As many people know who have crossed my path over the last year, my labor of love has been the ongoing renovation of the basement in the Somrod Townhouse. We finally crossed one of the major hurdles in the project today: we have built all of the soffits and chases. You have no idea what a relief that is.

You probably also have no idea what the hell a soffit or a chase is, but let me help. A soffit, in the basement sense, is essentially a box made of wood framing that runs along your ceiling to hide ductwork, pipes, and any other unsightly thing. (Unfortunately, I cannot build a soffit to cover up the neighbor’s house across the street!) Soffits are finished by covering with drywall, smoothed, and painted to match your walls. A chase is the standing version of the soffit.

In total for our basement renovation, I have built 7 soffits and 1.5 chases. The first 3 soffits and 1.5 chases were done last fall during my initial drywall run. Then I took some time off from the project (from burnout!). At the time I took off though, the major eyesore left in the space was this massive industrial size ductwork that the original contractor had run right across the center of the main room. It was ridiculous: anyone over 5′10″ had to duck to walk through the room. This was definitely something I could not build a soffit around. More importantly, what good is a finished basement for resale value when it has a giant duct bisecting it!
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As you may recall from this April entry, we were on a mission to upgrade and integrate the desks for our new home office.

Originally, I had envisioned two L-Shaped desks to go in the corners of the room opposite the closet and entranceway. S. Rod had foreseen a great disturbance in the Force with that, and suggested a room length slab mounted to the wall so it had no legs to deal with.

However, balancing the new desks against our three seven-foot tall bookcases ruled out the slab idea. Worse, the small width of the room canceled out the L-shaped desk idea too. So after selling our old tables at a yard sale, we moved into our townhouse without any desks.

But inspiration sprung from below. Outside of the turquoise paint color, the second thing we put in the room was the FLOR carpet. We bought those color patterns quite spontaneously, but it turned out to help make our choice much easier.

I had pushed for a more modern look to keep pace with the paint and carpet, and S.Rod found a frosted blue-green glass table with brushed nickel edging and legs that fit in perfectly. Multiply that by two and the new workstation was complete.

Now if only we could have such luck with the studio… Click here for the hi-resolution version. Cheers.

The question: which is more important— $18,000 worth of home renovation costs saved by taking on a huge project by yourself, or eight months’ worth of weekends spent executing that DIY project?

The answer: I don’t know yet. I’ll tell when I reach the end of the eighth month. I’m just starting month seven now.

A photo of the first complete room in the townhouse… just like I promised four months ago. Hey, it may be easy to put big furniture in a room, but the smaller pieces—which accent the room, and bring together the theme—are always harder to assemble. Unless you buy everything in one store… how boring!

As it turns out, our dining room is the culmination of 7 stores (IKEA, Target, Crate & Barrel, FLOR, Home Decorators, Michaels, and Home Depot). The room gets brilliant natural light during the day, and is great for dinner over a discussion of metaphoric cartoon mascots.

Now that we have 3 studios, we’ll hopefully never be forced to use this as a crafting table again. Click here for the hi-resolution version. Cheers.

The last four months have been a mind-bending roller coaster. But I know in my heart, it will be worth it in the long run. To think that back in March, we had no idea what to expect, and were not disappointed by the god of curve balls. Yet, here we are in July, finally able to laugh (mostly) about being moved into our townhouse condo. It feels good. Well, it feels better.

But let’s start at the beginning. Here is the basic summary of our new home and how it came to be:

The building is a brick structure built in 1889. There are eight three-floor townhouse units (each with a basement, back deck, and two parking spaces). The building was purchased and “flipped” by a private equity firm to have all new interiors and appliances. When we saw the unit back in March, it was totally gutted down to the wiring and sub-floor. You had to have a certain amount of vision to even remotely consider purchasing at that point.

But S. Rod and I are definitely high on imagination. While we knew that there was a certain level of risk involved when making a “new construction/major renovation” purchase, we could see the great opportunity in it.

Now, how great that level of risk turned out to be is a matter of opinion. Some who hear the last four months’ stories recoil in horror, others shrug their shoulders and say it is on par for the course. But along the painful way of dealing with the equity firm’s representative, the various contractors, the real estate broker, the lawyers, the lenders, the inspectors, the movers, and each other, we learned a great deal about the system. So you had better believe that the next time we make a home purchase, it will work much differently. We hope.

