Cycling and sheetrocking

Started out today very early with a great 48-mile bike ride. I was pleased with the pace, 16.9 mph average, and to crack 100 miles for this week. That's a good start to the long haul to Beach to Battleship iron-distance triathlon in six months from now! Time to start cranking up that volume!

Things at the new house are coming along, very gradually. Here's one of the upstairs bedrooms that I just finished painting - except for touchups (the trim needs a second coat), baseboard, and doors. We just had the whole house measured for new carpeting - that's still the old nasty stuff on the floor. Hopefully we'll have the new stuff installed within a week to 10 days, but I have a lot of painting to finish first.

"Before" with dingy old flat white paint (one coat over the wallboard and trim will do ya):

"After" with fresh warm tan paint (Kilz Casual Colors Dusty Orange), new bright white flat paint on the ceiling, and white semigloss on the trim (and begone with the fake removeable plastic window mullions):

The big remodeling project is coming along! They're right in the middle of doing the sheetrocking and plastering now. When they complete that, we move on to painting, flooring, and installation of cabinets and appliances! Then it's moving day!

Darwinian pruning

If they were meant to live, they will. The bushes on the new place haven't been trimmed back in a dozen years and were constricting the driveway and dangerously cutting off the view of cars down the street.

Before to the north:

After to the north:

Before to the south:

After to the south (it had completely grown over 3 other smaller shrubs!):

Maybe they'll live. . . .

Energy issues

No, I'm not talking about my workouts here - this is about remodeling.

As we've been browsing for new appliances I learned the details of the tax credits available for energy-efficient home improvements this year:
http://www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?c=products.pr_tax_credits#s1

This is probably the year to get these things done! There are tax credits available of $1500 total (up to 30% of purchase price) on a slew of energy-efficient items. Free money!

We hope to take advantage of this for:
* Outside doors (need at least 1 replacement needed)
* Storm doors (need at least 1 replacement needed)
* HVAC

I'd like to add an on-demand tankless hot water heater (like my Canadian friend Dianne just did), but we don't have natural gas or propane in the house and I don't want to add it just for that, so we will skip it. I also looked into an electric heat pump water heater, but those are just coming on the market this year for residential use and are recommended for larger-volume usage and warmer climates, so I think we'll have to stay with the traditional models if we replace the hot water heater.

The plat

Here's the new plat of the new house, just drawn up to save us several hundred dollars per year flood insurance!

If this house goes underwater, the entire peninsula will be underwater. We're in good shape, even though the water's edge of a tributary of the Chesapeake Bay is less than 60 feet from that top left (north) corner.

Notes:

IPF: Iron pipe found (buried)

IRF: Iron rod found (buried)
CMF: Concrete monument found
IRCS: Iron rod corner set

Property survey

If you're super-interested in this new house of ours (OF COURSE you are!) we just got a survey done yesterday to mark the corners of the property.

Photos are HERE (on Flickr).

Then I drew the little outline map above on the satellite image. The far back corner of the property is in the neighbor's front yard. Weird.

We had to have the house elevation documented. Because it's all a flood area around here, they wanted to charge us $2000 per year in flood insurance. Uhhhh.... Good thing we know a lot about a house two doors down that only is charged about 1/4 as much for annual flood insurance! It's something about being built at different times and some new regulation taking effect, but anyway, the survey documented that the foundation is something like 9 feet above the water line and there should be no particular risk of flooding (unless the whole peninsula is submerged when the polar ice caps melt). So the survey more than paid for itself in the savings for the first year.

Meeting with the remodeling guy today to get the numbers. Fingers crossed!

New house?

Here's what is probably going to be our new house in a couple of months:


It's just 100 yards from our current house! That's a Good Thing because we love the neighborhood. It's much bigger inside than it looks, and the best thing about it is that it's on a half acre with a huge back yard with a nice view of the cove. If we get it, be prepared for a long series of remodeling photos, because it needs one heck of a lot of work! We're still in negotiations, so it's nothing definite yet, but it's looking hopeful!