A quick epilogue to attach to our series of posts about our remodel: we finally have grass! As you can see in the photos, we finished up our landscaping in December, about five months after we moved back into the house.

To be fair, we had always planned to finish the yard in the winter: it’s so dry here in the summer that it wouldn’t make any sense to put a lawn and new plants in, as it would cost a fortune just to keep them alive.

Based on a recommendation from our friends Steve and Maria, we hired Salvador and his team to install a new sprinkler system and sod and to clean up the garden and flower beds so that they’ll be ready to use in the spring. Over the course of a few weeks, they transformed our yard from a barren moonscape to a place that actually seems fit for human habitation. There were a few hiccups along the way. In particular, language was a bit of a barrier, and as a result, the team ended up having to redo a few things that weren’t quite the way we wanted them. But in the end, we were very pleased with the results.

The team started out by turning over the existing soil and removing construction debris left over from July, and they then dug out trenches to accommodate the new sprinkler system: all of the old sprinkler heads, pipes, and valved were either completely gone or not in a usable state.

Unlike our old setup, which featured an automatic system in the back yard and manually operated valves in the front, the new system has timers for both the front and the back. The grass in the back was always a bit healthier than the grass in the front—perhaps because it had a more consistent watering schedule—so we’re hoping the new configuration will bring the front yard up to par.

The controller for the system is on the south side of the house, around the corner from the patio, and the back yard valves are just a few feet away, under a plastic cover in the lawn. On the other hand, the valves for the front yard are up in front of the house, on the other side of the driveway and front walk, close to the living room window. This placement put them close to the outdoor spigot on the north side of the house, which Salvador tapped into to feed water to the valves. To make this setup work, Salvador’s team had to run the control wires under the house in an almost perfect diagonal; the cable run couldn’t be longer if we tried.

After the sprinkler system was set up, we installed sod in front and in back. We gave some consideration to going with a scheme that featured more native and drought-tolerant plants, particularly in view of the severe rain shortfalls we’ve had the last few years. In the end, however, we went ahead with grass because we wanted William and his friends to be able to run around and play in the yard, which is a bit difficult when your landscaping consists of spiny succulents, coarse native grasses, and gravel. Once the kids are grown, we may reconsider.

One section that proved to be problematic was the street tree strip, or parkway. We had grass there in the past, and expected to keep things the same, but it turns out that the roots of the Liquidambar styraciflua, or American Sweetgum, trees that we have there have grown very close to the surface, which would make it almost impossible to establish sod in that area. We ended up putting grass in the middle portion between the trees and planting some ground cover around and to the side of the trees. Right now, the ground cover isn’t looking so hot—maybe it’s been too cold—so we might need to freshen it up in the spring.

Another part of the project that generated some significant discussion was the path on the south side of the house, between the great room and garage walls and the fence. Before the remodel, we had a series of square concrete pavers along that path, with a foot or two of distance between them. This was a simple, low-tech solution that made it easy enough to walk along the side of the house, but didn’t really other help with other common scenarios, like pushing the lawn mover from back to front and back again.

I originally argued to do more or less the same thing again, but Julie and Joe were both adamant that the old approach was insufficient. Instead, Salvador suggested we go with a straight, continuous path consisting of interlocking pavers, with river rock along the sides. In the end, it turned out very well; it both looks better and works better than the previous solution.

Along with the path, Salvador added on a small extension to the fence and built a new gate to control access to the back yard. Our old gate was falling apart long before we started construction, so it’s a nice change of pace to have something we can actually close. It’s a little closer to the side door of the garage than we would have liked, but the placement of the door, the water heater, and the family room window left us with few options.

Finally, the team laid down a few inches of soil in the flower beds and in the garden area along the north side the house, next to our master bedroom and the office. Enzo and his crew did a good enough job cleaning up when they completed their work, but there was still a fair amount of debris and other detritus all over the yard, enough so that Julie was concerned it might make it harder to get things going next spring. With the new soil, everything looks pristine.

Even though we had very good reasons to wait to do the landscaping work, it was still a real relief when it was done. In the summer, the unfinished yard produced vast quantities of dust that blew or was tracked into the house whenever we came and went; and in the winter, there was mud everywhere. Now, we can send the kids out to play without implicitly asking them to go play in someone else’s yard. And, of course, it’s nice not to feel like our place is a bit of embarrassment to the block when neighbors walk by.

