In Which We Visit Leavenworth

Today Jeremy and I left Connor in Joanna's more-than-capable hands bright and early in the morning and headed out for our day trip to Leavenworth!

Visiting Leavenworth is one of those touristy-but-awesome things that you just have to do if you live in Washington state for any period of time.  It's a town nestled in the foothills of the Cascades, and the entire place is decked out like a Bavarian village.  And they take it really seriously, too.  They have professional yodelers.  Pretty much every single street sign and shop is named something like Der Wienerschnitzel Gas Stationhaus, and even the local McDonald's is decked out in white stucco and wooden scroll work.  They have an annual festival celebrating the accordion.  Their town mascot is a nutcracker named Woody Goomsba, and you wouldn't believe their tourism commercials. 

No really.  That's really one of their tourism commercials.  I am totally not making any of this up.

So basically it's like what would happen if a Disney World employee went to Germany, got really really drunk, and then doodled on a napkin and built the result.  A really, really drunk employee-- a quick google search for "Leavenworth winery, brewery and tasting room" brings up thirty-four results, twelve of which are located on or within walking distance of the main street of the town.  Some of them were literally next door to each other. 

Did I mention that Leavenworth has a population of just over 2,000 people?  If you assume a quarter of the population is under age, that works out to one drinking establishment per 44 people.  Whoa.  And the ratio of mural-to-person might actually come out at about 1:1, because pretty much every available paintable surface had some sort of Bavarian Domestic Scene plastered on it.  The mural painters in Leavenworth are probably living very, very well. 

Obviously Jeremy and I were not there for the beer.  Luckily there were plenty of other things to do there besides drink, though.  We ate lunch, which involved both wienerschnitzel and red cabbage (served to us by women dressed in traditional dirndls-- also known as Those Poofy German Dress Thingies).  Then we bought cheese.  They had really good cheese.  Also we bought some roasted nuts.  And some chocolate.  Basically we munched our way through Leavenworth.

The scenery was truly lovely and the town itself was charmingly picturesque, if a trifle overdone.  We found a lovely park to walk through that followed the Wenatchee river and strolled along the path for a while, stopping on a bench to soak in the view and watch a trio of rafters make their way downstream.  After that we made our leisurely way back to the town and wandered in and out of stores and through the small art market set up in the central park of the town.  It was lovely to spend so much time with no particular goal in mind: just enjoying the day in each other's company.

So we drove back over the mountain pass in early evening, stopped for dinner at a little restaurant in downtown Auburn, and then ended the night at (where else?) our local bookstore, sitting in the comfy chairs in the back with a hot drink in hand.  All in all it was a lovely day!

We might take the time to go back in the winter, when they have a lot of additional activities like horse-drawn sleigh rides and dog sledding.  We probably would not come back with Connor, though-- the town wasn't remotely handicap accessible from what we could see; most of the buildings were multiple stories (with shops on the upper stories that could only be reached by stairs), aisles were narrow and crowded, and many of the doorways into the ground floor shops had uneven thresholds.  So sadly I don't think it's a place we would take the little guy, and Jer might have trouble with the place a couple of decades down the line.

But Jer and I enjoyed ourselves, and now we can say we've officially visited Leavenworth, so we can check that off our list of Touristy Things To Do In The Pacific Northwest. 

Gute nacht!

~Jess

In Which Connor Says Good Night

So Connor and I spent pretty much the entire day inside today. That's because our neighborhood looked like this.

We did make an attempt to go for a walk in the snow. Connor's wheelchair is not really built for snow travel-- it really needed some skis! It was a pretty good arm workout for me, though. We slowly crunched down where I thought the sidewalk might be until we reached the park, where I decided it might be fun for Connor and I to try and make a snowman. I'd even brought a carrot with me just in case we found a likely spot for one and needed a nose!

