Category Archives: Edison House

Off We Go

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Recently, two people in my life have said to me, “Melissa, it seems like you always have a lot going on.”  They are not wrong.

We have a date to leave the dock. But is this a solid date? So far we have had three dates for leaving the dock and they have come and gone for various reasons. We just were not ready. This time, we think, we just might pull it off. I mean, there is a gathering at our place in Olympia so we can say goodbye to some folks, so I guess we better make this one work. Cross fingers, spin and spit three times, say all the prayers and magical incantations.

The plan is to leave the dock August 1. It’s been awhile since I’ve posted an update and there is a reason for the delay.  That reason is not laziness. We were cruising forward, the end of the refit in sight and planning an exit around Mike’s June birthday when the inevitable happened. Life threw in a considerable change of plans and we had to adjust.  May as well get used to this kind of thing because cruising full time is filled with opportunities to learn how to be flexible.  This time it had nothing to do with the boat. It was the guy renting our apartment.

He had finally decided to move out. At the beginning of April. We had planned to leave in April. His timing was not impeccable.

This little apartment was carved out of the main house decades ago.

Now, understand, we bought our house with this tenant in place. He had a solid history of on-time payments and was quiet; two good things that go great together when you are basically sharing your property with a stranger. We are not displeased, however, that he had decided to move. The apartment needed a serious renovation, which we really wanted to get done before we left again.  But we could not do that with someone living there and we were not going to ask him to leave just so we could renovate. Olympia is extremely short on housing of any kind and we just would not do that.

The problem was the timing. I wanted to scream, “Could you not have decided this two months ago?”.  That apartment he lived in had not been updated since Job was tested by a divine being. I’m not going to go into detail here because you might be eating or have a weak stomach,  but let it be said that once he abandoned the apartment, we could not, in good conscience, rent it to someone else without renovations. Complete. Renovations. And deep cleaning. Deeply deep cleaning.  It was filthy.  Almost every single surface had to be redone. The stove was so dirty that I was afraid we’d need to replace it. Mike was still working on the boat and had a full time job at that point. That left the bulk of the work to me. Fortunately, I have wild renovation skills and in a pinch, I can be very focused, if not driven.It’s an understatement to say that this was an intense and all encompassing job. Hideous texture had been sprayed on all the walls, probably multiple times over decades. This included the original picture railings. All of this had to be scrapped off. The picture railings had to be stripped and painted because to buy new ones, and yes, we wanted that period detail to remain, would have been hundreds of dollars we did not want to spend. The paint on the walls was a grey gloss from the mismatch department of Home Depot. Gloss paint. On the walls.  My eyes felt like they were bleeding just looking at it. Countertops in the kitchen were original to the 1960’s and while that sounds retro at this point, in reality it was just nasty and would never be a clean surface again.

Why would anyone do this to beautiful, old growth fir molding?

It took two months. I literally worked on that apartment every moment of every day that I was not seeing clients. I always enjoy my job, but I have to say that during those two months seeing clients was the physical break I needed from the overload of daily manual labor. My body. It is not as young as it was.

The living room got deeply cleaned, the walls scraped of the old texture and paint and repaired where an ancient roof leak had left water damage; the paint literally peeled off the wall in that area, big sheets of rubbery latex peeled back like a price tag. There was the discovery of lovely pink wall paper, probably from the 1940’s. I kept a piece of that on the wall and put a frame around it.  Fresh paint on walls and all woodwork. Italian plaster on one wall, because I love that kind of finish and the apartment deserved it after years of neglect and outright abuse. Molding refinished and rehung. New air conditioner. New smart TV. New light fixtures. You’d think we were going to be living there ourselves, such was the attention to detail, but I don’t know how to do things by halves.

The new space. We love hanging out here.

I left a 5×7″ piece of this in place and put a frame around it as a nod to the history of the house.

Next the bedroom walls were scraped, during which the discovery of more cool old wallpaper from 1938 with Popeye and Olive Oyl (that link is to the Cooper Hewitt museum website where this wallpaper is listed). That room was part of the main house back when this room was, apparently, a child’s bedroom. Of course I wanted to uncover all of the wallpaper but then was not the time. I covered the walls with my favorite white paint: Dover White. Classic,  and it goes with both warm and cool colors somehow. Interesting serendipity: we have paintings of Popeye and Olive Oyl on the boat; done by our ex-son-in-law during happier times with him. The Universe provided a lovely framed print of Puget Sound in shades of blue at no charge to our pocket book. I decided to make the bedroom a tribute to our sailing days and hung that print and our watercolor of S/V Moonrise (done by Seattle’s Alex Kimball) and a hand embroidered whale done by our friend Lesley.