Gallery: Epilogue: Landscaping

On July 9, nine-and-a-half months after we started construction, and a day over ten months since we moved into the rental, we made it back to our house on Harmil Way. The project was a long and winding road—the first email in my Remodel folder is dated August 2, 2017—that, at times, felt like it would never end, but it was an incredible feeling to finally be home again.

There wasn’t much left to do at the house, so not too much changed between the end of week 41 and our move-in date four days later. There were a few tweaks here and there—the boys’ bathtub door needed an adjustment and various bits of paint and trim needed attention—but our primary focus was on preparing for the move.

Each of us had settled in at the rental to varying degrees. Julia was completely unpacked within a week, while it took me a couple months to get the office in a more or less habitable state. On the other hand, we left most of the decorative items from our living room in boxes for the duration of our stay: we were using the corresponding space in the rental as Will’s distance learning classroom anyway, and there didn’t seem to be much point to unpacking it all.

Nevertheless, the days leading up to the move were a flurry of activity as we scrambled to prepare for the movers. As we did when we moved out of our house last September, we opted to do our own packing and leave just the furniture and other large items for the movers in a (perhaps misguided) attempt to save a little money. This also bought us a bit of time: we didn’t have to have everything ready to go by moving day; rather, we just had to have enough packed for the movers to pick up the furniture. Even so, it was a surprisingly close call, particularly for me, as I was using the office for work right up to the evening before the move. I found myself finishing up my preparations well after midnight the night before.

Moving day itself went smoothly, the only signification complication being that the moving company forgot to send us two trucks (and a correspondingly larger crew), despite the fact that they knew we were reversing the move we’d done last year, for which we’d gone well over the capacity of a single truck. They somehow managed to squeeze most of our large items in, but that still left us with a few things to haul over in Julie’s van. Luckily, the van can hold a surprising amount of stuff, and we had a readily available supply of manual labor in the form of Joe, so it wasn’t nearly the disaster it could have been.

The movers finished delivering and reassembling our furniture by mid-afternoon, which left us plenty of time to settle in before our first dinner at home, which we ordered from a local Chinest restaurant, as all of our kitchen stuff was still in boxes or at the rental. After we ate, we got to work unpacking just enough of our bedding so we could enjoy a comfortable night at home, in our own rooms.

Even though we were incredibly busy the day of the move, I did find time engage in one bit of somewhat extravagant sentimentality. When we first bought the house, all the way back in July of 2002—just a week short of nineteen years before this move, in fact—the previous owners, the Dowds, left us a handmade sign reading “Welcome Home” and a gift basket with coupons and gift certificates from various local businesses. The sign was placed on the bookshelf in the kitchen, so it was one of the first things we saw when we walked into the house after we got the keys.

Now, because I’m a little bit sentimental, we asked the builders to save that bookshelf for us so we could put it in our new kitchen as a memento. And because I’m actually really sentimental, I hung onto the sign for the entirety of the nearly nineteen years we owned the house; it actually sat in the trunk of my car for the entire time we were in the rental. So, naturally, I ran out to get a flower basket the morning of the move and placed it and the sign on the very same bookshelf in its new spot between the kitchen and family room so it would be there when Julie came over with the movers after lunch.

The days after the move were a blur. We shuttled back and forth between the rental and the house throughout the weekend and well into the following week: there was a lot left to move, and we were faced with the daunting prospect of cleaning things up in the hope that the owners could rent it out quickly, saving us a bit of money on the back end of our lease. That didn’t go quite according to plan, but, as busy as those days were, they felt like an epilogue. After a long and surreal (if you’re reading this in the far future, look up “COVID-19”) year, we were home.

Gallery: Week 42: Home

Having passed our final inspections the previous week, things really slowed down in week 41, as there was little left to do other than taking care of some finishing touches.

For example, there were still a few areas where the paint needed attention. The water closet in our master bathroom had a few easily repair glitches, and if you look very closely at the front view of the house, you can see that the trim between the siding and the shingles is yellow, matching the siding, rather than white, matching the shingles. These would all be cleaned up in the days leading up to our move.

We also used this week (and the fact that we finally had Julie’s car back) to take care of some projects we wanted to get out of the way before we moved in. We assembled William’s bed and topped it with a new mattress; and Joe and I re-painted the mirror that had hung over the laundry tub in our old garage for use in our new laundry room. Julie picked out the color, which we also plan to use on the backing board for coat hooks by the door.

