Sunday, September 09, 2007

Cats and Bathrooms, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Start Picking Locks

Oh yea, the other floor plans

So, here's the floor plan for the second floor. It's not the final thing either. Probably the biggest impact change of any was to get rid of the wall and put the cable rail in its place alongside the office. We still can't imagine living in the house with that wall there - it would have been so closed off. Even if our office was a bedroom, we'd still have the cable rail instead of a double-walled hallway. And the master bath - the toilet and shower swapped places as soon as we saw how it would frame up - and we wouldn't have it any other way. These clearly aren't the final plans, because I'm also noticing that this doesn't reflect the proper placement of the sliding doors to the deck off the master bedroom. As designed, the bedroom door would open and block the light from and access to the sliding doors. Even before we tore down the old place, we made the change to shift the doors to the deck to the far side of that wall, so there's no obstruction. I've got to imagine they've addressed this in future designs as well.















This weekend has been filled with postable events, most of which probably are interesting only to us.

Mirror-Mirror
The search for mirrors for the guest and half baths had been consuming us for weeks. Like our own version of Groundhog Day, we returned to the same stores, naively believing that they would have something worthwhile this time. Yesterday, in blazing afternoon heat, we trekked through Harvard Square down Mass Ave to look for something serviceable, figuring stores catering to students would have something. After a disappointing round, we stopped for a beer and a salad (very, very good) at Henrietta's Table at the Charles Hotel, and on a dare, stopped back into Crate and Barrel. Well, we found mirrors that would work fine - not our first choice by any means, but better than serviceable.

So, the catch? Oh, these are the last 4 in the country, they've been discontinued and we don't know whether we'll be able to sell them, and they're part of a "design" and our designer isn't here to okay removing them from the display. Well, it turns out if you look like you might cry, people can change their minds pretty quickly - and slap on the 10% floor sample discount. Yippee and three cheers for a store manager with her head on straight!

If this hadn't worked out, we probably would've found ourselves schlepping to Ikea again, and we know how much fun it was to get lost going there the last time!

So, about that locked door

Well, someone other than me (who shall remain nameless) decided he had enough of a hungry cat and tossed her into the guest bath and slammed the door shut. Of course, the little pin lock on the other side had been pressed in somewhere along the way, resulting in a cat locked in a bathroom. This is, of course, on the second floor and has no operable windows. A panicked call to the builder on a Sunday afternoon for tips on breaking in didn't really work out (he has a life...). My entreaties to call the fire department (don't they rescue kittens from trees?) was not agreed to. So, out comes the tool box, and eventually we found an Allen wrench in my bike tools that was just the right size to wiggle into the little hole and pop the pin to the unlocked position.

Someone has litter box duty for the next month as penance for this little misdeed. In the meantime, I'm researching how to disable the locking function on all interior doors before something really bad happens. Why do people want locks on interior doors anyway?

Tuesday, September 04, 2007

Finishing Touches

We've been busy enough enjoying the house that I've not felt inspired to take the time to post - of course work seems to be taking up more time than ever. It's still so great to come home, have the big folding door open, and relax, work or do whatever.

Storage solved.

We worked with Stokes Woodworking to get some more bookcases. The cases are built in 3 separate pieces that then fit together like a single unit. Very good looking. The middle section is about 7 feet tall and something less than 6 feet wide. Clearly, this was not going up the staircase. The guys looked at the stairs and stepped outside. About an hour later, two more guys showed up. Two guys lifted from below, then one guy continued to hold it from beneath while two guys upstairs were stabilizing it and the fourth ran up the stairs to help lift it up and over the railing. Holy cow. This is why I can't be home when this stuff happens. I basically was freaking out watching this while concurrently participating on a conference call for work. Of course, I should have gotten some pictures of this.

Anyway, with those bookcases in, we've been able to move the existing ones to the reading area in the media room downstairs, and are gradually reshuffling books to the right destination. And, we're figuring out how to arrange our desks in the office - we're not 100% there yet, but we're getting close. The office was really the last place where we were living in a temporary mode, so it's good to get closer to final on it.

The yard has gone from a desolate lunar landscape to a weed-infested lunar landscape.
The cats love the floor-to-ceiling windows in the media room and the entry hall, and spend hours looking at birds, chipmunks, mice, etc. The hard-packed dirt and grasses going to seed provide a great buffet for the birds. The birds, combined with a bumper crop of dragonflies and a few very dry weeks, means that mosquitoes are few and far between. We have had the usual New England suspects on the bird front, but some of our favorites including a few hummingbirds, some goldfinches, and the periodic heron fly-over have brightened things up.

If you kiss enough toads, you finally find a good landscape architect. We spoke with some people we didn't like and met with one who was fixated on water gardens but didn't want to walk around the property with us - it wasn't looking good. We have finally met the person we think gets it and we're looking forward to seeing designs soon. She was a referral from someone at Empyrean, and she has a good balanced sensibility.

We'll probably leave the septic field wild with some mixed grasses and maybe some lupine. Defined spaces elsewhere will be for a vegetable garden, an herb garden, some perennial flower beds, fruit trees, and a very little bit of actual grass. Given where the budget's at, it's a good thing that this can happen over an extended period of time. Presumably, we'll make better decisions in the context of how the earlier plantings look. We are focusing on plants/species that are native to the area, and that are not invasive. The list of available plants is further limited by avoiding plants that will be more appealing to the deer than the ferns currently are. We're perfectly happy to have the deer eat the ferns and scrub bushes on the edge of the woods, but will be less thrilled to buy plants that become winter forage for the deer population. Not sure how many fences it will take to protect the garden from them. It'll be fun to build this out over time, no matter what we end up doing.

Asked and answered.
Here are the first floor plans - not exactly what we built, but pretty close. Of course, a magnifying glass will be required to read them. We didn't do the shower in the half bath, leaving a lot more room for the sauna, and we left out the concept of a partial wall of some sort between the living room and media room (called family room on the plans). I'll see how this looks and put the second floor on another day. If this doesn't work, someone will tell me and I'll figure out an alternative.