We got the print for free when a friend received it by accident and was told to keep it. Nice.

In the bathroom, more scraping of the gloss navy blue walls (Really? Gloss navy blue?), and trimming out a terribly badly done shelving unit at the back of the bathtub. New caulking everywhere. New fixtures and light. New mirror. The grey plank tile floor, while not my style, was serviceable and at least easy to clean. That stayed. Towel warmer on the wall for those humid Pacific Northwest winters.

More wallpaper was discovered in the bathroom. This time it was from the 1980’s. How do I know? Because it’s the same wallpaper we used in our kitchen in our first house, that long ago. Claire even remembered it from her childhood.

Can you see the little flowers? They were all the rage in 1985.

If there is anything I feel good about in this bathroom, it’s that shelf. That thing was just a mess that had been covered by a curtain.

Bad phone photo of a badly done shelf. What you cannot see in the photo are the raw 2×4’s and peeling contact paper. I just could not see my way clear to leaving it like this.

In the kitchen, the cabinet doors all got a refinish, which was much more work than I counted on,  and I painted the hinges and metal pulls in order to save a little $$ and time.  I did a concrete overlay on the heavy plywood that was underneath that old formica. That formica peeled right off, the glue was so compromised. New backsplash using beautiful aluminum stick on tiles. Those things are great. I tiled the floor using the same tile we used in the upstairs bathroom and the kitchen in the big part of the house. New sink with a smaller footprint to allow a bit more counter space, and new faucet. Mike installed a light above the sink, and new microwave/hood above the stove. He put in new electrical plugs, and grounded ones at that!  We installed a fold-down counter and I found bar stools at a Goodwill. The kitchen was the most work but it’s gorgeous and, more importantly, a good workspace now. And clean. It’s very clean.

A workable small space with room to sit and visit. Or fold clothes. Whatever you prefer.

The furnishings we got from our daughter, who had those in her last house. When she moved into our house they went into our basement. They are perfect for the apartment and saved a ton of money. Plus, our basement is a lot more roomy now. It’s practically light and airy.

We got this extensive project finished and spent maybe a week resting on our laurels and not letting anyone touch anything in there while we just enjoyed the restful fresh and clean feeling of the new space. Honestly, we just loved hanging out in there. In a wild coincidence, our friends Lynn and Curt Brownlow, who we first met in the Aquatic Park anchorage in San Fransisco on the way down to Mexico, were passing through Olympia and came to visit. What a great thing to be able to see them and have them take the apartment for a spin! It felt a bit like the apartment had been blessed by the the gods of cruising, somehow.

Finally, we listed on Furnished Finder and within a few hours after the listing went live,  it was rented to a traveling nurse. Our daughter, Claire, lives in our house and will manage the apartment while we are gone. It had been part of our overall plan to use this apartment as part of an income stream for cruising, but also be able to have it available when we needed it. Check that off the list. Whew.

The gardens have gone crazy this year.

And now that the apartment is out of the way and my body is on the road to recovery from that, on to boat news.

As I was working full time on the apartment and still seeing clients, Mike had finally left his job at the State Patrol and continued preparing Galapagos for our trip, going back and forth between helping finish the renovations and working on the boat. We discovered that we could not find our stack pack for the mainsail. Hmmm. It was just – nowhere- to be found and although we generally do not get rid of canvas until we have perseverated for years, we really were not happy with that stack pack and I can imagine saying something like “get rid of this thing because it’s not going back on the boat”. Maybe we tossed it, maybe we didn’t. But we could not find it anywhere. We’d have to get another. This problem was solved directly as Mike’s friend Bruce had decided to set up shop doing canvas work and he took us on as his first clients in order to learn. Got to love the timing of that. It’s good to have friends with skills.

He and Mike designed a pack that is a hybrid of the Sailrite pack and the Mack Pack, tweaking and fitting it until it was just right. We are really pleased with it.  We finally got the mainsail on this boat, with the pack in place, and today Mike will attach the edges of the pack to the mast and that project will be finished. Galapagos is looking like a sailboat again.

We are pleased as heck with this one.