Alas, our snowman was not to be. The snow didn't really want to pack well, and also I had to sacrifice my gloves because Connor quickly made his soaking wet once again. He has apparently decided that his gloves (and today, the rest of his clothing) are there for him to chew on. And when I say 'chew' I actually mean 'bite repeatedly,' as Connor doesn't seem to be able to move his jaw from side to side-- one of the major reasons why most of his nutrition is by g-tube. He's kind of in an oral stage right now; you can see him chomping away in this picture. So anyway, I ended up having to give him my gloves, which came up to his elbows and were apparently not as tasty. Snowmen are not fun to make without gloves in 18 degree weather though, so instead we turned around and slogged back home.

We spent the rest of the day indoors; I didn't really want to venture out and risk the wheelchair van on the icy roads. I wasn't concerned about my driving-- the van handles very well in rough weather. I was more concerned about all the little cars I'd watched fishtailing up and down our street all day. So we sat and played with the iPad for a while instead. Connor is newly in love with a program called Vocal Zoo. It's got a bunch of pictures of animals, and when you tap the picture the sound the animal makes plays. They have some really unconventional animals on there too, like the llama and the zebra. Mostly he likes to mash one animal over and over again. He particularly likes the ones with high-pitched, annoying calls.

We also played around with Proloquo2go for a while; it's the assistive communication program that was one of the main reasons we got the iPad for Connor. After some discussion, we programmed it to say "Good night Daddy. I love you!" and then I helped Connor push the button to play it for Jeremy when he got home.

Connor grinned and nodded after we pushed the button.

He's found a voice.

~Jess

In Which I Talk About Skating Some More

So this is going to be sort of a short post, because it's nearly one in the morning and I just got home.  I went to the Adult Skate at our local skating rink, which runs from ten until midnight.  It was practically deserted so I got to fling myself around the track without embarrassment, but I should have blogged before I left for skating time.  Oh well.

I would have skated earlier in the day, except for three problems.  The first was that it was nasty outside, which does not make for fun outdoor skating.  The second was that until ten in the evening there are a whole bunch of little kids out on our local rink, and I'm not quite up to jumping over sprawled munchkins yet.  The third was that I'd tried some baseball slides on the asphalt the day before.  I do not recommend this, by the way.  Not only do they tear up your skates really fast, but they also tear up good portions of your skin whether or not you happen to be wearing snowboarding pants.  I'll be sticking with the knee slides outdoors from now on.  But the end result of this fun experiment (beyond the delightful patches of missing skin on my thighs) was that I tore right through my laces on both skates.  So I had to get some more laces and also some toe guards (because the duct tape just wasn't cutting it) before I could skate again. 

I picked up two pairs of laces at the rink-side skate shop.  The first pair is hot pink, and the second pair is black with little skulls all over it.  Because that's what people think of when they see me.  You know, death and destruction.  Because I'm so intimidating and all that.  You've never seen such an intimidating toothpick in your life.

I found out while I was there that the rink (which is much closer to us than the one on post) also allows stroller/wheelchair skating during their family skate time!  I'm excited about this because it's yet another chance for me to involve Connor in a family activity.  Jeremy thinks he might be able to get up on a pair of rollerblades since they have the high ankle supports, so we could all hit the skating rink together!  I seriously love how inclusive and welcoming this area is; roller skating isn't something I would have thought would be a group activity of ours if you'd asked me shortly after Connor was born.  One of the women who worked at the rink was telling me that they have some children with cerebral palsy come in and skate; their braces fit right down into the skates and it's great for muscle strength.  What a fun activity for therapy!

It makes me really happy to think about it!

~Jess

In Which I Show You Our Completely Awesome "Oxygen In Use" Signs

So remember way back in March when I wrote about how we'd commissioned some stylish "Oxygen In Use" signs for our house?  We're required by the Fire Marshall here to post them since we use an oxygen tank whenever Connor has a seizure, but we weren't happy about the idea of posting one of those giant, nursing-home-type signs in the front window of our house. 

Since they don't have any regulations about what the sign looks like so long as it's clear on the "you can't smoke in here because there's oxygen in use" part, we figured we'd post an Alchemy request on the crafting site Etsy and see what we could come up with.  As several of you requested, I'd intended to show you the signs that came out of that project but I never got around to it.  Well, no time like the present!

