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.