Despite my marginal success hanging the living room mirror the week before, there were a some projects we weren’t completely comfortable taking on ourselves in the limited time we had before the move. With that in mind, we paid Enzo a little bit extra to have one of the guys from his crew take care of them. The crew member, Fernando, hung the wall-mounted bookshelf that we had saved from Joe’s old bedroom in his new bedroom—the hardest part there was making sure there would be enough room for his bed—as well as the small bookshelf that used to sit over our microwave cart in the kitchen; it fulfills the same role in the new setup.

We also asked him to put up the overhead shelves we’d salvaged from our old garage. These were custom-built to match the old garage’s dimensions, so they’re not an perfect fit, but we found a configuration that works pretty well. I was happy that they were still intact, seing as they sat outside in the back yard for the last few months of the project. Since we lost the built-in storage for large items we used to have over the workbench, we bought some additional overhead storage and asked him to install it, as well.

To commemorate the completion of the remodel, Julia graciously agreed to record a brief walking tour of the house; the gallery also contains a considerably less interesting video clip of our garage door going up.

With work wrapping up and our move-in date fast approaching, the coming week presented us with one of the most arduous tasks of all: packing up for the move.

Gallery: Week 41: Projects

Week 40 of the remodel was a big one: after just over nine months of construction, the house passed the city’s final inspections, marking the completion of the project, at least as far as the city of San José was concerned. We still weren’t completely done: we were still waiting on a few fixes from Enzo, as well as some plumbing, cleaning, and other odd jobs before we’d be ready to move back in. Nevertheless, this was a big step.

Julie and the kids happened to be in Nebraska this week, as well, which gave me an opportunity to spend some time in the house alone for the first time; if the photos are somewhat lacking this week, that’s probably why. The entire experience felt a bit surreal, especially since the window treatments weren’t installed, which made it feel as though my every move was on display for the neighbors.

Externally, the most visible change was pretty minor in the grand scheme of things: Enzo and his team painted the front porch gray. This was necessary because, out of a combination of frugality and sentimentality, we decided to keep the original porch and sidewalk. Both were in reasonable condition, so there wasn’t a compelling need to replace them, but there was a small hangup: there was an unfinished gap at the back of the porch that used to be covered by the brickwork under the dining room window. With the front door now occupying that wall, the bricks were gone, leaving the gap exposed.

Enzo was able to fill and seal the gap without difficulty, but there was no way he was going to be able to match the color of the original porch. Even if he had known the specific shade it was painted back in the day, the porch’s finish had been weathered by decades of sun, wind, and rain. Instead, we opted to paint the porch a neutral gray and leave the front walk unchanged. I was a little worried that the contrast between the two would be jarring, but it worked out well.

Enzo managed a couple other tricks this week. The temporary power pole, which was no longer needed after the house was connected to the grid the previous week, disappeared overnight. And our garbage and recycling bins, which vanished at some point very early in the project, reappeared out of nowhere after we casually mentioned that we needed to figure out how to get new ones. Are these the same trash containers we had before construction started? Had they been stored somewhere offsite? Did one of our neighbors borrow them for the duration of the project and return them in the dead of night? We have no idea! But they were back, and that was one less thing for us to worry about.

Around this time, I was very happy to discover some fresh shoots from the rose that used to sit in front of the house, outside the kitchen. The entire bush had been removed down to the ground during construction, so it was a pleasant surprise to see that some part of it survived. Of course—as Julie warned me—it’s very likely that these are Dr. Huey canes coming up from the root stock under the original plant’s graft, so the resulting growth will almost certainly look nothing like our old rose, but it was still exciting to see some signs of life.

Inside the house, the plumbers installed new toilets in the downstairs bathrooms: the internal hardware in the old toilets needed to be replaced, and the cost to do so, including labor, was almost the same as the cost to replace them. So, we now have brand-new toilets with fancy bidet seats that I still haven’t figured out how to use.

In what seemed to me to be something of a minor miracle, we also have a full complement of can lights in the garage. Fully half the lights had been covered up by the drywall team during construction, and I was skeptical that Enzo would be able to find them without punching a bunch of extra holes in the ceiling. He reassured us that he had accurate measurements, but I was still a bit dubious—wrongly so, as it turns out. Both banks of lights are exposed and fully operational.

While the rest of the family was out of town, I took the opportunity to work on setting a few things up for our move-in date. To start, I hung our living room mirror back in its old spot above the fireplace. It’s a bit higher than it had been, to accommodate the higher mantel, and it’s almost level. It took a few hours, and there was a false start or two, but it was gratifying to get it done.

