CoSar Casa

Hello! Jules here. You haven’t heard much from me because I, like most of you reading our blog, are wowed by Kelly’s amazingly conversational writing style and, I, like most of you, am a tourist keeping cadence with Docent Kelly from one blog post, “we’re walking; we’re walking; we’re walking” to the next blog entry. Let me fill you in on what happened after the earth below the weeds was rediscovered, and we came home from work to find a Q*bert reboot made of rebar, and Kelly stared at the build crew from every window in the house. (Big ups to those of you who rocked Q*bert in the 1980’s!) See? Q*bert! I had no idea what was going on here but I thought they were building a giant piano. Wow!!!   Yep, that about sums it up. Wow to the stress, the surprises, the neatly stacked cut-to-size piles of lumber. Then boom! In one day the piles of lumber were transformed into a seemingly massive structure in our backyard. You can see that day in this two-minute timelapse ...

I went back to work a couple of weeks ago, after having several months off, and that's when the construction started in earnest. Today is my day off, and the framers are here. (I'm pretty sure that's what they are.) The first hour they were here, I was popping around the house, from window to window, watching them. It got weird. Now I'm sipping my coffee and sitting in the massage chair and watching them through the sliding glass door. That's less weird, right? A LOT has happened since my last post, but with me being so used to being a lady of leisure and then suddenly going back to work full time, I've neglected to keep you informed. They replaced the sewer line and filled the dirt back in, so now our front yard is the barren wasteland it used to be and no longer a pile of holes and dirt. Bonus, in tearing up the yard to replace and install everything, they also tore up a lot of the vegetation that we hated! I'm being serious here. I imagine...

We had three major fears when embarking on this project: 1. Our 57-year-old sewer line would need to be replaced.  2. Our existing roof trusses would have termite damage.  3. There would be bodies buried in the backyard. Angry at being disturbed, they would turn into zombies and eat our brains. Aaaaaaaaaand the winner is*:  The entire sewer line needs to be replaced.  Because it looks like this: That rusted, crumpling, pipe-looking thing? That's a section of what remains of our cast-iron sewer line. But look how pretty that new pipe is! The plumber for Ritz is going to replace the line from the house to the city. The ACTUAL worst case scenario would be the sewer line under the foundation of the existing house cracking significantly, because that would mean tearing into our foundation and then having to do a major remodel costing tens of thousands of dollars. We're hoping not to have to do that for a few years!  Oh, and hey, in ca...

Don't you hate it when you get home from work and someone's torn up your yard and dug a big trench through it? Not us. Aren't you glad you're looking at a picture of a trench for a new sewer line? After we signed off on the designs, it seemed like it took FOREVER for the plans to go to all of the engineers and for the city to issue a permit. (Real time? Five weeks. Slightly less than forever.) Then we had a kickoff meeting, and the next morning all of the contractors came over to walk the property. Jules and Mommalinda stayed inside (it was pretty early) but I was out there, taking pictures and asking questions. Matt in the background, then Billy, Dale, Ed, and Sharzad Juan and Billy, Billy and Ed. Yeah, Billy is in EVERY PICTURE. I suspect vanity.  You could tell this crew has worked together for a long time and I loved listening to them problem-solve. Little things, like the electrician musing, "Maybe we should put a subpanel on the...

Okay, so I kind of started in the middle with the whole, "we're tearing down the pergolas" thing because I was all exhausted and proud at the time. But I never got to the "Why we're doing this" thing. So let's back up. My in-laws have been living in the same enormous 6 bedroom house since they purchased it in 1979. It was great when they were raising three kids and had various other relatives living with them throughout the years, but as they grew older, it became increasingly apparent that it was just too much house for them. However, my father-in-law was firmly planted and rather stubborn, so we helped them when we could but for the most part, let them be. When he died three years ago, it became increasingly apparent that things had to change. If it was too much house for two people, it was waaaaaay too much house for an elderly woman who had, in keeping with her generation, left most of the home maintenance to her husband. We spent many weekends...

Watch this space - it's going to be unrecognizable pretty soon. I don't mean the blog itself, I mean the backyard. We are having all of the concrete torn up and the yard regraded. Most of the concrete is in terrible shape, and we don't love the strange sidewalks to nowhere but more importantly, the yard slopes TOWARD the house, which is less than ideal, especially when you're about to pour a new foundation. Demo on the concrete starts this week, and Jules is out of town, so that meant that we had to remove everything in the backyard that we wanted to keep before she left. So that's how we spent the weekend. Just so you appreciate the magnitude of that, here is the backyard from the listing when we bought the house: The brown shed on the far left and the blue shed in the side yard were essentially just termite colonies and had to be torn down before we moved in. But I fell in love with the two big pergolas next to the house.  Another shot of the pergolas. ...