The main moving day was the day after Thanksgiving: November 27, 2015. We had emptied out my storage unit the weekend before, and hired laborers to help with unpacking on Saturday, but the main day when all the furniture and the majority of the stuff was moved from our rental house to Lovermore was Friday. The move went as smoothly as moves ever go. They’re a lot of fun if you like a cyclone coming into your house and sweeping everything up in whatever state of readiness you are in. I’m OK with this being a once-every-couple-decades experience. But it was all over 9 hours later and we live in Lovermore!
Thankful for Lovermore
A lot more has happened at Lovermore, all leading up to the big family Thanksgiving dinner. We got the granite bar top installed (although the tile backsplash will have to wait until after the holiday). Work on the kitchen cabinets has begun, although this won’t get finished either until the end of next week.
It doesn’t show up well in the photos, but I think the reddish brown color of the cabinets brings out the reddish spots in the granite, and it brings out the deeper red/orange tones of the tile backsplash. It’s not all sterile white anymore!
We had a last-minute panic about corbels, too. What is a corbel, you ask? It is the plain or decorative triangular-shaped support bracket underneath an overhanging bar. I didn’t realize until the day before the granite bar was to be installed that I needed to provide them myself. I ended up buying them at the non-DIY Home Depot in San Leandro while I was getting the tile for the fireplaced bullnosed.
We also got the hugest sofa sectional in the world finally delivered. We have two of those red/gold ottomans. If you push both of them in the center of the U-shaped area, it makes a huge mosh pit. That will be so much fun for watching movies on the 65″ 4K TV I bought. It is now wall-mounted on the wall to the left of the fireplace. I didn’t seem to get a picture of that.
Construction was not complete before Thanksgiving but we took that opportunity to clean up all the construction debris so we could prepare turkey in a clean kitchen. We made Rich’s famous “turkey in a paper grocery sack,” and I prepared cranberry relish and gluten-free gravy. Family members brought all the additional accouterments: stuffing, sweet potatoes, salad, and of course pies. It was a fully gluten-free Thanksgiving in honor of both Connor and Jennie.
And we feasted! For a potluck and paper plate Thanksgiving, I think we did pretty well!
Now we rest briefly before the main move. This picture of me and Rich was taken after everyone had left — it’s a new favorite!
Electrical, Painting, and a Refrigerator Snafu
A lot of work has been accomplished this past week at Lovermore. Pretty much all of it while I was gone on a business trip in Minnesota, planning our community solar gardens there. So muchas gracias to Rich who kept all this work moving along while I was out of the state. The electrical work is all done. I love the new wall sconces in the family room, they add so much warmth and light!
New and improved ceiling fan/light combos look much classier and deliver more light to the rooms. You can also see in the picture on the left below that we are preparing to wall-mount the TV.
And I love the colorful pendant lights we hung in the kitchen and bar area. They don’t look so interesting when the lights are off but when the lights are on, you see this really interesting marbling effect through the shades. I’ll have to get another picture of them when the lights are on.
As you can see, we also have the walls and trim painted. I like the look, much warmer than all the cold white before. There is still brick around the fireplace though. It will be another week before we have the new tile installed. We decided on a split-face travertine for around the fireplace opening and a 18×18 filled and honed travertine for the hearth. So that will be installed after Thanksgiving but before the Christmas party.
Now on to the snafus. Our cabinet installer, Isaac, is running late installing the cabinet faces, doors, and drawers, so that will not be fully finished before Thanksgiving. He says he will be mostly done though. But the bigger snafu is the refrigerator. We had wanted a cabinet-depth refrigerator, but needed more refrigerator storage in the house than we could get with a standard refrigerator/freezer combo. We will have a standalone freezer and refrigerator in the garage for storage, so we really needed more refrigerator space in the house. We found the perfect solution in a Samsung 4-door refrigerator. One of the four compartments can be converted from fridge to freezer. This is a perfect solution for us as we will use 3/4 refrigerator and 1/4 freezer pretty much all the time. The only problem is that this unit is slightly taller than the cabinet opening. The fridge goes about 3/4 of the way in but no further.
We didn’t discover this until the refrigerator was delivered. So today I contacted Isaac and he is going to raise the partition between the refrigerator and the cabinet above it. He will have to order two new doors for that cabinet, and they will take a little while to come in. So we will have a big hole above our refrigerator for the Christmas party, and the refrigerator will stick out about 6-8 inches for the duration. I guess we can live with that.
It’s starting to come together
Last week we had the electrician out doing the wiring for new outlets and light fixtures, and today we had Sosa Granite out to make the template for the granite bar top. It’s starting to come together! Somehow between now and Thanksgiving, a week and a half away, it will all come together. Rich has been a tremendous help, organizing and coordinating all of this, and taken heaps of stress off my plate. This is all the more necessary because this week I am travelling to Minnesota for business, while all this work is going on in the house.
