California – Melissa Winning

New Home Details – Small California Cottage 1920’s bungalow.

We moved during the pandemic, while I was pregnant. It was crazy…our previous house which we loved and had a fabulous yard with many plants (my roses!) curated by myself over about 8 years, and owned by my partner for 15 years, was due for so much work and maintenance that we felt leaving that home and moving to a better school district and more walkable, safe neighborhood was the best for our family. I know, sounds so yuppie, but that’s where we are at this time in our lives, kids come first and being able to walk places has been amazing.

Anyway, new home has no entry way closet, a cute built in cabinet in the dining room, 2 original bedrooms, and our additional main suite which was added on in a remodel. The kitchen has great lights and skylights, great cabinetry which makes it much more efficient as it is about as big as a galley kitchen, skylights also located in one of the 2 original bedrooms and our ‘main’ bath. Off of one of the orginial bedrooms is one of those huge closets that has a window in it, so we store a whole lot in there, and just use a coat rack for now in our entranceway.

Whole house is only about 1250 sq ft but it’s efficiently laid out and has everything we need-including 2 bathrooms; thank goodness we live in a warm climate and get outside most days and afternoons, because it’s SMALL.

I hope to add a new lighting fixture/chandelier to our dining room, wallpaper the entranceway and remove and plant a new rose bush in our side yard this year, 2023. When we moved in we had grand plans for the upgrades we would make but more on that later. We had insane property tax bills years 1-2 and did I mention that baby I was pregnant with came into the world safely and happily ….yeah, $$$$$, so we are taking our upgrades slowly.

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?