In the meantime, things are coming together with all of our different rooms and it’s exciting to be setting down the cornerstone of our future. I know I promised photos, but I’m waiting to get some completed rooms first (with assembled furniture and no boxes!), so bear with us. Time is on our side now. Finally. Cheers.

Just in case you were following the trials and tribulations of Sahm and S.Rod’s Excellent Real Estate Adventure, here’s an update.

Yes, the rumblings among the villagers are true: we are now officially homeowners. The closing took place on Friday and everything went through without any major hitches. But why am I not completely joyous right now? Because we did not move into the unit. It turns out that there are a lot of punchlist items which are incomplete. It would be difficult (if not impossible) to address these things with all of our belongings in the unit. So now, we can only hope that everything can be cleared up by week’s end.

On the bright side, it is very nice to have a set of keys again, after living out of a couple of boxes while sleeping on a sofa bed for the past month. But I’m not bitter… maybe a tad bit sour on the whole ‘new house high’ thing, but certainly not bitter.

After all, once everything is in place, the next level of life shall begin. You’ll see.

P.S. Pictures coming soon, I promise. Cheers.

Are you ready for pain? Are you ready for suffering? If the answer is yes, then you’re ready to purchase your first home!

. . . That’s the ticket: no pain, no gain.

Sure, go ahead, make jokes. In all seriousness, we went into the situation of buying a home with the most optimistic of intentions. At the time, we could not truly grasp how people could get completely miserable in the midst of a process which was bringing you something that you have always wanted.

But now we understand, now we too have felt the pain and suffering of dealing with all of those annoying things that you never encountered when we were renting and carefree.

It’s been a rollercoaster over the past two months. But, you know that point in the ride when you’ve gone through your last loop and you can feel the sled starting to slow, that you’re just a few hundred slow yards from when the safety railing pops back up, and you step off? Yeah, we’re right there. We know that the ride is just about to end.

Now if we can just hold down our lunch…

The past 3 weeks have been mentally and physically exhausting between all of the issues I mentioned here.

But as of today, I am living in a state (Connecticut) other than the one I’ve lived in for the past 12 years (New York). That, and I am presently homeless. Well, just for 2 weeks, until the renovations on our new place are completed… but technically that’s the gist of it.

I hope to have pictures uploaded of the new place soon… cheers.

Moving is like a jeopardized trans-Atlantic voyage where the crew has to cast the non-vital items into the sea to survive the journey. With the prospect of moving in our distant horizon, S. Rod and I know the non-vital items that won’t be making the trip with us.

The primary upgrade in our move will be the addition of a 3rd bedroom. For two people who enjoy arts and crafts, it’s only natural that this room will become a studio. Of course, you may ask, “Well, didn’t you have a studio before?” Yes, but it also functioned as our office/library/archive/computer room, so a little separation will be quite liberating.

More to the point, without all of the arts and crafts to bog down the office/computer room, we’re hoping to give it a little more productivity. The decision has been made that of the three IKEA desks now in the office/studio, none will be in the new office. The drafting table will go to the new studio, the pine desk will be an “uncle” gift to my oldest nephew, and the last desk will be out in the tag sale at month’s end.

With two desks to replace, we figure the best replacement would be an L-shaped corner workstation for both of us. But any specifics from there are totally up in the air.

Right now, we’ve narrowed it into three styles to choose from (click to see a larger view):

1. Cheap and Swedish

2. Modest and Modern

3. Expensive and Clunky

Therefore, if you were me and S.Rod, which choice would you buy a pair of?

Somewhere, somehow, someone stole my Badmotorfinger. Luckily, the joy of being part of a duo allowed me to find what I was looking for on A-Sides. (This is a Soundgarden reference, for those out there scratching their heads).

Another joy of being part of a duo is the flexibility it allows with real estate. In keeping with the SG theme, we’re gonna break our rusty cage of renting an apartment and run to the land of home ownership. I’m sure this was not what Chris Cornell had in mind when he wrote the lyrics, but it works for me.

Nevertheless, we’ve never been so psyched to be going into debt in our lives. Bigger and brand new kitchen, brand new bathrooms, about three times the studio space for painting-writing-crafting, multi-zone central air/heat, plus no more sharing a washer-dryer.

Of course, there’s a lot of paperwork between now and the closing date, and there’ll be quite a bit of sacrfices to be made financially in the short-term (a topic I hope to touch on in the upcoming weeks), but we’re pretty confident that everything will fall into place.

In summary, home ownership is just like the natural high of revisiting a song you had not heard in a long time multiplied by three hundred and sixty monthly installments. Cheers.