Another addition to the boat this time is internet access with Starlink. Even as I type, the Starlink dish is mounted on the stern rail and is fired up and working. We have been using Starlink as our internet on board for over a week now, testing it out, and have been pleased so far.  What a game changer this will be. We have an idea of how we will manage  to keep the internet from being front and center of our lives while we are cruising, but being able to keep working for awhile (me) to boost the sailing kitty even more and being able to be more connected to family will go a long way towards keeping my own mental health good. I really struggled with missing our kids and family while we were gone last time and while I am finally feeling maybe a little frisson of excitement to get going, there is the pull of my connections to my loved ones that makes me feel emotional. I have assuaged my sadness by buying three new wetsuits in a variety of thicknesses. I’m ready to get in the water!

No trip is without its flies in the proverbial ointment and, as it turns out, our latest fly is  the amount of alcohol we have aboard. I have prepared for two years of enjoying the occasional bottle of wine by stockpiling that and stowing it all over the boat. This is mostly because although Mike is more easily pleased with any number of red wines,  there are only certain types of wine that I actually enjoy and they are not readily available in Mexico. Tequila? Yes. Wine? Not as much compared to the embarrassment of choices we have here.  I just felt like this little luxury would be nice to have, so I have been buying the extra bottle here and there and stashing them.

What I did not consider is that we are going into Canada first to get that circumnavigation of Vancouver Island that we missed the last time we left for long term cruising. The rules for bringing alcohol into Canada are extremely strict and while it’s possible, if not probable  that it would not be a problem, if it turned out that someone decided to charge us duty or if we accidentally did not claim every bottle (because honestly I have no idea how many are on board) we could potentially lose our Nexus privileges. No bueno. Although people regularly bring a lot of alcohol across that border into Canada, claiming that it’s “ships stores for personal use aboard”, I have read more than one account of customs officers that did not find that claim to be either amusing or valid on a personal vessel.  It’s not worth the risk to us.

So I am looking at this as an opportunity to see our kids one more time before we head south. We will offload the alcohol to their safe keeping and then they will drive out to some location on the Olympic Peninsula and deliver it to us when we are back in the US. I imagine by the time we have gone around Vancouver Island we will have a list of other things they can bring as well.

At least these bottles are easy to find.

This will extend our time in the Pacific Northwest a bit because we had planned to just head south from Vancouver Island. But plans change and this is the latest iteration. I have spent some money on that wine and I intend it to be on the boat when we head south.

Our final (maybe?) tweak to the salon was to install our table top on the sturdy pedestal that came with the boat. We had replaced the big, heavy teak table with a smaller, lighter weight oval shape that pleased us more and we had installed that on a Lagun aluminum support that worked brilliantly while living aboard in a marina. We loved the many adjustments we could easily make to the position of the Lagun setup. But I was truly concerned it was not solid enough for offshore use or for even being in a rocky anchorage. So we changed that out for the solid pedestal that attaches to the sole of the boat. It is much more sturdy and I won’t be worried about grabbing the table if a wave rocks the boat hard.  We moved the aluminum support to the other side of the salon and installed that with a little tray that makes a dandy extra table on the other side. We can remove that when we are underway and stow it in the forward berth. The starboard side actually has a nice table that is built into the settee and stored upside down under the middle cushion, but its use divides the settee into two seats and we never seem to use that, preferring to leave that settee free for napping.

We use the spool of dyneema as a footstool for now. New lifelines, coming to Galapagos while at a quiet anchorage somewhere. Soonish. Yes, we snugged the pedestal up to the settee because it works for us that way.

 

We really like this Lagun table support. It’s just not solid enough for offshore.

Of course, we have other projects underway because project work is never done. But we did add a sewing machine to our inventory this time around. I had always wanted a Singer Featherweight machine and when I pointed that type of machine out to Mike, within days one appeared, as though by magic, on Facebook Marketplace. It was in Olympia about 5 miles from the marina. These little machines are very popular and a nice one will sell quickly so we bought it the day it was listed. It is literally like new. It has been stored in a garage for a very long time, having been built in 1961 and then used maybe a handful of times by a Scottish woman who decided sewing was not her jam. After giving it a drink of good machine oil and motor grease, it sews like a dream. Lightweight and small, it’s the perfect machine for me to take aboard for minor sewing projects that I would ordinarily do by hand. Mike loves it, too and I envision the day when I’ll need to move over and let him have a go. This will sew through canvas and made short work of finishing off the shade cloth curtains for the cockpit. I have a growing list of little sewing projects that will put this machine to good use.

