This New Santa Clara House!

It's been a super long time since the last post, so we've slowly been accumulating things like furniture and random pieces of cloth to put over our windows. Yes, at one point in time we had 2 foosball tables but still don't have curtains or baseboards anywhere in the house yet. :p
We also got into the Christmas spirit and decorated the house for the holidays! I'll post pics of our house lights and lights from our neighbours soon too.



This is the view from the living room fireplace looking towards the kitchenette. The room is still pretty bare, but we do have an interesting picture hanging by the front door. It's an original ad for our neighbourhood when the housing development was built in the 50's. The monthly mortgage payment was $68 and veterans didn't have to make a down payment!


This is the view of the kitchen from the pantry. You can see the front door on the right too. We recently got a dishwasher! The final appliance to buy is the fridge, but we're doing ok with the only thing we inherited with the house that works. :)

This is the kitchen looking towards the front of the house. That's a wreath outside the window and a ghetto homemade "curtain" in the meanwhile before we get the windows renovated. :p

This is the dining area, which is in our big entertainment room. The table is a recent purchase also, from World Market. I had to drive all the way up to Marin just to get the chairs, and it took both our cars to get the rest of the set but it's worth it. The set is really nice and matches perfectly with everything else. We got a table that seats 8 so we can host those BAD carbo-loading parties properly now. :)

This is the family room which is being seen from the garage door. That's the new foosball table donated by one of my friends, on the left and Jai's crappy old Garzoni loveseat waiting for Santa Clara's open garbage day when you can basically throw away anything you want and the city will pick it up! The loveseat covers up the open piping we left intact for a future bar we want to install there though.

This is the new sofa set and coffee table. The coffee table is also from World Market, but the sofa was from a random local furniture store we happened to check out one day.

This is the current state of the backyard... not pretty but way less scary than when we moved in. We're planning to re-sod the grass and I'm going to plant a garden in the spring and re-paint that fence also.

Thanks for looking! :)

got tv?

Yes. Yes we do. :) I haven't blogged in a while because Jai was oot for almost 3 weeks and not a lot of renovation happened during that time. I did repaint the front porch railings though - thank you very much. What I mostly "worked" on was shopping for furniture to cut down on some of that echoiness our empty house exudes. And yes, shopping is work.

Jai researched and picked out our tv from Best Buy. Apparently he used the ol "a guy I know knows another guy who saw this tv for $200 less on some website" line and it worked on the dutiful electronics rep. We're currently using our white IKEA coffee table as the TV stand, a small IKEA bench as a coffee table and the floor as our bench when putting on shoes. :( Don't worry, recycling box might get upgraded to bench in the meanwhile.

I had a pretty exhausting adventure buying the big white wool rug in the picture. I got an amazing deal on Craigslist for that 9'x12' off-white rug, but the catch was that I had to transport it from Aptos (past Santa Cruz) to Santa Clara, sans-Jai and sans-truck. That rug is incredibly heavy. One person couldn't roll it up, so I was a little worried when the lady selling it kept warning me over the phone that it's HUGE and HEAVY. She even reduced her selling price to nearly half because she was afraid nobody would take it even though it's a great rug otherwise. I brought all the rope I could find from home, and duct tape and a tow cable (don't know what I was gonna do with that) to be prepared to drive a heavy white rug sticking out of the SUV while climbing the hill back to Santa Clara. Luckily, with three of us we managed to squish the whole rug barely within the SUV so I didn't have to keep the back door open and drive at 20mph the whole way back. The next day my Andre-the-Giant-esque neighbour saw me struggling to wiggle an inch of the rug out of the car and carried the whole thing under one arm into the family room for me. I think I should register him in those crazy competitions where big dudes pull airplanes with their teeth.

New Flooring!

I've been so busy enjoying our new kitchen and new floors to blog about them for a while, but here's the story on the floors.
Our family/dining room is on a concrete slab so we took out the old shaggy orange carpet and scraped away the decaying, green, powdery layer underneath. I'm not sure what that layer was, since it was too thin to be useful as a cushion of any sort. It looked a lot like matcha green tea actually...not that I'd make a milkshake out of it.We ordered a dark brown engineered hardwood from a store in Santa Clara called "Simple Floors." They had a great Fourth of July special and paid the taxes on the flooring so we got a pretty good deal on the materials. As you can see, Jai's SUV was packed to the gills.


