Home – Melissa Winning

Big Updates!

Moving –

We sold our home during the pandemic to capitalize on the great ‘sellers market’, and moved to a more desirable school district and neighborhood that’s way more walkable. It was CRAZY because we had a lot of pressure on ourselves and our timeline- for one thing I was pregnant. This market was no joke and we struggled with finding a suitable option for our budget- aligning the financial reality of what loan we qualified for and desired lifestyle was TOUGH.

Baby –

I had another baby this August! We had a little girl and I will post about being a working mom at some point soon…..when I start working again or maybe before as I contemplate what this next phase holds. This is *top* of mind as I go back to work in late November. Having a second baby was MUCH harder than I expected for the first 6-8 weeks, particularly for my son and by extension ME. Now that she is 13 weeks, we are seeing my son and daughter become much more harmonious and my husband and I sorting things out as we all get more sleep, get settled into our new home, etc. There are so many factors here.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Hello, are you preparing for a small and pared down Holiday? I hope not too lonely or feeling isolated. I haven’t had a lot of DIY or house stuff to report. We are just working away busily from home, taking care of our son, and doing some small clean up of the yard for winter, which can be pretty slow to arrive here in temperate Northern California. I started to prune my climbing roses, and have cut back most things that need pruning, such as our grape vines in the side yard. We have two ‘table grape’ varieties; one is very happy and prolific, the other is sort of smaller- but they both made several hearty clusters of grapes this year, and we had fun picking and eating them and hey, no smoke taint a la Napa this year, 2020! I’m also drying out my fabulous begonia tubers and thanking them for another fantastic year of blooms, even though I got them in hanging pots and a few planters late this year, they really came into their own in Sept/Oct. when we’re in our warmest days. I’m also starting mini-African violet leaf cuttings, a tiny windowsill project that’s going surprisingly well!

Otherwise as far as projects and focus go (beside some career things in the works!!)…..

I guess I’ll confess even though I am not totally comfortable sharing IVF & fertility stuff , yesterday we did a frozen embryo transfer! After a planned date in early November was pushed off because I ovulated, this timing seemed better, as we know who the next president will be, I had the week off to relax, and now we can just rest around enjoy this (weird) Thanksgiving. This embryo is ours from a procedure in 2017, and we used one from that cycle to have our 2.5 year old son. That procedure and pregnancy’s was pretty easy and chill, and of course resulted in a healthy live birth. It was a HUGE relief yesterday to hear from the embryologist (yes, that’s a persons job!!!) that the thaw had gone well and hopefully the transfer ‘sticks’ and the little thing decides to make a home within me. Fingers and everything else crossed.

It’s definitely a strange time, but I will know soon enough if it worked, and my pregnancy is progressing, so for this week we are just as I said, planning some walks and small projects like getting rid of clutter – which is a continuous process- taking things to Goodwill, and my husband will be cooking. He makes his extravagant pasta salad (never a tradition in my family, but a Thanksgiving dish his family loves). He’s also making mini-Shepard’s pies for all family members to take home, since the gathering will be outdoors. I am being UBER lazy this year and ordered a pumpkin swirl cheesecake from a bakery.

What projects are you working on to keep sane and soothe your mind as this pandemic rages on to give you something to look forward to each day? Have a Happy Holiday, and be safe!!

Happy Halloween!

I hope everyone is having a safe and fun Halloween. We were lucky to do one outing today over to our extended family pods’ house for an outdoors ‘haunted house’ and family party for the kids. It was great!

Now that the windows are permitted, we are just waiting for them to come in. We are getting Marvin brand, with a fiberglass outdoor finish and the wood interior. This is what we have in the back room of our house, and so far so good, although some of the hardware is starting to wiggle and seems a bit loose after only about a year or so. The lead time for delivery is 10 weeks! So that means we are firmly into 2021 for installation and then we have to contend, we hope, with rain. It’s been another extremely dry fall in California, so we are hoping that by January, we see something! However, the dryness would be nice for our installations.

While we wait for the windows, I have put out a RFQ to a local electrician to get a quote on a ceiling fan for our entranceway. This has been interesting because our ceilings are not that high, we have a very very, small crawl space above ceiling, and we have really old wiring. It seems as though we have an electrician who is open to all of that and will give us a fair price for installation/box/additionally needed work to get it done.

Says it ionizes air!? That is impressive, no?