Note the cat slipcover. I covered all of our “bottom sider” style cushions with colorful beach towels. This is our new pet. He doesn’t need food or a litter box, making him the perfect cockpit companion.

I made these by hand but the addition of additional machine stitching, and heavy webbing, has made them sturdier. We use them all the time.

I’ve got a couple of clients today and a final Costco run on my calendar for later. Mike is blowing up the SUP boards to be sure they are still good. Keep your fingers crossed on that one. We don’t really want to purchase new ones at this point. The cockpit is put together, inflatable fenders are stowed within the easy reach of the lazarette on the aft deck. The boat is washed. We are that much closer to backing out of this slip.

S/V Galapagos, standing by.

 

 

 

Edison House Stories: Time Space Continuum

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Every day I wonder where the time went. Today I have made myself sit down and grab some time to organize my thoughts; a much needed respite from life under a firehose. It’s self imposed, I mean, we did buy an old house and we expected nothing less than all the projects we have before us. The difference between buying this house and buying our house in Lakewood (aside from the ridiculous price difference) is that we have a time schedule on this house. We want it done in months, not years. Because we want to go cruising again. We are moving fast and honestly, I do not know where this energy I have comes from. It’s probably due to having a sense of purpose and firm goals. We are no longer meandering into the future without a care for our own mortality. We have things to do and places to go and we need an income that will sustain that. This is, if we play our cards right, house #1.

This photo is from the historical society and was taken sometime in the 1940’s.

Although we have not moved into Edison House yet, we spend our days there every day. We have a little routine that is satisfying. Mike and I are both working actual jobs, although his job is way more demanding of his time than mine is right now, and we awaken at the Wilson Street house where we have been living with Claire and Dan, get marginally dressed, gather our cellphones and laptops, and walk around the corner to Edison House to begin our work day.

We are finding that we really do like this house very much. We like the size; fairly small by today’s standards, and we like the layout. We like the young man who rents the attached apartment and has lived there for 2 years. Three floors means we are moving up and down stairs all day, which is good for our bodies. We like having our own offices upstairs. We love having a basement. We love the high ceilings. Even the weird little fireplace has grown on us. And I got to use my little speak easy peekaboo door twice so far! It’s as much fun as I thought it would be.

Peek a boo! I just love this thing. Come see us so I can use it more.

My office is shaping up. Notice the ‘chair’ in the corner, made from Galapagos’ old cushions. That little project is on pause right now.

Something we learned on the boat is to really appreciate the use of small spaces and not overwhelm them with ‘stuff’ or large furniture. The size of things becomes especially important when you consider being able to move things in and out of the house, a consideration we never worried about in the Lakewood house with its many wide doorways all around the house. For instance, we are doing a complete tear out and remodel of the kitchen. During the design process I had to decide on the size of refrigerator we wanted. American refrigerators are ridiculously huge in my opinion. They are almost a caricature of American excess. After living with a boat fridge for 4 years and finding that overall I had TOO much space in there, I was not inclined to get anything bigger than the current 30″ fridge that already lives here. When we moved that fridge into the dining room to begin clearing out the kitchen, I realized that even if I wanted a bigger one, I wouldn’t be able to get it through the door! So 30″ fridge it is and will remain. And I’m fine with that.

Speaking of the kitchen, I recently had the joy/back breaking labor experience of removing the hideous ceramic tile, along with 3 additional layers of old flooring; exposing the beautiful original fir underneath. This house is built with 100% Pacific Northwest old growth Douglas Fir and I try not to think about those old trees coming down. All I know is that now every floor has fir that is 15/16″ inch thick and it’s gorgeous. Even the oak floors in the living room and hall are underlain with fir. There is a solidness to walking in this house that speaks to its existence of close to a century.

Underneath everything, the original fir floors. They need cleaning but soap and water will do most of the heavy lifting.

Revealed beneath the unfortunate choices of decades of living.

For now the kitchen floor is covered in the black mastic that is probably made with horse hooves, and turns out to be water soluble. There is a lot of washing of the floor on hands and knees coming to my body in the near future, but I can now take a break from that floor and move on to other destructive activities. I am enjoying the process of discovery as we peel back the layers of this house to its bones, revealing the choices residents of the past have made for better or for worse.

