Bare Essentials

 

Here we are! Its all started! The house is empty, down to the very bare walls. All that is left is what they need to connect the new addition. It feels very real all of the sudden, nothing on the walls, nothing in the rooms, no small pitter patter of feet or giggles from bedrooms. Its just the shell of a home now.

That part makes me sad. 

Because once it was my home.

and I know, I know , I know. It still is. But it doesn't feel like it right now. I'm still in this weird home purgatory for a bit. I wish I knew how to relieve myself of the little spots of hurt that happen when you leave your house so I could eclipse it with the happiness of the new house. 

But I'm not there yet. I know I will be, when I see the beautiful new house, but for now, I'm still totally attached.

Change is hard folks.

So here are some photos of the before formal demo period, but after all is stripped down to the bare essentials.

 Lori's room/ aka the play room/ aka the spare or guest bedroom

 The basement living room. This is all of our own hard work. Its hardest to watch this part disapear.

 The other side of the living room.  Lots of Drew's handwork in this space.

 The ominous stairs that have to be moved because they are so out of code.  I fell down these stairs holding Owen when he was a newborn. Drew fell down them earlier this year, our old nanny got a concussion by hitting her head on the header at the bottom step and almost no one is able to naturally not have to duck when you walked down them. I can honestly say good riddance to these!

 The kitchen! Its a bit bigger without the cabinets.

 The other side of the kitchen. Bye bye red. You were fun while you lasted!

 The main floor bathroom. You can't see it in this shot, but there is an old blue bathtub behind the door that I can't wait to have removed. The wainscotting in here was quaint at first, but then I started to realize all of the gross paint blobs, rifts and the improper application. I love wainscotting, when done correctly. This was a nightmare. Bye bye!

 Collin's old room. Which actually looks pretty nice here. Not too bad. Except for that it isn't insulated at all and ice forms below each window inside the room in the winter. It is sad that we'll lose the original hard wood floors though, even if they were beat up. They had lots of character.

 More of Collin's room. This room is more dear to me. We brought him home to this room when he was born.

 Owen's room, which before Owen was a spare bedroom and before that was a guest room. IT is fairly cute still, but with all of the lovely ice problems in Collin's room. I'm also excited to get rid of the tiny closets.

 The hallway. With a toilet. Cramped. Difficult to see where the kids were. Tiny. Just way too tight and small for our growing family.

 Our bedroom, upstairs. Here it looks huge. I guess it kind of was huge. Except that we didn't have a door at all and 1/2 of it was halvies walls so you couldn't do much on the sides. It was nice though in terms of space. Except for the lack of closets. Oh it was horrible! No CLOSET!

 The other side of our room.

 The living room with the weird corner window and non-functional front door. This room, when we moved in used to be my favorite room because it was the first room that got "real furniture", it made me feel like we were adults way back in 2004 or so....

 More living room, and the stove, which we finally just sold (Hooray!)

 Between the kitchen and living room on the main floor.

 The hallway from the other direction...

 Outside. Nothing too different here yet except all of the landscaping is gone.

 The garage, sans the loads of stuff. It felt like Drew was packing this up FOREVER. There was A LOT of stuff in there.

So now we're here. Ready for the next step. Demo. The real deal, folks. No going back now.

A temporary home

We moved!
Into an apartment!

Its a teeny tiny bit crazy. I never in a million years thought that I would live in an apartment again.  But here we are! Its all part of this lovely little journey we are on.

 

master bathroom

 master closet (hooray!)

master bedroom (we have a door! Double hooray!)

 The boys' room (yes, they are sharing, but so far so good!)

 boys bathroom

hallway. Fun for running in if you are 2 or under.

kitchen (really its at least twice the size of our old kitchen)

 

 Living Room (you can see the kitchen to the left)

 Dining and play space

 

View from the play corner

kitchen from the other side

another view of the living room

from the kitchen to the dining room

Really though, the apartment living thing isn't as bad as I thought it would be, you know, if you disregard the poorly behaved dog that howls and barks whenever we leave him alone in the apartment, making me cringe and cross my fingers that the neighbors don't report us. Or the smallness of the whole place, with no where for the kids to really go, except for in their room or a tiny corner of the main living space (or inappropriately running up and down the halls like hooligans). Or the lack of direct access to a car without going up and down the elevator, two flights of stairs and through a few locked doors (ugh). Or the uber hotness of living on the 2nd floor, even with the heat set as low as it will go (45 degrees or something) its always nearly 78 in here.

But there are fun silver linings too. The kitchen is at least 3 times bigger than the one in our house (which speaks to the major need for a renovation), the electric bill is about 1/15 of what it is at the house. The floor plan is open so its easy to see what the boys are doing all the time. The boys room is pretty big, so no one is squished. The boys have their own bathroom and when we shower in our bathroom we don't have to worry about waking them at all because its not directly under them.

