The Fixer Upper House and Garden

Moving Day

The window washer came and then it started snowing. Not a pretty, white, drifty snow but a wet, grey, slushy one that makes you want to fill the bath with tea and soak your body in it.

And that was the worst of it. Aside from the weather...nothing went horribly wrong when we moved back into the house. Yes, there are a few ticks here and there. At 4 a.m., Husband and I awoke to a distant bleep-bleep-bleeping sound that reminded us of the previous owner's house alarm, which GC dismantled months ago. Had it come back to haunt us now? We canvassed the house and yard (full disclosure: I stood at the back door) until Husband found a smoke detector in a trash pile. Problem solved.

The older kids were amazed to see our furniture, most of which has been in storage for nearly 2 years. "The antiques look so much smaller!" C declared with authority, and M agreed. T was delighted when M gave her her old desk (I can't figure out how to avoid using two hers in that sentence). It's an arts-and-craft desk that's been in Husband's family for several generations, and it's the perfect size for a second-grader who loves to write and illustrate stories and comic-strips.

The kids tested the laundry chute right away by throwing T's teddy bear down it. The laundry room isn't functional yet (fun, retro counter arrives next week!) but the chute works well and the cabinets, which we bought at Lowes, look great.

Husband installed ceiling fixtures in the kids rooms, which I ordered from Rejuvenation, and they look and function really well. I'm always nervous about ordering online or from catalogs, because some products often look better in a catalog than they do in real life. I've ordered Pottery Barn light fixtures in the past, and found them to be quite Ikea-like. Not that there's anything wrong with Ikea, mind you. But for PB prices, I expect more than Ikea-like products. Happily, this was not the case with these ceiling fixtures from Rejuvenation.

The dogs are nervous but coping well, though Allie is terrified of the stairs, which are uncarpeted. I gave Milo a new toy, and he sought out each of the kids to show them his good fortune. That pooch can be annoying, but his expression of gratitude is priceless.

I'm at the borrowed house as I write this, and so have no pictures to share. I came back today to let the plumbers in, because the sewer backed up in the basement on our last day here. Ah, moving day!

The Watching Window

After we moved out of the house, T announced she wouldn't return until the renovation is over.

"I want to be surprised," she said.

This posed some challenges for both of us. In my case, I tried to schedule all meetings, chores and visits to the house during school hours. When that didn't work out, T would read in the minivan with her coat zipped to her chin and her hat pulled down to her eyebrows (it was a very cold winter!) while I did whatever I needed to do at the house.

But a few weeks ago, I needed T to come in to approve her room's paint color. She had politely and specifically requested the same color she had in New Jersey, but the new paint wound up having deeper purple tones. When she came up the stairs to see it, she said she loved the purple and the new window seat in the hall. She called this "the watching window, because we're going to sit on this bench and watch out the window."

The watching window turned out very well. Here's a reverse progression.

From the present to pre-renovation:

Being painted:

Detail carpentry work:

Getting drywalled:

Getting framed:

In the beginning, the end-of-wall space was walled off for closets.

Photos Of ...

The floors looked spectacular for the 15 minutes that I saw them last week. The next day, GC taped a sign on the front door that said "Remove Shoes: Floors Just Refinished." This prompted the painters to tape heavy craft paper over the floors, so they could keep wearing their boots. This is good for the feet, good for the floors and good for the olefactory system.

Here are several photos of the work that's been going on recently. Great thought, care and effort went into every one of these projects by all involved--and not a little bit of agonizing!

The kitchen is shrouded in plastic:

Painting the bricks lightened up the kitchen a lot--the wall was once the exterior of the house. After we built the addition, Miguel had the idea to place HVAC ducts on both sides of the stained-glass window, creating a little desk-niche.

Here's what the refinished floors look like...under cover:

White snow, blue sky, new addition:

 

Before the recent spring snow storm, Nawkaw came out to stain the new bricks. I think they look good but Husband says "there's not enough red." Oh well.

The mudroom is multi-functional, including cubbies, a coat closest, nooks for dog beds and lots of shelves for stuff (opposite the cubbies). The Dutch door will come in handy when muddy paws need to be contained. To maximize light in the kitchen, we decided to not use the top half of the door.

This next photo shows what happens when you trim Motawi tiles. I will post about this in detail later, but if you're considering using hand-glazed tiles, just know you can't trim the field tiles that have variations in shading. Instead of trimming them to fit, you can order custom-sizes from Motwawi for just $4 more per tile:

The "Shaker Beige" paint on these plaster walls frames the old door and windows:

No matter what's going on in life, you still need to walk the dogs ...

 

... And dance!

Hooks or Hookers?

"It's better to be married to someone who's obsessed with hooks than to have a spouse who's into hookers," I said to Husband.

"Huh? What?" said he, looking up from the laptop.

I was dangling a sack of white, two-pronged coat-hooks in front of the screen. "What do you think about these for the mud-room cubbies?  Do you think it'll look crowded if I use 3 hooks in each cubby? They were kind of cheap. Do they look cheap?"

Cheap got his attention. "What? Oh. They're fine," he said.

