The Last Day of a Big Year

This morning I'm packing a few random boxes and going through each room in the house to fill up some Goodwill bags for the last drop-off run of the year. I did just go on Sunday but I can always fill up a bag. All it takes is 15 minutes of watching Hoarders and I'm mentally emptying out my junk. I've only been packing the "non-essentials" (ie things we may not see for a while if they need to go into storage or just can't be unpacked in our smaller future living space and have to wait to be moved up to Breck) and I already have quite a wall of boxes lining the basement. Lots of extra kitchen equipment and entertaining stuff, picture frames, candles, vases, board games, books, DVDs, a ridiculous amount of "back-up" bathroom supplies like bubble bath and 20+ bars of Ivory soap from too many Costco trips... When we moved to Denver, I couldn't believe how much stuff I unpacked and thought "why on earth did I haul this half way across the country?" And that was with two months of planning and preparation as well as relentless (I thought) Goodwill trips then too. I'm trying to make sure that doesn't happen again. 


We've been looking at potential houses to buy in our neighborhood and surrounding areas every night for the last week. Since we both want an older brick bungalow type house to fix up, we're going to take a real hit on the excess storage space we are accustomed to in our 3,000 sq ft house full of two walk-in closets, two regular bedroom closets, a linen closet, hall closet, double bathroom sinks/cabinets and a huge walk-in pantry...not to mention the garage and a bunch of storage/tool closets Curt has in the basement. The houses we've liked so far barely have hall closet-sized storage in the bedrooms, one or two tiny bathrooms with a single small cabinet and no hall or linen closets to speak of. BUT living small and living with less is in. I'm going to try to embrace a smaller footprint in 2011 :) 

More Good News

We had a structural engineer give our Breck house an inspection last week and for just $285 (what John Littlehorn wanted to charge us $5k for!), we confirmed that much of the wood is sound and mostly just the surface sheeting will need to come down. One large beam is questionable too but it isn't the critical central beam we were worried about. This engineer lives in Northstar Village on Quandary Peak as well so he knows a lot about the harsh winters and what that wood will have to withstand through one more winter. Curt thinks there's a chance we can still get the house dried in and Tyvek-wrapped, but we haven't found our local contractor yet, and even so we can't do much else until we get the well dug. The building department told us this wouldn't be until June, when the ground stops being frozen solid. We have to do our plumbing before walls and floors because Curt decided on radiant heat for the house. That will save us money because he can do plumbing himself, but he can't do HVAC. An engineer friend printed us a large full set of our architectural plans so now we can actually read the text and notes that were too tiny even printed on tabloid-size paper. Every day those plans get a little bit more memorized and a lot more real.

And the other inspection we were worried about - on our Denver house - went well yesterday. We found a sewer line break and a basement bathroom leak but the first contractor's estimate today was only about $2k for both fixes. The second contractor's estimate was only $800! And we didn't get burned for Curt not permitting the basement - it was a BIG concern. The buyers are still psyched to move in and packing has begun in earnest on my part. The boxes are freaking Greta out a little bit...I guess she's never moved but she's a Gallagher now so she will have to get pretty accustomed to it :) Here they are contemplating their futures on Christmas Eve.

Free, Found, Reclaimed, Repurposed & Recycled

Curt also discovered a unique source of wood for some of his furniture projects: pallets. Old, junky pallets you see in alleys, parking lots and behind big box stores. He's torn them apart and used the wood to built a few coffee tables on wheels and a bunch of wall-mounted racks that I'd like to use to store wine but could also hold books, magazines, plates, spices or whatever else. If I had a restaurant, I'd hang an entire wall full of these holding wine as a display. IKEA had something similar using stainless steel wine bottle holders in one of their model kitchen/dining rooms and I've always wanted to do something like that. But since I don't have a restaurant, I'd like to cover a wall or two in our future wine room with these rustic, rough, unfinished racks. It may be my favorite room in the house, perhaps one of the smallest but still the one I'm most excited and full of ideas for. I can't lie, when I saw WINE ROOM in the floorplans, it kind of sealed the deal on this particular house in Breckenridge. It wasn't buried in the basement, it's right in between the front door and kitchen, meaning easy access to delicious vino at all times.

And here are some ideas for the future...