We needed three signs-- one for our front door, one for our patio door, and one for the cabinet where the oxygen equipment is kept.  Over twenty artists made concept drawings for the signs, and it was an extremely tough decision trying to figure out which to go with!  In the end we chose a different artist for each sign: Chileary in Colorado for the sign in Connor's room, Metroink in Colorado for the front door sign, and Amberbrien in Montana for the sign on the patio door. 

There were some other artists with beautiful concepts-- so many that we wished we had more doors!  A couple of real standouts included Cjaneb877, who suggested ten different interchangeable seasonally-themed signs for Connor's room, and Montage, who proposed a front door sign that included distressed wood and stained glass elements.  You can see why it was hard to choose!

Anyway, here are the signs we ended up with:

Chileary did our front entry sign in green slate to compliment the colors of our house.  They took an element from the window in our front door and used it as a decorative accent. 

Amberbrian went with an Art Deco style for our patio door sign.  The vinyl window decal should hold up well to the weather, and the colors are drawn from the interior of our home. 

Metroink created a fun, lighthearted sign for Connor's room.  The simple laminated sign cleans easily and works well with the colors and decor.  The text reads "No Smoking!  (We've got oxygen in here!)" and there's a picture of an explosion with oxygen tanks flying out from the blast.

So there you have it!  We absolutely love the signs; I am a firm believer in the idea that just because something is required for a person with a medical condition doesn't mean it needs to be ugly, and to my mind these fit my principles to a T!

~Jess

In Which Connor Has An Outing In Pictures

Today Jeremy, Connor and I decided to have an afternoon outing!  Connor has gotten to the point where we're finally ready to start taking him out and about again, what better way to reintroduce him to field trips than a visit to the playground and then some back-to-school shopping?  We headed down to Bradley Park, and I brought along the camera.  Here's a pictorial tour of what we did today:

Savannah's Place, the playground we usually go to in Puyallup, is an amazing fully-accessible play space in Bradley Park, which is about five minutes from our house.  Recently it's been overhauled-- repaired, repainted, and added to-- so everything is in tip-top shape.  I don't have any statistics, but I would be willing to guess that this is the most-used playground in Puyallup; there's another also-pretty-cool-but-non-accessible playground literally ten feet from Savannah's Place and it's usually nearly deserted.  Everyone wants to play at the accessible playground, whether they have mobility issues or not, because it is just so cool.  So we got there and after a brief walk around through the woods around the (also accessible) trails, we made a beeline for the swings.

The next part of this is really picture heavy and there's also a video, so I put it after the jump in case you don't want to scroll through it.

In Which Li Li Gets A Pretty Palatable New Friend, And Connor Tries Out An iPad

So today went a bit better, I'm happy to say. 

Connor was a total crabby pants, but that may have been because instead of paying attention to him this morning, I was watching our new gerbil (who is as yet unnamed) and our old gerbil (Li Li)attempt to dig through the mesh divider I've set up in their cage so they can happily settle down to the business of fighting to the death, which is what gerbils do when they meet a "stranger."  Vicious little things, gerbils.  At any rate, I'll be rotating which side of the cage their staying on daily until their scents are mixed enough that they stop trying to kill one another and decide to be pals. Supposedly it usually takes about a week, but we'll see.  Signs that they're starting acclimate will include attempting to groom one another through the mesh, sleeping next to one another, and when Li Li quits trying to season our new gerbil with pepper and miniature lemon wedges. 

At any rate, Connor did fine this morning but I believe that the novelty of the new gerbil quickly wore off, and then he wanted to go play something instead of watching me frantically add more wire to the top of the divider to prevent Li Li from climbing over the top in an aerial pursuit of his dinner.  I mean new friend.  Yes.  But for Connor pretty much after 11:00 it was one giant meltdown after another, with a brief hiatus for Speech Therapy, where he did relatively well.  It was probably the gerbil combined with the seizure of yesterday and the fact that he didn't sleep well last night-- he cheered up considerably after his three hour nap late this afternoon.