I also started the process of hooking up connectors for speakers in the family room. I didn’t make as much progress here as I’d hoped—in fact, some of the speakers are still not connected—but at least I was able to get a sense for the scope of the project. The connectors I’d chosen, Neutrik SpeakOn connectors, turned out to be a bit bigger than I anticipated and are undoubtedly overkill for our application, so I actually checked in with Julie in Nebraska via FaceTime to make sure they wouldn’t be too obtrusive.

We were very close to the end now: just one more week of work, and then we’d be set to move in. The movers were scheduled to arrive at the rental bright and early the morning of July 9, and if everything went according to plan, that would be our first night in the new house.

Gallery: Week 40: Inspections

Progress continued to slow in week 39 of our remodel as the project began to draw to a close. At this point, construction was pretty much complete aside from cleaning up a few minor issues, some of which you can see in the gallery. We kept the painters busy right up to the last minute fixing various mistakes. For example, if you look closely at this photo, you can see that the horizontal trim between the shingles and the siding on the two front gables is the wrong color: it’s yellow instead of white. There were a number of small issues along those lines, and the team was, for the most part, really good about addressing even very minor concerns.

There were a few notable developments in week 39, however, and the most significant by far was the connection of the house wiring to the PG&E pole behind our shed: for the first time in nearly a year, we had consistent power inside the house! This let us see our hallway chandelier lit for the first time and gave us a chance to try to figure out which the many light switches in the great room (twelve, if I’m counting correctly) controlled which fixtures. Three months later, I still don’t have it down.

Having power was a prerequisite for getting another critical piece of infrastructure up and running: the Internet. We made an appointment to have an installer come by on a Saturday and, in contrast to the debacle we went through trying to get the Internet hooked up at the rental last year, he showed up on time and had a good handle on what needed to be done. He ran a fiber optic line from the pole in the backyard to the communications box on the side of the house and pulled it from there to the office closet through the crawlspace, feeding it up through the smurf tube the electrician left behind for precisely this purpose.

After that, he mounted AT&T’s hardware on the back wall of the closet next to where our network gear will sit, and we were done. It was a little strange having Internet access in the house two weeks before we planned to move in, but given the experience we had in the rental, we didn’t want to take any chances.

Utilities aside, the construction crew also put in a new heating vent under the cabinets in our master bathroom, replacing the ceiling vent that was removed to make room for Julia’s bedroom. This addition came late in the process because we didn’t realize that there wasn’t a vent in that room until quite a while after the initial HVAC work was complete. I’m glad we noticed, even belatedly, however: the tile floor can get very cold in the winter.

With all the major work complete, Enzo gave us the OK to start bringing things over, and that’s exactly what we did. Julie landed a couple great finds on the neighborhood Buy Nothing group, including a couple comfy chairs for the family room and a free refrigerator for the garage.

We got the refrigerator from a very nice couple that was clearing out their long-term rental for a move to Minnesota, and they gave us a couple bookshelves for the boys’ bedrooms, as well. All they asked in return was that we get the stuff out of their house. So, we repeated the process from May: we rented a U-Haul, loaded it up, and drove it back to our place. Things went a little more smoothly this time, the fact that we were parked illegally on a narrow little street for almost an hour as we loaded the truck notwithstanding; if nothing else, Joe and I had more experience pulling things up and down the truck’s ramp, and there was never any real risk of the refrigerator falling off the dolly this time around.

The couple even gave Joe a pair of convincing-looking katanas that they didn’t want to take with them. As weapons go, I’m not sure they’re serious enough that you could use them in an actual fight, but I am sure they’re serious enough that you could hurt yourself with them if you’re careless, so we asked Joe to put them on a high shelf well out of William’s reach.

The refrigerator itself had been used as a wine and beer fridge in the couple’s not especially weatherproof garage for quite a while, so cleaning it up, inside and out, was a project in and of itself. It ended up taking most of a weekend afternoon, but it worked out wonderfully in the end: for the price of a little manual labor (and a moving van), we got a perfectly functional refrigerator (not to mention a pair of bookshelves and some swords).

You may recall from our week 36 update that Enzo expected to be finished the week of June 14, which would have been this week. We didn’t hit that target, but we were close, and the path seemed clear for the final inspection the following week.

Gallery: Week 39: Power, Internet, and Free Stuff

Week 38 of our remodel brought minor changes inside and out, but the overall pace of progress slowed dramatically as the project neared completion. Enzo told us that the carpet would be one of the last things to go in, and he was true to his word: there wasn’t much left to do inside the house at this point.

As we guessed in the previous week’s post, the gutter crew was back this week to install downspouts, so now all the rain that we’re hoping will fall this winter—we are in the middle of a very severe drought, after all—will have somewhere to go.

Looking back as I write this in the middle of September, one thing I wish we’d considered during construction is leaf guards for the gutters. It’s still more or less summer here: the high today was around 90 degrees. But there’s a chill in the air in the evenings, and we know that in a few weeks the leaves will start to turn and fall, particularly from the large Platanus acerifolia next door. When they do, we’ll have to figure out how to get up on the roof to clear the gutters or pay someone else to take care of it. We haven’t even bought a ladder tall enough to get us up there yet, so we clearly have some serious thinking to do.

The construction crew also put some finishing touches on the pergola over the garage this week—we’re hoping to train a bougainvillea to climb it once we get started on landscaping—and installed towel racks and other hardware in the kids’ bathrooms. That was pretty much it in terms of visible changes, though. After all the time we spent planning and preparing for this project (my notes go all the way back to September 2017, when Julia was starting eighth grade), it was a strange feeling to be so close to the end.

Gallery: Week 38: Pergola, Bathroom Fixtures, and Downspouts

Week 37 of the remodel made the house feel much closer to being finished, thanks to the installation of carpet upstairs and in our master bedroom. Going with carpet was perhaps not the most modern choice, but both Julie and I had carpet in our childhood homes growing up, and no one has ever accused me of being stylish anyway.

We went with a very neutral shade upstairs; it has a fancy name, but it’s really just beige. Because the kids each have different color schemes in their rooms, we wanted something that would work well for each of them. This color certainly fits the bill, even if it does remind me of pretty much every apartment I rented in the ’90s.

Downstairs, we went with a gray-ish green, incorporating a few subtle hints of blue. I wanted something similar to our old carpet, but Julie put her foot down: to her, the old color was ridiculously dated. She would have preferred something closer to turquoise, but ultimately we compromised on this color. It’s near enough to the old shade that it still feels like home, without looking like it was pulled straight out of 1986.

This week also brought the addition of screen doors to our patio entrance. Julie has looked forward to these since the start of the project: for many years, she has wanted a screen door at the front of the house to allow air to circulate more freely and make sitting in the living room more comfortable in the evening after hot summer days. I had reservations and failed to act, so we were stuck in a bit of a stalemate. In the end, all it took to break the deadlock was tearing down half the house and moving the primary living space to the rear.

I’m under no illusions that this gets me off the hook for a front screen door, however.

Finally, though we’re unlikely to need them for another four or five months, the crew installed gutters on the house this week. There are no downspouts yet, but I imagine they’ll show up sometime next week.

Gallery: Week 37: Carpet

Work continued in week 36 of the remodel, with small changes apparent throughout the house and more behind the scenes. And, for the first time, we have a somewhat firm completion date: external dependencies notwithstanding, Enzo expects to be finished the week of June 14. With that in mind, we’ve scheduled a move date of July 1, a few days after Julie and the kids return from Nebraska. After that, I’ll have to find something new to write about.

One outside factor that could gum up the works is our energy utility, Pacific Gas and Electric, which you may be familiar with for their part in killing eight people in the San Bruno pipeline explosion in 2010 and eighty-four in 2018’s Camp Fire. We need them to move our circuit from the temporary power pole in the back yard to the actual house wiring via the weatherhead on the roof. At the same time, they’ll need to install a new meter (the old one was removed when they disconnected our original service).

Enzo gave PG&E a call, hoping that the process would be straightforward. Unfortunately, however, they told him that we would have to submit an application for new service. We took care of that, which was exactly as much fun as it sounds, and waited a day or so for a response.

At that point, we were connected with a rep whose job it was to make sure our application was complete before assigning it to a Project Coordinator. He went back and forth a few times with Enzo via email—he needed to see pictures of the site to assess the overall situation, and once he had the information he needed, he dropped a bombshell on us: depending on how things went with the Project Coordinator, we might be facing a sixteen-week lead time in the Engineering / Estimation department.

Obviously, this didn’t line up with Enzo’s or our expectations, as it obviousy won’t be feasible for us to move in without electrical power; Enzo groused that all he needed was an hour with a lineman to wrap this up. Nevertheless, the representative told us there was nothing we could do except wait to hear from our assigned Project Coordinator.

Fortunately, we heard from our Project Coordinator after a few days—we lost a couple of extra days because he reached out by phone, rather than email, and my default assumption is that any phone call I receive from a number I don’t recognize is spam—and it turns out that our project is eligible for the “Express Connect” program, which will allow us to bypass the sixteen-week queue. He needed a bit more information from Enzo—they would need to send out different numbers of people depending on whether they’d cut the original service line when they moved it to the temporary pole or simply coiled up the slack—but things went relatively smoothly from there. Happily, in the end, the Project Coordinator promised to get back to us early next week with an install date.

The most visible external change this week was the removal of the big, green construction fence that had surrounded the house since last fall; now that the house is secure and construction is superficially complete, it’s no longer necessary. After almost nine months, it feels very strange to be able to see the house from the street, but I’m sure the neighbors are happy the fence is gone.

One minor consequence of the fence’s removal is that it makes the porta potty in the front yard that much more prominent. You could always see its white roof sticking up over the top of the fence, but now it’s just sitting there in the open. This isn’t unusual for projects at this stage of completion, but it does make things a little awkward when you need to use the bathroom while you’re on-site: you can wave to all the neighbors before you go in to do your business.

Week 36 also brought a couple design elements that made the house feel a little more like home. First, Enzo and his team installed the original hardware for our mail slot in its new location, including a cute custom door on the inside. It’s far from the most practical receptacle for mail, but it’s nice to have it back.

Second, the bricklayer was back at work over the weekend, finishing up the trim on the front of the house and the border surrounding the back patio in the rear. As with the mail slot, these are probably not the most modern looks we could have chosen, but they’re subtle callbacks to the way the house looked before.

This week also brought, at long last, the beginning of construction of an actual banister for the stairs. This was a tremendous relief, as I’ve been plagued by mental images of one of the kids (or me) tripping and toppling into the open stairwell for a while now. We had originally planned to have a small, built-in bookshelf in place of a plain railing at the top of the stairs facing the play room, but that didn’t end up happening due to a breakdown in communications among Lesley, Enzo, and the two of us. Nonetheless, the banister is coming together nicely, and the wood finish complements the flooring downstairs.

The electrical team made minor progress this week. There are still a few items outstanding, including terminating the connections in the network closet and installing the doorbell, but they did find time to hang the chandelier over the stairs. We took a bit of a flyer on this fixture, and we’re not entirely sure how it’s going to look when the power is turned on, but it’s nothing if not striking.

Finally, the crew moved the appliances into place in the kitchen and laundry room. We can’t actually use them, seeing as there’s no power, but having them in their proper positions makes the whole room feel more finished. The new layout presents challenges, as well: the built-in look provided by the enclosure for the refrigerator looks neat and tidy, but it leaves us without a convenient place to hang artwork and mementos with magnets, since the front of the appliance is stainless steel, and the side is hidden by the enclosure. We’ll need to figure this out—along with a thousand other things—after we move in.

Gallery: Week 36: Fenceless

Work continued at a steady pace in week 35 of the remodel, as the electricians began installing light fixtures, while toilets, faucets, trim, and other aspects of the house began to come together.

As we guessed last week, the missing kitchen window was finally installed, closing the door on that chapter at long last. The front door was re-hung, as well, having been taken down to be painted several weeks ago. And the locks and handlesets we picked out were mounted on that door and on the garage entry door, so we could, in theory, program them with numeric passcodes to let us get in and out without having to use the key Enzo has hidden in a lockbox.

The light fixtures Julie and our designer selected seem to be working out well; it’s hard to predict how something is going to look in your home based on tiny pictures on a screen, but we seem to have lucked out so far. Julie had some initial qualms about the island pendants—they reminded her of the Dark Helmet character from the movie Spaceballs!, which I’ve never seen—but eventually her friends convinced her that they would be OK.

The light in the dining area is a knockoff of much more expensive fixtures we have in the Airtime offices in Palo Alto. Our version looks very similar to the original, but came at essentially one fifth the cost. When it arrived, we took notice of its somewhat sketchy packaging and joked that we hoped it wouldn’t burn our house down. The electrician didn’t say anything derogatory about its quality when he installed it, however, so I’m trying to put that possibility out of my mind.

When Julie visited the house on Wednesday, Enzo and the electrician mentioned that they were hurrying to get things ready for an inspection the next day. The electrician also mentioned that we needed bulbs for all our fixtures, and those two statements became conflated—incorrectly, as it turns out—in our minds. That evening, we scrambled to do the research required to figure out what kinds of bulbs we needed for each fixture, and then we made a frantic trip to a couple different Home Depot locations in the area to pick them up. We dashed back to the house to drop them off, taking time to label each box in the rapidly fading daylight, before we headed home, arriving just in time to put William to bed. As this was all unfolding over the dinner hour and beyond, Julia made pizza rolls, so no one went to sleep hungry.

