Hello! I’m finally reporting in from the other side of the move.  We only uprooted 2.4 miles—a longish stroll, really, but a move is a move and even a short one can make you feel like you’ve traveled a very great distance.

The move itself went smoothly but was exhausting.  Six professionals did the bulk of the heavy lifting—including a hair-raising transfer of our tall upright Yamaha piano.  A number of men from our church joined them at the new house and helped unload all the boxes once we arrived. Bless them!

Two friends brought dinner and another stopped by that evening with freshly laundered sheets and helped make the bed. (What a treat—something to offer when other friends move.)

As luck would have it, the next week was full of can’t-say-no commitments—mostly for M.J. who was asked to speak at a memorial service for an old friend at the beginning of the week and officiate at the wedding of some of his students at the end. Work and other night time commitments kept him away from home and I was left alone to unpack while doing battle with the cable and phone companies—a challenge worthy of an entire unpleasant blog post but I’ll spare you.

Meanwhile construction continued.  Gustavo was able to get the stove, cooktop and dishwasher in the morning (!) of the move. But the refrigerator—where this whole kitchen appliance switcheroo began–was still on backorder. About that time, Steve attempted to repair a few busted boards in the front walkway before painting and discovered this–

We knew all the decks of the house needed some work, but we didn’t realize how significant the dry rot was at the front.  Thank goodness the walkway held through the move and no one was injured, but we couldn’t just slap a coat of paint on it and ignore it.  So everyone shifted focus to the front deck.

The refrigerator arrived just after the walkway was finished but the interior entry stairs to the main level were steep enough that the deliverymen decided it was best to take the long way around.  Here they are lifting all 500 lbs. up the back deck stairs on a misty morning (such weather we get up here).

I’d like to say that was the end of the refrigerator saga, but alas, it continues.  Though Gustavo had carefully measured and allotted for the specified refrigerator dimensions, when he came to install it, the refrigerator fit in the space but didn’t have enough room for the doors to clear.  Furthermore, one of the handles the appliance company delivered was too short and couldn’t be attached.

We decided to take a break from all things kitchen related until Monday. And I spent some time outside trying to take the long view.

But today, Monday, I’m writing this to the familiar sound of a drill running as Gustavo and his coworker Geo modify the refrigerator opening again.

It’s easy to focus on how far we have to go, but I should also note how far we’ve come. We can find clothes in the closet and food in the cupboards.  The laundry is up and running and the garage door opener finally works. Last night for Father’s Day we straightened up the living room (isn’t that what most Dads like to do on their day?) I’ve added a new jute rug from West Elm and had the painters paint our old bookshelf a dark grey (BM “Iron Mountain”).  We haven’t filled it with books yet and the new slipcover still needs to be hemmed but at this stage of the game I’m less concerned with perfection and more grateful for the many things that are perfectly fine.

I’m whupped from simultaneously managing the construction project and packing up to move, but so pleased with the results.  Yes, there are things missing—the refrigerator is on back order for a month!—and we didn’t make all the deadlines we were working towards, but we did accomplish so much.

Today I made my final run to Home Depot for some odds and ends—a temporary shower curtain rod for the guest bath, more red rosin paper to protect the floors during the move, and  parts to repair the garage door opener including some doorbell wire.  A friendly employee named Cassandra led me to the wire then pointed to the doorbell display above and said, “This is my favorite thing in the whole store.”

Then she showed me how the doorbell can be programmed to play different ring tones like “Silent Night” or “The Star Spangled Banner.”  She giggled as she turned the switch to Beethoven’s “5^th Symphony” for a little drama.  I laughed and asked to take a photo of her demonstrating the different rings.  Another customer jumped in at the last minute.  It was a silly shared moment that highlighted how much fun so much of this has been.

Thanks for coming along for the ride.  Catch you on the other side of the move.

We knew the refrigerator wasn’t viable when we bought the house.  The cooktop was down to one working burner and we suspected something was up with the tired old dishwasher since the newly refinished floorboards were buckling in front of it.

Gustavo pulled out the dishwasher and it was clear that there had been a leak there for a long time.  Figuring that if three of the four appliances were going to be replaced, we might as well take advantage of some incentive pricing and upgrade them all.

But the cabinets needed to be modified to accommodate the newer appliances which required someone with carpentry, plumbing and electrical skills.  Gustavo has them all plus a calm, steady presence that keeps me from freaking out getting agitated when I hear the latest installment of What’s Wrong Now.

