We put up a new light fixture in the dining room. I've been looking through my files and can't believe I don't have a picture of the old one anywhere. I guess it wasn't remarkable enough to take a picture of, but it was rather dated. The sixties modern look it represented isn't really our style, not to mention the style of the house. This one suits us better and it also gives off more light, which is good. We have a number of additional fixtures to replace throughout the house. Luckily our friends at Home Depot are having a sale on some appealing fixtures right now.

Compare and contrast. The top photo is the old flooring in the upstairs hallway. It seems to be a linoleum or vinyl flooring done in a parquet pattern. The bottom picture is the new wood flooring we just had put in. It makes a huge difference and looks really nice. It's also a little quieter which is always good when you have a sleeping toddler in the house.

Apologies to the readership for our lack of posts. As you may be able to imagine, trying to unpack 279 boxes, care for a toddler, and continue with various renovations and updates is challenging at best. Here's hoping everybody had a great holiday!

You may recall my post from last week about the cracked joist. This is the repaired joist. Doesn't it look stout? The guys worked on it today, glued the cracked wood, put two hearty bolts into it and added "daughter" supports. This is all happening in a pretty small room on the second floor in the back of the house. It seems that this room and the other two on this level in the back were not original to the house. There is some thought that these rooms actually made up a sleeping porch at one time and then were enclosed. One of the distinctions of these rooms is that the ceiling are quite low compared to the rest of the house, they might be eight feet. Since the ceiling has been all torn up in this room, when they put it back together, they will raise the ceiling to be closer to the rafters and give it an interesting look. Stay tuned for updated photos. Additionally this room will be getting nice new windows to make it really tight and cozy.

One of the cool things we've uncovered as we set about fixing up our new place is a set of blueprints from 1956 showing what changes were wrought upon the old girl when she was drafted into use as a Doctor's office. Some of those plans were implemented, some were not. What's interesting is how much our redesign merely undoes what was changed fifty years ago.

One of the key things we're trying to re-do is to install nice french doors where the entrance hallway (or vestibule, if you will) joins the living room. They must have been nice pre-1956. Scour the place as we have we can't find the old ones anywhere here. We've hit all the architectural salvage places etc. but can't find any that are 92" tall.

If anybody reading this thinks they may have a source for some nice old french doors (the really tall kind), please shoot us a note!

After reading Simon's posts regarding the downturn in small business at the Dryden village crossroads, I thought I'd throw out some quick thoughts. In just the few days we've been in the village we have tried hard to use the local merchants: Bought bevs at the Dryden Liquor Store, got my hair cut at Shear Designs, pizza from Todi's and I think a new wing on the Agway may bear our name on it from the number of visits to get odds and ends.

On a related note, there are at least three new residents on our block alone. They like and want to support the locals too.

Until reading the Living in Dryden post I was unaware of the money that has been spent recently on sprucing up the crossroads area. I can say that the library, the village green, the charm and quality of the crossroads certainly impacted our decision to buy our house and settle here. The net: The village appears to be growing, and folks really like to keep their money local. Hey area merchants, or those considering starting a small business, how about filling some of those empty storefronts? We want to spend our money with you!

In keeping with the green growth tone of this post, here's a pic from our garden, a couple of months ago...

I am new to this old house thing. Loved everybody else's old places for years. I've always seen myself "ending up" in a charming old joint, maybe something like the place Michael Douglas ran in Wonder Boys, apparently just to house all those attractively eccentric college kids. What can I say? Victorian quaintness has always just looked like home.

And then there is reality, just about now rounding third and heading straight for creaky home in Dryden: cold, unfinished, fairly dangerous, rather filthy, and most of all strange. I used to move about once a year, many many moons ago, loved picking up and going to a new abode. But spending a decade-plus in one place seems to have bred the adaptability right out of me. It's the whole Anchored-down-in-Anchorage thing I suppose. This soon-to-be-lovely place is all for the best of course and everyday dawns a little brighter and all that, but for one thing, what's with all the people in my house banging on stuff and exuding clouds of dust all day? Oh, those are the people we are paying to make this place nicer. Thought they'd be all done by now.