I jingled the plastic bag again.

"They're awesome hooks!," he added, sensing my need for more feedback. "Great job!"

But I wasn't going to let him off the hook in regards to the hooks. "OK, so I'm obsessed!," I admitted. "Be thankful it's only hooks! Do you know how many stores I went to this week in search of hooks, door stoppers and a fireplace key with a black flange?

"No," he said. "No I don't know, but I think you're going to tell me."

"I went to six stores, seven if you count two separate Home Depots! And not one store had decent-looking door stoppers! And they're all either phasing out coat hooks or selling them at such a clip that they can't keep them in stock! You try it! You go to two Home Depots, Expo, Lowes, Renovation Hardware, Ace and Craftwood and we'll see how sane you are at the end of the week!"

"Do you want me to get you a beer?" he said, eyeing the computer again. "We have Blue Moon."

I love Blue Moon with a slice of orange, but I didn't need a beer right then. I needed the lap-top so I could search online for decorative hardware. In addition to 20 door stoppers, I need a dozen cool-looking-but-not-too-expensive coat hooks, 15 glass door knobs, one fireplace key with matching black flange and a hand-held shower nozzle that doesn't look like something Dr Frankenstein used to charge his monster. Not to forget 15 or so light fixtures, bathroom mirrors, carpet for the master suite and a retro-looking Formica counter for the laundry room.

"Yes," I said. "A beer would be great."

And while Husband was slicing the orange, I signed him off the laptop and got to work.

Floor Refinishing

If not for the Polish music drifting from the basement, I'd think I was alone in the house. It's so quiet, so empty. So ... very ... foreign. Sunlight mingles with dust in the living room and I wonder what's more striking: sunshine after a dark winter ... or is it the floor?

GC and his crew have cleared out the house. Gone are the ladders, saws and cans of paint, the scraps of wood, piles of molding and plastic bins over-flowing with trash. The house has been emptied for tomorrow's appointment with the hard-wood floor refinishers.

The bride is donning her veil.

I'm very nervous. I OK'd the floor stain weeks ago based on a four-inch test area in front of the refrigerator. We tested several colors, with the end goal of having very light floors but not so light that they look naked. We tried cherry, golden oak, natural, driftwood, early American and some other stains whose names escape me now. We also tried 50-50 blends, but I didn't love anything. How do you love something you can't envision? Emmanual, the floor-refinishing overseer, was adamant that I go with natural, which looked fine on the new floors but yellow on the old. A decorator urged me to blend natural with "just a touch of brown but no yellow or red." The painter suggested cherry to match the cabinets, but to my eye it was too matchy-matchy. Miguel the architect liked early American. I felt it would be OK if it was lighter, but when GC mixed early American with natural, the blend came out yellowish on our old, yellow-oak floors. In fact, none of the blended stains turned out well. Adding to the dilemma is that old floors take color differently than new ones.

So I decided to move on. I OK'd early American and let it go. But now, as I stand on dusty floors in this sunny room waiting for the floor guys to arrive on a day that's so bright my head hurts, the worries creep in. What if it's too dark? Too brown? Too mottled? What if I hate it?

Well, whatever goes down this week will be better than what's there now.

The hallway floors are a dark stain and are in dubious condition:

Since we expanded the dining room, it has both old and new floorboards:

The stairs are a very ugly orangish-yellowish stain that doesn't match the rest of the house:

One Good Girl

Getting Allie to "smile for the camera" has always been a challenge, because she averts her big, brown eyes the second you snap the photo. But recently, M realized she can keep Allie's attention by holding a snack next to the camera. All she needed for this photo was a single Wheat Thin. Then M used Kodak's EasyShare software to turn the photo into a cartoon-like image. I love it!

A Diamond In The Rink

My friend Ivy found a diamond ring at a local skating rink last year. It's an expensive gold band with two 1-and-a-half-carat diamonds, each of which is flanked by a slightly smaller but equally radiant 1-carat diamond. Rather than leaving the ring in the lost & found or giving it to the manager, Ivy decided to seek the rightful owner by herself. She placed "Ring Found!" signs around the rink, gave her phone number to the skating coach and manager, and reported the ring to the police commissioner in town. She also started wearing the ring to every hockey game and talking about it with everyone she knew, hoping the grapevine buzz would reach the owner.

If it did, Ivy hasn't heard. She's coming to the conclusion that the owner probably was a skater-mom from an out-of-town team who hasn't a clue where she may have left her diamonds. She also figures the woman filed an insurance claim and has moved on to bigger and better jewelry.

But what to do about the four diamonds that Ivy's been jiggling on her ring-finger for the past several months? She's considering having them made into two pairs of diamond-stud earrings for her two daughters. When she told me this, my first thought was: which girl will get the bigger diamonds?

Now I'm feeling a little creepy that I thought that, and even more creepy that my friend might turn someone's loss into her daughters' gain. Now I think she should sell the ring and donate the money to charity. She could get really clever, such as putting it up on Ebay with a promise that the highest bidder gets to pick the charity that the money goes to. Or she could convince a local jeweler to make the earrings in exchange for getting the credit when she donates them to a local silent auction.