Like the tile in the bathroom. I am dead excited to pull this tile off the wall. My exploratory shenanigans uncovered pink and white candy-striped wall paper. Who knows what may lie beneath the tile of the tub surround, also being torn out, and under the floor tile? That floor is higher than the floor in the hallway, so there is something under there. Maybe just fir, but I’ll be finding out soon. As an aside, if you suffer from any kind of anxiety or even anger, a good tile tear-out is a great way to let it go.

This tiny bathroom offers many design challenges but I already have a vision. Sure, it’s not entirely solid yet, but it’s coming along.

This is the mess of paint layers on the medicine cabinet. So. Many. Layers.

The explorations continue with stripping about 20 layers of paint off of the medicine cabinet in the tiny bathroom. Originally I was going to just take this thing out, but it’s really built into the wall and would be a real act of destruction to remove it. Better to be more conservative in the truest sense of the word and see if the original wood can be brought back to life. So much of the decision making about how to go about upgrading this house must be made carefully, not only with a nod to the history of the house, but also with the checkbook firmly in mind.

Revealed beneath the tile: pink candy striped wallpaper and a bit of crumbling plaster. The Our Old House forum on Facebook is a wealth of information on how to stabilize and repair things like this plaster.

The electricians have started. So much of the remodel money is going to be spent on things like electrical and plumbing. But that’s like spending money on a rig on a sailboat. You hate to do it, but it must be done in order for the vessel to be safe. Same on houses. We will not be risking an electrical fire on this house. We are dealing with a lot of deferred maintenance but, again, we already knew that going into this. It’s not our first rodeo.

In terms of plumbing, let’s just say that whoever fixed the leaky drain on the tub did not have an eye to the future. I’m going to show you a photo, but if you are a plumbing nerd, please avert your eyes. It’s bad. The plumber just shook his head. When a plumber has no words you know it’s bad. And yes, it does leak onto the basement floor. There are a lot of plumbers in this neighborhood of older homes. I see them when I take walks, their useful vans of tools trundling down the roads to their next jobs. If you want job security, be a plumber or an electrician.

So ugly. And yes, it does leak.

That bathroom is not as bad as I previously thought, though. Whereas I had immediately had dreams of pulling out that old tub and putting in a free standing tub, I have changed my mind. What changed it? I took a bath last night after yoga. I used the tub that exists there already and decided I like the way it feels. It’s deep, and solid, and supportive and original to that part of the house. The new plan is to keep it and have it refinished. That’s going to save both money and the tub and time. I still have to rip out all the tile and replace whatever it’s installed on, but we can open up that wall where the plumbing lives and then the plumbers have easy access to running water lines up to the second floor where our final project of any size is waiting. I’m getting excited about the possibilities in the bathroom and the kitchen isn’t even done yet. Whoa, Nellie. I probably should slow down, but how?

These walls. They will succumb to my prybar and hammer. Soon. Very soon. I know just the place to repurpose the fir flooring that goes halfway across this ‘closet’. Halfway? I mean, come on!

On to the upstairs. This little space is about to yield to my hammer and pry bar. I’m going to remove the pitiful excuse for walls in there so the plumber and contractor can explore the space. We need a second bathroom upstairs. Any money we spend on that will be money well spent whenever the house gets sold again (probably after I’m long gone from this earth but don’t quote me on that). Our contractor has some good ideas for enlarging the space, and the plumber has some good ideas for how he could plumb it in. It’s well located just above the other bathroom. If that works out, we will have a 3 bedroom 2 bath with a garage close to town. Did I mention that a lovely French bakery is moving in next to the yoga studio, 1/2 a block away? They’ve been in business down the road about a mile, but are moving to a larger location. Yay! It’s like they knew we were moving in and wanted to be neighbors! It’s not quite the same as Bahia de Navidad in Mexico,  with its French baker who delivers to boats, but it’s a great second to that. I’m envisioning Saturday morning coffee with a real croissant.

Some little vignettes. We try to maintain a little civility here. We’ve moved the ‘kitchen’ into the dining room, along with the tools.s

And speaking of neighbors, I was greeted yesterday by a woman named Brandi in an older SUV as she was turning the corner in front of the house. She liked my overalls. I was seriously confused by her comment because these are probably 15 years old, have boat bottom paint on them, as well as various other grimy substances. These are my serious work clothes. They take a beating and keep on going. What she really wanted was to know if we were moving into the house and to say welcome to the neighborhood. Oh, and to offer me some Irises from her yard and to tell me that she is very excited that we are going to repaint the exterior (Everyone is very excited about that, apparently. Pumpkin Spice is an unfortunate color on a house.) It was very nice, almost heart warming. I hope she can come see the house after we’ve finished the remodeling.

