Thermostat

There are three thermostats in the house.  One controls the bedrooms.  One controls the living/dining/kitchen, library, and sun room.  The last is not connected to anything and just looks cool (I think).  I don't know what controls the artists' studio and rumpus room, but it's probably the same as the bedrooms.

Disconnected, I think.  Probably also original.

The bedroom thermostat is in the paneled kid bedroom, which will belong to the boy.  The boy, being 4, LOVES to push buttons.  We don't want him to control the climate.

The boy and the puppy

The boy and I went over to the house to check on the floors.  The boy commandeered the camera, so here are some lovely shots of the ceiling.

In the upper/left one, you can see the upper part of the wall of glass. If you squint, you notice that there are two panes of glass here, stacked vertically.  There's a large rectangle, and then some smaller ones up in the rafter spines.  The divider is just a fine grey line.  The roof pitch is symmetric left to right; it only looks asymmetric because the photographer made an artistic choice.

Upstairs public floors

Under the carpet in the living room, dining room, upstairs hall, and library, we found some very special tile.

Living room.

Check out the single missing red tile 4' in front of the fire place.  Why is that one white?

Living room tile

We lost the carpet in the living room today:

Look what we found underneath!

More pictures later.  

Kitchen

By popular request on Facebook, here's the kitchen.

I love to cook.  I love to socialize while I cook.  My husband does dishes, often while I cook.  We need a kitchen large enough to handle a cook and a (human) dishwasher, plus somewhere for conversation partners to sit.

For a house with a surfeit of doors, the kitchen is door-free.  There's an opening from the hallway and another from the dining room.  There are two pantry-closets just outside the kitchen.  There's also the row of cabinets that separates the living room and stairs from the dining room and kitchen hall.

It's also one of the only rooms without horrible carpeting.  There's some dark laminate in great condition, probably recently installed.  I'm not fond of laminate -- I'd like to replace it with cork -- but it's in great shape so it can stay.

I'm standing in the east end of the kitchen looking out the west windows.  The dining room is behind me.  Just visible in profile on the left is the double wall oven (pretty new) and laundry machines.  

Buying flooring on the Internet.

There are about 2ksqft of carpet in the house. Most of it is 1980s high pile in tan; some is light blue. The rumpus room is beige berber.

Underneath the sellers' furniture, the carpet is unexciting. I don't like carpet in general, but we'd probably let it stay. Where the furniture wasn't, though, it is stained and gross. It smells of cat pee in a way that suggests it has been professionally cleaned and yet the pee got into the underlayment. The smell is worse when the house is empty and closed up. 

See that brown patch in the front right?  That's not a trick of the light. 

The carpet needs to go. 

Sinc we are getting rid of it anyways, we can have what I really want: hardwood. Tile would also be period, but I like wood better. 

We got stranded bamboo. Basically, they compress and glue and do magic things to bamboo so that it is stronger and less bamboo-looking. Bamboo is not period, but I love it, especially in this light natural color. Stranded bamboo is super hard and dense. It's oddly cheap, so we got solid wood not engineered or laminate. 

When you buy 2000 square feet of flooring in 91 boxes, they freight it to you. Some of it comes from Tukwila and some from Atlanta, and of course neither freight company knows when, even though there's only one local carrier that serves MHK so in theory they should be able to figure this out.  Probably Atlanta gets here tomorrow and Tukwila on Monday, so no pics yet. 

Fireplace

Check out the fireplace!

Fireplace front and center. Sun room on right, office on left.