Julie, our Speech Therapist, brought out a new toy for him to try out today-- an iPad!  They have a number of adaptive applications -- Robert Rummel-Hudson has discussed the topic much more elegantly than I'd probably put it-- and the thought was that Connor was more likely to do well with an iPad than a PECS system because there's less touching and manipulating to do.  We put up a cute little xylophone application for him just to get him used to using his hands to work it, and he caught on really quickly!  I'm pretty stoked; the iPad or another AAC might just end up being a fantastic way for Connor to communicate with those around him that don't understand his Home Signs-- the personal language he's made up with his limited motor skills.  So we're going to see how this goes.

Technology is awesome!

In Which Connor Sees Some Cool Bugs

So today Connor and I took a field trip to Bug Safari in Seattle!  They're sort of a gift shop/exhibit combination, with the space split about evenly between the two.  They had about 50 different kinds of insects, arachnids, millipedes and centipedes arranged in large tanks around the room.  While it seemed to be geared more towards elementary and middle school aged children, Connor still had a good time.  His favorite bugs were the Sunburst Diving Beetles and the Goliath Bird-Eating Spider, which was a spider with a body about the size of a baseball.  I'll spare the squeamish by not posting pictures.  I'm the type of gal who, when I find spiders in the house, carefully picks them up and takes them outside so they can live in my garden, so I thought it was pretty cool.  Though I might think twice about picking up a spider that size-- even with my trusty rolled-piece-of-paper method.

Before we visited Bug Safari, however, we had to get there.  This proved to be a bit of a problem. 

See, the store is located on the third level of what is known as the Pike Street Hill Climb.  This involves a whole lot of stairs.  And no handicap ramp.  And no elevator.  Apparently if you call ahead someone will give you access to a service elevator at the rear of the building the store is in, but of course we had no idea this was going to be a problem, as we just assumed they'd have some sort of a wheelchair ramp.  Luckily we had a friend with us, and she graciously helped me lift and carry Connor's wheelchair up three flights of stairs.  So if anybody with a little one in a wheelchair plans to make a visit to Bug Safari (or the Mexican restaurant, gelato place or other stores located in this building)-- either call ahead or be prepared to do some heavy lifting.

We rode the service elevator back down.

After our trip to Bug Safari, we walked up and down Pike Street for a little while.  A street busker saw us and  called us over because he decided that we had to hear a special song.  By some weird coincidence, he sang "There Ain't No Bugs On Me."  Connor thought it was fantastic-- he was totally enthralled, and giggled and clapped his hands through the whole thing.  I'm not normally big on watching and tipping street buskers, but I gave the guy a fiver.  If he can entertain Connor to that degree, he deserves it in my opinion. 

After a brief stop in the park, we bid goodbye to our friends and grabbed some lunch at Piroshky Piroshky Bakery-- one of my favorite to get portable food-- and then stopped by the Perennial Tea Room for something to drink.  We sat outside and people-watched for a while, which was fun.  The market area is always full of interesting people, and while the Perennial Tea Room is a little off the beaten path it still gets its share of colorful characters.  Finally we walked down to Fran's to pick up some of those ridiculously good salted caramels for Jeremy (and maybe a truffle or two for me) and it was time to go home, after a quick stop in a restroom, which is where I discovered Connor was sporting an extremely nasty looking rash all across the right side of his rear end.

So we canceled our evening plans, as Connor was not likely to be in a wonderful mood, but also because one of the potential side effects we're supposed to look out for with the little guy's medication change is rash.  Apparently you're supposed to tell your doctor if you develop a rash while on Tegretol, as one of the (extremely rare) side effects of the medication is toxic epidermal necrolysis-- also known as "your skin dying and falling off."  Glorious.

We did just up Connor's Tegretol this morning, per the doctors orders on transitioning between Tegretol and Trileptal.  But we also tried a different diaper brand (we switched about a week ago).  So more than likely this is just a nasty reaction to the different diapers-- Connor's not running a fever and, other than being itchy, he doesn't seem to be in any distress.  I ran to the store this evening and grabbed a tube of diaper rash cream and Connor's regular brand of diapers.  We'll take a look in the morning and see whether or not he's looking better, and if the rash has spread significantly (or shows up on parts of his body other than his rear) than we'll put a call in to the doctor.  It's probably nothing to worry about, though; we're certainly not going to call them for a case of diaper rash.  Lord knows we're in that office enough without abusing the system.