Anyhow, the journey has started. We've been living here a few weeks and we're starting to get the hang of it. The kids love the elevator, pushing the buttons and going up and down. They think its fun to drive their toy cars in circles across the floors, dance to music all morning and make tons of loud noise to disturb the people who live below us, like dropping things on the floor (or in Owen's case, throwing sippy cups on the floor), jumping off furniture (Collin: Momma! Look how far I can jump from your cedar chest {said with pride} as I cringe and remind him for the 500th time that we can't jump because people live below us).

While we are here, Drew's been spending nearly every night doing pre-demo on the house- selling appliances on craigslist, taking out fixtures we'll keep (fans, light fixtures etc.), pulling out toilets and carpets that we'll save and packing the final few things that are waiting for his attention before the more formal demo (read Excavator and sledgehammer) begins.

The house itself though, is pretty empty. I didn't think that I would be so attached to it, but as it turns out, I am. I actually get a little verklempt when I am there. It feels like being homesick without the home. I'm homesick for what belongs there, and as much as I know logically that it doesn't matter where our family is to keep those memories, it doesn't make it any easier to let go of the house. Its hard for me to reconcile the old memories in that house with what it will become. My emotional attachment is strangely sad and comforting all at once.  I desperately look forward to the new house, but at the same time its hard not to be attached emotionally to the spaces that meant so much to me: Collin and Owen's first steps, bringing them both home from the hospital, our first night back in Minnesota after we were married, moving into the house way back in 2005, the day we found out we were pregnant with Collin, the list goes on. My dissonance is overwhelming enough that I try to actually stay away from the house now- out of sight of out mind seems to be working for me at the present moment.

So, to distract me from wrestling with the feelings associated with our transition between old and new, here's some photos of our temporary life. There aren't many because its not terribly large, but we'll make do for the next 6 months and then it will all be worth it.
Thats what I keep telling myself anyway, as I try to find my way out of the old house.

A journey of 9 months!

If you read this title and think we are pregnant again, I'm sorry to disappoint, but we are NOT pregnant. What we are doing is embarking on a crazy adventure for 9 months to remodel/renovate/start over in our home.

Its been in the works for awhile now, but I thought we should at least try to document the journey so that when our children get older they can see the house they used to live in, the rooms we brought them home to when they were born.

More and more often Collin says to me "Are they coming to build our new house today?"
I respond no, because they aren't coming for awhile, but the journey has started.

How did we wind up remodeling our house you ask?

Well, it actually all started awhile back. Say, when Drew bought this house 5 minutes after he met me. It was a bachelor pad. Well, it still is. We knew that we this house wasn't a permanent house for us once we started really dating but as I mentioned we 5 minutes into our relationship so I didn't really get a say, you know?

Anyhow, a couple years later we were welcoming Collin to our family, finishing the basement, and realizing it was a temporary solution. Either we were moving away to somewhere that had more room or we were staying and adding on. We weren't anxious to move at that moment but it was looming in the background of our lives.

Life went on. We've grown accustomed to our routines, our jobs or lives. But its becoming painfully noticeable how we've outgrown this house. We plan to have two more children, and with those future babies around the corner, we really don't have the room to put them in this house.

Then there was that whole housing market slump thing. It made the idea of selling painful. Over the past four years our house as lost over 35,000.00 in value. OUCH. We weren't really interested in taking a huge hit and we love where we live. Location, location, location they say.  We agree.

We mulled over if it was smarter to sell and buy or something add on. We hemmed and hawed. There are moments when I still think "did we make the right decision?" But in the end, the idea of getting exactly what we want in our home, rather than settling for something someone else has built and finding ourselves wanting to change it later, was appealing.

Alas, here are the 9 months.

It seemed the journey actually started a bit ago now, but I'd say we're still in the first trimester. We have an architect, some plans, and a builder. We've been to the drawing table about a dozen times and we're still trying to make our budget match the bid. We've been bending our resources back and forth trying to squeeze every little bit of value from our house, sweat equity, picking quality but fiscally responsible finishes. Its an unending process. Well, I take that back. We'll wrap up plans fairly soon because in the coming month or so we'll break ground and then we start the 6 month clock.

The journey is a crazy one.
Pack up our house for the winter. The whole darn house.

Rip apart the house. Watch every bit of energy we've invested in the basement, in the house, in the moments we've dedicated to making the space ours for the past six years trickle away as we prepare for something new, something better and invited.
Change is always hard, so it is a little bittersweet. I won't lie. But its also going to be a fantastic house that we'll have for the rest of our lives.

Once we take it all apart they start the building process, but not before we move into an apartment. That's right friends. We're headed back to apartment living for a 6 month stay.
Fun times ahead.

And so, to help my boys see how we used to live, how our lives and home has changed since they were born we're going to have a little running documentary.  Every month, maybe even every week if you're lucky we'll take pictures to document the changes and see the transition from our current house to the new house.

So, here we are in installment one. Current house, yard and such. Consider it the "Before" shot. However, we've already started here- you'll notice all the landscaping is gone and that most of the inner walls are missing photos and shelves and we didn't take any photos of the basement, but if you want to see that just go back a few blog posts to "school psychologist christmas in a basement".

We're on our way.