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Bungalow New Years Love

January 13, 2009

I can’t believe another year has passed! MERRY CHRISTMAS AND HAPPY 2009 EVERYONE!

Christmas 2008

Christmas 2008

I also can’t believe the entire month of December somehow flew by without a single blog entry. All I can say is life has been crazy! (In a good way.) We have been crazy busy with our business…which is never a bad thing, but even less so when everyone else is talking about recession and lay-offs and such. Unfortunately those 11pm work nights for most of December also meant our house process just about came to a screeching halt. (That, and as Patrick noted in the previous blog entry, we were also out of town for a little bit.) Thankfully we were able to push ourselves to work a little bit more on paint removal in the dining room. We had a deadline to meet – the Westview book was being republished in time to make it back for Christmas and we wanted to update one of our detail fireplace pictures with a dining room shot…

Stripped wood in the dining room

Stripped wood in the dining room

…so at least from that angle it looks decent. And as we enter 2009 the business workload hasn’t slowed down, so we’ll just have to discipline ourselves to not entirely abandon all of our unfinished house projects. Actually that makes me laugh…unfinished projects…you get so used to them you don’t even notice anymore. We’ve had comments from people that we have “cool” kitchen crown molding and then we have to explain that it wasn’t actually meant to be unpainted, but was rather just another unfinished project, haha.

There are times where I feel that we’re not getting anything done on the house. The first few months so much happened and things seem to progress so slowly now. I suppose I need to remind myself that the first few months of work consisted of bringing the house up from a non-inhabitable space to an inhabitable space. Thankfully our house is very much livable now and we’re just working on the aesthetical items. As I was scanning through the folders of photos documenting our house process in 2008 I was actually excited to realize that perhaps we got more done than I thought. We painted the bedroom, worked on dining room paint removal off and on throughout the year, had the attic insulated, finished the interior of the bathroom built-in, had the brick foundation re-pointed and partially rebuilt, and tore out our shameful broken concrete front path and replaced it with a beautiful historic brick path.

In addition to reviewing our own house progress many things have happened in Westview in 2008, and we’re excited to be able to say we’ve been part of it. We’ve been active with our neighborhood association, the Westview Community Organization, and the Neighborhood Planning Unit (the official citizen advisory council to the City of Atlanta), as well as meetings with City Council Members, the Bureau of Planning, participating in the Atlanta Home Show, and the list goes on. Of course as many things in life the good also comes with some bad mixed in. We experienced a tornado narrowly passing our neighborhood (thankfully!) only to cause much damage downtown. We’ve witnessed the City of Atlanta spiral into a financial disaster, closing Fire Station #7 in neighboring West End, cutting city services and increasing our water fees. We were there to see mortgage fraud mastermind Kevin Wiggins get sentenced to 8 years in prison for leaving our neighborhoods devastated in the early 2000s.

But like a sprout pushing its way through the soil in spring Westview is up for an exciting year. I think 2009 will be big for Westview. I can feel it. Sometimes change is so gradual you don’t see it. But this feels like change. We’re gaining more and more homeowners who are also busy fixing up their homes. We have a new homeowner on our street working on the house, and another house under contract a few doors down from us. And we see new faces appearing at the Westview Community Organization meetings or emailing us saying “Hey, I’m a new neighbor…”. Hopefully all these new neighbors coming to Westview and working on their houses will inspire us to work extra hard in 2009. You know, ‘keeping up with the Jones‘…

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Bungalow Travels – Gaudi in Barcelona

January 12, 2009

We know. The blog has been neglected. Hopefully everybody made it through the holiday season and got everything they were hoping for! We spent the holidays in Spain visiting Steffi’s family, so as you can imagine not much got done around the house. We did decorate before we left – I’m not sure if that counts?

On our journey we stopped over in Barcelona for a few days. We have been there before, but last time we spent all day climbing around the towers at Sagrada Familia and everything else had closed! I have been longing to return to check out some of Gaudi’s other masterpieces. If you aren’t familiar with Gaudi he was Barcelona’s infamous Art Nouveau architect. (In Barcelona they call it Modernisme.) Google his name and you’ll immediately recognize his work. I think his professor really summed it up when he said “Who knows if we have given this diploma to a nut or to a genius. Time will tell.” I would probably describe live online casino him as a sculptor pretending to be an architect, but he still managed to find a way to weave both form and function into his work.

First we stopped off at Casa Batlló, a six story single-family home that was remodeled by Gaudi around 1905. (11-12 years before our bungalow was built!) Can you believe someone needed a six story home?!

Casa Batllo 1

As you can see from this picture the house has no straight lines.
Casa Batllo 2

Casa Batllo 3

Casa Batllo 4

Next we stopped off at La Pedrera, an apartment block built around the same time. It was amazing to see pictures of this place being constructed. It feels perfectly at home today, but in the old pictures it seems oddly out of place.

