Amyblog

LOYOLA MARYMOUNT

We have been having tons of rain the past few weeks. We do need the rain, but I'm having to keep my succulent plants in my garden from drowning! Hopefully, my other plants are enjoying all the rain. With all this rain, the kids haven't been able to go out much, even at school. But I want to share with you our little bike riding adventure back in December. We took my In-Laws to Loyola Marymount University for a nice picnic and stroll the cute little campus. The kids got to ride their bikes. It was such a glorious and easy day! It was a Sunday so campus was practically empty. Luckily, we did find one set of bathrooms that were accessible. That's the only caution I have for visiting campuses on weekends, most buildings are closed. This lovely univeristy is a small private school, situated on the top of a hill with some pretty spectacular views. Here are some lovely pictures of this little campus just 10 miles north of us.

Posted on February 15, 2019

MEET MARS

Happy Chinese New Year, it's the Year of the Pig!! Hopefully, the year of the pig will be a better year than the year of the dog. Also hope everyone had a wonderful Valentine's Day. The kids brought home tons of candies and cards from school. I think elementary school is when kids most enjoy this holiday. I helped Ahgoo make a flower using felt and lollipops. I helped Buzz made felt mustaches and red lips and attached them to the lollipops.

When I became a mother I knew I had to learn to do a lot of new things. But never in my wildest list of things to learn would include how to take care of a wild lizard and how to feed a Venus flytrap plant. Yes, indeed, meet our newest family member Mars, the Venus flytrap.

About three weeks ago, Mr. BAW and Ahgoo went on a daddy-daughter camping trip with a bunch of her friends. So I dragged Buzz to Lowes with me to pick up a few repair items and some house plants. While I was looking through tons of different plants, trying to read which ones were good under low light conditions and which were good for bathrooms, Buzz spotted the Venus Fly Traps. There were about four or five of them in little cup containers with clear lids on them. He immediately started to campaign for one, citing a good friend of his has one. Seeing that they looked pretty harmless (they were pretty small) and that they were only $3 each, I let him take one home. He was pretty happy and held the plant on the drive home. We decided to name him/her Mars, see the irony?? Haha, it fed my inner astronomer. We are also going to watch Little Shop of Horrors this weekend because I love Audrey II.

Posted on February 14, 2019

EPIC HOUSE REVEAL

Even though you guys get a big reveal of our house remodel, we did not. In a way, that's kind of the drawback to living in the house during the constrcution. We slowly "moved" back into different parts of the house as rooms were completed. But there were still dust and chaos in other parts of the house. But there were little surprises each day coming home from work. I can't remember now which part of the house was completed last. But even today, we still have a few more things that need to be touched up or fixed. The biggest problem is the downstairs shower, the bottom glass seal leaks water. We are still waiting for the shower people to come seal it. But of course, it's going to be weeks before anyone even calls us back. Once you've paid your bills, what's the incentive for them to come and fix something for you? Besides waiting for contractors to come back to fix a few things, we are still not completely done moving back into the house. Most of our things were stored in the garage during the construction. We've managed to park one car back into the garage. I just need one more good day to organize the garage and we should be able to get both cars back into the garage. But as you can see from the photos below, our walls are still pretty bare. Since the pictures were taken, I've added a few more plants in the kitchen and living rooms. But for the most part, I'm still undecided on where to hang pictures and I'm still very nervous about marking up freshly painted, smooth walls with nails. It'll probably take me another few months to get things completely done. We still have the exterior of the house to work on, we desperately need a new fence, new garage doors, and exterior lights. But I don't even want to think about those things for a while. For now, enjoy the pictures of our newly remodeled house!

The downstairs guest bathroom.

The upstairs master bathroom.

Posted on February 4, 2019

EPIC HOUSE REMODEL

So after three months of living in our finished home, I'm finally ready to tell you about our epic remodel. I am finally at peace with everything and can actually recount bits of the entire process. Yes, it was bad, yes it was tough, and yes we hated the entire process. But it's over, we are glad we did it, and we will never do it again! I'll try to share some interesting things I learned about house design. If I am up to reliving the horrors, I may share some of our frustrations. But here's an excerpt from the design pro, Emily Henderson, where she pretty much captures the real deal of house remodel.

"Before we get to the juicy goss about all the things we fought about, a few things. Firstly, a lot of you know this project took FOREVER and cost a lot more than expected. The construction budget ended up being about $150,000 and that doesn’t include the appliances, finishes, fixtures, and furnishings (which I’m estimating would add another $50-$60K if not more). I know it’s kind of gross I’m just throwing these numbers out there but I hate it when I see posts about this kind of thing and people act like it’s cheap and everyone can do it. The type of construction that this project required is expensive and my parents live in an expensive part of the country, so basically nothing was affordable. I’m not saying that to be discouraging. I’m mostly saying it because one of the main complaints I hear from designers is that they constantly get clients who have completely unrealistic expectations for what can be done with how much money. I’M HERE TO SQUASH THOSE MISCONCEPTIONS AND RUIN YOUR DREAMS. (Sorry)."

