It's been a crazy summer for us here in Grand Rapids. Our housing situation went from stable to unstable to non-existent when the house we rent in GR recently sold before we were able to sign a lease through next summer. We have until August 21 to move.

We had already been planning to move back to Three Rivers next June (into the apartment we've slowly been renovating), so it didn't make much sense to us to find another place to rent in Grand Rapids for less than a year; the thought of finding a new apartment/house and then moving twice in 10 months was not a good option given our already-too-full lives. So we've decided to dramatically increase the pace of our renovation in an effort to finish our apartment in the next 3 weeks--a time frame which includes a week in Ontario for camping is not optional and a few Food Tour stops. Yikes.

I'll try to keep updating the blog with photos and descriptions of our renovation, but it's proving difficult to keep on top of everything going on right now. Your thoughts and prayers are needed and welcomed. Thank you to all of the folks who came out last weekend (including friends from TR, GR and my whole family from Chicagoland!) to help move things along ... you're all amazing and we're glad to have such a wonderful group of folks alongside us for this strange leg of our journey.

It's a bit surprising to see Audi promoting diesel through connecting it to political history (even taking shots at American automakers along the way). It's actually refreshing to see such a frank assessment (from a car company, anyway) of how our transportation choices have far-reaching and often unintentional effects.

Now if only Volkswagen and Audi would start bringing more diesel options to the North American market!

We've been busily making progress on the apartment renovation lately, squeezing work days into an already overloaded schedule. The weekend after our windows were installed, we spent a day taking two loads of junk wood to the dump, dropping a load of clean scraps at the cottage for firewood and then organizing the space in preparation for our electrician.

This past weekend, we used some of the oak floor we'd removed for the bathroom and kitchen area to fill in the floor where the stair had been removed. In the process, we de-nailed the reclaimed oak floor and, of course, got rid of a pile. All in all, it felt like a very productive day!

While we were on the road for the Eat Well Food Tour, our contractors installed new windows and doors in our apartment in Three Rivers. They aren't quite finished yet (there's still a bit of exterior trim work left to be done), but this is a very exciting step in the renovation process. We have windows! And doors! And they all open!

Front:

Back and side:

Eventually, we plan to build a deck off the second floor and a stair down the side of the building--hence the doors on the back and side of the building. At the moment, though, we'll be installing cast iron bars so we can still open the doors for ventilation.

Back windows (interior):

All of the windows and doors were chosen primarily for their energy efficiency; they're all wood windows with vinyl exterior cladding. We intended to use Anderson 400 Series throughout, but they didn't have a window with an arched top sash that was tall and narrow enough for the front of the building. Instead, we used windows from Marvin with similar specifications.

We framed in a new ceiling over the living room and dining room. Unfortunately, the existing ceiling joists were in too poor a condition (and not level enough) to affix drywall, so new joists have been installed beneath the old.

We also exposed the existing beams in the kitchen, as they were in much better shape and quite beautiful. To do so, we installed plywood on top of the beams, insulating above the plywood (there's a bit of space between the ceiling joists and the roof joists. We plan to paint the plywood and leave the beams unfinished (after cleaning them up a little).

As per usual, you can see more photos on our Flickr site, including photos of the ceiling work.

On July 15, 2004, I blogged about having reached 100,000 on our beloved Volkswagen Jetta TDI (read: Diesel). Well, today we reached the next milestone in mileage achievement:

Two things to note:

1. Yes, we did take this photo while driving 60 miles per hour.


2. The check engine light is on, but it's for something different than the check engine issue indicated in the 100,000 mile photo.