount light fixture here and hated it, so we ordered this amazing piece off the internet. We think it’s totally gorgeous, the insurance guy who was here called it ‘crazy’. He’s not getting invited back.

Topsoil, and, though you can’t see it, grass seed. Not just any garden shop grass seed, no sir, this is a native red fescue, Molate strain. For once, it wasn’t us that picked something weird and expensive, it was Jefferson County in their infinite wisdom that picked ‘native grasses’ for re-planting around the house. The joke’s on them because it’s actually native to Northern California.

I hope the next thing I put on here will be stair railings and 2nd floor deck railing. Fingers crossed.

I almost forgot you wanted a crazy crooked photo of the dog shower. The shower head looks odd because it has a plastic molded handle like the back of a brush you use on horses. I don’t know what that’s called. It should make it easier to torture the dogs without dropping the shower head.

There are light fixtures now – some – and kitchen cabinets – some – and we are still pleased with our selections. A couple of fans need to be changed because of ceiling height, and a couple of pendant lights are being chopped up because of the length (and lack of adjustability) but overall things are going well.

By the way, the entire house (with the exception of bedrooms/baths and accent walls) is painted in Benjamin Moore’s Stonington Grey – these photos really show how the color is changing all over the house. Beware, any of you considering Stonington Grey!

I apologize for not keeping up, things have been busy, and we’ve been traveling, and suddenly, I realize I haven’t updated this.

So here we go. First, the ceilings got done, and I have to remind myself to take more photos of the finished ceiling, as what I have here are pieces that are not quite done. The ceiling is pine, and it’s lovely, but I have concerns about it going with the floor, but, well, it’s too late to do anything about it. It’s a lot of…wood.

Then the tree and lattice got done – the cedar that we are using for a support for the lattice outside the bedroom came from a tree we took out on the property, and it looks so cool. I think I have photos here of it being put into place, but not the finished product.

Finished grade happened, but since the house isn’t done I’m not sure why. Anyway, the usual big machines came a moved dirt around, and we moved all the trees back to new places (they are not happy, they liked where they were), and we also moved rocks, some of which are now on the banks of the pond, as if they were always there.

And then finally, the floors are in. Mostly. They are hickory, and will be finished with a water-based finish that will not yellow the color. My concern is that the ceiling is, in fact, yellow. We have a lot of different colors now…hoping they work. This is what happens when you do your best to pick out nice things and then they all end up in one place.

That’s all the events now, we’re up to date.

Another picture of the fireplace…the tile is Pental Corten, in case you want to take a look at it in real life or on your monitor…it’s a very cool tile but hard to get a feel in pictures. I’m not sure the tile guy was a fan, but we’re pleased. In retrospect I wish we had gotten larger tile, but the tile guys hate larger tile. I’m all about pleasing the guys who do the work. Kind of. The surface stuff you see on it – the whitish traces – are a substance they put on to keep the layers of tile from scratching, and it’ll come off.

That seems to be a really big picture. Not sure what happened. The ‘socks’ are covering supports for a future mantle, I guess so the tile guy doesn’t put his eye out.

That’s it for indoors lately. Outdoors, this was happening:

They are maneuvering a beam into place, to support a lattice roof over the outside of the bedroom, that I forgot about completely. I forgot the lattice – I knew the bedroom was there. One of the supports for this beam is a tree that we cut down last fall. You can barely see it behind the ladder and forklift and all. This is a better shot of the tree, pre-beam:

Here is more lattice:

And here’s a picture of something interesting (not really, but part of the nuts & bolts that took time and money and frustration):

This is our drainfield. Because we’re near wetlands (within the allowable setback, actually), we have to have this super duper Glendon septic system, in which the waste water is pumped through two tanks and then up into these mounds, to then be further filtered on its way out:

These are becoming more and more prevalent in this area as the eco-friendly septic treatment of choice. I don’t know. There’s got to be better than this. These monsters are for a two-bedroom system; for a three-bedroom, we’d have to have yet another mound, and not only that, but we’d have to have it clear across the pond because there’s not room for it here. That would bring up another whole host of issues. These mounds are just a hundred yards from the house or so, but at least they are not really that imposing from the house site.

There are some tiny plants in place, for groundcover; the only reason it’s bare is because it was only installed last fall. The mounds will eventually be covered in plants, which will help a lot in making them at least acceptable if not attractive.

I wanted to end with a pretty picture. I tend to not even see the construction debris anymore:

Window trim, tile….things that make it more complete but aren’t as dramatic.

The front door was unwrapped briefly as somebody is in there putting stain on the wood around the doors & windows. They’ll cover it up again. It’s sad.

This is the deck upstairs, with siding around the round window and cedar on the wall that…has cedar. The deck itself is metal, a red color like the trim. Everything has to be covered, to save us from ourselves. The wall on the left will have cable railing above it, and there will be cable rail behind where I am standing when I took this.

Once the railing is in place I think it’ll make the top look more complete.

This is the view from up on the deck, looking back towards the barn. Someday the pile of logs will be gone (anybody? need some alder?).

This is the view looking towards the pond, although Jamie is not permanent (on the roof). This roof will be a ‘green’ roof, with little trays of sedum all over it so we won’t be looking at grey roof stuff. We even have a hose bib upstairs that we will use to water the stuff. I hope it works, seriously, it’s such a cool idea.

What the interior trim will be. It’s hemlock.

This has nothing to do with the house, although it’s right next to it.

The house won’t be quite done, but ‘final grade’ is scheduled for June 13th – the dirt gets leveled, we bring in top-soil, the trees get moved to their new places. More decisions. The floor won’t even get here until the beginning of July, though, due to I don’t know what reason.

It’s just not very dramatic.