Try not to pee yourself...

Yup, already another blog update. IT'S THAT AWESOME!! Progress is a great thing and we are making some excellent progress at the house. First of all, the faux wood blinds (2" Levelor if particulars tickle your fancy) came in a week early and so the other night Jason went ahead and installed them in Dylan's room, one of the master windows (you know, the ones the Window Guys actually did replace as opposed to the second one that STILL hasn't been done), the two in the playroom and the breakfast room. Unfortch, the bath ones were never produced so I had to call them and have them actually make them and send them. Since we got these all a week early, I was super nice about it. But they are gorgeous and block out sooo much light which is nice for the bat cave effect we dig and the energy they save in cooling. The ones Jason did corresponded to the east and west windows =) Here are some pics, and yes I did rearrange Dylan's room already. I finally made it work, it is a tricky small space.







That in itself was going to make for a pretty enthusiastic post, but wait I'm not done. This morning, Jason, Paul, Karen (MIL) and I all were at the house by 8 am (Dyl too) for some useful time. Holy crap. Holy. Crap. I could have called this post Eff Ikea, but they can't all have the same title, can they? Those cabinets that I still haven't paid for offered all kinds of surprises. Let me explain the Ikea process with cabinetry. Let's say I want one base cabinet. That is actually several individual orders. A simple one is a box, a door, toekicks, the shelf and the hinges. That's five things rung up seperately, and I guarantee you received seperately. I wanted mine to have a shorter door and a drawer on top, adding two and making a total of 7. There were at least 23 cabinets. Multiply that by a min of 5 pieces and you are at 115 pieces. Panels and custom pieces bring us well over 130 at least. Get where I am going? Unfortch (this is the word of the day), the lady typed this in wrong despite my very specific instructions. I got full doors, no drawers. It's confusing, and as I told the lady at Ikea when I went to check in on items she admitted were never ordered but were "paid for" (I use that term lightly), it all a pile of crap until you get it together. So stuff I ordered in June, have been collecting as things arrive for weeks, has all been a pile of crap until now. And let me say, those Swedish names (Liljestad, Perfekt, so on) sound more like procedures at a foreign torture site than anything that would be slightly meaningful to the renovation process. So there were some surprises as we went along, but all in all I only had a decently small pile of returns (10-15 boxes) and only 3 orders to place tomorrow morning (Ikea, Sun at 10 am is my official weekly mass these days). I am still waiting on those things that were never ordered though. So we dealt with about 75 things today -- shelves are later and boxes are already together. Toekicks are returned because Paul has a better system of building a plywood base as opposed to trying to make a bunch of toekicks all even (right...) But there are good surprises too. The lady meant for me to have all those cabinets with drawers, so the drawers were there. We made two 15" cabinets full of drawers (that's eight right there!). The cooktop I chose is two 36" wide drawers instead of a cabinet with two shelves -- drawers for pots and drawers for pans! The corner has a lazy susan with two racks, yay for tupperware. So many cool custom pieces that remind me that Ikea isn't quite ready to be renamed Satan Inc. And yes, I went with another set of glass doors like in the last kitchen. Just a pair, but I dig em. The only two cabinets that will ever look pretty on the inside. Oh, and the Silestone that was in the kitchen when we bought the house looks AWESOME on these and it is a perfect fit. The walls are still open there for the lighting that will go under the cabinets soon. We ordered a piece for the island so that will come later and the old island top is going on the desk in the living room behind Dylan. It will be cut to fit, so it won't be as big as it looks behind Dylan. Anyways, here's the journey of the day...















So yeah, an awesome day. Jason also got fans up in the spare room and the master, Karen assembled fans for Dylan's room and the living room and door knobs were beginning to be installed in most rooms. All in all amazingness. I'll be off to Ikea in the morning and Target. Turns out when your windows look that cool with super special wood blinds, you don't want to cover them up with drapes so I have a bit to return. Happily.

Oh yes -- I meant to talk about the green things you can do during renovation that rock. It's a sad, wasteful process unfortunately but frankly living in 60+ year old filth ain't always better and many of the changes (added insulation, new windows, blinds) actually cut down on energy costs and fossil fuel usage and we like that. We saw early on that the curb is enough for a lot of the trash -- when you nicely put it out, it will be nicely picked through by others. We put the doors and drawers for example in their own pile - all picked up. The nasty stuff is on the bottom because no one needs or wants that without a tetanus shot. But remember the 130+ items from Ikea? At least 75 of those came in some form of cardboard. That's a lot of cardboard and then if you add those to the 11 mega sized ones from Levelor blinds and then moving boxes (all were from previous moves and many are reused, but not all)... well you are talking about a lot of cardboard. I have made an effort to pile them up again and again and bring them to the neighborhood recycling bins. It's win-win -- I think. I found out that one of them I was using doesn't actually take cardboard so I may have just dumped them, but I think the others do. The effort should award me good karma anyway.

If you're still reading, thanks. If I had to take a gander, I would say that the complete renovation of the interior will be completed in almost exactly two months from the day we closed on the house (maybe the weekend of the 23rd?). That isn't including the converted garage and studio that we need to work on later or the exterior work of those two buildings (and the painting of the whole thing), but we didn't really expect to do those before move-in anyways, as a matter of budget, time or priority. That plus the month it took to fix up and close on the sale of Foxwood and then the month it took to close on Brookwoods will put us as almost exactly four months of in-law living. I wish I could complain, but that's been the easiest part of the whole process. I would never have guessed it would be this easy to coexist and I wouldn't mind living right next door instead of ten doors down; I think that is a testament to the easy, cool people that Dylan calls Granny and Paw Paw. They rock.