The Garrett Wallis House

Well, if not for the pandemic, we would have been returning from our honeymoon on Wednesday of this past week. Nathan would have spent the month of April in England at a  cabinetry school ; we would have met in London and traveled on to Vienna to visit Nathan's aunt, then to Berlin to see friends, and finally to Greece to stay in the family home of another dear friend.  While we are grieving this postponed trip -- made all the more present by the google calendar events that auto-populated on my calendar to mark our various flights (apparently these automatic calendar events don't delete themselves when a flight is cancelled...) --  it's wild to think that if we had been able to go on our trip, we would only just be beginning our work on the house. As it is, we not only got an early start, but also benefited several weeks when we were able to completely dedicate ourselves to the house project. That all being the case, we are looking forward to rescheduling our trip wh...

Well I thought I had better get an entry in early, before everyone gets too used to Danielle’s chipper style. I wanted to call our blog “7307 Lindbergh: Wrestling with an Angel” but D said no. Without an explanation. Sheesh. This is a big project. Not crazy, not unrealistic…but, big. I felt sobered when I took a look just now at the “before” pictures. They make it look like a perfectly fine house to begin with. So, uh, why did we just decide to spirit away a third of the overall mass of our dwelling as purchased? Turns out there are a lot of good reasons. Here are some of them. Removing all the plaster in one swell foop permits us to… Stop worrying, forever, about rotten ceiling keys and collapsed plaster ceilings. NOT embark on the plaster-repair learning curve. Choosing our battles. Make all the ugly dusty mess now, at once, and never again. Our proposed changes to the floorplan are evolving as we learn more about the space, and I don’t want to re-enter the dem...