The Little Yellow House™ is changing

We’ve owned our home for seven and a half years, and until last year we hadn’t made any changes to the exterior. Of course last year we wrote a check and had something like 10 trees removed and a whole lot of other yard work done. Normally I could keep up with weeding and stuff, but between my health misadventures in 2017, 2018, and 2019 . . . well no, I couldn’t. I thought I would be able to this year at last but then I broke my foot. And as Kent will tell you, he’s fine mowing the yard and that’s what he has energy to do.

The exterior needs to be repainted pretty badly. I think the last time the house was painted was in 2006 but I don’t know for sure. And our decision to get the exterior painted all stemmed from the house numbers. We’ve never cared for the ones that are out there, they’re flowery and not at all our style. I found an Etsy shop and got these instead:

That’s what’s shaped our paint color choices. Here’s what we’re going with, with bonus photos of our new sun umbrella and front porch chairs (which will look amazing once the house is painted that dark grey). To be clear, the exterior will be the dark grey, the front door will be that aqua/turquoise blue (the color is called reflecting pool), the shutters that black color and the trim will be that white trim. We're still debating whether we want to paint the inside of the front door that same reflecting pool color. TBD to be honest.

Some changes around our place

First, say goodbye to the pergola. This is what it looked like in 2012 when we bought our house. The squirrels have not been kind to it and the wood bees love it too much so it was time to go.

Nearly gone!

And all the way gone. We're both shocked how little we miss it.

 And we replaced our front door:

We both keep giggling and telling each other how much we love this door, and it's true. We do.

Thoughts while temporarily less than fully abled

I’ve been on crutches just over a month now. Good thing I already had strong arms, shoulders and back! I haven’t had any muscle soreness there. What I’ve had instead is pain in the heels of my hands, especially the left hand, I’ve developed a weird discrete lump on the top knuckle of my left thumb on the outside (not the palm side). It’s not in the joint, it’s clearly separate and I’ve noticed that it gets bigger (and more painful) if I’ve been using the crutches a lot and goes down when I’m on them less. Oh and my left pinky finger is on fire (guessing tendons or ligaments or something).

Basement stairs are on the right

When Kent and I bought our home just over five years ago, we thought this house would be suitable for aging in place. After being on crutches this long, I think we were mostly right. It’s a ranch house, so the only stairs are the couple of stairs to get into the house (front door or through the garage), and the stairs to get to the basement. However, while I can manage the stairs to the garage, if I were truly disabled, say needed a walker, I’m not sure I could get into the garage directly from the house. If you look at the picture, you can see the problem. The stair at the door to the house is narrow front to back, and we can’t add another stair because the stairs to the garage are right there. We can’t move the stairs to the garage, or at least we couldn’t move them without a lot of money and somehow rebuilding the entire garage because the stairwell is concrete.

The shower in the master bathroom might be problematic if either of us were truly disabled—it’s got a lip about four inches tall and three inches wide, but that could be fixed. The other bathroom has a tub/shower combo so that one would just go unused.

It’s also been interesting to see how people react or don’t react when I’m out and about. People at work have been great, offering to hold doors, help me set up for meetings, things like that. When I’ve been out with Kent running errands, some people notice and are careful to give me extra room but a lot are just flat out oblivious. Since I’m the one who’d pay if I got knocked over, I stay extra vigilant. Children are, ironically, mostly the best about paying attention. I suspect it’s because they see the crutches more because of their eye height. When they notice, I can tell they’re really curious and they often stare almost rudely (I take zero offense). However, if children are roughhousing in a store or chasing each other, then I really have to pay attention. They are so focused on their fun that they often don’t see me until it would be too late.

I can tell the fracture is healing, although not fully healed. When I am at home, I can lurch around a bit with either one crutch or sometimes no crutches. But based on everything I've read (thank you, Dr. Google), I need to give this fracture plenty of time to heal. Others who've had the same injury have reported it taking months (like four, five, or more). My long term goal remains to return to running so I will (or not do) what it takes to get there.

Windows

When we lost power July 22, of course we also had no AC. We’ve got curtains and/or blinds on the bedroom windows, but by design have never put any in the living room. Our fireplace is flanked by floor to ceiling windows that look out into our (no thanks to us) gorgeous back yard. We love that view and also like the views from the patio door, and the other two more typical windows in that room.

Except we get full sun on the east window and a lot of sun through our west-facing patio door. For those 53 hours, that solar heat was awful. About midday on the first day, I tacked up some beach towels and fabric to block the sun. My make-shift solution worked, even if it was ugly as all get out.

Two weeks ago, we picked up some curtains at IKEA (do we ever shop anywhere else for home goods? No, no we don’t), but only for the patio door and the east window. We’d thought we could leave the other, normal window uncovered but honestly it looked like we forgot something.