There's so much you could do with someone else's windfall. It's an interesting dilemma to ponder.

Fireplace Surround, Day 2

Some more pics of the progression of our fireplace surround. Leon will grout it today:

from another angle:

Here's Leon, who installed every type of tile possible in our entire house, including porcelain, ceramic, glass, marble and these hand-glazed tiles from Motawi.

On To The Next Thing: The Fireplace Surround

I am coping with the shock of the half-inch overhang fairly well today. Pushing up the leg posts is going to be an ordeal, given that they are nailed to the new floor, so we are going to fill the gaps with a strip of wood that's flush with the leg posts. This is different from placing scribes over the gaps, an earlier suggestion that left me colder than the ice on my front stoop because the scribes would stick all the way out to the edge of the overhang.

Enough about that.

Now it's time to focus on the fireplace surround. The lovely hand-glazed Motawi tiles arrived yesterday, so this morning I had another pow-wow with Bert and Miguel to go over the order. I think everyone was worried about one thing or another---that the tiles wouldn't fit within the just-built mantel, or that we wouldn't have enough pieces, or that Leon the installer wouldn't know what to do with them. Fortunately, our worst fears have not materialized and things are working out fine. Here are some pictures of the morning's progress.

Miguel examines options for the tile pattern beneath the soapstone hearth:

Here's Leon, the tile installer, making some suggestions:

As of about noon today, a work in progress. Leon was very busy!

A corner detail emerges. The photo really doesn't do that soapstone slab justice. It's black with a lot of green swirling around. Very cool:

One ... Half ... Inch

I expected to be blown away by the Costa Esmerelda counters after they were installed in my kitchen Thursday afternoon. I should have swooned, because the counters are graceful and lovely, with just the right depth of color and veining. But instead of swooning, I gasped in horror at the sight of a narrow gap between the island leg posts and countertop. While invisible to some, this gap is so obvious to me it's as if flashing arrows are pointing at it.

"What is that GAP?" I asked Edgar, the counter installation guy who is about the age I was when I graduated from college. "The countertop is too small!" Nervously, Edgar got out the order.

"Ma'am," he said politely, "These are the dimensions you signed off on when the counters were measured last week."

I looked at the order. The island counter was measured from the rail and not from the leg posts, which jut out a couple of centimeters beyond the rail. What this means is that while most of the counter has a one-inch overhang, the overhang at the two leg posts is only about one-half inch. The gap between the posts and the counter exaggerates this one-half-inch deficit.

Hysteria started lurching from my stomach. Or was that lunch?

I called Miguel.

"What is that GAP?" I asked Miguel.

He didn't seem too worried.

"Yea, I noticed that. We just have to push the leg posts up and it will be OK," he said.

"But what about the OVERHANG?" I asked, gripping the cellphone to my ear. "It's only one-half-inch at the leg posts!"

"It's supposed to be like that," Miguel said, trying to reassure me. "It's supposed to look like a farm table."

"It looks like a man who arrived at his wedding in tuxedo pants that are too short!" I cried.

Now Miguel was starting to get worried---not about the counter but about my state of mind. "It's not that bad!" he said. "I'll come by and take another look."

I called Husband.

"The counters are in and the island top looks like it shrunk in the dryer!" I wailed.

"It can't be that bad!" he said. "I'll get off early and take a look."

That day, Bert the GC, Carl the carpenter, Mark the kitchen designer, Miguel the architect and Husband the husband all came to the house to see the patient I mean the island counter top. None of them felt the overhang was an issue. They offered various solutions, ranging from using a scribe to fill the gaps to placing "buttons" at the foot of the posts so that the leg tops are flush with the bottom of the counter. They tried to assure me that once the gaps are filled, the overhang will not be an issue.

"But that's because you don't think it's even an issue with the gaps!" I said suspiciously. I calculated the height difference between Husband and me, which is about seven inches.

"You can't even see what I'm talking about!" I cried.

I demanded another solution. All reluctantly agreed that in addition to filling the gaps, we could adjust the island by pushing the legs in one-half inch at both sides. This sounds easy, but it's not without repercussions because the leg posts are already nailed into the floor boards, and if we move the leg posts forward a half inch, the holes in the floor might --- or might not--- be exposed. We also would have to cut and move the rails, exposing nail holes in the island that would have to be filled and stained. Plus, these adjustments would affect the symmetry of the overhang, making it deeper than one-inch at the rails.

I asked my brother-in-law Chip, who's a woodworking guy, to evaluate the island overhang, and he doesn't think it's a problem. My sister agrees, and my kids think I'm crazy to actually talk about something like: "The overhang? What's the overhang?"

Part of me worries that everyone secretly believes the overhang is a real issue, but that they don't want to say so because of all the work that's involved in fixing it. But then again, maybe it really is a non-event. Maybe I'm just too close to the situation. Maybe I'm just a little looney.

Either way: It's bugging me. Here are some more pictures:

from the left side:

from the right side, with a piece of wood shoved in the gap to show what it might look like when the gap is filled: