Lovely Wedding

Yesterday we went to a wonderful wedding of two of our friends, Kate and Deane. It's really neat because we knew Deane from square dancing and we knew Kate from SCA.

It was the best wedding ever because we got to bring our dog child!! It was a lovely, informal wedding in the park. And they did a great job on the food. It was really nice to see so many of our Oregon friends again.

Found Our Remodeler!

We just met with a local remodeling company—Craftsman Design and Renovation. I spent hours yesterday cruising around their website reading everything I could find and looking at every picture. I was really impressed with their work in regards to remodeling historic houses and maintaining their historic integrity.

This morning we met with Wade Freitag, the owner and interior architect, and Chelly Wentworth, the senior designer. I think we really hit it off with them and they seem to totally "get" what we're trying to do. So, assuming their references check out to our satisfaction, I think we've found our remodeler!

It's such a relief to have this big decision behind us. I feel a little bad about not hiring Green Hammer, because they seemed awesome too, but we are confident Craftsman Design will do a better job remodeling to suit the style of the house. Though, we still have to decide how much we're willing to invest into this house right now, when we've just moved and both still unemployed. We'll no doubt spend more than we should...

The weather today has finally turned cooler. It actually sprinkled this morning, which was a welcome departure from the heat earlier in the week.

Turning Our Attention to Remodel Planning

Our hot weather is making it difficult to do real work, so I've turned my attention to getting our remodel planning started. We've been negotiating with Green Hammer recently, but today I found another promising-looking firm, Craftsman Design and Renovation. I like many of the samples in their online portfolio and their work appears in some of my bungalow books. We have an appointment with them on Thursday morning.

I'm anxious to get a remodel plan finished so we can get started on something! I'm itching to start scraping some paint off woodwork so we can figure out just how difficult a job we're taking on. I scored some douglas fir salvage doors last week and I think I'll try the electric paint stripper on them once it cools off later in the week.

I'm looking forward to dreaming about the possibilities. I've already begun making sketches of dreamed of floor plans. This is exciting for me.

Sold the Trailer

We got quite a lot of responses to our craigslist ad for the Wells Cargo trailer. Finally sold it for good today for close to our asking price. We're happy with the deal. And now we plan to take the funds and purchase a smaller trailer, something that will fit in our garage and down our driveway without problem. Not really sure yet what we'll be getting.

Our furniture ads are doing OK too, especially the cheap stuff. =)

Since the weather has been so hot, I started unpacking our stained glass project down in the basement. I'd like to get that project going again as it would be great to get it finally finished. Unfortunately, the pattern got a little damaged in the rain in Redwood City; it apparently got damp and now it's wrinkled. I'm wondering if it would be possible to take off all the glass and mist the paper down and try to flatten it with an iron. I think I'll have to try it with another piece of paper and see if it works.

The basement is certainly not an ideal location to work on stained glass as it's so dark down there. But that's really the only place we have the space to set up the work area.

Yes We Canned!

We have been canning and baking up a storm this weekend. We found a good deal on local apricots so we ended up buying 2 full boxes (about 30 pounds worth). We actually would have bought more, but the store realized they were undercharging for the fruit and raised the price right after us.
We finished up the last of the peaches in a batch of apricot-peach-blueberry jam. That batch was a really pretty color.

Jeff also baked up one the six apricot pie fillings with the addition of a handful of blueberries and this morning he made jam cookies. We are eating good food this weekend! Yum.

We're thinking about going Monday morning and doing some U-Pick to get some more peaches. We'd really like to try doing more canning of fruit slices.

Craigslist Rocks!

Today was mostly spent shuffling furniture around, trying to figure out the final placement of furniture pieces, and then unpacking into the furniture once we were reasonably sure it was in the right place. We now have night stands in our basement bedroom! During Jeff's last trip down to California, he picked up two living room end tables and two bedroom night stands, all Bentwood, in the same finish as our other craigslist pieces! Yah for craigslist!

Jeff and I have spent several hours today cleaning and touching up furniture and taking pictures. I'm in the process of listing several pieces on craigslist in an attempt to help declutter the house. We have a number of cherry pieces left from California that we didn't have time to sell and I didn't have the foresight to call a charity to come pick them up before we left, so they got thrown into that last POD. (Unfortunately, then some the stuff we actually did want to keep wouldn't fit.) Though, on the bright side, that enabled Jeff to go pick up those Bentwood furniture pieces in California, so I don't consider that it was a wasted trip.







I also went ahead and listed our Wells Cargo trailer, because it doesn't fit at this house. The wheel base is too wide to fit down the driveway, so it needs to go. Hopefully we'll be able to find someone to take it off our hands fairly soon because it's blocking our driveway.

Canning Today

Jeff brought back a big tub of peaches with him from Redwood City. They are off the tree in the backyard at Upton. Even though I didn't particularly feel like canning today, with fruit you use it or you lose it. So, canning we are. =)

This is the first time we've tried canning peach slices. We only had 4 pint jars of peaches that were "perfect" enough. The rest of the peaches are being made into jam and coffee cake. Jeff is still working on the coffee cake, so there's no pictures yet.

I ended up doing three batches of jam, and unfortunately, I lost a jar in the hot water bath, probably because there wasn't a metal tray in the bottom of the pot and the jar was right above the flame. Oh well. My tray went AWOL a couple moves ago.