Final Inspection

This morning we had our final building inspection as well as the final walk-through for the Arlington County Green Home Choice program. Rob showed up at 7 am, and, since he knew we'd still be in bed, did some work outside. He raked up some of the gravel from the driveway...
...and used it to fill in the window well. Exciting stuff!The gravel-raking noises woke me up, so I hopped in the shower and eventually made my way downstairs just as Rob was finishing up. Our newspaper was already sitting on the kitchen counter, along with fresh bagels and cream cheese. What a sweetheart! We compared notes on our Indian wedding experiences (we both attended different Indian weddings on Aug 1) and caught up until Josh came down. Just as we were starting to dig into the bagels, the doorbell rang. I thought it was the building inspector, but it turned out to be Steve B. He had brought us some raspberry plants that he had to dig up from his own yard as he is having some work done on his house. We'll have to find a good spot to plant them this weekend.Soon afterwards, Josh noticed Steve W standing in our back yard. Rob hadn't mentioned that either of the Steves were planning to come for the inspection, but it was nice to see them. We chatted with them over bagels while we waited for the inspector to arrive.

The county inspector rang the doorbell a little after 9 am, followed closely by our architect, Marta, and Helen, the Green Home Choice program coordinator. Marta also brought us a gift -- hand-painted house number tiles and a butter dish that her husband had picked up for us on a recent trip to Mexico. We are eager to use these lovely tiles to replace the spray-painted plywood sign on the front lawn that currently displays our house number. The county inspector was in and out in about 5 minutes, as he just had a couple items left to sign off on. Once all the paperwork was taken care of, we gave Helen a tour of the house. Here are the Steves explaining how the heat recovery system in the basement works. Steve W likes to refer to it as a "whole house bong" or a "hookah" because it kind of looks like a giant water pipe... Actually, it is a giant water pipe, but in a different sense of the word 'pipe'.Once we had finished the tour, we sat down to go over the scoring sheet to see if we had enough points for the Green Home Choice certification. From left to right: Marta, Helen, Rob, Steve W, Steve B, and Josh. Josh and Steve W eventually had to duck out, but we finally tallied up the points for our score around 11 am. For the basic certification, you need at least 150 points. Our grand total: 298!
Rob also presented us with a homeowners manual that he had put together for us. It has all our green certifications as well as information about the green aspects of our home and how to maintain them and suggestions for other ways to save water and energy.
He also gave us this huge file box with all the owners manuals and documentation for the various appliances, mechanical systems, and fixtures in our house.
It looks like we have our work cut out for us to go through all this stuff and make sure we know everything we need to about our house and its inner workings.

After Steve B, Marta, and Helen left, Rob finished up a few final projects around the house. He replaced a sconce in the master bathroom, touched up some scratches in the hardwood floors, and installed shelves in the built-in cabinets in the master bedroom.
I spent some time last night unpacking books and photographs to put on the shelves. Of course Rob teased me about not being able to reach the top shelves. But we do have 9-foot ceilings. I don't think he could even reach the top shelf without a stool. (Have I mentioned how tall he is? Probably.)
Rob finished up around 1 and said goodbye, although I'm sure we haven't seen the last of him. Especially since he forgot a tote bag full of his stuff here. Clearly, he enjoys our company enough to create excuses to keep coming back -- at least subconsciously... ;-)

For those of you who care (mom?), here's the latest grass photo. As you can see, the weeds are coming up quite nicely, too.

This afternoon I gave a quick tour to a couple who are planning to work with SAI to build a green house in Arlington. They have a new baby, so they had a very small window of opportunity in between naps and feedings to see the house. I've lead a lot of tours already, but I'll need to work on a condensed version in case this situation arises again. We ended up having to run through the entire upstairs in about 3 minutes, and never made it to the basement. Still, it was nice to meet them and I think they were impressed with the house. I hope to eventually add "tour guide" to the list of new skills and knowledge I acquired through this renovation project...

Vacation Roundup

I know, I know -- this is supposed to be a blog about our renovation. But I took so many photos during our week on the Cape that I just had to share a few more...

