Open House

You'll notice the previous set of photos show everyone bundled up and snow on the ground. Believe it or not, these were taken just a few days later. It was in the 70's over the weekend, and all the snow was soon just a memory. But first, let's get caught up on the events of the past few days...

We got a call Saturday morning from our friends Jason & Elizabeth asking if they could come see the house that afternoon. We agreed to meet them there around 3:30 and then headed down to Architectural Ceramics in Alexandria, VA to finalize our tile selections. It's a good thing we scheduled the meeting early (10 am), because it turned out the annual St. Patrick's Day parade was happening right around the corner at 12:30. Seeing as it was only March 7, it hadn't occurred to us, but now that I think about it, it always seems to be at least a week before the actual holiday. Coincidentally, Josh and I both happened to be wearing shades of green, so we blended right in with the crowds headed towards the parade route. The tile store was pretty busy, too, but we managed to get out by 11:45 and hightail it out of there before the crowds reached critical mass.

That only left us 15 minutes to eat lunch and get to our noon appointment at Allied Kitchens & Bath in Springfield, VA, so I called to ask if they minded us picking something up on the way and eating there. They said that wasn't a problem and mentioned there was a Subway nearby, so we stopped there first and got some sandwiches -- a turkey & ham for me and a spicy Italian for Josh. While they were finishing up with their previous meeting, Josh found a nice kitchen island display with chairs tucked away in the back where we could eat. I joined him there a couple minutes later to find him chowing down on MY sandwich! He had already eaten about a third of it without noticing that it tasted nothing like what he had just custom-ordered 5 minutes earlier. Sheesh!

Anyway, after finishing what was left of my lunch, we spent a couple hours working on our kitchen design. Our architect, Marta, spent several weeks last summer designing the layout with us -- down to choosing the appliances -- and we've already settled on our countertop material and backsplash tile, so fortunately all we have left to do is decide what we want our cabinets to look like -- and how green we want them to be. They were able to create some cool 3-D renderings of our kitchen that really helped us visualize what it will look like when it's all done.

Our meeting ran longer than we expected, so we had to go straight from there to the house to meet Jason & Elizabeth. We got there a little early, so Josh had a chance to call his grandmother while we were waiting. She fell and broke her pelvis a couple weeks ago and subsequently developed pneumonia, so the prognosis was grim. She seemed pretty lucid on the phone, though, and asked Josh how our renovation was going.

While Josh was on the phone, I noticed that our crocuses were blooming. The builders carefully fenced off a big chunk of our landscaping in the front yard, so I'm looking forward to seeing the daffodils, tulips, and hyacinths come up this spring in the midst of our construction site.
The framing of the second floor is all done, and they've installed the sheathing, so you can really see what the shape of the house will be when it's all done.
Here's the view from the back, with the enlarged family room framed in on the right and our master bedroom above it.
Here's Josh standing next to what used to be the back corner of our family room. It's hard to believe that it was really that small -- and how much bigger it will feel now!
Just before our friends arrived, we saw our neighbor, Alan, and his son out enjoying the nice weather so we invited them in for a tour as well. So soon thereafter we ended up with 3 toddlers in the house. Not the safest place for a bunch of little kids, but we kept a close eye on them (and the youngest was in a backpack).
Jason & Elizabeth's daughter, Lauren (age 3), is fascinated by construction equipment, so I took her outside to check out the Bobcats. She was delighted:

She was kind enough to let her little brother have a turn, too.
When we came out to the front yard, we bumped into a few more neighbors, so we ended up giving a couple more tours. Everyone on our block has been impressed with how quickly our renovation is going, so they were very interested to see what was going on inside. Then I got a call from our friends Rob & Diana asking if they could swing by for a quick tour since they were taking Rob's dog, Emma, to the dog park near our house. I was nervous enough about having toddlers in the house, but a construction site is definitely not a good place for a large, excitable sheepdog, so we had to take turns hanging out with her outside. It was all worth it -- Rob ended up inviting us over for dinner later in the evening.

By the time everyone had left it was nearly 6 pm, so we headed back to the apartment to change out of our muddy clothes and relax a bit before heading over to Rob's. What a long day!

Sunday we spent some time online trying to find a bathtub we liked for our master bathroom. We'll have to settle on something soon, as our builder asked us to have all our plumbing selections picked out by Friday. We also bought tickets to fly up to NH on Friday to see Josh's grandmother one last time. I hope she can hang in there until then. She's the matriarch of the family and I've grown very attached to her since I first met her in 1996. I can only imagine how hard this must be for Josh's family. But she has lived a long, full life...