Oak has always dreamed of being able to have two ovens – very handy for entertaining, baked goods, stock-making, and so on. We always had a struggle with what temperature to use when cooking two things at the same time.
Well, our house had a microwave-oven combo. As you can see, it was a lovely unit:
Also, check out that HAWT brass squashed light fixture. When we moved in it had like a 1/4″ of dust on it. We have it as a souvenir out in the garage. There’s a simple flushmount fixture there now but I really want to put in an L-shaped track light when we redo the kitchen.
Anyway, the microwave didn’t open. It was missing a crucial piece: the handle. (WTF?) Initially we thought, oh, we can just use the oven for awhile because we already had a microwave… but an hour of trying to chisel off the black gunk on the inside caused us to throw in the towel. Even my mom, the queen of rescuing grungy appliances, said it had to go. Um, GROSS! Unfortunately I never got a picture of the inside of the oven. Consider yourself lucky!
We went on a hunt on our new favorite site, craigslist. Double ovens are tricky because they need to fit the width and depth of your cabinet. We finally found one! Best part was that we ended up getting it for something like $175 (you might note that a new double oven is at least $2000). Ding a ling.
First, the old oven had to come out. Note the awesome hair on Oak caused by several days of hardcore housework. I think they took out the electrical panel on the top of the unit for fun! haha.
Our new oven would fit the cabinet, but the pesky electrical box stuck out and would cause the oven to stick out a few inches too far. Dave had the great idea of recessing the electrical box back into the wall behind so the oven would fit. Sweet! Here he is removing the box to cut the new recess:
Yeah.. OK, he actually DID turn off the electricity this time and he was not actually being shocked. Had you fooled there for a minute didn’t I?
Oak decided to give our new unit a hug after we plugged it in and did discover it was functional (always a question with a craigslist find)!!! Woohoo!!
A little more work by the boys and our new double oven was in place. It’s already made several delicious meals and batches of stock!! It even has convection… aren’t we fancy?
Side story: As you recall, the microwave in our old unit was lacking a handle. However, when you looked in the door, you could see that there was something inside the microwave – like balls of plastic bags or something. Oak and I liked to joke that there was a raccoon living inside of the microwave. Being the curious cats that we are, we had to bust that puppy open. Dave thought there might be some money hidden in there (ie. our key to fame and fortune). However, the result was several bags of cereal and some leftover Halloween candy. Um, yes that is what I store in my microwave!! Whatevs! Stay tuned for some more interesting items found in around the house.. 
Our yard has like… a lot of leaves. Our neighbor noticed Oak and Evan struggling with rakes on our 10-year pile up of leaves, and offered up his hefty heavy-duty leaf blower. Oh boy!!! That definitely made things easier. You still had to rake the very bottom layer of decayed leaves, but, at least the vast majority got moved along!
Leave it to the boys to be screwing around.. No the blower wasn’t actually on at this point.. haha.
Next step… figuring out how to get grass!! haha.
The front (guest) bedroom in the house was pretty much a disaster. An HVAC unit above had leaked and caused a giant hole in the ceiling:
The leaking also pretty much destroyed the particle board underlayment on the floor:
So, we had to get all that out of there, in addition to some in the hallway… the foreclosure peeps reportedly would let their dogs relieve themselves wherever in the house. Lovely. Well, we could tell there was some doggie essence in the hallway so we took that floor out also. Luckily it seemed the dogs couldn’t get to many of the rooms upstairs.. phew.
What does “removing underlayment” mean??? Demolition. Oak was very excited at first and gave the brute force (i.e. “Oak SMASH”):
but both of us did get pretty tired of it after awhile, especially when we approached the doggy toilet area… let me tell you, that is not a scent to bottle. My responsibility was mostly to bag up the yucky old pieces and not stab myself with any wayward nails. No Carries were harmed in this project, luckily. After the smashing process we put some primer over the plywood underneath to seal off any yum-yums that were left. Sometime in the next couple weeks the contractor for our renovation loan is going to come and put in the new underlayment. Woohoo!
We got this cool door knocker as a housewarming gift from Daniela and Donny that now graces our front door:
Get it… Oak… acorn? hahhaa Daniela and I think that a red door on a brick house.. not so optimal. Add that project to the list…
OK, maybe you haven’t watched Beavis and Butt-head enough to know about their fascination with fire. But, I think I understand where they are coming from now.
While Oak’s brother and father visited a few weeks ago, they took down several dead trees in our yard. Luckily, this is what his dad does for a living. Nice! As a result, we have many large piles of firewood around our yard: 
But, oh! We have a fireplace now! And not one of those tacky gas-powered ones like we had in our townhouse (which, we never turned on, not even once, in 4 years). Here’s a picture of our very first fire!
What exactly we are doing cosmetically to the fireplace is still under debate. However, it’s fully functional and is always making us nice and toasty!
I never realized the ridiculous number of doors we have until we started cleaning and painting all of them. In the upstairs, we removed all of them and took them down to the basement to get them all in one central location and out of the way of the renovations. This ended up being something like 20 doors – and we still have about 4 that are still installed (what.. some of us need a door when we use the potty).
