Barter

What do you do when you're flat broke but have an enormous living room wall that cries for art?

You barter away an old red couch...


...call your friends over for an evening of watching you bicker over leveling a huge sheet of painted Tyvek...


...watch your husband do death-defying stunts 13 feet off the ground...


...and replace the old couch with one you've spent two years saving for! (Found here.)


Many, many thanks to our generous friend and artist Benjamin Wiemeyer for taking pity on us and doing the barter. We love the painting and the view from the sidewalk:


(And so does the neighbor kid who just rode past and shouted, "I love your painting!")

The first tree of spring

Behold:


A sign of progress. Thanks to friend Shannon for the very thoughtful and beautiful weeping snow fountain cherry tree, which has found a happy home in our front yard.

...

Forgive us the posting drought. By way of brief announcement, I was pregnant this fall, and over Thanksgiving I went into pre-term labor and gave birth to our stillborn son. We will be mourning for quite some time, but we have been so grateful for the love and support of our family and friends through it all. Pouring ourselves into finishing this house has been a great comfort to both of us — we are clinging to the happy anticipation of a finished house as a way to soothe the grieving process.

We are close. Yesterday our staircase and landing rail system arrived and was installed in a matter of hours (you can also see our finished, exposed duct work):


You can see the blue that we settled on for the large north wall, too. Many, MANY thanks to the our weekend volunteer crew: Judy, Greg, Nancy, Laura, and especially my father-in-law Tainui who couldn't be dragged from helping by wild horses. Tainui: we owe you our baseboard, our painted walls, our light fixtures, our tile floors, our sanity and our love.

Davido's crew has been hard at work on our garage. Over the weekend that meant putting up particle-board sheeting in sub-freezing temperatures. Today, it meant installing a garage door in the biggest blizzard of the year:



In the "insult upon injury" category, last Saturday night we discovered water damage in our kitchen ceiling. Turns out that a part of our master bath shower fixture had a slow leak that had been dripping onto our ceiling since it was installed. A late-Saturday-night visit from Davido, the plumber and my in-laws helped us pinpoint the location of the leak. The plumber repaired it yesterday, and today the drywaller was redoing the kitchen ceiling.


Part of the stairs delivery included the frame for our front door canopy, which will eventually have 2"x4" cedar planks to form the "roof" for our front door and approach:


So, we're getting there.

11 views on YouTube = famous!

We mentioned on Twitter recently that we had a visit from Park City TV to take a look at our current condo. We are clearly not TV stars, but we still get a kick out of seeing the finished product (and that remixed Jose Gonzalez song as the soundtrack!):



(Plus, how classic is it that Tai's first reaction was, "the SWINYARD condo??!?" Totally makes up for all those times I've been called a Biesinger, darling!)

Welcome, voyeurs

Most of you probably know that we started another blogging endeavor at Renovation Voyeur, an aptly named site for the more prurient among us. We'd like to issue a hearty welcome to those finding us via that route, and we'd also like to send all our regulars over to check out the site if you haven't gotten there already.

Braggadocio

Buddy Doug is off doing great things in Washington, D.C. Among them he's making good on his threats to green up all our beltways. He wrote and launched The Green Home Guide, brought to you by (him and) the Green Building Council.

I've already read his beautifully crafted prose about green renovation, and, I'm proud to say that we were planning to do all of those things, minus the exterior plantings.

We have four floor-to-ceiling, single-pane windows that rattle and leak air like crazy (you could catch pneumonia from across the room), so we'll be caulking those. We're replacing the fridge and dishwasher with energy star versions and plan to purchase an energy star washer-dryer combo (ovens and dryers evidently can't be energy star by their very nature, but we air-dry at least half of all our laundry, so there's some more bragging for you!). We already have a programmable thermostat that is set to 51 degrees during the remodel. We need to replace the shower head and we don't have any sink faucets right now, so it should be pretty easy to buy low-flow faucets or make them that way during installation. We're already using low-VOC paint, and we won't be using any other industrial glues or products that will have lots of VOC(s). We're purchasing IKEA kitchen cabinets made of particleboard constructed to European standards, which means very low levels of formaldehyde and less off-gassing after installation. And we're using bamboo flooring and slate tile — both of which we have picked or will pick up from warehouses within 20 miles of our condo (granted, Utah doesn't have any native bamboo fields, but we haven't yet found flooring made of scrub oak).

Since we live in a condo building, we don't have a lot of control over landscaping. But I've long loved having plants inside — the sunroom in our last place always had three or four planters and a few potted plants. We also keep a plant in nearly every room (a small deed when you have only a few rooms, but I'm taking credit nonetheless). It's literal green for the figurative green title.

Greenie

In a former life, I labored at a certain Salt Lake newspaper. While I did not, as a whole, enjoy my experience there, I did meet some pretty amazing people both in and out of the paper. In the year since I quit that job, my friends there have been trickling off to do bigger and better things (I'm looking at you, Ellie's cheeks). One of those, Doug, is now moving to Washington, D.C., to join the U.S. Green Building Council, the friendly folks who came up with LEED certification.


This is the man who trailed around the newsroom, scouting for notebooks in people's trash cans in a quixotic quest to be the 7th floor's collective environmental conscience. (He'd cut off the wire binding and recycled the otherwise-worthless pages.) I can't think of a better job for him than this new one, even if Salt Lake will miss him dearly.

I am looking forward to exploiting his future expertise, though, since he will allegedly be developing a residential component to USGBC's already substantial commercial and office repertoire of green-building tips. Dupont Circle, Doug!