I don't know anything about remodeling, using contractors etc (true, true). But the Universal Truth has been made clear, and clearer and clearest: Everything you try to do with an old house will cost more and take longer than you think it will.

OK OK as my Brit pals would say, whinge someplace else. So I won't tell much about how the Executive VP of the place where I moved here to work, in our one and only meeting, had but one piece of advice to give me as I sally forth: Don't move in until you are done with any remodeling.

In the meantime, here's a picture of our pretty car. It's likely the best cheap used car you can buy, because they are way undervalued. It seems people simply don't like the look of station wagons. Feast your eyes on the last old fashioned wagon people-hauler made in America. This is the (pause for effect) Collector's Edition 1996 Buick Roadmaster Estate Wagon, purchased from Fred at BigStationWagons.Com. It is a beast but a cool one, cost next to nothing, has the same engine as the Corvette and gets 23 miles per gallon highway. With this mighty steed we can do most anything an SUV can do (except require heavy payments) and what's more it's easy to find in the Wegman's parking lot.

Whew! We made it. All 279 boxes, furniture and feline companions are now on the opposite side of the lake from where they were 24 hours ago. This was no small feat and required two very large trucks and six men. The trucks and the men came from a local outfit, Hicks Moving and Storage, and they were great. The guys couldn't have been nicer, not to mention how hard working they were. I wouldn't hesitate to use them again, except for the fact that we're NEVER MOVING AGAIN!

I'd like to welcome the new readers who've found their way here courtesy of Dave Makar and his nice post over at Dryden is Home. Thanks Dave! Now that we're in the neighorhood, I look forward to finally meeting you in person along with the other nice local "Commenteers."

The photo tonight is not of your exhausted hosts, but of the nice French doors that are at the top of the stairway and lead into the master bedroom. I love transom windows, so this doorway is particularly endearing to me. You can also see a glimpse of the nice stairway newel post, one of which is missing at the bottom of the stairway, but that's an issue for a later post.

Just a short post, because we're trying to MOVE tomorrow! This is the afternoon sun coming through the stained glass window in the stairway outside the master bedroom yesterday. Pretty!

As my co-pilot has already mentioned, we really should be busy loading up our cars with stuff before the tiny terror wakes up, but I had to do just one more thing on the blog before getting started. Frequent visitors may have already noticed that I've turned on the comments feature, so feel free to click down there at the bottom right of each post and give us a little feedback.

...and just one more post+pic. MB is a little leery of showing photos of King Truman on this blog, horrible stories of stolen identities and worse propagating over the web. But I thought we could risk one shot. Here the wee fella is at the Trumansburg Elementary School playscape.

Before I return the steering wheel to the major domo of this fine establishment I thought you might like to see the Dryden Village Green, as photographed by a local blogger at the Christmas Fest. This scene is one block from our house.

Special guest bleugger Chris here. Love the site sweetie! Especially the chipper, NO-Whining tone, which believe me could easily be a whole lot different, considering the "active" past six months in our shell-shocked little lives. Anyway... It is far far better to be stirred than shaken by these goings on, and I will try to keep to that mindset going forward.

Howdy everybody! as they say in Texas, we used to be from there. I just finished gobbling down a piece of toasted homemade bread and strong Sumatran coffee from Costco. The very last bean from our Austin hoard is as of this morning gone, but what a delish cuppa it produced. I'm sure there will be many satisfying coffee adventures for us in the future, but it is a bit hard to let one more friend go...

We should be spending these precious pre-dawn moments loading the cars with more stuff to haul to the new house, in advance of the movers who will be showing up on Monday to haul the crushed, opened, thrown around boxes (which were hauled a couple of months ago from Austin) to their final destination in the village of Dryden. And I do mean final. This load will have electronics, tools, food from the pantry and toys for He Who Must Be Obeyed to busy himself with while we work to get the place a bit more kid friendly.