So, welcome to this view of the door painting sweat shop- in the “living area” of our basement. Daniela and Elaine helped to prime all of them about a month ago… a long and arduous process considering every door has two sides, and the sliding doors on the closets have “butts” that like to collect drips. But, we did it! However, all the doors have been sitting there primed ever since. I kind of figure doors can be painted and brought upstairs “later on.” At least we got a start!
Does this look fun OR WHAT! You too, could be employed by the door painting sweat shop. The pay is nonexistent but the paint fume inhalation is free! Ding! Just submit your resume here!
I am going to be presenting our home projects in no particular order…. I thought about going back to the beginning and going chronologically but, I need to take a bunch of “after” pictures for some of our earlier projects, so you get them as random as they come.
This house came with an abnormally large number of candleabra lights. That is, lights that only fit those stupid lighbulbs that look like fake flames. How special is that? Apparently someone along the line enjoyed the fake flame look. Here is the lights in our guest bathroom BEFORE:
You can’t really tell from the picture, but those are, indeed, BRASS light fixtures with clear glass globes (embellished with teeny flowers) and the aforementioned candleabra bulbs. My mom thinks they are supposed to look like the wall candle sconces that were used on old fashioned ships that rotated along with the sea to prevent the candles from tipping over. Judging by the rope motifa of the wallpaper, that’s probably an accurate judgement. However, I lived through my mom’s nautical stage and that is not my envisioned theme for the bathroom.
I did some cursory looking in Lowes/Home Depot (our new home away from home), but holy moly those sconce lights are EXPENSIVE. Way more than buying the single vanity bar for over the mirror. Who decided to wire this setup anyway?? I put that thought away for the time being, thinking we’d just invest in the sconce lights later on since the candleabra lights were functional enough.
Fast forward a few weeks… I was in Concord a few weeks ago and my mom and I went to the local S&A boutique for some browsing. I was in the housewares sections and found two BRAND NEW Price Pfister light sconces. In the box and everything, for only $7.99 each! I thought for sure there had to be some pieces missing or something, but the kindly S&A employee let me open them up and look inside. Lo and Behold, it all seemed to be there! So I grabbed those puppies right up. I didn’t realize what a deal I got until I got home and looked up the lights and found that they are selling for $50 a piece online. An over $80 discount!
Even though we’ve done nothing with the rest of the bathroom, Dave was in light fixture installation mode over the weekend and I figured I’d ask him to install our new fixtures too. Look how fabu they look!
Plans are in my head for the tacky gold mirror and ridding the room of the wallpaper, but that’s a low priority project at the moment.. stay tuned!
There hasn’t been much holiday spirit here (yet) what with all the renovations. The only thing that has been done is some shopping – no tree, no outside decor, we’re regular ol’ Scrooges. Unless you call Drywall dust a festive snowy decor item?? Hmm.. Yes, I think that’s a good angle.
I have been listening to some Christmas music on Pandora to get in the spirit.. some interesting new rock renditions can be found on this channel that Nichole posted on facebook.
That brings us to today’s question. What is your favorite Christmas or otherwise “holiday” song? I’ll start by revealing mine….
Sleigh Ride. This is quite possibly THE most fun Christmas song I ever played in high school band, and I’ve loved it ever since. I’ll stick to my nerdy roots and reveal that I prefer the orchestral version, but I will pretty much be happy with any version I hear!
We haven’t gotten into the holiday spirit here much with all our renovations going on. However, we learned that there’s a neighborhood tradition of putting out luminaries one night during the Christmas season. So, we picked up our sand, white bags, and candles, and set them up and lit them at 6pm along the roadside. We have a corner lot, so we had 25 luminaria total. Crazy! It was hard to get a good picture of the luminaria because it was so dark, but here are a few photos of the neighborhood holiday decorations.
The Best:
We thought this was the most tasteful and well presented holiday light display.
The Worst:
Could these people GET anymore stupid blow-up figures?? Seriously. I couldn’t even fit them all in one picture.
Largest inside tree:
Our neighborhood has an eclectic mix of architecture styles – this very modern house has a cool angled roof that fits a HUGE christmas tree! This thing had to be at least 15 feet tall.
The luminaria was a fun tradition that we’ll be looking forward to again next year!
Yeah, I know… I’m like, the worst blogger ever. Here is the reason: 
WE GOT IT!!! Sure, it only took oh, 5 months of waiting, complaining, and waiting some more for the evil bank for us to finally get it, but the wait was worth it. I did, at one point, start writing an entry with all of the gory details of the acquisition process, but it still hurts my brain! Never Mind! We closed on October 28th, exactly 3 months after the closing of the townhouse. Let’s just say, we were very happy to leave the extended stay hotel!! haha.
I think I am going to wait until we have actual stuff in all of the rooms until I give a full on-line house tour. For now, the pictures don’t look all that different with the empty rooms and all, so I’ll just post projects results as we get them done! We made the decision early on that before we got our carpet put in upstairs that we would clean and smooth all of the popcorn texture off the ceilings. Well, this endeavor has pretty much taken over our lives.. haha. These days, Oak can most likely be seen in one of the following states:
Drywall sanding Oak – he’s aging rapidly with his graying hair!
Gaining da skillz with the drywall mud!
I promise, more updates and details soon!!!