And what of the spirits of the house? I’m sure you’ve all been sitting on the edges of your seats wondering if we have any ghosts hanging around. Well, we aren’t sure yet. There have been some interesting little things like knives being misplaced and found in strange locations later. But that could just be our old and overloaded brains. I do sometimes get the sense that people are watching me in an interested sort of way as I get into a meditative state doing the labor of pulling tile, especially when I was doing the kitchen floor. But that may or may not be something to take note of.

And then there is Grace. Or at least that’s what I call her. Grace is 11 and popped into my head yesterday when I was at the house alone applying stripper to the medicine cabinet. She opened the conversation with a query. “What are you doing?”. Um, what?? “What is that you are doing?”. We went on from there as this external voice chattered on in my head about all the work being done on the house and how excited her mother was that I was taking care of the place. Ooookaaaay….

Mike taking measurements of the fireplace. The cheesy but useful electric fireplace has to go. On the other hand, it offers heat, and both blue and red lights! What a find!! Original flickering candle sconces: a definite ‘stay’. Rug is a classic GoodWill find.

I don’t know who or what Grace might be, which insults her greatly, but my questioning nature and internal skeptic is always firmly in place when these things happen. There have been a handful of times in my life where I have had a connection with someone dead. I wrote about my friend Betty, who spoke to me for days after her passing. I also had some pretty strange experiences on D’arcy Island a few years ago before our cruise. So it’s not unheard of, but as a general rule, I don’t go around listening to or speaking with those who have slipped the old mortal coil. Anyway, Grace followed me back to Wilson House and I finally had to ask if it was possible that I could go to bed without listening to her delightful, if not a little disturbing, chatter.

Is she a ghost of the house somehow? Is she even real? If she isn’t real, then why am I having conversations that feel as though I’m not initiating them? And what is reality anyhow? Haven’t we learned in the last few years that reality is flexible and people get to choose to believe whether factual things are, in fact, fact? Don’t we now believe in secret cabals and reptile people and space lasers and that the earth is actually flat?  I don’t know the answers to any of these things. All I know is that everytime I mention the possibility of Grace not being real I hear this: “I AM, TOO, REAL!”. That response is so ‘eleven’. So I’ll let you know if she sticks around, whoever she is.

Enough of this sitting around and chewing the fat with the blog. I have walls to paint and tile to rip out and paint to strip. Time is flying by.

Yes, Gracie, there probably IS asbestos in that old floor tile.

Oh, by the way! I forgot to say check out the March edition of Good Old Boat magazine for my article on anxiety and sailing. 

 

 

 

Edison House: A Soft Place to Land

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When we landed our fine ship Galapagos at the dock in September, we stepped onto the dock clutching  tightly in our fists great lists of demands we were prepared to place upon our sailor selves; tasks that, as they were completed, would create a road of sorts to a financial future that would allow for another sailing trip of epic proportions. Having one successful round of cruising under our belts, we are determined to go round again and this time we want to do a few things differently. Now that we know how much it costs for us to cruise the way we like to (more than we anticipated), we feel like we can better prepare for our next go around. And that means we may need to take some risks, get outside our usual comfort zone. Because if we keep doing the same old things, then the same old things will keep happening.

Edison House. We closed during the big storm of 2021. Today. Built in 1929.

We approach these kinds of spiritual contract negotiations with our lists of desires clutched tightly in our fingers. These are the things we must have: We must have regular money coming in. We must also have a house to return to or for our kids to go to if they are in need. If we can get two houses, that would be even better. One of those properties needs to offer my mother a place to live if she needs it. Is that the final tally? Have we ultimately decided which direction to go? Looks like we have, and so forward, march. We need a soft place to land from this point we are jumping from because jumping into the void is an act of faith. We are in that space where playing it safe may not get us where we want to go, especially in a fast paced market. We’ll have to do something outside our comfort zone, something that feels risky.  It will be time to go with the heart and the beacon that it is, lighting the way forward. We call it ‘riding the wave’. If you are lucky enough to notice the right wave coming your way and you step into it, the energy will carry you home. That’s how we knew when to sell the Lakewood house. It’s how we chose the right realtor to usher us through preparing and marketing the house. And that’s how we would buy another house in the market from hell for buyers. We would find a wave and ride it home to a house that ticked off a number of boxes on our long lists.