But otherwise we had a fun day!

~Jess

In Which We Help Friends Move, And I Traumatize Their Neighbors, And Also Our Deck Looks Awesome

We had a busy day today!

Jake got here about nine this morning and we worked on the deck together for a couple of hours.  I got to use the circular saw again, and I didn't cut my fingers off or anything!  Then Jeremy and I left Connor with his respite care worker, Joanna, and headed up to Seattle to help some friends of ours move.  They bought a beautiful craftsman style home with, among other amazing features, an actual Hobbit door!  Even if the rest of the house wasn't totally cool, that would clinch it. 

Rowbert, our wheelchair van, is terribly handy for moving, by the way, because not only does he have a whole bunch of room inside and reinforced shocks, but he also has that nifty ramp so you can simply slide heavy boxes up into his interior or, if you have a piano mover, roll them inside.  He makes things super easy.

So we spent a few hours helping our friends move.  In my case this involved, at one point, strutting down their street dressed in a leather tunic (originally part of an orc costume) and touting a seven-foot long spear. 

Don't ask.

When we got back to the house around five, we discovered Jake had finished just about all of the framing for the deck!  Doesn't it look awesome?  We have yet to frame out the ramps, as we have to pour some concrete pads first to make sure they have a really solid base, but we're getting there!  To give you an idea of what you are looking at-- the basic "rectangle" of the deck is 15' by 24', with an additional 4' by 8' landing.  One of the ramps will run down the front of the deck off that landing on the right-- from this view we'd be looking up that ramp.  The other ramp will run down the side of the house.  Hopefully it will blend pretty well with the rest of the landscaping-- we'll just have to see!

~Jess

In Which Jeremy Breaks In The Kitchen

Jeremy pulled out his coffee bean roaster for the first time since he arrived home back in August.  It used to be that every Sunday our kitchen would be filled with the grassy, slightly acrid smell of roasting coffee beans while Jeremy hovered over the counter, watching the process with an expert eye.  And like clockwork, every Sunday our smoke alarm would go off because Jeremy, in his zeal to get roasting, would forget to turn the oven vent on.

Jeremy hasn't been able to roast his own coffee for so long because he wasn't able to access the kitchen in the apartment.  The galley-style kitchen wouldn't allow him to use his wheelchair, and standing for a long enough period of time to be able to roast his coffee beans and then use his espresso machine wasn't very feasible.  So he'd been making due with pre-roasted beans and a little French press, which just wasn't the same.  The man is serious about his coffee. 

The new kitchen is wonderful because it allows him to return to so many activities he enjoys that he's been unable to do.  He's cooking his own breakfast in the mornings again, has talked about pulling out the bread maker, and of course the espresso machine-- a little worse for wear after being shipped back from Afghanistan-- has once again been unpacked and now has place of pride on his island work surface.  As I'm writing he's in there doing the dishes-- not an activity that he necessarily enjoys, but one that I certainly appreciate and that he was unable to do in the apartment.

He seems so much more comfortable in this space, which makes me very happy.  Today when the smoke alarm went off in the kitchen the sound to me seemed more like a joyous shout of triumph than an extremely loud annoyance, even if I couldn't figure out how to turn the darn thing off and ended up bracing Jeremy's legs (who as the instigator of the alarms has a lot more practice at turning them off) as he wobbled on top of a chair to take out the batteries. 

I sat down in the living room afterwards and listened to Jeremy putter around the kitchen, making his coffee and telling happy falsehoods* to Connor about the fire alarm.  I didn't have to do a thing for Jer-- he was just fine on his own in there.  It feels like we've regained something that's been missing since August.

Feels like home.

~Jess


*"You should always yell hysterically when there's a fire, Connor.  Like this: AHHHHHHHHHH!!!!  Fires hate that."