Back in 2015 (yes, 2015!) we started talking to our designer whom we found from randomly going to an open house of a brand new build. We loved that house and asked the realtor who the designer is. In any case, we also worked with the same architects and they referred four general contractors (GC) to us. We then interviewed and got bids from the GCs. From there, we picked our GC. The whole process started with the architect and desginer working to redo our floor plan. We added a bedroom on the main floor and re-configured out laundry room and kitchen. We also reconfigured the master bathroom and closets. I used Pinterest from the getgo and pinned interiors and fixtures that I love. Of course, cost was a major concern. I discovered that I have expensive taste! Ha, but from the beginning, I was honest with my designer and told her that we would want to save money where ever possible but still try to achieve the look we wanted. She was understanding but some things just can't be duplicated by lower end products. But we figured out areas to splurge and areas to save. We used the best countertops in the kitchen but used lower grades in bathrooms. We used high quality cabinet pulls again in the kitchen and lower quality ones in bathrooms. But overall, there were few places we could cut back on and plenty that drove us over budget. Windows and doors were expensive, structural work and electrical work were expensive. We also ended up having to fix our roof amongst other fixes that were necessary simply due to old age and that "may as well" clause. Since you're breaking open the walls, you may as well redo the electrical and add in reinforcement for earthquake. The list goes on and on.

Besides the usual stuff, there were other issues that I just want to share. Since we had a GC and a designer, they did not exactly "get along." Each wanted to use their people for tiles, for fixtures, for cabinets, etc. Since our desiner was known for her tile design we decide to order the tile through her. Well, the GC then refused to inventory the tiles as they were delivered to our house because they were not people he had worked with. Then the electricians like to go throught the GC and not the designer so there were instances of wall sconce height mis-mount. Communications were horrible throughout the entire project. The GC made decisions without asking us but we ended up paying to change it. For example, I came home one day and discovered that they had installed the kids' closet doors in a bi-fold manner. I hated bi-fold doors, it was the original closet doors but we made it a point to change them all to sliding doors in the drawings. Of course, they tried to convince me that it's better. In the end, I made them change it to the way the drawings had it but of course we had to pay for the rework. Another day I came home and the electrician had placed our master bathroom light switches on the outside of the bathroom. I've always thought that that was the stupidest design. Why would anyone do that??? Turns out the electrician didn't think there was room on the inside wall next to a tall cabinet. I asked if they have a narrower light switch and it was as if a lightbulb went off in his head and he admitted that there is indeed a narrower light switch that would fit. Of course we had to pay for them to put the light switches back into the bathroom and patch up the wall. Both of these cases would've been avoided if the GC would just contacted us and asked.

It's actually a catch 22 situation. If you hire a contractor that dedicates time to your project, they are likely not highly sought after so they are probably not going to do the best work. But if you hire a contractor who does good work, chances are you're not their only project, nor their biggest project. So you're not high on their priority. Bottom line, on a huge project, you will no doubt have periods of time where no one shows up to work on your house for a week at a time. Ok, those are my biggest gripes. I don't think it's unique to our project nor our contractors and it's certainly true for homes we see under construction on our route to the kids' school. We also have several friends in the area who are building their homes from scratch and their timelines are unpredictable and lengthy as well.

Finally, after months of tinkering with the floor plans and getting approvals from the city, we were finally ready to demolish. Our designer and architect had both met Toby at the start of the project. Toby passed away weeks prior to the demolition. It was a blessing because I would not want Toby to have to see his last home being torn apart. He would've hated the entire process. Finally, in late summer of 2016 demolition started and our house was in two years of chaos!

We worked on the house in stages, we had bedrooms and one bathroom for a long time. We had no kitchen for over a year. I kept a plastic tub of water to soak plastic dishes throughout the day and lugged the tub upstairs everyday to wash the dishes and utensils in the tiny bathroom sink. We moved into Ahgoo's room and the kids shared Buzz's room. This was the state for about a year. Then we had to move downstairs to the big living room and the kids and I slept there while Mr. BAW slept on a sleeping bag in Buzz's room for about four months. Then, I washed dishes in the downstairs shower. Somehow we made do. The kids thought it was great fun to sleep in the big living room all together on one bed. It was then that I discover that my daughter loves to "spread out" in bed and will hit me in the face throughout the night. On top of that, our roof leaked in many places so on a few nights in March of 2018, water dripped onto my left arm while Ahgoo smacked me in the face all night long. Lastly, I can't even discribe the dust...it was just everywhere, dispite the heavy use of plastic sheets by the contractors. Do we recommend living in the house during a major construction? Of course not, not if you can afford to move out. But we were cost constrained. Will I ever want to do it again?? Never, and hopefully will never, ever have to in my lifetime! But we survived it and now I can show you the "during" pictures so you can see the magnitude of our house remodel.

The exterior of the house during the demo.