Category: Uncategorized

While a new world war looms We don’t know the motivations of Glenn and Agda Welch for moving from their not-terribly old house on the west side of town to a new house in Coquillard Woods. We know that changing demographics in the late 1920s and early 1930s may have been a motivation. But the…

We are slightly at a pause point as some measuring problems get solved. We are confident we are on a great trajectory in construction. In addition, we are enjoying a couple of days when we can enjoy our back yard while it is not a work site. We had a great meeting today with a…

After a very frustrating week, which I will describe tomorrow when we expect to get answers, the weekend has been a relief being our little family with no workers around. It also gave me time to research some of the gaps in our understanding of the history of the house. For example, early in the…

The morning was thrilling with our new cabinets arriving. Just pulling them in the house was a huge, two-hour effort. A few hours in, the crew had a problem: some of the cabinets were too tall and the trim was also too tall. Those were reasonably easy fixes. Later in the afternoon, the complications led…

After most of a week having no access to our back door or rigged basement kitchen as workers installed and finished the new floors, I urged Dan to consider that we would be all back to “normal” by Monday! Great advice, in general, until last night, as I walked from our back patio to the…

I worried in late May—two weeks ago—that we were beginning to get ready for the kitchen to be complete too early. Now it appears we may have been a bit tardy, at least on this issues on which we were focusing. After workers last week reoriented on installing new oak flooring and refinishing those and…

I noted in my recent post about the noise and smells of the reno, which can be intense. I also noted the last-minute prep and the space restrictions. I did not mention how hard this is on each of us individually and as a family and I feel that’s important to share. Back not so…

For the first time in 87 years, all of the floors on the first and second story of our house are oak: If you expand the photos, you can see the beauty. We had been theoretically fine with mocking the oak with well-stained pine, but we are so incredibly happy with this improvement once in…

One of our dogs, Caoilin (“Keelin”), was a powerhouse who hated spaces on ground surfaces, such as the grated iron bridges that we walked on near our home in Virginia. Here’s our sturdy girl, that we described as a German Shepherd that had spent too much time in the dryer (shrimpy as she was): When…

In the kitchen looking into the hallway. The mudroom is the light on the right at the end of the hallway. When the renovation is complete, the entrance to the 3/4 bath will be in the mudroom as well as the back door. Today was comparatively quiet in part, I suspect, as our project manager…