For example, none of the bathrooms have working ventilation fans.  The guest bath and powder room fans were disconnected (too noisy, perhaps?) and there was no fan at all in the master bathroom–just a heat vent and a central heat lamp/light.  Curiously, there was a mysterious vent outlet on the wall outside the master bath that looked like it should probably lead to a fan.  Gustavo did some precision surgery on the ceiling and discovered a vent all prepped and ready to go but we needed a fan.  He sent me off to Emperor Electrical Supply in Oakland’s Chinatown to pick up a Panasonic fan.  I wanted to snap a few portraits while I was there, but that seemed rude. Let’s just say the place was full of characters as well as electrical supplies.

I brought two fans home—one with and one without a light—and decided to go with the lighted fan at the toilet end of the long narrow space and move the central light a few feet over to the shower. Maybe it’s because as a kid I’d occasionally step into the basement shower in our farmhouse and find crickets, grasshoppers or sometimes even frogs, but I do prefer a lit shower.

Finally, we played musical doors throughout the top two floors.  The front entry houses three doors—a central front door flanked by the garage door on the right and bi-fold closet doors on the left.  The front door is made of redwood and maple with medieval-style hardware including an elaborate speakeasy; we call it The Hobbit Door.  The other two doors are made from unpainted fir with traditional panels.  Everyone agrees that all three doors are good quality and likely upgrades from the original (plain?) doors, but since the style and color of the fir doors don’t match The Hobbit Door or compliment the modern architecture, the floor stain, or the white washed ceiling—the whole entry feels jumbled.

Interior designer William Anderson recommended we just trade out the side doors for simple painted white doors to clear the clutter. Painter Steve Vaughn has also been working on cleaning up the front door to give it a more contemporary look—more on that later.

Gustavo is reframing the closet opening to accommodate a smaller flat door which should approximate the dimensions of the garage door.  We’re also replacing the powder room door with a plain door so that all the doors on the main level, with the exception of the front door, match.  That frees up the powder room’s existing paneled fir door to replace the broken pocket door by the shower/toilet area of the master bath—which will also match two small paneled closet doors nearby.  Still with me?

These are all projects we would have dealt with slowly over time had we just moved into the house. (Maybe–I was raised in a large family where you learned to make do and move on.) But having this month to work on small but significant construction projects means Team Pritchett is knocking them out before we move in.  Then we’ll be back to putting things off as usual.

Week 3 and there’s clear progress in the house. Most of the rooms are painted, the kitchen cabinets and front door are refinished, and the kitchen and powder room renovation projects are coming into focus.That said, there were enough hiccups this week that I ended up one evening pretty much in a fetal position. No major disasters did me in, just a steady stream of miscommunication, escalated costs, dead ends and false starts. “Sounds like you had a ‘gumption trap’ kind of day,” said my friend Nedra as I rehearsed the day’s woes the next morning. Defined as an event or mindset that can cause a person to lose enthusiasm and become discouraged, the term ‘gumption trap’  comes from Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Coincidently, that’s a book M.J. asked me to read while we were courting (the same year this house was built!) In turn I assigned him The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles–but I digress. A few days later, things are looking up. Here’s a peek at this week’s progress:

After asking design professionals and friends about their favorite white paint color, I had the painters put some big samples up near the whitewashed ceiling to see what played well with its pink/gray tones. From left to right – Bone White, Linen White and Swiss Coffee. Later on joined by White Heron, Dove White and Timid White.

My friend Jana, a color consultant and the poet behind Green Olive Archives, weighed in by encouraging me not to pick anything with a pink base because it would skew the whole house heavily pink–”which could be limiting.” Otherwise, she assured me that any of the whites I was considering would be just fine. When I worried about the white walls being too bland, she reminded me that in this modernist house it will be my stuff that will bring color and interest. “But will the house feel too cold?” I said, confessing that I was leaning towards Swiss Coffee, one of Jenning’s picks. Jana noted that it was considered a warm white and one of the easiest ones to work with. “If the rooms feel too cold on a rainy winter day—or a foggy summer one–add something as simple as a bowl of oranges and it immediately warms up a room,” said Jana.

She also confirmed what I was seeing on the walls–Swiss Coffee has a brown base which tones down the pinkish cast of the ceilings and now the color of the refinished cabinet fronts. Hoping to stave off a full blown kitchen remodel, we wanted to keep the original cabinets but over time  the varnish was peeling on the fronts near the windows and over the stovetop and had turned a plasticy yellow. You can see the difference, above, with the yellowed cabinet front on the left, the stripped natural front on the right and the cerused cabinet front in the middle.

