Beer Advent Day 1

It's that time of year again! Thanks for the calendar, Trace.

Movin' on Up!

"To the top. To a dee-luxe apartment big-ol-house in the sky-y-y..."

Obligatory soundtrack for this long-awaited post:

We did it! We moved! After 16 years in our little "starter" house, we got a new place (still in Corvallis).

Somebody pinch me.

I won't have the easy bicycle commute to work anymore (the house is 1000 feet up Vineyard Mountain a few miles north of town), but I can live with that, I think you'll see why:

That's the entrance side of the house, from the driveway. Here's what it looks like looking up from the "yard" (1.25 acres of forest):

The inside is nice (huge!), but we need to get rid of the brown carpet and original '80s appliances. We're getting flooring quotes today, actually. The woodstove isn't there anymore, we're getting a new modern up-to-DEQ-code one and getting rid of the giant tile pad/wall thing:

That's the main "living/dining/kitchen" area on the third floor. Not pictured are the two big bedrooms, one on each of the bottom two floors, a nice finished two car garage, a big attic, woodshed, and tool shed.

Oh, did I mention the roof deck? There's a roof deck:

There's also a smaller deck off the master bedroom (second floor) you can kind of see in some of those pictures.

It actually looks a bit different up there now, other than the trees not having leaves anymore. Believe it or not, last Friday (the day we were supposed to start moving), the largest ice storm any of the neighbors can remember hit the hill and took out a bunch of trees, blocking the driveway. Thankfully nothing hit the house, and it actually happened before we technically owned the place -- the seller covered the cost of the tree removal. That screwed up our schedule, pushed our moving day back to this past Wednesday, and we still have to clean up the trees that fell in the "yard" (forest) itself but weren't deemed dangerous. It could've been way worse, but was just kind of the crowning weirdness to top off the bizarre ordeal of selling and buying a house simultaneously, and the random crap that seemed to pop up for us at every turn.

While it's not nice and warm and sunny like it was when those shots were taken, and the place is full of boxes that need to be unpacked, it's still pretty damn nice. Here's the view from this morning while I was drinking my coffee as the sun came up over the Cascades:

Not bad, not bad at all.

Big, BIG thanks my amazing wife for going through this craziness with me, and to all the friends and family that helped in various ways, big and small, (you know who you are) during this ordeal. You'll all be invited to the housewarming, whenever we can manage to get unpacked.