Jai was initially going to install the flooring in the family room himself, but he discovered that the floor wasn't level so we'd have to fix that problem before wasting $1000 of material doing a terrible job. We hired a few guys to make the floor level using a really thin and runny material called "self-leveling cement". The main handyman guy was a strange, extremely heavy-set man wearing a cowboy hat and giving us a lot of attitude. He basically just ordered around a couple of guys that worked for him. I think Jai said he weighed 360 pounds!



After the floors were put in, we also got recessed lighting installed in the family room. It was a little tricky doing it in that area because the ceiling and roof had a much smaller gap between them, and there's no attic access in that part of the house. Unfortunately our nice new ceiling had to get torn up a little to get their wires through. We had to re-drywall and re-paint that area of the ceiling but thankfully it looks good now.
This is the new family room before any furniture was moved in.

This is the front living room after pulling up the old carpet. We liked how the flooring in the family room looked so much that we decided to go with that look in the rest of the house. We also found out that it's cheaper to put in a floating hardwood floor over the whole house, than it is to refinish the old floors. Since we like the contemporary dark brown flooring more anyway, and wouldn't be able to perfectly match the family room otherwise, we decided to buy another SUV-load of wood to do the other rooms.

Jai got the living room done in pretty much one full day by himself. It was a nice surprise when I got home from work. :) Now I just have to figure out what to do with that fireplace. I've been looking into acid wash to restore a bit of its original colour. It looks really dull and old-fashioned so if anyone has any advice I'd appreciate it.

Kitchen Done!

I haven't been blogging much lately, but that doesn't mean stuff wasn't happening with the house... quite the opposite actually. :)
The biggest accomplishment with the house has been getting the kitchen renovated. The things we did were:
1. Install a skylight
2. Rip out all the old cabinets and appliances
3. Fix up drywall holes
4. Run a gas line for the stove
5. Fix the water damaged subfloor
6. Install porcelain tiles
7. Install new cabinets and create a peninsula for extra counter space
8. Install granite countertops
9. Install recessed lighting
10. Paint the walls and ceiling
11. Buy a new gas convection range
12. Buy and install a microwave range hood
13. Buy some cute dishes and silverware for the new and improved kitchen :)

Here are some pics showing the transformation:

1. The kitchen in its "before" state. There wasn't much counter space and it felt very dark and oppressive because there wasn't much light in there.

2. This is the beginning of the destruction. This was the mess created by the skylight installation.
3. Half the cabinets removed and a giant hole in the wall created.
4. After all the cabinets were removed, and the water damage was discovered under the fridge area.
5. The recessed lights went in first.

6. Cement backerboard put down as a base for the tiles to go on top of.
7. Tiles going down. We picked a tile available from Home Depot but I can't remember the name now. The nice thing about this earthy, stone-like tile is that it matched well with a dark grout so it shouldn't look discoloured in some areas versus others.
8. The cabinets finally being installed. Note the old heavy cabinets being replaced by glass door cabinets above the sink.
9. The granite countertop being installed. Got my Shalimar Gold in the end!



10. The day the range arrived was very exciting! That huge truck was full of fridges and other big appliances.


11. Unfortunately we had to get our kitchen painted last instead of in the middle because the kitchen contractor couldn't take a day off in the middle of the job. But we got a couple of careful painters who did a good job.

12. Ta-Da! The kitchen finally done!


Sorry this is a dark photo but it's actually really bright in real life...was too lazy to brighten it up in photoshop. :) We put the fridge back in the corner after all because it's annoying going back and forth to the living room or garage for stuff, but we'll eventually get a stainless steel one to match the other appliances.

Garage Gourmet

I'm actually feeling a little weird that I won't be cooking out of the garage soon. :S I guess I got pretty used to it, but I'm sure one day in the new, clean, functional kitchen will help me get over it really quickly. :)
Here are some pics of "Garage Gourmet" meals. I've had a microwave, convection toaster oven, regular toaster and a hot plate at my disposal. I also have a handy electric waffle maker that is very easy to clean up so I used that one morning for our tradition of Sunday morning waffles.

Most Amazing Garbage-Robot!

Since I've been home for a week I got to observe lots of daytime activity that I would otherwise have missed, such as the 6 walks a day the granny across the street takes, the 4 walks a day another neighbour has to take to walk each huge dog at a time, the cheerful mailman who listens to really loud music on his headphones and the GARBAGE ROBOT! The garbage robot is a cool robotic arm on the garbage truck that snatches the garbage cans and dumps them into the truck. Maybe I'm making a big deal out of nothing, but I thought it was super cool.

Funny Comic about Moving

This is a short post. One of my coworkers has a desk calendar with comics from The New Yorker and this one made me LOL...almost to the point of ROFL.