Here's a house that has trimmed its hedge to resemble a whale, complete with water spouting from the blowhole.
And this one has a playhouse that is an exact replica of itself!
This is the view along the little harborfront beach across the street from our house.
Every Friday night in the summer (since 1936!) there is a free concert at the local bandstand. People show up very early to stake out a spot on the lawn, and come back later in the evening with a picnic dinner. It is a great evening of campy, family-friendly fun! Kids and adults are encouraged to dance around the bandstand for certain portions of the evening, and there are several audience-participation numbers (Old McDonald, BINGO, etc). The band leader is 86, and most of the musicians are about the same age, with a few high school and college kids mixed in. They all don bunny ears for grand finale -- the Bunny Hop! It is a real hoot to watch everyone get caught up in the silliness -- not just little kids, but parents, grandparents, and even teenagers!
Saturday Josh spent 5 hours windsurfing. I made him take me out to dinner to make up for it.
Josh's cousin Hugh and his fiancee Lyndsay (and their dog, Olive) arrived late Saturday night. That made it even harder for us to leave the next morning, but we'll all be back in a couple weeks for Josh's grandmother's (Florrie) memorial service.
It took us nearly 12 hours to drive home, thanks to all the traffic on I-95. It was strange to walk into our house -- I think our vacation had so effectively taken our minds off of the renovation that we practically forgot all about it, so we were expecting the house to look like it did 7 months ago. We were pleasantly surprised that it did not.

Speaking of the memorial service, I forgot to mention earlier that Uncle Josh had given us an assignment right before he left. He asked us to go to the local cemetery where Josh's grandfather is buried and remove his old grave marker -- the family had new matching ones made for Josh's grandparents -- and then fill in the hole and scatter some grass seed so it will look a little nicer when it's time to bury Florrie's ashes next to her husband's. So, Josh and I showed up at the cemetery on Wednesday with shovels, gloves, and a tarp. I'm sure that didn't look suspicious at all...

The 'Other' House

If you're wondering why there haven't been any house updates this week, it's because we've been seeing another house on the side. Yep, we are cheating on our house by taking a last-minute vacation to visit Starboard Light, Josh's family's house on Cape Cod.
This fabulous getaway originally belonged to Josh's great-grandparents and then his grandparents, so everyone in his family has lots of fond summertime memories of this place. In fact, the house is like a member of the family. I first visited in 1996, soon after Josh and I started dating, and fell in love with its quirky charms and amazing location just like everyone else who's ever been here. We try to visit every summer.

The house sits right across the street from the water and has it's own little beach on the harbor. Here is the view from the top of the stairs leading down to the beach. There's a yacht club down the street, so all those little sails are kids in itty bitty sailboats being towed back in after their afternoon sailing lesson.
We arrived on Monday afternoon to a picture-perfect day of clear blue skies, a nice breeze, and a warm welcome from Josh's uncle (also named Josh) and cousin Eliza. After we unloaded the car and got settled in, Uncle Josh suggested we go fishing, so we rowed out to his old wooden motorboat and headed out.
Now, I'm not a big seafood lover, but I couldn't pass up an opportunity to cruise around in a boat on such a beautiful day. Especially with this cheerful lot. (That's Uncle Josh and Eliza doing their best 'American Gothic' impression.)
We'd only been out for about 20 minutes when Eliza got a bite. She reeled in this impressive 8.5-pound, 31-inch bluefish. Very exciting! At least it was until the Joshes attempted to kill it with a small baseball bat and a knife. It was the Rasputin of fishes!
The bluefish became dinner that evening. Uncle Josh and I went to the local market to pick up some ingredients for a recipe they had decided on, so I bought myself some chicken and adapted the recipe so I'd end up with a similar entree. It was quite a feast.

After Uncle Josh and Eliza left Tuesday afternoon, Josh and I decided to take another tour around the harbor. Since it was very calm, I thought it would be fun to paddle around in the kayak.
But it was a 1-person kayak, so Josh had to improvise his own watercraft. He actually managed to paddle himself around on this contraption, which is a beach chair on top of his windsurfing board. It was quite comical!
Wednesday was much cooler and cloudy, but Josh could not resist the lure of the water, so we rowed across the harbor in the dinghy to Harding's Beach and walked around the old Stage Harbor lighthouse -- a popular subject for local artists and photographers.
It rained most of today, but it was windy enough that Josh was able to do some windsurfing. We both did a fair amount of work, since the house now has WiFi, in hopes that it would free up the rest of our time here when the weather improves. It's supposed to clear up tomorrow afternoon and be nice for the rest of the weekend, so we can put the laptops away and enjoy the great outdoors.

Watching Grass Grow

If you're thinking that reading my latest blog entries is about as exciting as watching grass grow, you're in for a real treat... Now you can actually watch our grass grow! Yep, it's been a couple weeks since the landscapers re-graded and re-seeded our back yard, and now you can see little blades of grass poking up through the straw.
Josh also retrieved our picnic table from the back corner of the yard and our patio umbrella, gas grill and lawn mower from our neighbor's garage. Now we have a nice place to hang out in the yard.
I'm happy to report that the umbrella and lawn mower seem none the worse, but our attempt to cook dinner on the grill the other night resulted in our testing out our new kitchen appliances instead. The grill was a very generous housewarming gift from some close friends when we first bought our house 5 1/2 years ago, and we used it frequently, but it seems to have given up the ghost. Bummer! I guess we'll have to add that to our list...

We still have quite a bit of unpacking and organizing to do -- we took a week off while our houseguests were here -- but once we clear all the boxes out of the corners and put things on shelves and walls, I'll try to do a more comprehensive photo tour of the house so you can see what it looks like with all our stuff in it. (It may take a few weeks, so be patient!)

Going Postal

I got an email from my parents this morning asking if I got the check they sent me. My first reaction: "What check?"

My second reaction: "Come to think of it, I haven't received ANY mail for the past two weeks!"

I called the post office and managed to get our actual mail carrier on the phone. It turns out that while they did process my recent request to forward mail addressed to our apartment to our home address, they never got around to canceling our order to forward mail addressed to our home address to our apartment -- despite the fact that I submitted the cancellation request form in person three weeks ago. So our mail ended up in some kind of postal purgatory where it kept getting forwarded back and forth but never actually delivered.

What makes this even more ridiculous is that both our house and our apartment are in the same ZIP code and serviced by the same post office, so our mail never even left the building, it just kept getting shuffled back and forth from one carrier's box to another. Thankfully, I was able to get this straightened out over the phone, and our mailman showed up a few hours later with a big bundle of mail -- including the check -- and a package that my friend Kinnari had shipped to herself here. It arrived just in the nick of time, as they left about an hour later. Fingers crossed that we will be receiving regular mail delivery from now on...

In other package-delivery news, yesterday was my sister's birthday. In the midst of packing and moving, I managed to pull up her Amazon.com wish list and order a couple books for her. The total came to something like $24.42, so I was just shy of the $25 required to qualify for free shipping. I did a quick search to see if I could find something for less than a dollar to add to the order, and settled on a glue stick for 96 cents. She's crafty, so I figured it would come in handy for some project or another -- and since we both come from a long line of frugal penny-pinchers, I knew she'd appreciate the reason why I included it.

Well, a few days later I got an email from Amazon.com informing me that they had shipped part of my order separately for quicker service. My subsequent email exchange with Sonia went thusly:

July 27
Naina: You should be getting a couple packages from Amazon in the mail -- one of which will seem completely ridiculous (because it is!).

July 31
Sonia: I just received a box from Amazon containing a single glue stick. I imagine this is the ridiculous part? :)

The books were delivered to her office yesterday, but since she took the day off, the only birthday gift she's received from me so far is a glue stick -- most likely in a way-too-large box with unwarranted amounts of air cushioning. I'm definitely going to have to make up for this at Christmas...

What's New?

Sorry I haven't posted for a while, but the past few days have been quite busy, and very little has changed with the house. I'll try to get caught up...

Thursday the landscapers put some finishing touches on the patio by making sure it was perfectly flat and installing some kind of edging around it to hold it in place. They also weeded the back yard and disposed of all the transplanted shrubs that didn't survive the move.
In front, they filled in the middle of the runners with rocks and added topsoil and grass seed on the edges to make the driveway level with the ground.
They also reseeded the back yard and covered it with hay to keep the seed wet and protect them from birds. I'm not sure how effective that was, because our yard looked like a Hitchcock movie all weekend -- there were so many birds feasting on grass seed! Fortunately, we also got a lot of rain, so that should help encourage the remaining seeds to germinate and grow us some grass.
The big thrill for me was finally being able to park in my driveway again! And there was plenty of room for our friends to park behind us, which made it easier for them to get the kids in and out of the car.
Friday evening we all attended a pre-wedding picnic at a park in Chevy Chase, MD. We had tasty Indian food and were treated to a Bhangra dance lesson by a friend of the bride's. Ironically, the woman teaching the lesson was African American, while the majority of the people learning were Indian.

The wedding was on Saturday at Meridian Hill Park in DC. It was a bit humid, but otherwise a beautiful day for an outdoor wedding. Here's a photo of Josh and me all decked out in our Indian party clothes.
We had a good time at the wedding, but we were so exhausted afterwards that we ended up taking a two-hour nap when we got home (it was an afternoon wedding).

Today we had a bunch of friends come over to tour the house. It was a bit chaotic -- there were six kids, ages 1-4 -- but it was fun to see everyone and we got lots of positive feedback from our friends. We are planning to have a proper housewarming party at some point, but I think we'll need a little more time to settle in, and perhaps take a much-needed vacation, before we're ready to do that.

Coincidentally, Rob was at an Indian wedding this weekend too, but he's supposed to come by later this week to take care of a few more issues and give us our house manual. I'll keep you posted on any new developments.