Month: January 2011

The Holidays

The holidays kind of snuck up on us this year. Perhaps it was because we didn’t have to book flights far in advance and make sure our shopping was done before we had to leave. At any rate, Christmas arrived and we were hardly ready for it. Once the celebrations started, it felt like we were on a roller coaster, going from one party to another. It was a lot of fun while it lasted, but I think I am speaking for everyone around here when I say that it was good to have a week where we didn’t really go out at all.
Pam found a pair of skates for L at a garage sale earlier this year. We’ve only strapped them on twice so far, but L is already showing signs of improvement.

One of the good things about the Christmas holidays is that it gives us an opportunity to see (Great) Grandma F. When I sat down to chat a bit with her this year, she commented on how remarkable it was for her to be enjoying relatively good health at this stage in life given the boughts of rheumatic fever she had when she was young. We’re blessed to have her with us. I’ve been meaning to take a multi-generational picture for a while now. This year we finally did it.
The Christmas tree just about didn’t make it up this year. It was packed away in the garage with about half of our other possessions while the basement was being remodeled, and we didn’t have access to it till about a week before Christmas.
L and K have a great mom. She makes reindeer cupcakes!
Even though the play microwave was K’s gift, L had nearly as much fun playing with it as K did. When L was about K’s age, he couldn’t get enough of the kitchen set that was in the nursery at the church we attended in Amherst.

A “Finished” Basement

The contractors have left and we have our basement back. We can’t say that our basement is finished—more on that in a bit—but we no longer have to let the contractors in and out. Hooray! We like it and we look forward to settling in and making use of our new space.
Even though we are mostly satisfied with the finished product, the renovation didn’t go as smoothly or painlessly as we would have liked. We got really tired of the general contractor by the end of the project, because, as it went along, we got the distinct sense that he was just in it to squeeze as much as he could out of us and the subcontractor he had hired to do most of the work. I had to learn how to put my foot down and, at times, speak my mind. By the time Christmas loomed, we were as anxious to have him out of our basement as, I’m sure, he wanted to leave. Eventually I just said that things were good enough. We paid him the last of his money and he left, leaving me a few odds and ends to look after myself.
We didn’t want to spend the money to break up the existing concrete floor, so we had to work around it. The old floor sloped steeply around the drain, and so one of the things I had to do was build a level platform in the laundry room for the washer, dryer, and freezer to sit on. K and L think the new basement is a blast and they had great fun running back and forth on the platform while I was building it.

I finished building the platform and then went to hook up the washer. When I opened the taps, water went everywhere. Having sat closed for two months, the old shut-offs had developed leaks. Off to the hardware store I went to get some plumbing supplies. We are very happy to have laundry facilities of our own again. We were both tired of carting loads of dirty diapers with us when we went to visit family.

The bathroom is no longer in the middle of an open room. We think we’ve done relatively well given how little room we had to work with. Unfortunately, the contractors didn’t get the shower quite right and they have to come back to fix a leak. We hope that fixing it doesn’t involve taking the entire shower out.
It felt like a nice large room after the contractor’s tools were moved out.
Unfortunately, until I finish the shelving in the laundry and furnace rooms, all of the stuff that we moved out of the basement into our garage is now back in our basement, piled in the middle of the family room. Sigh. When we moved back from MA, we never really bothered to unpack the stuff that was in the basement. We didn’t want go to the trouble if we were just going to have to repack and move it if we decided to remodel. I told Pam the other day that we will finally be unpacked from our move when the pile that’s now in the middle of our basement is gone.