Mike and Jeff's New House

If you are looking for a firm to do concrete work, we had a great experience with our contractor, Excel Concrete. They did the slab for our house, all of the steps and driveway and finally our sidewalk....highly recommended! Here they are shown finishing the sidewalk in front of the house...

At long last our front steps and sidewalk are done... We also replaced half of the sidewalk in front of our old house next door. The city had flagged it for replacement due to tree root damage(at our expense of course - thanks to Proposition 13) six months ago. We worked with the new homeowners to repair their landscape and now we both have great looking sidewalks.

Our friends Rob and Kent are moving to San Fransicso and will have a much smaller home over there. Soooooo, we bought their beautiful cherry veneered Techline Murphy bed and paid the Techline studios guys to come and move it and install it. The bed has 6 heavy duty springs that serve to counter balance it and allow it to easily be lifted up to the storage position. It is kind of like installing a sliding garage door, easy if you know what you are doing, dangerous if you don't....

Here is what the bed looks like when it is folded up.

We looked at a lot of places and finally found some chairs for the living room that we liked. They were delivered on Saturday afternoon and we really like them... We fired up the gas fireplace unit last night, it is almost starting to feel like fall....

We found the perfect rug for our media room. It looks great on the cork floor. Now, all we need to do is buy a big-screen TV and we'll be ready for movie night....

The kitchen drawers are finally all done...The drawer pulls are aluminum and they went on last weekend....Next weekend we are going to install the stainless steel kick-plate underneath the cabinets....This cabinet system is all from IKEA and is a Eucylyptus veneer.

At long last our dining room light fixture is up and working.. This fixture is a modern homage to the crystal chandelier... Our new dining table is from Room and Company in Sacramento..

Thanks to IKEA we found the perfect storage shelves for the pantry under the stairs... One of the challenges we are dealing with is that the polyurathane that Mike put down on the entire first floor is failing....It just peels up in big sections...The manufacturer said `Sorry, that was a bad batch, we'll send you another jug'.....Needless to say, we won't be putting any more polyurathane down...we are going to pull it all up and put down a concrete wax instead.....oh well....

Our 3rd floor shower is currently the home for Mike's orchids that are not in bloom....We hope to put in a little greenhouse next year, but until that time they have to live somewhere...

Last weekend Jeff put all of the towel bars and toilet paper holders onto the walls in all 4 bathrooms. The master bath has a heated towel bar that is on a timer so that our towels are warm in the AM....Since our solar panels continue to make more energy than we can use, we don't feel too guilty about having it.... NOTE: Since being connected to the power grid in May we have yet to pay any money to our local electrical utility, we have almost 1 megawatt of excess capacity stored in our `energy bank' so we are ready for the foggy days of winter.

This armoire was in our old house and is one of the few antiques that we are keeping. It is Italian and the dealer estimated it was built in the early 1900's.... It is now standing on a platform at top of the 2nd floor landing.....The nice thing about this armoire is that it was built to be taken apart, which is just what we had to do to get it up the stairs...Those Italians....always thinking of design....