Grandma and Grandpa's House

We took a trip down to Washington in June to visit the grandparents. There was beautiful, sunny weather the whole time. We all enjoyed hanging outside, eating and lounging.

The gravel in the backyard has always brought hours to fun to our kids at all ages.

Pork ribs, anyone?

They played hard and slept hard.

And Caleb liked that Grandpa helped him get to places he couldn't normally play.

One day we went out the family cabin and had all sorts of fun.

Here we are discovering root beer.

And making the most of our s'mores.

The kids got to stay with Grandma and Grandpa alone for a night while the two of us parents escaped off to Bainbridge Island. We had delicious crepes at a restaurant where all the staff are flown to Paris for training, and we stayed in a lovely little cottage.

We also got to see some cousins and drive some cars.

And we met some more cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandparents for a nice picnic dinner.

We only had a few roasting sticks so we tried to develop a more efficient way to work with what we had. It was great for melting the chocolate and toasting the crackers, but the marshmallows just expanded into the grate and stuck there so it wasn't ideal. But we learned something.

And that was our Seattle visit in a nutshell.

Windows were just the beginning...

In February or March we signed up for the Alaska Home Energy Rebate program. In this program, people go out to inspect houses and make recommendations on what can be done to improve their energy efficiency. Then once improvements have been made, the state will reimburse the costs at varying levels, based on what work has been done. The sole reason we signed up for the program was to get new windows, but while we were at it we took the opportunity to do a bunch of other projects too. 

The first big project was the water heater. When the energy auditor came to do the first inspection we went down in the crawlspace and discovered the water heater was leaking, so that had to be fixed right away. We decided to do as much as we could on our own to save money, so I learned how to replace a water heater. We replaced our old tank water heater in the crawlspace with an on demand unit in the garage. I spent quite a lot of time in the crawlspace and the garage and learned a ton about rerouting water and gas pipes and running exhaust vents to the outside. The new water heater is efficient because it only heats water as you need it, instead of keeping a big tank warm all the time for the few minutes we need hot water every day. Although Marel worries (only half jokingly) that it may turn out to be less efficient for her, because she used to take showers until the hot water ran out, but with the new water heater, it never runs out of hot water so she doesn't know when to get out.

After all the work done and time spent, and with a new water heater hooked up and working, we realized we needed to get the old one out, which turned out to be almost as challenging as the rest of the project, requiring some ratcheting cables to hoist it out of the crawlspace.

One of the smaller projects was replacing our bathroom fans and all the ductwork attached to them. We found out that the upstairs fan had a flimsy, flexible tube that had become detached from the vent on the roof, so it was just spitting moisture from the bathroom into the attic. Then we found out that the downstairs fan didn't even have a vent, so it wasn't effectively moving moisture anywhere. The things you learn when you start taking your house apart.... Now we can take showers with endless hot water and the mirrors don't even fog up!

We also replaced the front door. The old one was mounted a little crooked and was hard to open and close, and became even harder to open and close on the coldest days, when it's most important to keep the door closed. It's been nice having a door that opens and closes easily.

And in order to get the old door out and new one in, we had to remove the old railing, and when I did so it sort of disintegrated because it was built in such a way that rainwater pooled in it and rotted the wood out. So I replaced the railing too.

We also added insulation to the attic and crawlspace. The crawlspace was a long process because I had to foam-seal between the floor joists and hang fiberglass batts, but the attic was quick and easy. We just had to pick up the machine and a bunch of insulation and blow it in. It was sort of a lot of fun blowing it in. The machine outside that you feed the insulation blocks into is kind of like a giant shop-vac--big and noisy--but being up in the attic with the hose was surprisingly quiet and peaceful. It was like being in heavy snowfall out in the woods.

This is what was happening a lot of times while I was working on projects...we had a pretty nice summer.

