Welcome to the McBerkoBlog!

Emailing pics or sending links to SnapFish was getting tiresome, so welcome to the McBerkoBlog! This will hopefully be an easy way for me and Bill to share updates about progress on the house, provided we actually take some time away from working to post.

Immediately after closing, we started tearing stinky old cat carpet out of the entire place, hoping to find decent wood floors underneath. Lucky for us, there were nice oak floors throughout the first floor. The second floor was way cooler, if you ask me - various widths of old pine boards. To get to those pine floors, however, we had to remove the particle board nailed in every room. (Ask Steve what a fun day that was.)

After ripping out the carpet, we did a quick paint job on the kitchen to make it temporarily livable (an expensive kitchen redo will have to wait a while!). We then decided to start the first real projects - 2 bedrooms and the living room.

At this point, it's been about 3 months and we have these 3 rooms done. Another year or so and we might just have a nice place to live!

Next Up - The Great American Road Trip!

Dear reader - and here I'm speaking primarily to myself, as I'm writing mainly to document these memories for my own future enjoyment - I must apologize. I barely captured anything here about our Costa Rica trip in summer 2024, and nothing at all about our two weeks in Prague and Vienna in 2025. Maybe someday I'll catch up, but in the meantime, let's forge ahead! This summer we're staying in the US. Time for a nearly 6-week long road trip! Why now? Ruth will be a senior in high school next year, so this might (?) be the last time we can all do such a long trip together. Bill quit his job in April (yay for FIRE, aka Financial Independence / Retire Early... but that's a whole separate post), so we've got this short window where we all have the time freedom to do it. Here's the plan: Leg 1 - Raleigh west to Denver. We'll visit Asheville, Chattanooga, Huntsville, Memphis, Little Rock, Oklahoma City, Amarillo, and Great Sand Dunes National Park along the...

Alaska Day 8 - Wasilla

The second to last day of our trip, we had a relaxed travel day back south with the goal of ending up somewhere near enough to Anchorage for us to turn in the RV on time the next morning. Jim did some fishing (no luck), we had a leisurely breakfast in our boondocked RV, and wondered when exactly a huge moose pooped so close to our RV during the night. Fishing by our boondocked RV We didn't have a campground reserved for the night, but knowing that Anchorage campgrounds are primarily super expensive parking lots, we decided to stop 45 mins north in Wasilla. The city might be best known as the hometown of Sarah Palin, and it was covered with Palin signs. We later learned that Alaska was holding elections this Tuesday (Palin lost). In more entertaining news, Wasilla is also home to the Iditarod Headquarters and Museum. The Iditarod is a long-distance sled dog race covering over 900 miles in 8+ days. The headquarters had dog houses but no dogs visible during our visit, so we looked ar...

Wall and shower (?!) paint

Last post, I mentioned that we'd painted the walls, so here are finally some pics. The color was pre-selected for us: we found this teal on one of the three layers of walls that we demoed. Bill installed a fan in the wall above the window, which got new trim to match the rest of the house. He also put in two recessed lights in the ceiling, a medicine cabinet, and a light over the cabinet. In the pics below, you'll see only the top half of the wall painted, since the bottom half will have white beadboard. The last picture shows the shower area, painted in a crazy "liquid rubber" waterproofing goo (ShowerSeal). Here's hoping that works.

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