Our weekend visitors

Geoff and his girlfriend, Chicago Rena, made the journey to Salt Lake City to hang out and celebrate the house centennial. On the Monday after the party we all took the short drive down to the Mount Timpanogos Cave National Monument in American Fork Canyon. Although the tour guide did not make a good first impression, having the four of us cringing in fear of too much interpersonal small talk and not enough cave information, she quickly turned around and made it a very interesting and informative tour. It was a luxury to be on the tour with just the four of us. The walk up to the caves is on a steep, but paved, mile and a half trail, and the caves are three linked caverns with many types of cave formations. It is most renowned for its 'cave coral'.

Rob & Rina in front of a tunnel that was created to facilitate the paved trail to the mouth of the cave.

The Heart of Timpanogos.

Geoff & Rob in the depths of the caves.

Geoff, Chicago Rena, Rob, and Utah Rina taking a break on the return walk from the caves.

Centennial Celebration

Here are some photos from our house's 100 year birthday celebration. It was a lot of fun to have everyone by to see how different it looks compared to only 6 months ago.

Ivo and Maxine stopped by on their way out to dinner. Thanks to the Costume Closet, Rina and I were able to dress more closely to the style of the day around the year our house was built. That place was a trip to explore.

This long lost stranger appeared at the door as an apparition and stayed for 10 minutes as he was en route to the airport to catch a flight back to Malaysia, where he now lives and works.
Toan!! Great to see you again.

The Haggerty clan from Montana caught a three day stage coach and made it down to Salt Lake in time for the celebrations.

Nell - ecstatic at the excuse to dress up (or down - as the case may be).

The Basement Project Continues. . .

Here is a series of photos to update everyone (especially those who could not make the centennial party, etc.) on our progress with the basement. The first photo in this series is from April 11th. Our basement has been completely dug out at this point to an overall depth of 8 feet beneath the existing joists. As you can see, the water heater was being supported by this contraption from those 100 year old joists. At least we still had hot water at this point. Not too long after this photo, the water heater was taken down and we've been living without any hot water since. At least we have still running water:)

Here's a photo of the basement right after the new sewer lateral was placed, inspected, and prepped for concrete floors.


Here's Ivo's right hand man, Mel, pouring the concrete.


It was a pretty quick process once they got started.


The floors dried over night and turned out great.


The next steps. . . stairway access and framing. Ivo's son, Lane, built our stairs and Dave Villella did all the framing. Dave has helped us create some nice built-in areas that will make use of all the space underneath our new stairs. What a great day when we finally had stairs to access the basement and could see our plans coming to life in 3 dimensional form.



This is the 2nd bathroom. The shower has been framed out and the toilet and sink will be on either side of the shower. The clawfoot tub from the upstairs bath will be placed in the other corner of this bathroom later on.


This is our laundry room with a new washer and dryer ready to be hooked up and used.


Next to come. . .drywall.

Spring Moab weekend

We spent this past weekend in Moab with Rob's brother, Tom, his girlfriend, Melissa, and Melissa's friend, Zack. While Rob, Tom and Zack were mountain biking on the Porcupine Rim Trail, the girls including Melissa, Lucy and myself went for a hike along the Negro Bill Trail. Lucy really loved going for multiple dips in the water along the trail to cool herself off.

We arrived Friday night to a constant light rain in the desert. The next afternoon, we saw a lot of cactus blooms like this one along the Negro Bill Trail.

Lucy takes a break from all the swimming and running through the water to sun herself.

Another beautiful cactus bloom.

Tom graciously invited us to stay with him at this semi-permanent tent that he and his friend, Gavin, built in Castle Valley. It made desert camping much more luxurious for us. If you zoom in, you can see Rob helping set up an Ikea kitchen that will be used in the tent from now on.

Reclaiming the floors.

After the walls were removed, we could see the original layout of the house and it was interesting to see how in 1908, it was custom to paint the perimeter of the Douglas fir floor and then have a rug covering the middle. We were pretty excited even at this stage to try to imagine what the floors would look like once refinished. Here are some before and after pictures of our 100 year old Douglas fir floors. Dining area "before:"


Dining area "after:"


Living room "before:"


Living room "after:"


Front hallway "before:"


Front hallway "after:"