Check out the chimneys.

La Pedrera 1

The butler’s pantry! Note someone painted over their hardware as well.

La Pedrera 2

La Pedrera 3

If you have a spare 30 million Euros lying around Gaudi’s Casa Vicens is for sale – www.casavicens.es. Somebody should have clued them in about the current state of the real estate market!

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Happy Thanksgiving!

November 27, 2008

This is totally unrelated to house stuff, but Patrick and I were preparing deviled eggs for Thanksgiving dinner and came across a “twin egg”!! Never seen that before. So…somehow that means HAPPY THANKSGIVING! I hope everyone was able to spend some quality fun time with loved ones over yummy food!

Thankgiving twin egg

P.S. Nolan, if you’re reading this, I think this egg is dedicated to you! :)

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Neighbor Stories

November 14, 2008

I’m sure everyone has their stories about neighbors. I know we have our fair share – I think one day I’ll have to publish my book “Diary of a Mad White Woman,”€ haha. Anyway, the other morning we woke up and opened the blinds only to find our neighbor’€™s boy had tagged his grandparents house, shed, lawnmower, herbie curbie – the list goes on. We were like “Ohhhhh shit, someone’€™s going to get in sooooo much trouble!” There was no denying it either since he wrote his name. Patrick joked that even he was smart enough to write his sister’€™s name on the wall when he was doing this stuff as a kid. ;-) (He said the handwriting still gave him away, oops.) Since the neighbors don’€™t always come walk on that side of the house we gave them a warning when we saw them (hey, they were going to see it sooner or later anyway, right?). Needless to say, once he got home from school that afternoon he spent the rest of the day scrubbing away his ““art work.”” Hey, maybe he’€™ll be the next big graffiti artist, right?

Graffiti tagged house

Speaking of neighbors. Some nights ago Patrick and I had just gone to bed. Patrick was already more asleep than me, but I was also half dozed off when I heard a noise that woke me up. Then I heard another noise – kind of like a ““crack””. I asked Patrick “€œDid you year that?”€ He hadn’€™t because he was asleep, but now I had woken him up. It wasn’t that old house shifting kind of creaking that I’€™m used to. This was different. We both listened if there’€™d be another noise. Next thing we know we hear this giant crashing sound. I think we both just about leapt out of bed! We had no idea what it was – did our neighbor’€™s house just collapse?! We peaked out the window. Nothing. Patrick put on some shoes and walked outside around the side of the house. Nothing. So we went back to bed joking that maybe we were hallucinating. (Sniffing too much of that chemical paint remover? Haha.) The next morning we woke up and saw our “hallucination” – a tree had fallen on our neighbors shed! Eek! There are two trees (one of them made up of two large limbs) that were leaning towards ours/our neighbor’s sheds. We had been fearing that one of them could possibly fall on our shed (especially since a rather large limb had fallen from it when we first bought the house), but interestingly enough this was the other tree that had lost its twin limb. A good portion had even made it to our side and was leaning on our shed, though thankfully (for us) the neighbor’€™s shed had broken the fall. We’€™ve been so busy we weren’t sure when we were going to get to removing it from our shed, so we were excited when the neighbors knocked on the door this morning to ask if they could come in our yard to remove it. *phew* Relief!

Tree on fence

Not sure how well you can tell from the photo where the tree fell…hopefully you get the picture. Oh, and those other piles are not related to this case. We’re just stock piling our wood droppings, haha.

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Miscellaneous Outstanding Projects

November 11, 2008

Every homeowner will know these projects- the miscellaneous projects that aren’t big or too difficult, but there’s about a million of them and you just need to 1) remember that the project is outstanding, and 2) have the time and energy to take the 5-10 minutes to carry them out. They’re small enough where they don’t really interfere with your everyday life, but just annoying enough to get annoyed about.

Well we finally tackled one of these miscellaneous mini-projects – the drawer dividers! Back when we were looking for them it took us a minute to find suitable drawer dividers that would fit the size of our drawer. There were some that were plastic and could be extended to whatever size the drawer was, but we weren’t too crazy about those. Leave it up to Ikea to get what you need – we spotted some decent ones that happened to match our drawer color pretty closely. And when combining three of them they filled the drawer space pretty well. Only when we got them we couldn’t be bothered to cut the dividers to match our needs…so ever since we got them however many months (years?) ago the cutlery compartments looked fine, but the back space was totally wasted and the extra items we had in the drawer were sticking up and got caught just about every time you opened it. Well they will not get stuck any more! We took the 5 minutes to cut the divider into a better size and voila everything is great.

Yay for miscellaneous annoying project getting completed.

Before:

Cutlery organization

After:

Cutlery organization

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