Next question is; what style fan!? I have a few favorites in mind, but some of them need a taller ceiling than I have space for- and I should say, I want a ‘fandalier’ which is sort of like the mullet of lighting fixtures!? It has a chandelier/multiple lights and a fan! Trust me, we need this air flow in our small house which has no central air and has been getting SO hot in the summer and fall. Also I realize I have to choose the correct scale for the room, not too low down, and so it will not overpower the space- another reason shopping online, while often a better deal, can be harder for me than in person.

https://www.overstock.com/Lighting-Ceiling-Fans/Miyaka-6-light-Metal-3-blade-29-inch-Rustic-Bronze-Ceiling-Fan-with-Remote/20981057/product.html?option=34890136

Here are some ideas. How has having a celling fan worked in your space and what do you recommended?

https://www.overstock.com/Lighting-Ceiling-Fans/Modern-Chrome-Crystal-Ceiling-Fan-3-Light-Chandelier-N-A/30889442/product.html?refccid=QH6YELNHX47Z3H2IUS7FO2J4HI&searchidx=12&kwds=&rfmt=

New Windows and ‘Pulling Your own Permits’

Today was Monday, and I had such a hard time getting going. I had a good weekend but as the pandemic wears on, I’m wearing a bit thin. Probably the highlight of the weekend was going to the lovely Marina with my son on Sunday morning to play at the playground and check out the shoreline on such a warm and beautiful day, and having the contractor for our new windows come over on Saturday and confirm measurements, because our PERMIT got approved.

I really struggled to get these permits first formatted, then properly submitted and accepted to be approved/reviewed at all. For a few weeks I was stressed about it, knowing it wasn’t getting crossed off my to-do list, and just feeling down about being a procrastinator. Finally my husband stepped in because he thought the windows had been ordered weeks ago (they had not!), and I provided him with all of the information I thought we needed or I had already filled out. He was able to format the PDF files to the correct dimensions (helps to have a licensed version of the software!) and used an app on his phone to take a very detailed looking photo turned sketch/rendering of the window to show the ‘before’, while our contractor provided the ‘after’. Don’t even go there about why our contractor didn’t do the permitting…sigh! The county had just updated their website to make online permitting happen, and I had started the process prior to that launch, so we had to change from using email to web submission mid-process which also added to the confusion and time lag.

Once we had all of the forms, in the proper format, the rest was ‘easy’ and our windows will be permitted! Part of the reason this is important to me is this is the biggest window in our house, it’s huge, almost floor to ceiling, and it needs to be compliant if we ever want to sell our house (in my opinion!) It’s also going to be a huge energy savings and keep the room cooler in the summer, and warmer in the winter. As it is, our living room basically acts as a greenhouse. Ahhhh, the joys of a pre WWII house. Of course, once the permit got submitted payment was requested, and it was not ‘cheap’, like anything worth doing, right? (Eyeroll, California is very expensive, to put it gently.)

Anyway, glad we are ready to proceed- the sad thing is, with everyone getting home projects and improvements done this year, we may not get the windows shipped/ready to be installed until after Thanksgiving, and it may be late December/Christmas if we are lucky that they do get installed! Weather dependent, of course-since it’s a huge, Western/Bay facing chunk of wall we are opening up- including stucco and our redwood lathe walls that they will be breaking and repairing. But this year looks to be a dry one in Northern California, so that may work in our favor.

Another part of this project is we hope to get serviced in conjunction with the windows is the hardwood flooring restoration in our living room and perhaps most of the rest of our home, which is all hardwood or parquet hardwood, except for the bathrooms and kitchens. The floor under our huge picture window is so water damaged, as well as some water damage under two smaller windows we are also having replaced, plus wear and tear from years of abuse and this houses’ years as a rental, it’s really time to show the parquet floor some love. I look forward to having this done almost as much as the windows, knowing how satisfying it will be when it all comes together!

Staying in Touch & Entranceway

Hey Guys! I should say gals too, although at this point I have literally 0 readers, that is okay, someday when I have enough posts and get a bit more cohesion with my website I have no doubt I will have more traffic and followers, ha.

I’ve been up since about 6:00, just thinking about Christmas gifts, chatting with my husband about the upcoming elections and making coffee, as well as browsing the web and looking at Etsy, Pintrest, and emailing an old friend I have not heard from in a while. I really haven’t heard from him in a while and he is in his early 70’s, we met when I was a sales rep in his area and we worked together, he ended up being such a great mentor and business partner, and when I worked in Santa Cruz we would go out for a meal. I hope he is okay – he had a surgery just before COVID and had lost his wife early in 2020. I’ll update if I hear from him, which will be a huge relief.

Besides my framing project (see framing post, here), I’ve been thinking about a wallpaper project in our entranceway. We have an older, at least by California standards, early 1930’s (1929?) home, and the entranceway is THE largest room in the house, almost as big as the living room. The square footage is very generous but it has a total of *6* doors or doorways going in and out of it, so it’s a tough space for flow with only a few solid, long walls- one of which you face when you enter the house. I’ve been thinking about wallpapering this wall. (Photos to come.)

Here are some ideas for wallpaper from my entranceway. Note we have a parquet floor which is kind of a complicated pattern. What do you think about these patterns?