How about that fireplace with its period flickering candle sconces? And the little ‘speak easy’ window on the front door. I love that.

Long time readers will remember that we kept our house in Lakewood, WA when le left the dock because it just didn’t seem like selling it was the right idea. I still loved the house and felt connected to it. The boat did not yet feel like home. Selling would have been seriously hard for me and it just felt wrong. I also thought the timing was not right to sell because I could see the market for sellers being much better in a couple of years. If we kept it and didn’t lose money doing so, then we would be able to sell during a strong sellers market that surely would be coming due to pressures from the Seattle housing market. So we kept it and we had excellent renters in the home for two years. We stored our household goods in a reasonably priced storage unit.

Coming back to the states, we knew the time was perfect to sell. The feelings about selling at that point were clean and clear. There was no wavering, no doubt, no internal argument, no convincing of the self that this was the right thing. Sell and sell now. Not one tear was shed because the feelings had shifted. We sold the house two days after listing it. We sold to a nice family with grandchildren who live close by. We couldn’t have been happier and we got a windfall profit by timing the sale correctly. We could check ‘sell house’ off of our long list of preparations for Little Cunning Plan, Phase 2.

I’m seeing whites and creams. This is the upstairs landing.

Money from the Lakewood House in our account, we began taking stock of the seriously low inventory in Olympia. It’s a bad, bad time to be a buyer in this market and we knew that. Very few houses are on the market, and those with reasonable prices have some kind of seriously wrong thing going on-like being downtown next to the armory or something. Nope. We wanted to be close to town because we love walking to town and Mike can walk to work, making his commute so easy. We wanted to be close to Claire and Dan, and mostly we wanted to find something we could enjoy living in while we are here, but that could also be used as a nice rental when we leave. The house you rent and the house you live in are rarely the same kind of house. So that was a tall order.

We looked at a few houses as they came available and shied away from each one for one reason or another. We would drift into looking at big victorians because we both love them, only to pull ourselves up short and remind ourselves we’d never feel good renting out such a place. We looked at a really lovely rambler out in the country. Then reminded ourselves that we would find better renters close into the city and that the yard was much too big for renters to care for. Another ‘no’ to a beautiful house. We also wanted to be able to pay cash for the house and then go back and finance part of it later if we wanted to recoup some of the cash for another use. So that seriously limited the houses we could reasonably go see.

From the kitchen and through the dining room, which used to be a kitchen way back when.

Rental houses are not the kinds of houses we usually look at. We’ve never been ‘investors’. We live in the houses we buy and that’s a different kind of house as a rule. But we are also wanting to live in our own space as we begin to take on big projects like the upholstery in the salon on Galapagos. I need a larger work area for that project. So the goal became, ‘let’s find a house that will work for us for now and that will make a fine rental when we leave. It cannot be too big or have too difficult a yard to keep. If it’s a duplex, that would even be better. Surely something will come up on the market”.

And very quickly, it did.

Just around the corner from where we live now, an unfortunately colored house we had named Pumpkin House, came on the market at a price that was moderately good for the area and the size of the property. Obviously they were hoping investors would swoop in and bid the price up. The house is a duplex with one main dwelling and a smaller apartment on the side of the house. With a finished attic space and full basement, there would be plenty of room to spread out projects. The apartment had a long term renter who pays on time by autopay each month. The roof was new last year. The house, while a color I would not choose, had a bit of style that I could bring out better by using color more wisely. The downside was the house had only 1 bath and that looked very small. And the kitchen looked like it was ready to have a complete remodel. A bonus was that the house sported a one car garage in good condition with a door that closes. That’s right, the bar is really low for garages in Olympia’s older neighborhoods. Hardly anyone has one and this was an almost non-negotiable thing for me because of property crime. Cars left unprotected overnight are an easy mark.

A kitchen remodel is coming our way. I cannot bear that tile. 

And now we were faced with either leaping, or losing out. Because the market in Olympia is ridiculously tight at the moment. There are not many houses on the market and decent properties of all kinds sell within days. In fact, we had already lost out on a really nice property that had several small houses on it. It sold while we were driving out with our realtor to view it. Lesson learned. Do not hesitate.  It’s not for the faint of spirit and if ever the term ‘you snooze, you lose’ were applicable, it’s now. If we even wanted to see this house at all, we would have to make an offer and have it accepted because it had renters living there a bit longer so the usual house-viewing rules didn’t apply.

