Category Archives: home sweet home

home sweet home: lee house

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It has been about a year since we moved into Pearson House in Walla Walla, Washington. After months of renovation, we moved away — to Kansas, of all places. For the past couple of months, we have lived in a rental home while combing the area to find just the right property to buy. (When I say we combed the area, I am not exaggerating: We visited seventy-two homes and experienced two failed contracts before finding Lee House.) After we had Lee House under contract, we had more waiting to do. We barely made it through those agonizing weeks between having our offer accepted and actually moving in.

We finally took possession last week, on Valentine’s Day. We spent a long, romantic day unloading our belongings into the home and several more very long, romantic days — including my husband’s birthday — getting all our things situated. By “situated,” I mean hauling heavy pieces of furniture and boxes of books in and out of rooms and up and down the stairs. And by “all our things,” I mean only a fraction of our things. Many items are still boxed up in the garage waiting for someone to bring them in and make a place for them.

One of the great things about Lee House is that it’s not a remodeling project, like our other three houses, including the last home we owned in this area. Lee House definitely needs cosmetic work here and there, especially upstairs, but overall it’s in great shape. This is the first time ever that we’ve been able to simply move our things in without having to repaint, remodel, rewire, re-roof or redo anything at all.

That doesn’t mean change isn’t coming. It is. Just not yet. Not for at least a few months. We’re taking winter off with regard to home renovations. (But spring is right around the corner!)

Below are photos of the house as it looks at this moment. The four roof windows on the second level — one of which is shown below — are my favorite feature of the house. I’ve seen two hawks, an eagle and scads of smaller birds through these windows since we’ve moved in.

Living Room One
:: Living Room View One

Living Room Two
:: Living Room View Two

Living Room Three
:: Living Room Cubbies

Dining Room
:: Dining Room

Sunroom
:: Sunroom

Kitchen
:: Kitchen

Bedroom One
:: Master Bedroom

(The pendant light, dated track lighting and the strange brass pole are all items we will be addressing when we begin renovation on this space. The carpet will also be stretched. You can see it wrinkling on the right side of the image above.)

Bedroom Two
:: Master Bedroom

(The pieces of art above the bed won’t really be positioned in this way. We hung them on existing hangers in the wall for now.)

Bedroom Three
:: Master Bedroom Headboard Shelf

Bedroom Four
:: One of the Four Master Bedroom Roof Windows

Bathroom One
:: Master Bathroom Entrance

Bathroom Two
:: Master Bathroom Double Vanity

Bathroom Three
:: Master Bathroom Slate Tilework

Office One
:: My Office

(My husband also has an office, but it’s not presentable at the moment. When I took the photo above, I didn’t realize Beebs was in it. She must have photo-bombed the shot.)

Office Two
:: Office Shelving

(Above, you can see some of the drywall damage we have to address. Every drywall joint on the second floor really needs to be taped and mudded again. A full skim-coat might even be in order. Most likely, somebody DIY’d the drywall work on this level to save money when they should have contracted it out because it wasn’t their area of expertise.)

Office Three
:: More Office Shelving

Office Four
:: Even More Office Shelving

(The tackle boxes in the photo above are poetry emergency kits.)

home sweet home: where the meadow meets the woods

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lee house sunroom
:: Lee House Sunroom

Jon and I have been back in Kansas City for three weeks. We are delighted to be here for more reasons than we can count (though I might try to list those reasons in an upcoming post). However, even though we are here — back in the city we both consider our home — we are feeling absolutely homesick. By that I mean we are sick about not yet having found a home to call our own.

Since we began our search back in November, we’ve gotten close on two houses, but the deals didn’t come together in the end. To date, we have viewed seventy-two houses, put three houses under contract, and attempted to put another two houses under contract. We have conducted three general inspections, three pest inspections, three radon tests, two structural inspections, one mold inspection and one asbestos test. We have also wasted used up devoured squandered consumed countless hours of our agent’s time.

In short, we’re tired — and we still don’t have a house.

But we just might have found the one — finally. And not just the one, but the one and only house for us. Following our tradition of naming houses after the street on which they are situated, this home’s name is Lee House. Lee House lies two blocks on the Kansas side of the state line, which wasn’t in our initial search area. Lee House also resides in the historic district of a city named Leawood, which (I believe) denotes that it’s where the meadow meets the woods.

I hope we can live in the city where the meadow meets the woods, because that sounds lovely. I also hope we can come to call Lee House our home, because it is a lovely home indeed.

home sweet home: oak house

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For the past week, Jon and I have been working nonstop to complete all the work we need to have finished before Pearson House officially goes on the market later this week.

In the kitchen, we built out the island, added tumbled travertine tiles to the counter and island backsplashes, painted the countertops with a fast-drying acrylic paint designed for laminate surfaces, repaired the original door to the pantry, had a new sink installed, and touched up the cabinet paint. In the master bathroom, we removed the shag carpet, installed a new floor, painted the walls, and had a pedestal sink installed. In other rooms, we plugged away at remaining details, such as touching up paint and making minor repairs as needed.

In addition to finishing our projects, we also had to get the home staged and ready for the professional photo shoot that took place yesterday evening. We cleaned off the front porch, added flowers and topiaries, swept the walkways, mowed the lawn, and had the yard edged.

We haven’t had enough sun here to take decent photos of our improvements with my point-and-shoot camera, but I hope to share images as soon as we have better light. I am also very interested in how the professional photos of the home will turn out. In the meantime, I thought I’d share before and after photos of the first home Jon and I purchased, Oak House, which we renovated over a period of seven years, from 1997 to 2004.


:: Exterior Before


:: Exterior After

When we purchased Oak House, it was in a neglected state aesthetically — the kind of state that would turn many buyers off. But Jon and I could see its bones — what it was at its core, and what it could be with our care and attention.


:: Bathroom Before


:: Bathroom After

By the time we left, Oak House had made an appearance in Kansas City Homes and Gardens magazine and had won neighborhood awards for best lawn and best home. People routinely stopped by to ask us what colors we’d used on the house because they wanted to replicate the scheme on their own homes. Our neighbors across the street even took photos of the home from their upstairs windows, then sent us the photos and thanked us for giving them such a great view.


:: Kitchen Before, View One


:: Kitchen After, View One


:: Kitchen Before, View Two


:: Kitchen After, View Two


:: Kitchen After, View Three

Oak House was a hard renovation for us, and it was lovely to have our efforts validated by our neighbors and others in the community. Two months after all our work was finally done, Jon was offered a job — out of the blue — in Washington State. It was time to hand Oak House off to its new owners, which wasn’t an easy thing to do. We’d grown attached to Oak House, just as we are attached to Pearson House.

I don’t know how other people feel about their homes, but for me they breathe and speak. They communicate and nurture, and they need nurturing in return. This means they are, in a way, alive — and they are certainly responsive to being cared for and protected. Letting go of a home you’ve invested so much time and energy in is like letting go of a relationship with a friend or family member — one you’ve come to know and love deeply, and one you will miss terribly once they are no longer part of your life.

home sweet home: grounded

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:: Grounded

Jon and I had a heart-to-heart conversation last night about the unexpected frustrations we’ve encountered with our home sale. Those frustrations had begun to affect us as we put the final touches on our renovations. We were arguing with one another and weren’t enjoying the work anymore, which is no way to spend our last days in this town and in this home.

We knew we had to do something to remedy the situation. Because we didn’t want all our remaining time in Pearson House — and all our work on it to date — to be effaced by circumstances beyond our control, we vowed to get back in touch with the goals we had when we first purchased the home, which were two-fold. First, we wanted our work here to be an extension of our love and respect for the home’s history and architecture. Second, we wanted our work to be an expression of our love for one another and our commitment to our relationship.

When we first set foot in Pearson House as its owners, we were elated to make a life here and to move forward together with this exceptional home as our anchor. Though we are leaving long before we anticipated doing so, we can still imbue our last days here with the same spirit we possessed when we arrived.

We love, honor and respect one another, just as we love, honor and respect this home. We will carry out all remaining work grounded in this knowledge. All the remaining improvements we make here will come from a place of joy, as well as mutual admiration for the skills we each bring to the renovation process. We will support one another in carrying out our work to the most exacting standards because we will be doing that work for ourselves in order to honor our commitment to our marriage and our home. This work isn’t about anyone but us, and nobody can take our experience of this place away from us, let alone our joy at having lived here and having seen the renovation process through to its completion.

We will wake up tomorrow with this love in our hearts. And the day after that. And the day after that. Each day we have left in Pearson House is a gift, and each day we will be thankful to call it our home.

home sweet home: wallpaper fail

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:: Sad


:: Sadder

The inevitable has happened. The wallpaper failed. Turns out, it wasn’t our walls or wall prep that were the problem — or at least they weren’t the sole source of the problem. Unfortunately, the wrong type of adhesive was used in the paper’s application. The instructions that came with the wallpaper state that a heavy-duty, low-water-content vinyl adhesive is supposed to be used with this type of wallpaper. Instead, our contractor used a thin water-based adhesive.

The only areas that successfully adhered to the walls were (ironically) those that failed immediately after the wallpaper was installed. Our contractor reattached those areas using a heavy-duty vinyl-to-vinyl wallpaper paste. In the end, we had 90 percent failure (where the water-based adhesive was used) and 10 percent success (where the vinyl paste was used).

A 90 percent fail is still a complete fail where wallpaper is concerned. And to make our fail even worse, the areas glued back on with vinyl adhesive required a great deal of time and effort to remove because they adhered to the wall so effectively.

I removed all the paper over the weekend and have started priming the walls with two coats of white-pigmented shellac. Then we’ll have the walls skim-coated so they are ready for paint. I don’t think I’ll ever choose to have wallpaper in another house after this experience. Between the paper and labor for this room, coupled with the time and expense of removing the paper and starting over with bare walls, we’ve wasted thousands of dollars — money we couldn’t spare and didn’t anticipate spending.