Handyman

Speaking of moving, a lot of things have already been moving in and out of our house during the last few months. Specifically furniture. More importantly, furniture Curt has built. And most exciting, furniture Curt has sold! I had wanted to build our own adirondack chairs for years and we got plans from a friend over the summer. Not only did those plans cost them more than a couple hundred dollars for just two chairs, they were a more traditional style and we wanted something modern, funky and bright. So Curt googled and found plans for a "modern adirondack chair" which he built in a few hours and I painted green to match the big pots in our backyard. Then he built some and painted them red. Then we stained some natural. Then he built a few out of pine beetle kill wood. People are really into that sustainably forested wood here in Colorado. Then he built matching footrests. Then he whipped up a side table. Before too long, I decided I wanted an outdoor table and benches to match. Then he built a huge farmhouse table out of reclaimed cedar a la Restoration Hardware. And now all of the sudden, he's a furniture building machine. We spent much of the late summer and fall in the garage working together - Curt cutting, drilling and gluing and me staining or painting. He works MUCH faster than me at both of those tasks but nonetheless I enjoyed it. We had a humorous Labor Day BBQ with the outdoor table, two benches, two dining chairs and four or five sets of different colored adirondack chairs in our tiny backyard.

At the moment, all of this furniture and then some has come and gone, including those very first green chairs which just left our back porch last night to be delivered as a Christmas gift. It's so cool to think that even though I have emptied our house of most of our own furniture because we're moving out, I know Curt can whip up a solid wood table affordably in just a few hours. There's something comforting about knowing we will always be able to have a place to sit down together and eat. It's the most important piece of furniture in the house!

Of course I have big plans for the furniture we'll want in our mountain house: the butcher block kitchen island, king-size storage bed and benches shown in my previous post plus colorful adirondack chairs around a fire pit in the backyard, a 12+-seat rustic farmhouse dining table and bunk or trundle beds in the loft rooms. If you'd told me a year ago that Curt was capable of not only building a house but outfitting it entirely with furniture from his own two hands, maybe I wouldn't have been surprised, but I would have gotten him started a lot sooner :)

Moving and Shaking

...at least moving, that is. Our house went under contract yesterday. We decided back in September to stick our house on the market "just to see what would happen" - the idea being that we could use the cash from the sale to finance as much construction on our mountain house as we could eke out. We were hoping to net $100k but had a slow few months with not much interest even though other realtors told us we were fairly priced. So we dropped the price and had two offers Sunday. The couple who ended up winning out (and putting $80k in our pockets) actually live a street over from us, and met us during our garage sale in May. Everyone at the garage sale asked if we were moving and we said no - it wasn't even a twinkle in our eye at that point! And now here we are. They are young but have 20% cash saved for their downpayment, something I respect. They have a new little one, and our wall-sharers and friends Dan and Nicole are about to try to expand their family with their first baby, so I hope it's a happy beginning for our house and their new inhabitants.

We should close on January 28, 2011 - exactly three years and one week after we ourselves closed on it and moved in late on a Saturday night. We drove out from Seattle Friday so I could start work at my new job that Monday. I'm not sure I'd ever been more excited than when we inflated our air mattress borrowed from a friend (who incidentally just moved out here from Seattle too and we had to give him back his airbed!) and slept on the floor  in sleeping bags with our two dogs where our dining table sits now. We left our family and friends, and I spent a few quiet months just with Bailey and Penny as my companions while Curt wrapped up business in Seattle until mid April. I was a total homebody and loved spending all my time in this big, bright, sunshiney house. I cooked and made messes in the kitchen, watched the dogs play in the backyard and even sat on the floor in the empty spare bedroom at the front of our house because it let in in the most light, and I imagined that being a future (farrrrr off future) baby room. The house was like a cocoon for our new life in Denver. Even though it was brand new construction, we found a few ways to tweak it. It provided something fulfilling and money-saving for my husband to do (finish our 1,000-sq-ft basement) when he got laid off. He added built-in foor-to-ceiling shelving and a cabinet with doors in a nook in the front spare room. He added a sliding-glass-doored office and a three-sided mosaic tiled linear gas fireplace. We even xeriscaped the backyard. I didn't think we'd move for a long time!

But now we have new projects ahead of us and I'm so excited to make the first of quite a few transitions over the next few years. I love to pack, love to organize, love to purge and love to move. I'm ready for a clean, but old slate that we can play around with and make our own. A little less cookie cutter. So we'll soon be saying goodbye to our first Denver home at 4121 Xavier Street! Here are a few photos:



Living room before Curt added the office up front.



And here's a shot of where our office now is.

Ideas

With time on our hands to mull over lots of ideas, I've been scouring design sites and savings pics of things that might be cool to incorporate. Some things we both agree on: heavy use of reclaimed and pine beetle kill wood, concrete (or at least non-granite) countertops, a big ole farm sink with an industrial faucet, homemade butcher block island, flush-to-the-wall linear gas fireplaces like we have in our current house, lots of storage benches, a rustic outdoor table, a master bed with storage underneath a la Pottery Barn's Stratton bed so we can skip dressers in that room for awhile, a sliding "barn" type door between the master bed/bath to let in light and an open floorplan with open stairways/rails. Some pics I've saved: