The talent behind Carter Oosterhouse

After 2 days of hard labor, well, not so hard, we nearly surrounded our house with new wall framing. My dad, Pat, kept us moving at a good pace while making us laugh with tales of his early days of construction as side-kick to his mentor Bob Ranski. Pat had anecdotes for every tough moment in our two days with him. He explained the practical points of proper positioning to Patricia and I all while executing exacting cuts with the circular saw from over his head and chewing gum. I now understand that it is my dad's knowledge he passed on to Carter Oosterhouse that made Carter both into a famous host of several HGTV home improvement shows but also a handsome male model. I am feeling prettier today and Patricia now cuts 2x4s with ease on her Chop Saw.

Windows and a large order of building materials arrive in our front yard this morning. Two very chatty, jolly men unloaded our future windows to our storage shed. They were looking forward to their long trip to the cooler shores at Ocean Beaches to drop off their other order today and maybe an ice cream. And they were right. By mid afternoon the sun crested our cedar trees and added to the dark tan on the back of my neck.

Patricia worked the saw with skill, cutting lumber for me to nail up to the house. Only a few feet of the south side of the house and the whole west side is left to frame. We hope to complete the remaining framing tomorrow, get our inspection and begin with the insulation and vapor barrier installation on Wednesday. This all means our windows and siding will go in later this week!




Pat executing Bab Ranski's favorite vertical cutting with the circular saw.
patty says: I'm glad Pat was here to give us a confident nod that cutting a hole through your house is okay. So far, so good! I told Joanna we live in a Jamaican house now - no windows and boards up in the evening.



Pat peeking through the hole in the guest room. It's drafty now! Anyone up for a tropical breeze at our place?



Three seconds after this photo Pat leaped from this window doing a reverse back flip to remove a nail above his head.



That's how big the window's in our bedroom will be! - 4'11"
Patty says: I can't wait to sneak out my bedroom window!!



Keeping up with Patricia is not as easy as dancing tango at our wedding.



She just told me to, "get back to work, chump."



The cut that made Carter famous.



My cut was no where near as successful. Note the final location of the saw at my feet.



See, Patricia works hard! It's only 4:59 pm and I'm falling into REM sleep.



And out cold by 5:01.......

patty says: it's beer-thirty!

Good night all,
s & p

We tore apart the house yesterday - literally

Before we get into the full demolition story of Saturday, we want to thank everyone for all of the advice on color choices. Brent V by far pulled off a brilliantly executed coup to persuade us to make different color choices - he colored 20 different images of our model with alternate choices. Thank you, Brent!

All of this feedback has left us thinking - actually, agonizing - even more over this choice. I guess, you get what you ask for! - and thankfully we do have a group of people out there willing to be thoroughly honest. We thank you for that. Despite popular opinion, we proceeded to by small quarts of yellow and green paint to test on the house. We even demoed the look of the hardwood by nailing them up on the house. This is what it looked like:

We decided against the pastel-looking yellow and green on the left of and below the wood slats. We do still like the goblin-green color on the right. And after much thought we are now leaning toward a slightly more conservative combination. Goblin-green, natural fir wood, and a dark chocolate brown. We're still playing with the color of the door, but for now we'll make it sunshine yellow. Check it out:



While these colors are still hopeful dreams in our mind - we know there's a lot more work to be done before we arrive at the fun of adding the final color touches to our labor of love. In the meantime, we're moving forward with demolition and reconstruction of the exterior of the house, including all new windows on the first floor.

Siding and windows arrive Monday! - I have the week off of work to sweat, labor, and learn alongside Spencer. Yesterday we tore all of the old siding off of our house. Apparently, our siding is a particleboard-style product that was recalled 20+ years ago. Luckily, our house did not sustain any water damage with this defective product fronting some kind of protection. I think our deep soffits and low-lying home contributed keeping our exterior in good shape.

Pat Noland (Spencer's Dad - and master builder) is in town and we have the good fortune of his help this weekend. Jim Tsen showed up in the final hour to help us pluck off some of the soffit boards, and he stayed to make us a fabulous dinner of salmon, new potatoes, and green beans - thanks, Jim!

Tools: shovel (pat's favorite trick), crowbar, cat's paw (my new favorite term - the origin of the name is ever better), hammer, ladder and staple gun.

Here's the destruction we accomplished Satruday:





Spencer and Pat just returned with lumber and nails to start framing. We're building out the exterior of the house to match the foundation - it looks like the previous owners may have built the foundation with the intention of adding brick to the house someday.

Today, the skilled labor and lessons begin. Wish us luck!

:) patty homemaker

Color Test

Okay, we've been chewing over a tough home decision for the last month. Now, we're looking for your advice. How do you go about picking the exterior colors for your house??! I've read tips such as: coordinate, don't clash with the neighbors; choose historic colors to match the style of your home; don't go too bold or bright on a small house, but use bold accent colors; choose colors from inside of your home - what color combination are you drawn toward?

We have a gray house to the south of us, an electric-blue house to the north of us, and a green house looming over from the hillside. We like bright, warm colors. We've walked the streets of our neighborhood looking for inspiring color combination - we've found a few. We definitely like a houses that use multiple colors in interesting ways.

What we keep coming back to is the vibrantly colored houses we fell in love with on our travels - it seems loud colors exist close to the equator where the sun shines all the time. We would love it if the sun did shine every day in Seattle, but that's just not the case, even though Spencer says different. So, why, I wonder, do so many people have a muted colors on their homes, when the sky is of the same tinge?

So, here's where we're at - Spencer being the brilliant architect he is, whipped up a 3D model of what our house could look like. We haven't bought the paint yet, and we're honestly looking for input here. We've landed on a bright, golden-yellow, goblin green, and a natural wood accent - that's the orange-ish/brown in the rendering.

Tell us what you think - honestly! Give us your suggestions, advice or your color-choice story.

Happy Homemaking,
Pattyg

Project I - Mom's Room

May 16, 2009

So, we actually started work on the house 2 months ago - these next couple of posts will be us catching up with what we've already finished. The project that quickly rose to the top of our list was to provide cozy accommodations for my mom who was arriving in late-June to help with my Grand Opening events at work - thanks, Mom! The least we could do was provide her with a nice, comfy room to call her own.

However, after moving in to the house in late-April, we quickly noticed a musty smell radiating from the back bedroom. This was supposed to be our guest room! We kept the door shut and proceeded to move in and settle into our home around that room. Mold, and unhealthy air-quality was a real concern for me - I already had my summer allergies coming on and had heard unfortunate stories about what breathing mold can do to a person. The last thing I wanted was our new home to cause harm to us or anyone else in our home.

It was obvious that condensation was a problem around the windows - single-pane, original 1950s windows left black mildew stains all over the window sills. We tried wiping down the sills with a solution of warm water and bleach, but the musty smell still prevailed. Spencer carved small sections of wall board out to see what he could discover in the walls - nothing visible. I'm not sure what he was expecting to see - something like this??! - Luckily, that was not the case. Regardless, we needed to rid our house of the smell and whatever harm was lurking in the room, so we decided to demo the outside walls in this bedroom - removing the wall board and insulation.

Spencer quickly saw a new talent of mine - efficient and effective destruction! We had fun :)


















Even after ripping the guts of the wall out, we still didn't find much of anything to find that real ah-ha moment. We proceeded to wipe down the inside of the walls with warm water and bleach and then we added another layer of Mold Control solution.

During our demo and clean-up, it was incredible to find what lay behind the flat painted walls: 1 x 12 planks of knotty cedar. Sap lay behind these walls crystallized, revealing the purity of the product. A true testament that this is a tried-and-true Northwest home.

We let the room sit for a few days and went back in to find only the fragrant smells of cedar radiating from the walls. No hint of must survived. Satisfied with our remediation, Spencer proved to me that he was better than Heman and Spider Man combined - I got home from work to find that he had hung the room full of drywall and perfectly mudded every seam and crevice by himself.

To add the final touches, we needed a fresh layer of paint and curtains to match. Spencer's technique of choosing paint colors scared me at first: he hits up the Oops! shelf of mis-matched paint and chooses the colors he likes. A gallon of Yolo paint (No VOC, GreenSeal Certified) at Ecohaus (Environmental Home Store) runs $40. On the Oops! shelf it's a mere $8. At first my reaction was - We are going to choose the colors of our house, based on other's mistakes?! - Now that I've faced the daunting color charts myself and see the fun that these Oops! colors have brought to our walls, I realize the uncanny luck of turning one person's mistake into our indomitable first choice. We choose cloud blue and light olive green. I, too, choose a fabric from the clearance rack at Pacific Fabrics for curtains - a funky African-print in greens, browns and blues would finish the room perfectly.

Our spare room was ready for our first guest - Welcome Mama Gray!

For our friends and family who are out there reading - know that we invite you to come and stay and experience our cozy guest room too!



:) patty homemaker

HOME at last

Spencer and I are on a new journey in our lives. We're settling into our first home and are eager to dig in and unleash the beauty that surrounds us. After 15 months of a full-on housing search, 3 failed attempts to buy, and a real estate market that crashed and burned, we found this little unnoticed gem tucked quietly behind Safeway in Mt Baker/ Columbia City neighborhood. It sat stagnant on the market for 9 months, the price was down considerably and we able to purchase this place under ideal terms: a mortgage based on one salary, 4.5% interest, $8K Home Owners Tax Credit and a low-low price (for Seattle, that is!).

We bought our house from four sisters who grew up in this small 750-square-foot home - along with a mother, father and brother - I can't imagine a family of 7 in this house! Their father built the house with his own hands in 1954 and the family owned it for 54 years. From what we've heard both parents passed away and the house sat empty for 5 years. The sisters would come and visit from out of town, care the lawn, not willing to part with their childhood home.

The subtle 50s charm of the place is what caught our eye - a huge corner picture window in the living room, a low-pitched roof, simple wood trim, and clean lines throughout the house. Well-worn treds on the stairwell- Spencer says that's called "wabi sabi" in the wood - take you from the kitchen down to a concrete cellar. I immidiately thought: rollar rink! Spencer thought Speakeasy one night a week. Low-and-behold, as all of our friends warned, it's now full of our tools, toys and junk! However, this unfinshed basement contains luxuriously-high ceilings, windows, plumbing and heat - this is our best bet to expand the house and increase our livable space one day.

No fancy modern embellishments made it on this 1954 house - no built-in wood cabinets, no brick fireplace, not even brick on the exterior, although it strangely looks like that was the intent. We fully intend to change this reality.

Spencer and I are committed to making this home a charming mid-century modern home with the added personality all our own. Spencer's artistic mind is already running wild full of ideas - I've already told him multiple times "No, let's finish this project first, then start on the next". He has the creativity, talent, and knowledge of design and construction to allow us to take on our dreams into our own hands. Although I wasn't born with a hammer in my hand, like the Noland family - I am the lucky woman who gets to listen and learn in awe beside the youngest Noland. I've offered to do my part by documenting this process and sharing it with whomever will listen.

This will be the "GrayNol" - an active and honest place for us to tell the story of the making of our home. Will you join us??

:) patty homemaker