This is not what you want to see when you are renovating a house. What we have here, gentle readers, is a cracked roof support joist. As you can imagine, that's not a good thing to have many roofing supports attached to and holding up your roof... or not holding up your roof as the case may be. Popular opinion has it that this was caused by heavy snow loads on the roof. If you're interested, you can learn more, much, much more about snow loads here. OK, enough drama, while it's not a good thing to have, it's not the worst thing when you have a good contractor on the job. Our sainted contractor, Jack, will be taking down much of what you see here and replacing it with new stuff. This is just all part of what you deal with when you have an old house... Just to prove that we remain undaunted, we're moving in on Monday! Stay tuned for more adventures.

Work is going along at a fast and furious pace, which of course is never fast enough. The house is improving by leaps and bounds. And beyond just the great stuff you can see, like how amazingly improved the upstairs rooms looks with this nice green carpet instead of the old linoleum, we are also upgrading the electric and some of the plumbing. We'll have a house that not only looks better, but works better too!

What a difference four coats of white paint makes! This is the formerly pink bathroom. I can't begin to tell you how much better it is to see it all white. The floor is still in rough shape, but I can live with that over the dingy pepto bismol pink paint - see previous post below for a comparison.

Here's a little glimpse of what the upstairs bathroom looked like when we started this adventure. You may not be able to see very well, but the whole thing was painted a pepto bismol shade of pink - including the outside of the vintage clawfoot tub. It was very much not to my taste. We've had a painter in this week tearing down the wallpaper that had been painted over and painting the whole thing white. I think this will be a big improvement. It's not a very big room, though adquate for a bathroom, but also has kind of a low ceiling, so whatever we can do to lighten it up will be good. We'll also be adding a shower enclosure and shower fixture to the tub to bring it a little more up to date without having to do a whole tear out renovation of it.

Here's the kitchen. Yes, someone painted the pine cabinets yellow and then added panels of dark floral wallpaper to them. The same wallpaper is on two walls in the kitchen. Anyone who knows us might wonder why we are destined to be in houses with kithcens that have rather extreme green based wallpaper. I have no answer to that question. At least the decor is only on the top cabinets. It remains to be seen what exacatly we'll end up doing with this kitchen. There has been talk of taking out a wall to what would otherwise be a nice little pantry. We may get all new cabinetry, we may try to use what's already there with some stripping and the addition of new hardware. There is a fabulous lazy susan in one corner. There are also three windows, so it's nice and bright and has nice views of the backyard and sideyard. Like the rest of the house, the kitchen has a lot of potential. It's up to us to realize that potential and do it without breaking the bank, which is all too tempting in the room that I like to spend so much time in.

This linoleum rug was in one of the upstairs rooms of our house. It's really charming and estimated to be from the 1940's. It's kind of grungy, as it was on the floor of the previous owner's workshop, but I'm hoping we can try to clean it up and use it somewhere. I'd love to rig it up somehow has a wall hanging in the kiddo's room, but I imagine it's quite heavy - we haven't tried to lift it yet. These are still available, as new old stock, brand new in the tube they came in from Second Hand Rose in NYC at a pretty penny.

To catch everybody up, we are now the proud owners of an 1866 Italianate house! We closed the day before Thanksgiving and have been on the run trying to get things done ever since. The contractor has been in there this week demolishing partition walls that were put in years and years ago to make exam rooms for a doctor's office out of the original parlor and another room. The painter has been there stripping off three layers of wallpaper from the upstairs bathroom and the stairway. The carpet installer has measured for carpeting upstairs and wood for the upstairs hallway. The plumber and electrician have been there investigating to give us a quote. So, things are really moving along. Not quick enough, but it never is, and really they are going as quickly as they can.