This house is walkable to downtown Olympia, less than 2 blocks from the market, less than a block from my yoga studio, and literally around the corner from where we are living now with Claire and Dan. In spite of the ugly color, the house has good lines. In terms of the neighborhood, it’s an eclectic mixture of cottages, bungalows, victorians, and every other kind of architecture that you can imagine. Most are well kept, many are rentals. They almost all have gardeners in residence because this is Olympia.  I describe the area as Pacific Northwest Creative Funky Rainbow Friendly. It has a good vibe but mostly on-street parking, which sometimes makes it seem a bit crowded. In terms of an investment, it’s extremely well located. There are straight up never enough rentals available in Olympia.

This tiny bathroom offers many design challenges but I already have a vision. Including a pocket door.

As soon as the listing was up, our realtor was hearing from us and making arrangements for us to make an offer on the house, sight unseen. It’s worse than buying a boat without a sea trial (which, you’ll recall, we also did).  You just have to somehow ‘know’ that this house is worth taking a risk. To be clear, if we didn’t like the house, we’d get our offer rescinded and our escrow money back, but it’s a lot of work to go through just to view a property.

Our offer was accepted by the seller and we were stunned. Honestly, the competition was so great that we didn’t think we had a chance. So how did we manage to be first in line? Our realtor, Shane Klinkhammer. The man knows how to make an offer that is attractive and he knows how to move fast. We had the offer in the agent’s hand within 24 hours. It was all cash, no contingencies, no expectations of fixing anything on the house (but if big things were found in the inspection we could walk away), and we could be closed by Feb 15, less than 2 weeks away. We offered a little bit above asking; just a few thousand. And we put down serious earnest money that reflected the serious interest we had.

Upon their acceptance of our offer, the selling agent let us know that they had a back up offer already signed off on. It was for more money but the buyer had to get financing. That was the difference. We could close fast, and they couldn’t. So the seller would have his money right away. It’s not the way we like to buy houses, which seem like they should be given more time, but that’s the way it’s working right now.  We had to get the place inspected, have another electrician come out quickly to asses some older wiring in part of the house, get an appraisal all within a two week period. Shane kept his hand on the tiller the whole time, making sure we stayed within contract so that our position was safe. At the end of the day, they sold their house in less than 24 hours, before their offer review date, because we were able to come in strong and had a good realtor.

A historical find in the upstairs closet: a stamp from the Carlisle Lumber Mill in Onalaska WA where the wood came from. It was in its heyday in 1929. The smokestack from the mill still stands.

It was the fir floors, the coved ceilings, the full basement, and the spacious finished attic that sold me. There are just enough period details to give the house a bit of charm, not so many that modern amenities seem out of place. It still has its glass doorknobs, and the little peek-a- boo on the front door makes me feel like we will be running a speak-easy out of the living room. I have always wanted to own an old house and have all its solid history as part of the family. We are very excited to get moved in after a bunch of painting and a bit of remodeling. It’s nice to be in a position to get stuff done before we move the furniture in.

The kitchen needs completely redoing, as does the bathroom. There is one bathroom and it is the size of a boat head. So that room will have some design challenges to be met but I’m excited about those and already have some great ideas for how I will make that room remarkable for its size. Small soaking tub, anyone? We are considering adding a second bathroom upstairs if the cost is not too much. We can do a lot of finish work ourselves if we can get a plumber to get in there and do the important stuff right.

My biggest challenge will be keeping the yard down to a mild roar in terms of gardens. Basically this is a blank slate and I have hundreds of little plants and starts that I moved from the Lucerne Road House. Those will need to be put in the ground in the spring. I don’t want to make this property difficult to keep neat. So I’m not sure how i will solve all that, but I look forward to the puzzle.

A fun find in the basement. There are still coal ashes inside.

This house ticks off a number of boxes for us: it offers a nice place to live while we refit the boat, it offers extra money each month from the rental of the apartment, it will be very easy to rent the place out when we leave and have more income from the house, it has a garage for the car, and the apartment offers my mom a place in the future if she needs it. We can check those things off our long list.

There will be some blog worthy days coming up so stay tuned for the next installment of the Edison House transformation.

Playing with these colors. Looks better already. Even better if the porch eyebrow were that white color and maybe bring the white down toward the windows a bit.