Last weekend, we went back and got another pair of curtains, and two matching pillows for the couch. Those pillows hadn’t been there the previous week—and I’m not sure if you can see in this photo, but the flowers and stuff are also embroidered. I think that’s why Wally adores the pillow.

Today, I decided that our kitchen window, the one over our sink, also looked bare. But as with our flanking windows, I didn’t want to obscure the view into the backyard. So I made a simple valance, and now everything looks planned, cohesive and complete.

Dining room is back to normal (at last)

This is one of those projects that took a long time. It started with the foundation work we did in April, 2015; the house had nearly a three inch drop toward the street side and before we could make any other changes, that had to be fixed.

Getting started

Then we had to wait . . . and wait . . . until everything settled into the new position and any cracking that was going to happen did happen. So then we needed to find someone to repair the cracks, which we did in July. The guy we used suggested that rather than getting rid of those built in cabinets, we reuse them in the garage.

So we did.

Bye bye built in cabinets.

Repurposed cabinets in their new home.

Then we asked him to come back because we knew we were going to use the Billy bookcases from Ikea and wanted them to look as built in as possible. So he did.

Kent assembled the bookcases. 

You can see the framing John added around the bookcases.

Kent stained the framing
and put a coat of poly on too.

In a way, this project reminded me of the kitchen renovation we did when we lived in Crush House. That kitchen had a peninsula that just made no sense at all. We were stymied about what to do until one night (while on strong pain medication after major surgery), I told Kent he should just get out his circular saw and take that sucker out. He warned me we might have to live with the hole in the floor for a while, and we did; it was nearly a year later before we were positive we didn't miss the storage and had a good idea of what we wanted to do.

Ugly peninsula (and counter top).

Hole in the floor tile.

An after picture; I'm really proud of this project.

In transition

The houses in my neighborhood were built in the late 1950s and early 1960s. You see a lot of ranch homes here, with a few split levels or two story homes. We live very near a large Catholic church with a school that goes from pre-school to 8th grade, I think.

The other morning, I was getting my first cup of coffee and glanced out the kitchen window. I could see the lights on in a home behind us—a co-worker, who is also a neighbor, had told me that the husband in that home had died about six months ago, and that the wife could no longer care for the home as she’s now in her 80s. We’d seen some people from a lawn service blowing out leaves last week, and as I saw into the house that morning, it was clear more renovation work was going on.

So our neighborhood is changing. In some cases, these are the original owners of the homes who are dying or moving into assisted living. Some of the houses are being bought by developers, who tear down perfectly good homes and build big custom made houses. To be honest, those big houses look kind of silly since the lots here aren't so large.

In our own house (which we affectionately have named Little Yellow House), the previous owner inherited the house from her parents and they had been just the second owners. Next door, there’s a family with elementary-school aged kids. Across the street, the family’s children are even younger. Next to them, there’s a couple that moved in, then got married and I think the baby I’ve been seeing recently is theirs.

I think the average age still skews toward middle age but that’s changing. I see more kids on bikes when I drive home, or out on scooters or on walks with their parents. It’s good to see, even if it makes driving on my street more of a challenge—by design, our neighborhood has no sidewalks. Apparently it’s supposed to make everything look more like country roads.

I bought us more time

This won't look like much, I'm sure. Just a couple of open windows, right? But they didn't always open.

The woman we bought this house from renovated the kitchen, living room and dining room. As part of that big remodeling project, she put in new windows everywhere except the bedrooms. So all but eight of our windows are quite good and work beautifully.

The ones in the bedrooms are in decent shape,  as good as you could hope for with windows that are 57 years old. The storms, however, are a very different story. They are aluminum and have gotten grimed up in the grooves and in the latches that let you open and move the screens and panes of glass. We'd originally thought about replacing those windows but unfortunately we needed to get some expensive foundation work done, and as seems to be always the case for us, we have to replace the HVAC this fall. Those are/were necessities, not nice to haves.

It's important to me to have working windows. I love fresh air and I don't like running the AC when the weather is lovely. But our windows were so horrible that Kent actually threw his back out trying to get one of them open. I Googled "how to maintain aluminum storm windows" and found a great article that spelled out what I needed to do.

It turns out that WD-40 makes a silicone spray that unsticks those storm windows in a jiffy. OK, it takes a little longer than that but after about two and a half hours of work yesterday, I got all but one window opening and closing easily again. The lone holdout looks to be stuck shut because of paint; I can't even get the window open to get to the storms.

I'll take the seven windows that work. Now we'll be able to enjoy the cooler breezes with our windows open, and once winter arrives? We can put down the storm windows. I'd say we can live with these windows for a couple of more years.

I love Leawood in the spring time

Our house was owned by a family that apparently loved gardening. The parents bought the place in the mid-70s, I believe, and planted all sorts of trees and bushes and clearly had a vision when they did so. One of their daughters moved in to take care of the parents as they got elderly and feeble and she also had a big love of gardening. So that means we have a very lovely yard, even though we aren’t particularly good at gardening ourselves. The yard is one of the reasons we bought the place because it truly looks like a park.

