Marcie "Mom" Glanzer Column: #37

Wednesday, August 15, 2007

Photos (Click to Enlarge)

Basement digging begins. Brandy wants in the basement with us. The office in early construction. The front of the house during construction.
Kitchen during construction. The house is coming down the road! House waiting to be set on basement. Trying to decide paint colors.
 
The green wall is completed. Me painting. The kitchen is nearly complete with appliances!  


 


"Out with the Old!"

You have undoubtedly been wondering where I have been with my popular prose lately…the reason for my absence is perhaps the biggest thing to happen to me since childbirth…a new house!  If you have ever attended one of the Carpenter Bashes you can’t have helped but notice that we live in a very old house, one which has many flaws but still managed to provide shelter to many families for over a hundred years.  Like anything else, time has taken its toll on this farmhouse and the cost of fixing and replacing all the long suffering parts would have been way too much to spend, only to end up with an old house with one bathroom.  Dick and I had been tossing around the idea of building a new house for a couple of years now, but I believe the deciding moment came about this March when we were having abnormally cold conditions.  The wind was blowing incessantly (as usual) with snow drifting and single digit temps.  I was gone to work and Dick was out doing chores when he came in for lunch only to find the south porch door had blown open which caused the inner door to the house to open.  We had snow drifting into the house and the poor furnace was running non-stop, trying in vain to heat all of Clark County.  After scooping snow out of the now freezing house, Dick proceeded into the kitchen where he had to unfasten rubber bands to open cupboard doors which no longer shut correctly due to the crumbling foundation that caused the entire house to begin leaning.  (That’s also why the doors weren’t able to shut against the wind).  That did it…when I got home from hauling mail, he said we were getting a new house!  This would be great news to anyone, but to me it was a dream come true!  If there is one thing I love, it’s looking at house plans, picking paint colors, dreaming of the floor finishes and window treatments.  I was ecstatic!  After perusing some local home builders, we decided to have a house built by Custom Touch Homes in Madison (Ryan’s former college home).  This business has a huge building where all the homes are built inside, out of the elements so there are no delays due to weather and such.  We went in at the end of March and signed away our lives…our house would begin in the middle of April and was to take only 6 or 7 weeks to completion.  This meant a lot of scrambling to line up someone to dig a basement, finalizing plans and, oh yeah, trying to get financing.  It seems they wanted money to build this house for us if you can believe that.

