Maiden Lane - After

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Maiden Lane - Before

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So this one time, we had a blog...

Remember that? That was fun. Then we bought a house and took on the immense task of potty-training Oscar at the same time as renovating said house. I'm amazed that I lived to tell the tale. (Mostly because of the Oscar thing.)

No stringers, just 2 x 4s.

Stringers, the spine of a staircase.

So much has happened in the last six months. Let's see... Oh! We got new stairs. Yes, stairs. Everyone commented on how loud our stairs were and how you could see daylight through the top of each stair as you walked up them as they bowed under your weight, even more so with a 300-pound electrician (yikes!). We figured the stairs had a cracked stringer or just needed a little extra support. Apparently the people who built this house almost 100 years ago didn't believe in a thing called stringers. Not familiar? Neither was I at the time, but now I am. Intimately. Stringers are the stair-stepped pieces of wood underneath a stair case that actually support the steps of the stairs. Yeah. We didn't have those. We had two very old 2x4's underneath leaning against the bottom corners of the stairs. The whole kit and kaboodle had to come out and be replaced with a brand-new staircase. I have never walked on such quiet nor expensive stairs since. 

kitchen before - cave like.

kitchen after - let there be light!

The rest of the house renovation was mostly cosmetic, albeit thorough. We completely redid the kitchen which included knocking down almost an entire wall between the kitchen and dining room, added a closet to what used to be a breakfast room to create a ligitimate four-bedroom house, tiled the mudroom, refinished the floors, updated the electrical and added recessed lights throughout the common areas, replaced light fixtures, switched Oscar's second closet over to our side of the wall so we now have a double closet, painted EVERYTHING, added a whole-house fan, (hold on writer's cramp) replaced the windows in the attic and second floor, removed a chimney from the attic and had the roof patched with matching slate where said chimney used to be, and just because Oscar was jealous of all the demo to which he was not being able to contribute, he took matters into his own hands, literally, and ripped a spigot out of our exterior wall and flooded the basement for about 2 minutes before I got to the water main. I seriously believe a Marvel comic book is going to be made based on his life someday. 

I still have to hang some shades in Oscar's room so these before and afters are not complete, but you'll get the idea. Oh and in regards to the potty training of Oscar: I can't remember anything, only a ton of laundry and years off of my life.

Annie and Oscar are heading towards summer vacation and we're excited to enjoy a slightly more relaxed pace. They have camps, my parents and my sister's family are coming to Smith Mountain Lake for Schindhelm-a-palooza 2013 (yes, I just typed that), we'll be headed back to Connecticut for our annual Bridgewater Fair pilgrimage, and mostly we're just going to enjoy not listening to the sounds of me yelling, "We're LATE! GET - IN - THE - CAR - NOWWWW!" Ah, summer.

Just as a reminder to myself, mostly, I hope to recap Annie's first feature length performance in Kitty Cat Capers, or some such title, in which she played a singing scaredy cat, very convincing. Until then, enjoy the pictures, and take comfort in knowing that we're alive and well despite our absence from the blogosphere. Happy summer!