Room By Room: Connor's Room

And last but certainly not least, here's Connor's room!

I have to tell you about the last owner's inspired decorating scheme in here.  While normally I'm not one to criticize anyone's personal tastes, this room kind of takes the cake.  This is the only room in the entire house, including the bathrooms, that did not have a stenciled design in it.

They had a dartboard hung in here.  A harvest gold, kelly green, and crimson dartboard.  Design inspiration!  You can see the glorious results in the slideshow after the jump.

Room By Room: The Office

Here's the office!

If we adopt a little girl this will be her room, but otherwise this is where our office/guest room will stay, as if we adopt a little boy we'll be making him share a room with Connor.  This is for a variety of reasons, the main one probably being that we like having an office/guest room.  Sharing rooms builds character.

Right.  Anyway, this room was a totally unremarkable white (excepting the ever-present stencils) box, decked out with vintage 1980's ruffled floral pattern curtains.  This room, along with Connor's room, also sported one of those narrow little passageways to get inside with a standard (non-wheelchair size) door.  There was no way that could open the door wide enough to squeeze through, even if he had someone push him through instead of trying to wheel himself.  Slideshow after the jump.

Room By Room: The Master Bedroom

Here's our bedroom! 

This is a huge room.  And when I say huge, I mean huuuuuuuge-- the kind of bedroom that architects generally say is a total waste of space in a house with this amount of square footage.  That's a king size bed languishing in the middle of the room in the "before" picture, which gives you the general idea of just how large this room is.  We briefly considered making this Connor's room before we decided that, nah, we couldn't resist having that space all to ourselves.  I'm so glad we did, too, because I'm relatively sure a king-size bed wouldn't fit in Connor's room very well, and after sleeping on the floor for the past five months (we couldn't fit Jeremy's hospital bed and a bed for me in the same room, so I've been carpet camping since early September) I am swooning over this bed and spend as much time in it as humanly possible.  Slideshow after the jump!

Room By Room: The Bathrooms

Ah, the bathrooms.  The master bathroom was a large part of why we bought this house in the first place, so I have a special fondness for it, or at least I'm as fond as you can be of a room with a toilet in it.

We sure as heck didn't buy the house for the bathrooms as they were.  The original bathrooms were like walking into a time warp to the eighties, complete with fake beige marble vanities, stenciled walls, random earth-tone flower tiles, and those hideous hanging light fixtures, which I'm sure have an official name but which Jer and I termed "nipple lights" for obvious reasons.  By far the biggest asset of either bathroom was the fact that the master bath backed up to a pretty large walk-in closet, making it ideal for remodeling into a larger roll-in shower.  Of course, we never anticipated that thanks to some amazing people we would end up with a couple of bathrooms as gorgeous as our new ones turned out!  Slideshows for both bathrooms are after the jump.

Room By Room: The Mudroom

On to the mudroom!

This is by far the largest laundry room I've ever had in my entire life.  It runs the entire length of the kitchen, and the washer and dryer were stuck waaaaaay over in one corner, and the passage to the garage was waaaaaaaay over in the other corner.  The water heater also used to be in this room, and every time you turned on the hot water in the house it sounded like some sort of Thing From The Swamp was rising up in my mudroom to drag us all to a watery grave.  Seriously the thing scared the bejeezus out of me the first time I heard it.  While ordinarily I'm a fan of pocket doors, the tiny one in here that led into the kitchen was so narrow that Jeremy's chair couldn't fit through it without scraping the walls, and the door track had settled so that the pocket door would stick and scrap against the jam.  An extremely odd coat closet with two doors-- one on the kitchen side and a really narrow one (about eight inches wide!) on the mudroom side added a slightly bizarre touch.  Really the rest of the long narrow space in here was wasted.  The slide show of the construction process is after the jump!

Room By Room: The Dining Room

Today I'm going to talk about the dining room!  The space was formerly being used as a family room, and was dominated by a large woodburning stove, which was nice but rather outdated.  Since we now had a gas fireplace in the living room, the odds of us taking the time to set up and use this stove when we could just flip a switch and have instant fire in the other room were not very good.  Also once the kitchen was expanded it no longer made sense for the roomto be a family room, as it was really too small to fit a couch or television in.  Finally, if I wanted a library the dining room had to be moved somewhere.  So we said goodbye to the family room, and trust me; we're not missing it.  Check out a slideshow of the construction progression after the jump.