And it’s prettiest in the spring. We’ve got all kinds of blooming bushes and trees so I thought I’d share a couple of pictures with you.

There's a hole in the bucket

First, thank you for your comments on my last post. It’s very helpful to me to hear what others have experienced and how they handled it.

Second, I’m still not sure if this is the big ol’ change or not because it could very well be massive stress. Last week, things were up in the air for me in terms of the next job and the uncertainty was definitely intense. Long story short on that, I accepted a full time permanent position and I’m scheduled to start May 4.

In addition to my job situation, we’ve been having some foundation work done on our house. The front half of the house (street side) is about 2 ½ to 3 inches lower than the middle. This is old settling but because we want to replace windows in the basement and the bedrooms, we need to get it fixed. Plus the slope is quite visible in our dining room. We have built in storage the previous owner put in and she accommodated the slope. That’s all fine and good since the shelves are level but when you look at the top, the slope is really obvious.

There are two ways you can fix this kind of settling: you can lift the frame of the house from the inside of the basement, or you can lift the foundation. Obviously lifting the foundation fixes the root of the issue and equally obviously, it’s a more expensive solution because holes have to be drilled through the basement floor and dug outside along the foundation. But we’d found a company based on a recommendation by a friend and their price was pretty reasonable, all things considered.

We think now that they anticipated the job would be pretty simple and that they could squeeze it in between other, bigger jobs. Ha.

As specified in the contract, they were going to dig 18 holes total, eight in the basement and the remaining 10 outside. They started a week ago Wednesday and by Monday morning this week, it was clear this was a very slow process. I don’t know if that’s because the digging went slowly but I do know that they were showing up after 9 AM, taking a good two hours at lunch and leaving by around 4 PM. So Monday morning, Kent mentioned that the project really needed to get moving since he would be out of town all next week. They decided to lift the house with just the internal holes dug—just eight of the 18.

Well nothing happened. I confess, it never occurred to me that maybe the house wouldn’t lift. But the part that just annoyed us both to no end was the sales guy going on and on about how it wouldn’t lift, we should just go with the internal frame lifting (remember, that’s the cheaper solution and doesn’t require holes dug in your basement floor), you might have structural damage (first that ever came up), etc etc etc.

This isn’t our first reconstruction rodeo (yet another thing to thank Boston for) so we’ve made it clear that the job needs to be done as specified in the contract with all 18 holes and lifting both inside and outside the basement. We may still be on the hook for additional work because our front porch may need to be removed so they can get to that part of the foundation. Fair enough, if that’s the case we’ll deal with it.

But yes, more stress.

He is a little ham bone

The youngest grandchild absolutely loves the camera. My daughter-in-law had told me that but until I actually watched him ham it up, I didn't realize exactly how much he loves it.

Here he is at our house last week.

Day 4

OK I'm really thankful we live in a relatively cheap area of the country.

One of the few benefits that came out of our time in Boston (other than the amazing friends we made) was learning to manage our money. Even when times were really tough -- and in a city with such a high cost of living plus down to one income plus a mortgage that was double what we'd paid in KC, times were tough -- we got strict, buckled down, got a bit lucky in that nothing else catastrophic happened and even saved some money. But it wasn't easy, not by a long shot.

So being here, where our mortgage is just under half what we were paying, plus we no longer pay $400 a month to park two cars on patches of dirt, plus gas, insurance and heck even food is cheaper? Well it's just enough to make me thankful.

The Little Yellow House

Warm and cozy

Last night, even though it wasn't really cold out, we turned on the fire (it's gas). We take turns sitting on the hearth, soaking up the warmth. Toward the end of the evening, we realized we weren't the only ones enjoying the fire:

Chloe is around 13 or 14 years old. I got her in October 2001 and the rescue place estimated that she was one or two years old then. I always suspected she was closer to one because she was still so kittenish in her behaviors. Either way, she's getting up in years now and I think the warmth of the fire is soothing. I sometimes think she's getting arthritis, and if so then I'm sure the fire really feels good to her.

Surprise!

In the never-ending quest to rid the house of cat hair (a quest doomed to failure), Kent was vacuuming under the built-in book cases between the dining room and the kitchen. He started hollering for me, telling me I had to come see this right now!

Here's what I saw:

Photo bomb by Eddie

We've been in this house nine months and never knew there were drawers at the bottom of our book cases.

Room with a view

Kent's rented some lenses for our trip this Thursday. He likes to rent before he buys, and given how expensive camera lenses can be, I heartily approve. For this trip, he's got a wide angle among others and he's been running around taking lots of pictures with it.

