Solstice Work Party #3

"Technology" issues kept this posting from getting up the other day, so here you go. More pictures from the amazing work party on June 20th.

Here Christophe and Josh work hard to put together our new grill in time for the big BBQ dinner. Miraculously they succeeded!

Truth in pictures! The deck is DOWN!!!


Bethanie and Laurel did a great job making this pathway on the side of our house, once filled with weeds.



And on the Monday after the work party, we hired a crew to take the old asbestos shingle siding (CAB) off our house. What a difference it makes! "Soon" we'll scrape and refinish the original cedar siding (the white stuff), put siding on the rest of the house, and paint it all. We can't wait!

2009 Summer Solstice Work Party - 2

Round 2 of pictures from the work party/ birthday party. It is truly amazing how much we got done - tore down the old deck, gutted the old garage, built a pathway on the side of the house, installed radiant floor heating, built a wall, weeded, cleaned up, and much much more!

Here's Mason taking the old deck to its new home: the dumpster.

Andrew, I think, actually enjoyed tearing down the walls in the old garage (our future bedroom). The masks were definitely necessary given the blown-in insulation we found in the walls...

Laurel, though she looks a bit despondent here, really got into it. Here she is bagging up one of the dozens of bags full of the insulation. We hope to reuse this stuff in the attic....

And what would this project be without a before picture....

2009 Summer Solstice Work Party - 1

On June 20, 2009, friends and family converged on our little Pearl Street home to do some major deconstruction (and a little reconstruction, too). Thanks so much for the hardy souls who came out to help get our house a few steps closer to "complete." I'm glad we all had a blast, too!

Here is Corey in prime form tearing down our old (horribly built) deck. One of the first things the inspector said when we bought the house was "Ya, I'd tear this down. I mean you two could hang out on it, but I wouldn't throw a party out here."

Clark Rider shows us that cyclists have arm muscles, too!

My mom pitched in to help tame our neglected garden. Now we can actually tell the difference between our lettuce and the grass!


Here, the Dads puzzle over how to install our kitchen radiant floor heating. In the end they got it in. Nice work gents!

Laying the foundation - of soil!

Last weekend we got to work on our garden! Not that the inside is completely done, but spring is on its way, and we WILL have home-grown food this summer.

What you don't see in these pictures are the moments of frustration, the grimaces of defeat, and the screams of triumph from our "dump truck getting stuck in the front yard" ordeal. Let's just say, the dirt piles were supposed to be in the back yard...


Here I am loading up the dirt the old fashioned way - without the help of the hydraulic dump... By the way, that was 4.5 yards. Grrrr.....


Here's Tricia laying down some top soil on the side of the old garage so we can put something besides the old holly and hawthorn trees that once grew there.

Here's the newly pruned hedges in the back, without the massive blackberries and ivy that dominated them before. We're planting some red alders (from The Bluff on Whidbey), a diodora cedar (our living Christmas tree), and other native plants in this beginning to our backyard wildlife habitat garden.



And here's the triumphant start to our vegetable garden. Consider this the rough-in stage.

More to come!

The many meanings of Islands

So not all of our winter was fun and games. We did do a little work on our little house.

An island (or ball) of green. Here is our transformed camelia shrub, which once was more of a hedge. Thanks to our neighbor I got it done a bit quicker with an electric trimmer. I thought about doing a bunny, but ...


And in place of a hard packed section of dirt, weeds, and an old stump, we now have grasses and a planting bed for the future. Like an island of landscaping. Thanks to our other neighbor for the plants! What great neighbors we have.


And in the house we continue to work on the kitchen island, which is now taking shape. Here is a recent picture with the cabinet in place, the counter top base attached, and the wood in process of being painted. We also are building a shelf in the back of the cabinet facing the living room. Fun stuff!


Okay, actually this is the fun stuff. A day of surfing in Westport with Josh and Corey. That's Josh shooting the curl there. I was dethawing and drinking chai because it was DAMN COLD! Not tropical island style...

Winter Catchup

Okay, so I'm not a daily blogger. But here are a few pictures to give you a taste of our winter so far. After spending November in India (see my Facebook page for photos - there are way too many) we found ourselves marooned in our own house in SNOW STORM '08...


It was actually really great. We went cross-country skiing from our front door, along Lake Washington, and around Seward Park. Liz and Sascha visited and made this great snowman with Tricia.


For Christmas we went up to Whidbey Island and gathered with the whole Vander Leest clan, which is constantly growing it seems. Driveway sledding is an awesome thing, especially when you're four.


And we even had our own Christmas tree (a living diadora cedar) that will one day be landscaping in our yard.

Yes, and even the kitchen sink

Tricia did some great work converting some old craftsman cabinets (solid fir!) into ones that fit in our space. I think they turned out beautiful. We topped them off with an old slate chalkboard from Garfield High School in Seattle, and our new kitchen sink! I even got the sink to work without any significant leaks.

Here they are in place...


And cutting the slate... (measure four times, cut once!...)

And here it is - our new kitchen counter, complete with a sink!