Room By Room: The Kitchen

On to the kitchen!

Before the remodeling this kitchen was, in a word, appalling.  Not only did it still have the original 1984 oven and dishwasher, but that year also appeared to be the last time they had been cleaned.  The inside of the oven was literally black with burned drippings and grease.  Rotting food was left in the cabinets and under the sink.  In the "before" picture you see a nice refrigerator and microwave; the previous owners took both of those with them when they moved out.  The industrial carpet (yes-- carpet in a kitchen) was badly stained, and the previous owners had cut mats of the same carpet and simply laid them over the worst of the stains in an attempt to disguise them.  The grout on the tiled kitchen counter was black with mildew.  A ceiling dropped eight inches lower than the adjoining space meant I could reach up and easily touch it with my fingertips.  A small pantry, message center and oddly shaped coat closet lined the wall that led to the mudroom door, and Jeremy was completely unable to fit through the narrow entrance into the mudroom beyond.  The microwave area (had there been a microwave) was completely inaccessible to anyone in a wheelchair, as was the sink and cooktop.  Slideshow of the progression after the jump!

Room By Room: The Library

This is probably my favorite room in the house.  Though I also love the kitchen.  And the living room, and the bedroom, and well okay every room in the whole house is a pretty close runner-up.  I'm not even sure if you ccan technically call the library a separate room, as it's more like an alcove in the living room.  But this is my blog so I get to call it what I want to, and "reading alcove" doesn't sound nearly as exciting as "library."  So library it is.

Anyway, this room was originally the dining room of the house, but the strangely shaped alcove on the back wall was just begging for a built-in, and when the folks at Signature Custom Homes learned about my modest little book collection they suggested that a library for me would be the perfect conversion for this room.  I'm so glad they did!  You can see a slideshow of the whole remodeling process after the jump.

Room By Room: Living Room

So the living room had a lot of work done.  For starters, it had a sunken floor with a single seven-inch step down (which, if these wonderful folks hadn't remodeled for us, means that we would have had to have had a seven-foot long ramp into the living room).  The windows, while dramatic, were original to the house and if you stood next to them you could feel the cold radiating off of them.  Also they weren't made of tempered glass, which meant that they weren't to code and that if Connor eventually graduated to a power wheelchair he might potentially be able to drive right through them.  The fireplace hadn't been serviced in so long that the chimney cap was literally falling apart and as a result the flue damper had rusted open.  The wooden railing dividing the living room from the entry and dining room (now library) was for show only-- it was wobbly enough that it was pretty obvious leaning on it would be a really bad idea.  Two measly can lights were the only illumination in the whole room.  You'll find a slideshow of the whole remodeling process after the jump.

Room By Room: Entry

As promised, here's the first in depth room-by-room talk about the house!  I've included a slideshow after the jump so you can see the construction process, and I want to tell you about the modifications that were done to make the house more accessible (and also gorgeous).

I think that it's appropriate to start with the entry.  The modifications start just outside the house, where the steps were replaced with a sloping walk that follows the path of the original walkway and is easily to navigate in a wheelchair.  The new zero-threshold door ensures that Jeremy and Connor can roll through with no big bumps on the way into the house.

Our New Home: The Big Reveal!

Okay, here we are-- the big reveal!  I'll just post a single before and after photo of each of the rooms today so this doesn't get too picture heavy, and then I'll do posts on individual rooms later in the week.  The only room not here is the library, which I posted a shot of yesterday. 

We held an Open House today (more on that tomorrow) so that everyone who helped out with the house could come back and see it, and also to meet some of the neighbors.  It went wonderfully, and it was so great to meet or see again the people who made it happen! 

I still can't believe that we actually get to live in this house.  I feel like a kid in a candy store every time I walk in right now.  But enough talking-- on to the pictures!