Normally I'm not all that fond of wide angle lens photos but I like this one and thought it showed how open our living room is.

Click the photo for a bigger version.

We'll never put curtains on the windows flanking the fireplace. That view is just too beautiful even when the trees have no leaves.

A new rug

We broke down and got a rug for our dining room last week. We wanted just a bit more color and texture in the room and this looks to do the trick:

Now it's clear I need to recover
or dye the seat cushions

Our yard

One of the things that I loved the best about our new home was the landscaping. Connie, the previous owner, had done amazing things and clearly loved her yard. Well I'm not nearly the gardener she is but I sure want to keep this yard in the best shape possible. It's like living in a park.

“Make the leaves dance again”

Kent thinks that’s what our cats would be saying today if they could talk, and he’s probably right. We sort of inherited* a yard care person from the previous owner and he came yesterday with his crew of two other guys to rake, mulch and fertilize the yard, front and back. We had a lot of leaves on the ground so the raking took quite a bit of effort plus at least one leaf blower (there may have been two, I just didn’t notice). 

All of that work meant the leaves were swirling and swirling around our back patio door, which is where the cats spend their time plotting the demise of all the birds, squirrels and bunnies in our yard. They were absolutely enthralled by the leaves, and kept running between the two windows that flank the fireplace, with stops at the patio door. In fact they wore themselves out and crashed hard for the night with us. That’s saying something when you have three nocturnal creatures living with you.

Today they’ve gone to the windows from time to time, and when the leaves don’t move (because they’re gone), it’s almost as though the cats sigh with disappointment. 

*I say we sort of inherited our lawn care guy because he stopped by last weekend to introduce himself and see if we were interested in using his services. Since one of the big reasons we bought this house was because of the amazing yard, and since we don’t own any yard tools at this point beyond a snow shovel and one rake, we were definitely interested. 

Don is probably in his 40s or 50s and is Romanian. He fled Romania during Ceaușescu’s reign and got to the U.S. with only the coat on his back. He’s a fairly recent citizen, within the last five years or so, and told Kent very seriously that he loves this country and thinks those who don’t like it should go someplace else. I think he’s earned the right to say that. 

A warm Friday evening

Yesterday's high was 81F, so Kent opened the windows and patio door. I'm not sure who enjoyed the weather more, us or the cats.

Surveying the back yard (and the little dog next door)

On alert for a bird or squirrel

I think they were watching the little dog

He was entranced by the blowing leaves

How do you store your knives?

Years and years ago, I was at my aunt and uncle's house with my children and noticed that my aunt and uncle stored their cutting knives on a magnetic strip attached to the wall, under a kitchen cabinet. I thought that was a very clever way to store knives; I've always detested just tossing them into a drawer where they rattle around and bang against each other, getting duller and duller. I equally detest those nasty butcher block holders because they take up so much room on the counter. Plus I'm not convinced they are particularly good for knives either since the knives generally rest with their sharp sides against the wood. So once I got home, I bought my own magnetic strip and have used one to store my knives ever since.

Unfortunately, our house, while practically perfect in every way, won't accommodate the magnetic strip for knife storage. You see, we have tiles on the back splash where you'd normally install the magnetic strip. Kent is pretty sure if we tried to install the screws used to hold the magnetic strip, the tiles would crack.

So I had to find another way to store knives, one that didn't involve a butcher block or a drawer. Here's the solution:

It's a block of wood with a big magnet inside, and then there are two pieces of acrylic (I think) on the outside of the two big sides of the block. I wish this were smaller but the footprint is not as bad as a butcher block. Plus the sharp parts of the knives don't touch anything.

Work it

This weekend, we painted the second bedroom (two coats) and the dining room (only needed one coat, hurrah!). We liked the paint the previous owner had used but unfortunately, while she left us her paint, the second bedroom color was missing and the dining room color had entirely congealed.

So we went with one of our favorites, Navajo Sand by Glidden. We like that it's a bright neutral that shifts in color just a bit depending on what kind of light you get in the room. And take my word for it, it's not a boring renter's beige at all.

We also got the dining room curtains shortened to the correct length. These are our curtains (yes from Ikea, I swear we are a poster family for Ikea), and the directions for hemming the curtains pretty much tell you to just cut them off, no hemming, to the correct length. You can't iron the fabric because it will melt, so normal hemming is challenging. I did hem them for the apartment we rented but couldn't do that again. While they were too long for their current location, they weren't long enough for me to turn up a proper hem. Kent cut them to size with our big rotary cutter mat. I was too nervous to do it myself, I tend to get jagged lines with the rotary cutter but Kent's mastered it.

Here's the room after the painting and shortening. We have another picture to hang off to the left (off camera) above the sewing cabinet. We also need to hang the five black framed mirrors we have and they'll go to the right, off camera.

Photo bomb by Chloe

Next weekend, we'll tackle the entry and long hall.