Tag: blog

Journey

Happy New Year (2023)!

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It’s been quite some time since we last did an update — seems to be July 2022 was the last. We did take some time off from home renovations in August, with a couple weeks in Wisconsin doing our annual Door County and visit to Milwaukee/Mequon. Then, in October, another couple weeks in Florida. And we’ve spent the Christmas and New Year holidays back in Milwaukee/Mequon.

November 20th marked one year since moving to the Olive Street house. We are super happy with the progress made so far, with the main floor being 95% complete. We really enjoyed decorating the outside of the house for Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas, and even did a little bit of decorating inside as well.

Since last posting an update, we’ve completed the front “sun room,” the hall bath and the living room fireplace as well as hung all the doors (still needing a final painting though as the first one was a bit rough.) The master bath is halfway done, with tiling of the shower and painting the trim remaining. You can see additional images in the Gallery (Interior Main Floor) for the hall bathroom, sun room and fireplace. We will look to update the reveal pictures soon as we hope to get the kitchen floor tile completed in January.

One additional step made was the demolition of a non-load bearing brick wall in the basement. Peder ran the jack hammer while Laura and Matthew took turns carrying the buckets up the stairs and dumping the bricks into the dump trailer. This was our test for additional interior basement wall demo. Since we now have a functioning one and a half baths on the main floor, the next step will be to demo the basement bath.

Journey

Getting Close to Moving In!

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There is excitement in the air as we close in on our “move in” date. We haven’t struggled at all living in the motorhome for the past 7 months, in fact it doesn’t even feel like its been that long, but it will be great to get into the house. As a side note, Laura has also just uploaded a significant number of pictures to the Interior Main Floor and Pool and Patio galleries.

We won’t be 100% finished, but will at least have the bedrooms and living room substantially complete. The kitchen is mostly installed, just waiting on countertops and flooring. We called for the “pod” to be delivered and that was dropped off and is sitting in the driveway waiting to be unloaded. Laura is on trim painting duty this weekend following closely behind Peder as he gets it installed. The master bedroom carpeting was installed this past week, and looks and feels fabulous! So…if we can keep on task, we should be able to start moving in within the week!

Design Tips

Inspiration overload

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There was a time when Laura’s iPhone camera roll was filled with pictures of dogs and kids. Anymore, it is a jumble of design ideas. The Christmas to New Year break was filled with HGTV binge watching and now the weekends are planned around trips to home improvement and design stores. Adding a “living blog” to capture some of the early ideas. We are capturing more ideas on Pinterest (OlivePit2Perfect) as well.

Pool and patio choices…

Bathroom ideas….

Kitchen ideas…

Counter and Cabinets we already selected

Sun room ideas…

Journey

Coming up on 3 months…

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I keep stressing out because it seems like we don’t seem to be making very much progress, but then I look around and we’ve touched so much. Guess it’s just that there is so much to do…something like trying to empty the ocean with a spoon?!?! We actually have quite a bit going on inside and outside over the past eleven weeks…

Peder has 95% of the main floor framed out, with only the kitchen ceiling and stairwell remaining. Working through bids on getting the HVAC installed so that should happen soon. Then we need to get the plumbing and electric done.

Halls and walls nearly complete!

All the exterior painting is complete and last weekend the garden walls in front of the house were power washed and painted as well. Huge improvement! The new windows are expected within the next 3-4 weeks and the new front door is sitting in the garage waiting to be installed. With a new front entry walkway put in, we spent a couple hours cleaning up the concrete overflow from the forms and filling in the edges with top soil for a finishing touch.

Peder “minding the gap” and filling in top soil along the new walkway…notice the new house numbers!

We’ve had Nate Patton from Top Knot Tree Services on site for the past two weeks doing a significant amount of tree trimming and removal. We had a couple dead trees and several more with dead branches overhanging buildings, power lines and the road. We probably have enough wood to have a fire pit going every night for a couple of years. However, our plan is to set aside some of it and then put a sign up offering it to anyone who wants to haul it away. We’ve moved a number of small trees in pots from Wisconsin to Centerton and now Rogers, and they are destined to get planted this Spring. One is a pine tree from our house in Fredonia and another a cedar from our lake house on Boom Bay!

Nate rappelling down after taking down overhanging limbs.

Super happy that we’ve had enough warm days to have Sand’s Decorative Concrete working on the pool, patio and front walkway. Pictures in the Pool and Patio Gallery provide a glimpse at all the work the crew has done — definitely required some heavy machinery. We are really happy with the work they’ve done so far.

One powerful jack hammer breaking up the pool patio

To make room for the big equipment to rip out the existing concrete patio around the pool, we had to take down the wooden privacy fence. Getting rid of the stained wood required a trip to the local landfill. Another adventure and some fun when we had to purchase ($10) individual hard hats and safety vests in order to safely unload the trailer. It was actually pretty cool watching the extremely large excavators and bull dozers outfitted with steel spoked wheels compacting and pushing the construction waste as folks unloaded it from their trucks and trailers.

Laura as a landfill “social influencer”
Journey

Time flies – 1 month in

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This week marks 1 month since we closed on the W. Olive house. We can’t quite understand where the time has gone, but then, upon reflection, it’s like…oh yeah…a lot is going on!!

We closed on W. Olive on Oct. 12 and spent that first week getting things lined up – turning on utilities, finding a demo crew, getting roofers scheduled and a construction dumpster delivered. We then focused on getting our current home in Centerton on the market having picked a target date of Oct. 22. We didn’t have a ton of things to do to get the current house ready — just the typical “thinning out” and some touch up paint, especially where the dogs tend to bang around chasing balls.

Knowing that we would probably see a lot of traffic over the weekend, we loaded up the RV and made last minute reservations at Horseshoe Bend Recreation Area for Oct 21-24. This was our first time at this beautiful spot, but definitely not our last, especially since it is less than 10 miles from the new house. Laura called a friend to see what amenities the RV sites had, only to find out he and his wife were already there…small world! We invited our dear friends Myank and Shweta to join us on Saturday night to walk along the lakeshore and have dinner around the campfire, and it also turned out to be a celebration of the sale of the house!

Our realtor, Mike Self (@Caldwell Banker) told us we would most likely see a quick turnaround, but less than 48 hours from MLS posting to accepted offer gave us quite the whiplash! The sign outside the house still has “Coming Soon” and we will be closing before Thanksgiving. Fast forward to today, and we have a Pods container sitting in the driveway and a multitude of boxes packed and stacked.

Meanwhile, progress is being made at W. Olive Street. As the Gallary photos show, our focus has been on getting the room above the garage completed so that Laura can use it during the day as her home office and we can all use it at other times as an additional place to hang out. The space is something like 15ft x 30ft with dual skylights and a small outdoor deck space, so no doubt it will be a favorite place to retreat to when the RV starts to feel tiny.

The demo is taking about 7 to 10 days longer than originally planned, but we also increased the scope to include “everything.” But now, with the ceiling and all the insulation out, we are super hopeful that we will be able to raise the ceilings on the main level by at least 2 feet, which will be awesome. It is very interesting as well to see that this house has actually gone through several renovations in its lifetime. We see evidence of moved or added walls, windows turned to doors and doors to windows. From evidence on the central chimney stack, Peder also believes that the house has had its roof raised at one point. On the positive side, we aren’t seeing any evidence of water or termite damage, which is always the risk when you start tearing things out.