We had a house plan that we took in and had one day set aside to make all the minute decisions before building could begin.  Things such as window style, how many windows, siding, shingles, flooring, cupboards, bathroom fixtures…you name it, we had to decide every little detail before anything could go ahead.  This is hard when you have to try to imagine the interior by looking at a little piece of paper with an overhead view.  One task was to go to the neighboring furniture store and choose the flooring.  Custom Touch got a discount from this place since they did so much business here.  Now the fun was starting!  What woman doesn’t like to pick out carpet, tile, wood and everything in between?  I had no idea what things cost, so just picked out what I liked and went home.  A few days later Dick got a phone call from the salesman who said that out of all the houses they had ever sold, nobody had gone over the budget more than little old me!  $7500 over to be exact…so it was back to the furniture store where I tamed down my choices and got it back to a more realistic figure.  This was a precursor of what was to come.  It didn’t matter what I was picking out, from toilet paper holders to door knobs, if I liked it, it was their highest priced product.  I had to make a few concessions, but one I wasn’t going to give in on was my kitchen.  I had watched enough HGTV and “Divine Design” (refer to archives for more on this!) to know what kind of cabinets and appliances that I wanted and wasn’t about to be talked into something less.  In my mind was a very contemporary kitchen with dark cherry cabinets and long, stainless steel pulls, stainless steel appliances, under cabinet lighting.  If you watch any decorating shows, you can surely picture this.  Well, the cabinet maker they deal with had never heard of such a thing.  They couldn’t imagine why I’d want dark wood like that and they insisted it couldn’t be done.  So I ended up going out on my own and ordering cabinets from a store in Huron and got exactly what I wanted.  Anyway, to make a long story short, we got the house ordered and at the end of June it was ready.  We had our basement dug, the foundation poured, walls built and were ready for the house.  The day that the house was delivered was so exciting.  When I saw the pilot car coming down the road I raced outside to watch.  It took quite awhile before the peak of the house crested the hill south of us, but I nearly got tears in my eyes as I watched it approach its new home.  At the same time, I felt kind of sorry for the old house.  It really was showing its age when the new one was set down right beside it.  I had an image in my mind of moving in within a day or two of the arrival, but there were a few things to be done first, such as electricity, water, and air conditioning.  That was on July 5th and today is August 13th and we are just getting to the point of moving some belongings over there.  Dick took it upon himself to do the plumbing and just got things running the other day.  I have been agonizing over paint colors for weeks.  I went to Sherwin-Williams and pored over the color chips, asked anyone who would listen for an opinion, and got several quarts of sample paints to try out.  A man would walk in and be out of the store in 5 minutes, not really that concerned over paint colors, but to me this was a big decision.  I had decided on green for the living/dining room which is wide open to the kitchen so they all had to blend nicely.  Why green?  Because I had seen Candice Olsen do a room in green on her show and I loved it and had to try to duplicate it.  But have you ever seen how many shades of green there really are?  I wanted a kind of funky, retro, avocadoish green, but was a bit hesitant to really put it on three large walls.  I did two side by side tests, one the vibrant green of my choice and the other a bit tamer, more of a sage green.  Everyone liked the tamer of the two except for me and Jordan.  I threw caution to the wind and went for the wild one.  It has grown on me and I like it, Dick and Alex are completely neutral, they won’t say one way or another, so I guess that settles it!  Today my new stainless steel appliances are being installed while I write, and then it’s time to move in!!!!!  I will attach a few pics to give you an idea of the beginning, middle and end…though the end isn’t near as we still have to build a garage, decks, steps etc…

This house will be the last place I ever live unless my kids stick me in a nursing home someday, and I am so excited to begin our “empty nesting” there.  I will be working for a LONG time to make the payments…holidays will be a bit less spendy than before, just to warn you kids, and I’ll yell at anyone who comes tramping in with cow crap on their boots, but it will all be worth it.  The house was officially “broken in” a few weeks ago.  You know how it is when you get a new car or sofa and you hate to see that first scratch or stain?  Once it happens, you can relax a bit, the damage has been done.  Well, that is what happened to my floor.  Little Emerson Hayes Krogman decided to “help” Grandma and Mommy clean the floor and upended a 5 gallon bucket of water which seeped under the wood floor.  I tried to mop it up, but a few days later the edges of a few boards began to curl up a bit.  Not too noticeable, but she officially christened our new home.  We’ve gotten that first bit of damage out of the way and can begin to enjoy ourselves!  With that I will extend an invitation to everyone who is in our neck of the woods to stop in and visit our new abode, admire the green paint and try out Dick’s plumbing… just be sure to scrape the shit off your shoes before coming in!
 


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About the "Mom Column"

There was a time a number of years ago when I wanted ryanglanzer.com to feature dozens of columnists, and for a while, there were about ten or so. 

Derrick Geiszler, Kayla Laursen, and Nick Sandbulte each wrote a few good columns for the site, but Mom was there since the beginning and still is today.  (I must apologize though, as Geiszler has written a few recent columns that I have neglected to post for no reason other than laziness.)

Mom's columns have become very popular amongst female readers of the site.  Focusing on anything from her tips on leading a successful marriage to home improvement to what happened on HGTV, Mom has entertained and inspired many.  On more than one occasion, female friends of mine have commented that a Mom column either opened their eyes to a subject, or even changed their life altogether!

If you are a fan of my writing skills and wonder where they came from, look no further than Marcie Glanzer.  Not to say Dad isn't a good writer either, but I've never seen him write anything creative.

So let us bask in the writing stylings of my mail-carrying mother, Marcie Ann Glanzer.

 

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Ryan Trivia: The most expensive meal I've eaten was at The Top of the World at The Stratosphere in Las Vegas.