This post is a bit backdated to moving day because around the time we were so stressed out, a blog post would have been pretty much incoherent.

The house had passed final inspection, and we set a date of Saturday November 13th for moving day which would be after most of the hardscape was done.  Fall is an extremely busy time for Catherine’s travel, but it seemed like the best of a bad set of options – at at least Catherine had a little over a week at home leading up to that day (it was sandwiched between trips to New Zealand and England).  So many dates had come and gone (the house at this point was almost a year past our most optimistic date, and nine months past what we thought was our “more realistic” date, six months past our “well, it will never take *that* long” date, and three months past the “are we EVER going to finish this project?” date.)  Needless to say, we really really wanted to be in the house for Thanksgiving, so we decided to go for it.

For days before the move, Catherine was waking up every night at 2 am from anxiety dreams, and simply couldn’t get back to sleep, so she got up and packed boxes until the sun came up and then went to work.  Paul was wound tighter than ever, and Natalie was starting to say she was going to miss the old house, and maybe didn’t want to move after all.  The cats were also cooped up inside in anticipation of the move, and were driving each other, and all of the humans, crazy.

The day before the move, the landscaper’s project manager called saying the people cleaning the house prior to our move in had “noticed water pouring out of a second story sprinkler head into [Natalie's room], and it was now dripping out of the downstairs ceiling” and had asked him to call us.

Yeah, OK.

Catherine was making lots of panicked phone calls to the general contractor, fire sprinkler contractor, the solar hot water contractor, the plumber and anyone else she could think of as she raced up to the house from work.  It turned out that the fire sprinkler folks had run their pvc fire sprinkler pipe too close to the solar hot water return pipe.  Now that the solar hot water was up and running in anticipation of us moving in, the pipes had gotten hot enough to melt the sprinkler pipe resulting in the flood.

The sprinkler pipe was rerouted, the water was drained away, and holes poked in the drywall to let the water all drain out – and preparations for moving the next day grimly continued.

Moving day probably would have been fairly uneventful had the movers actually shown up. But no.

We were scheduled for an afternoon move to give us more time to finish packing in the morning.  They were supposed to arrive between 2 pm and 4 pm which was already rather late to start a move, but the only time they would commit to.  We were done packing at noon, and we had started taking car loads over to pass the time.  As 4 rolled around, and the dispatchers could not get a hold of the crew to get an estimated time, it was looking pretty grim.  They were found by the dispatcher some time around 5 pm, but were “not quite done” with the previous job, and at 6 pm they were still pretending that they were coming and “would be there in 15 minutes” but 15 minutes later, called to say they weren’t coming after all – “sorry”.  Apparently this crew had had two people call in sick that day, so the last move which should have had four guys had only two, and it had taken all day.   Our move was also scheduled to be a four man crew, so there was no way these two exhausted guys could do this alone at that point, but we were furious with the company which could have easily predicted that a short crew was going to be delayed and looked for alternates.  These guys had gotten good reviews on Yelp, but they really screwed this up…

We were a bit stuck.  We had moved and already unpacked our whole kitchen and set up for dinner that night, so we zipped back to the old house, put Nat’s mattress in the car, grabbed our inflatable bed out of storage, and all of our bed linens, and set up mattresses in our new bedrooms.  Our first night in the house was not *quite* how we had imagined it, but we were there, and our senses of humor were still intact.

The next day an excellent, efficient and very hardworking crew showed up at 9 am, and moved everything quickly. It was just a day late, and on the morning of Natalie’s first horse show with California Riding Academy, so she and Catherine left Paul back at home to handle the whole moving crew himself.

Natalie on Little Leo waiting to go into the ring

Natalie proudly shows off the ribbons she won

We unpacked as quickly as we could, but by mid afternoon, Catherine had to leave for the airport to fly to England for a week.

This is one of those things that is so much funnier in retrospect.  In the end, we did have a wonderful Thanksgiving in the house.   There are still boxes to be unpacked, and even a few things still to move over from the old house that didn’t fit in the moving truck, but all in all, the stress level is way down, we are really really enjoying being in the house, and we are just methodically working our way through the 1001 not-quite-done-yet details.

More to come on those.

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In late October, we were getting close to being able to get final inspection.  We even dared to start maybe thinking about possibly setting a date to plan to move.  The final finishing touches on plumbing and tile were getting completed in the kitchen and bathrooms, and we were getting the hardscape part of the landscaping done so there would be a driveway to drive on, a path to walk up to the front door, a landing when you got there, and a back patio.  As for the soft stuff in the yard, we figured the planting could all happen after we moved.

The kitchen tile finally done... no handles on the cabinets yet

The prep sink in Catherine's lowered butcher block counter top (for months she'd been standing on cookbooks in the kitchen while cutting in the old kitchen to determine the perfect height for cutting with the big chef's knife)

Prepping for the landing for the front door

Natalie showing the huge stones that would make up our patios, front walk, and landing

The driveway pavers being laid. We used 4"x18" pavers - the same aspect ratio used at Stanford at the CCSR building, and had them laid on the same orientation as the house so that they and the paving stones would all change your orientation to our "off kilter" house as soon as you stepped onto the property

You can see that the paving stones immediately change orientation and (hopefully) lead you up to our rather hidden front door. So far most visitors have found our door without too much trouble, but it is a bit hidden

The ground prepped for the rear patio

Black wooden strips secured to the underside of the stairs to narrow the space to that ever-so-critical-for-inspection smaller-than-baby-head size (and fortunately, the addition actually makes the steps seem to "float" even more than they did when you could see the supports)

And AT LAST... final inspection signed off

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The staircase finally has the finished treads and is looking great... but not so fast! - it still won't meet code because the treads have more than a 4" gap between them. We have a solution for getting our final sign off... stay tuned

The big copper tub that has been sitting upstairs while the house was finished around it finally got its platform and was about to be installed

Part of the plumbing for the tub was putting in a recirculating water heater

Finally in place with water in it. Now the teak decking and screen need to be finished up

The lights for over the stairway went in with our electrician doing the "high wire" act. It is hard to appreciate from this picture just how precarious it feels to be on a scaffold board running between two ladders at the top of a two story stairwell

The finished result of the lights is very nice, however (in this shot they are not *quite* finished as they aren't all aligned and pointing in the right direction yet

The floor upstairs after the bleaching and sanding getting its first clear coat

The floor in the office with the finished floor

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