I asked William Anderson, an Oakland-based designer with a classic, commonsense approach to design, to walk through the house and weigh in on a few decisions. He felt strongly that we should try to refinish the cabinets and not paint over them. Fortunately, our painter Steve was up to the challenge and stripped the old finish off  then found a lime wax that he put over the natural oak to give it a cerused finish. The end result looks modern but retains the original vision of the house. We’re not sure if the stone countertop was original (were they doing stone in 1979?) but it’s a nice piece of green granite and it seems such a waste to have it end up in a dump heap. My only hesitation is that the vaguely pink and green color scheme recalls my original everyday wedding china–Mikasa’s Silk Flowers (so 80s!) Perhaps down the road we’ll change out the tile, but it’s also in good shape and not unattractive. William agreed we should keep both the countertop and tile for now. New hardware and appliances will help update the room.

Besides the track lighting in the kitchen there is only one overhead light in the whole house and that’s in the entry. It’s a chance to make a statement so I want to take the time to find just the right thing for the space. In the meantime, I had the painters hang a simple ceiling fixture that I already owned from Berkeley lighting designer Sue Johnson. It echoes the entry pole (painted a dark grey per William’s suggestion) and really classes up the joint, don’t you think?

Here are some of the painters on a plank stretched between two ladders installing the fixture. This rigamarole does not seem like something we want to replicate every time we need to change a lightbulb. (Broken hip, anyone?) So that will need to be taken into account when selecting the ultimate fixture for this space.

The painters are pausing for a week to work on a previously scheduled project. A carpenter will step in to modify some of the kitchen cabinets for the appliances and tackle some smaller projects at the entrance and in the master bedroom. Then the painters will return to clean things up. Out of order, I know—but with the quick close of the house we’re scrambling to schedule workers when they’re available.

When it all gets to be too much, I’ll try to remember the morning I was out on the back deck and saw two foxes chasing across the ridge, their buff-colored tails lighting up the shade of the native oaks. Maybe the  memory of those lovely creatures–and the desire to be up on the ridge with them–will help me retain the gumption that got trapped earlier in the remodeling chaos.

But the basics like paint and carpet (see last week’s post) unfortunately needed to be addressed as well as some nonworking items like the refrigerator, bathroom fans, exterior lights and garage door opener. Mostly manageable stuff.

The big ticket renovation items—the kitchen and bathrooms—could all use some updating but for now we’d just polish them up a bit. For example, while the paint crew is on site we’re having them refinish the kitchen cabinet doors.  Here’s Steve Vaughn and his crew foreman Helo stripping doors in our driveway this morning. Bless them.

We decided we could live with the bathrooms if we resurfaced the master shower and guest bathtub.  But that didn’t solve the problem of the odd powder room layout. The vanity was tucked into a corner and the countertop extended to the opposite wall with an undercounter opening that made it seem like it was intended to be used as a dressing table (weird for a powder room.) The sink was also exceptionally worn. So on our first day back in the land of homeownership–when we were just going to pick paint colors–M.J. and Steve decided to rip out the vanity. Which leaves us with this—missing floor tiles, off-center exposed plumbing and our first remodeling project underway.

So much for my plans to slowly, minimally, fix up what needed fixing.  But I’m rallying. Even the best taste isn’t your own taste.  Being forced to make a place your own can be, to quote the queen of home projects, “a good thing.” Right?

Today we made our final pre-closing visit to the house to meet with the painter and carpet seller to get bids for projects best tackled before we move in.  After years of living in older houses that took to color like children to chocolate bunnies, it’s strange to be parsing shades of white.  But that’s what this house is telling us it needs.  Designed in 1979 by San Francisco architect Jim Jennings, the home is unapologetically modern.  Clean geometry, high ceilings and banks of windows oriented to the adjacent PG&E green belt and bay view give the main rooms a gallery-like feeling.

The seller had an affinity for Arts & Crafts architecture and paint colors and did a fine job incorporating them into the house, but we are interested in returning it to its modern roots. Accordingly, I called Jennings’s office to see if he preferred one white over another.  Jennings happened to be in and graciously gave me a little history on the house–one of his first projects–and said that though he couldn’t remember the colors he’d specified thirty-five years ago, today he tends to use Benjamin Moore’s “White Heron” or if that seems too severe, “Swiss Coffee.”

Armed with “White Heron” and “Swiss Coffee” paint chips (along with a handful of others) we tried to envision our gallery walls.  The painter said either would do, though he personally likes “White Dove” (often recommended by design professionals, along with “Simply White” and “Linen White.”)

Tired of squinting to see which ghostly shade best suited the bleached wood ceilings, we moved on to the bedrooms and considered a sea of flax/ivory/alabaster carpet samples. Pity the poor carpet salespeople trying to sell style during this heyday of neutrals. The winner today was a wool berber named “Divinity” (though it looked far more like “Honeycomb” to me.) But a late afternoon call from the carpet showroom said they could find a similar color in a large remnant that could save us some money–would I be able to come in tomorrow to see the sample?  And so it begins.