As it turns out, however, all that last-minute hustling around was probably unnecessary: the bulbs were still sitting on the kitchen island when we went by the house on Saturday, and power hasn’t even been connected to the house circuits, so there would have been nothing to prove by having them installed. On the other hand, we would have needed to track down the bulbs at some point anyway, so at least that’s one less thing we have to worry about.

This week, tradesmen also got to work on putting up the brick trim around the base of the house. They’re using a combination of brick salvaged from our chimney during demolition and materials that people were giving away through the local Buy Nothing group. Our hope is that we’ll be able to match the existing trim as closely as possible, and avoiding having to purchase all-new materials is an added bonus.

Another nice consequence of picking up recycled brick around the neighborhood was getting an opportunity to put the kids to work loading it into the van, unloading it at the house, and stacking it neatly in the front yard. I’m not sure they derived as much satisfaction from the activity as I did, but it made for a fun afternoon family project.

I’m very happy we were able to preserve this aspect of the design—it wasn’t in some of the early architectural drawings, and I was somewhat stubborn about restoring it. It provides a link to the house as it was before the remodel, and I’ve always liked the look of brick, anyway.

We expect that things will continue to move quickly next week, as well. Enzo told Julie that he’s planning to be finished by the middle of June, but walking around the site, it seems as though there’s a lot left to do in a relatively short period of time.

Gallery: Week 35: Fixtures

One thing is clear from the activity in week 34 of our project: we’re well past the point where each week’s progress fits into a coherent theme. Instead, there’s a sense of controlled chaos at the house, with a variety of different activities taking place every day as we careen toward the finish line.

The big story this week is that the skylights have finally been installed, bringing us one step closer to (or one kitchen window short of) a house that can actually be closed up and secured without the use of a hammer and nails. We—and especially Julie—had been eagerly waiting to see what the great room would look like with sunlight coming in through the skylights, and we weren’t disappointed. The whole room felt brighter and more alive, including the kitchen tile, which also benefitted from the addition of grout between the tiles to provide a bit of contrast.

There’s good news on the window front, as well: as we were snooping around the garage over the weekend, we noticed a large box from Marvin. At first, I thought it was one of the windows we’d been sent erroneously during the winter, but on closer inspection, we noticed that it bore a shipping date in early May. It looks as thought the kitchen window has finally arrived, and we’re looking forward to seeing it installed soon.

The timing of the window’s delivery seems fortuitous, as Enzo told us a few weeks ago that he couldn’t get started on painting the exterior of the house due to its absence. Either coincidentally or as the result of careful planning on Enzo’s part, the painters started work on the stucco this week. They seem to have covered most of the front of the house, though the eaves and trim aren’t done yet.

We’re doing our best to match the yellow color we had before, and the painter went so far as to put together some samples for Julie to pick from, as he thought that the color our designer had originally selected wasn’t a close enough match. We’re pleased with how things are turning out, and hope that the new color will work well with the larger elements of white trim we’ve added during construction.

As if that wasn’t enough, we were more than a bit surprised to see that our new garage door was installed during the week. We had picked out the model we wanted just a couple weeks ago, so it seemed logical to expect that it would be a few more weeks before it could be delivered, based in no small part on our experiences with other big ticket items. Happily, however, our expectations were confounded in this case.

Work continued in a number of other areas, as well: the bathroom tile seems to be more or less complete, including the floors, and the sink and faucet were installed in the laundry room. There was some question in my mind as to whether there was enough room for the broad base of the faucet to fit between the edge of the sink and the backsplash, but the crew made things work. On the electrical front, the doorbell, under-cabinet lights, and various switch plates were set up, but the interior and exterior lighting fixtures still await installation.

The week’s excitement wasn’t limited to the construction work, either. At the beginning of the week, Enzo mentioned that it would be a good idea for us to make sure our appliances were available on-site so that his team could install them when the time came. Sure enough, by the end of the week, the new dishwasher, which we’d had delivered directly to the house, was in set up in the kitchen.

That left us to figure out what to do with our old appliances, which have been sitting in the garage of our rental for the last eight months. In fact, we’ve been putting our refrigerator to good use throughout the project, using it to keep pop cool and to allow us to keep extra staples, like fruit and milk, on hand so that we could make fewer trips to the store during the pandemic. Living with a spare refrigerator has spoiled us: it’s going to be a real challenge to re-learn how to get by without the extra space, and I’ll miss the luxury of knowing that there’s always a chilled bottle of Diet Coke just a few feet away.