Also somewhere along the way we got our garage door replaced, which was the only work we hired out for. Then in December we had the follow-up audit and found out that the efficiency of our home improved enough to get all our money back, minus the cost of tools (which aren't covered by the program). So by doing all these projects ourselves under the state rebate program, we made all these improvements for only the cost of the tools we used to do them! And after all that work last year, we're really ready to sit back and relax in our warm house this winter.

New windows

Our windows were wood-framed windows that were original to the house. The seal had broken on almost every single one of them, so they were nearly all foggy between panes, so we could hardly see through some of them. And when condensation would form on the inside during the winter, it would drip down and the wood would get all black and mildewy, then when the kids would look out the living room window, they would come away with black in their fingernails. In addition to that, the hardware on some of them was broken so several of them couldn't even be opened. They had to go.

So in May we learned how put in new windows. The first task was getting the old ones out, which turned out to be pretty easily done because they weren't even nailed into the frame of the house--they were only held in by the exterior trim, with just a few nails attaching it to the siding. It's sort of amazing the windows all stayed in place for 30+ years.

I figured out the two downstairs back windows on my own because they're fairly inconspicuous and at ground level, but enlisted the help of others for the upstairs windows...

...especially the large, 3 pane window in our living room.

We invited some friends and neighbors over for pizza, and the women and children played outside while the rest of us got to work.

Here we are watching the sun go down at around 10 pm. The room felt so light and open without windows, so it sort of felt like a shame to have to put some back in. But it is Alaska, after all, so windows are pretty useful for keeping out snow and mosquitoes.

Getting the old windows out and the new ones in was actually pretty quick and easy. It took some brute force but didn't take very long. It was the trimming that took forever. I spent hours and hours on ladders outside sawing, nailing and caulking.

Caleb tried to give me a hand, but we only let him help on the ground-floor windows (and even then he wasn't much help, being a toddler and all).

Luckily we had fantastic weather the whole time we were replacing windows. It was sunny the whole time, and then the day after I finished the exterior trim of the last window, it rained.

While I was up a ladder for hours at a time, Marel was in the garage painting all the trim.

Finally after a few weeks we got both interior and exterior trim finished, and the rooms are so much brighter after replacing the old dark wood windows with white vinyl ones. They aren't moldy, we can open them, and we can actually see through them, which is a big plus for windows!

Last Spring

We had quite a busy 2015, and now that it's over we can start blogging about it. Here is a brief recap of what happened in April and May last year.

Caleb became much more mobile, but still small enough to sit on the dishwasher without breaking it. It was a very dry winter last year--lowest snowfall on record--but we did get a late snow in April. The girls relished a last chance to play in the snow after having almost none to play in all winter, and Caleb liked watching them from the window, saying "no! no!" which is how he says "snow." (It also means "more" as well as the obvious "no.") 

He also started using anything soft as a blanket and sucking his thumb like Linus from Peanuts, and he loved trying to unlock the car.

He also became interested in TV and always sits in his rocking chair to watch it.

With no snow, the grass and driveway cleared up much faster than usual once the weather started getting nice, so we played outside a lot. Caleb and Sabrina enjoyed their matching hoodies.

There is a dip on the edge of the driveway where a puddle forms, and even by the end of the summer Caleb hadn't learned not to sit down in it.

Celia's new obsession was monkey bars. She laments the fact that she can't do them in the winter because she can't hold on with her gloves on.

Sabrina took a gymnastics class. Every week there was a different theme. This week was superhero day, so here she is dressed as Michelangelo the Ninja Turtle.

She's very proud of the medal she got at the end of the class.

We started family bike rides a little earlier this year than we meant to one day when both our cars ended up in the shop at the same time. Celia still needed to make it to school, and since it was a drizzly day, we stuffed her in the bike trailer to stay clean on the way to school. The next week was bike to school day, and since it was a nice sunny day, Celia got to ride behind me.

Caleb became very shaggy around this time--he was starting to look like Doc from Back to the Future, so we gave him a trim. He looked much more sophisticated afterwards.