Faced with the task of getting these items over to the house—they wouldn’t fit in Julie’s van, even if it were available for use at the moment—Julie looked at the available options and their associated costs and decided to rent a truck from U-Haul. It wasn’t a small truck, either: because we were moving large, heavy appliances, we wanted a ramp, and the smallest truck U-Haul offers with a ramp is the fairly gargantuan 15-foot moving truck. We picked up the vehicle early on Saturday and planned to be finished with it by the next morning, so that we could get by with a one-day rental.

Getting the appliances into the van proved to be relatively straightforward, with help from Julie and Joe. We loaded the four items (washer, dryer, range, and refrigerator) around midday and planned to unload them at the house later in the afternoon, after William’s baseball game. We thought that the unloading process would most likely be easier, and that the hard part was finished. Reader, we were very, very wrong.

The plan had been for us to open up the front door of the house, carry the appliances up the front steps using the appliance dolly we’d rented along with the truck, and leave them in the laundry room and great room for Enzo and crew to deal with when they were ready. Unfortunately, things went off the rails more or less immediately. The temporary front door was secured to the frame using a piece of wood and some Torx screws. One of the workers mentioned to Julie on Friday that he could leave behind a screwdriver that would allow us to remove the wood and open the door, but there wasn’t a screwdriver anywhere to be found, and we didn’t think we had enough time to run to the store to buy one in time to finish up before dark. Instead, we were down to plan B.

Plan B was to wheel the appliances around the garage to the back of the house and take them in through the patio doors. Simple, right? Unfortunately, not as simple as we’d hoped. First, it’s important to remember that the house sits on a construction site. The yard, or what’s left of it, is not a smooth expanse of carefully maintained surfaces; it more closely resembles a rocky, pitted moonscape. Second, Enzo and his crew had just poured the concrete for the driveway and patio the previous week. In preparation, they’d dug out the areas around the locations to be paved to construct the wooden frame that would give the concrete shape. Those dug-out areas were still there, as as you can see in this photo, which meant that we’d have to get the appliances across no fewer than three miniature chasms to get to the patio from our front walk.

We scrounged around the shed to find a piece of plywood to use as a makeshift ramp between the front yard and the left side of the driveway, and got to work trying to move the refrigerator: we figured that if we got the biggest and heaviest appliance out of the way first, the others would be a comparative cinch. It did not go well. The plywood we’d found turned out to be neither wide enough nor long enough to make an effective ramp on its own. As soon as we started crossing over the the driveway, the refrigerator began to tip precariously to the right, and only with the help of Joe and our next-door neighbor, who happened to be walking by, were we able to prevent it from falling and and pull it onto the driveway.

Undaunted, we looked around the yard and found a second piece of plywood we could combine with the first to make a bigger, theoretically more stable, ramp to get us from the driveway over to the side yard. We placed the two pieces of wood side-by-side and began to move the refrigerator across, but quickly discovered that the still-unstable two-piece ramp, combined with the very small area in which we had to make a 90° turn, made the strategy fundamentally untenable, at least for amateurs like us. We weren’t at risk of losing the refrigerator on this attempt, but neither did we come close to making it across.

This left us in something of a bind. As I mentioned, we wanted to return the truck by morning so that we wouldn’t have to pay for another day, but we didn’t have a clear path to getting the appliances into the house before dark. Furthermore, we weren’t excited by the prospect of leaving our appliances inside the parked truck on the street overnight (and we definitely weren’t going to leave our refrigerator sitting in the driveway). That’s when Julie came up with a brilliant idea that was staring us right in the face all long.

If you’ve read this far, you may recall that one of the advances we were excited about this week was the installation of an actual garage door. We didn’t have the means to get the appliances safely into the house, Julie reasoned, and we didn’t want to leave them parked on the street overnight, so why not leave them in the garage? We could ask Enzo whether he wanted us to come back during the week to move them inside (with the front door unlocked this time), or, if he preferred, we could leave them for his crew to move when they were ready for them.

This left us with the relatively easy task of figuring out how to open the garage door without electrical power, which we managed without too much difficulty. We successfully transported the remaining appliances off the truck, over the ramp to the driveway, and into the garage, and were able to return the truck with time to spare the next morning. Somehow, after all that, we failed to take any pictures of the freshly unloaded appliances, but mostly I was happy I hadn’t dropped the refrigerator on Joe.

Gallery: Week 34: Skylights, Stucco, and Adventures in Moving