Morning

If you've inspected any of our photos closely or you just have a pair of eyes you might have noticed that we don't have any curtains. Well, I take that back, we have one verrrrrrry sheer pair in the guest room but they filter about as much light as a piece of clear glass so...

Someday I plan to put shades up but I honestly have just never seen a pair of curtains that I really liked. Ever. So, for now at least, it's no curtains or shades on the windows. And aside from constantly being badgered about not having any privacy, it's working out pretty well. Just don't walk around downstairs in the nood (misspelled on purpose for comic relief) and don't have a giant flatscreen TV in your living room : ) I kid, I kid. But serioulsy, to our critics I say come over at about a quarter to 9 in the morning and feast your eyes on all of the beautiful light cutting through the house. It really is our best feature.

The guest bedroom gets the best morning light. Our two guests have raved about this room. For real.

The light in the landing is pretty terrific too. As is that picture (I swear it's straight in person) that I got Conan for his birthday from here.



Stare/Stairs

A little pretty for your Friday.

I just love looking at these lazy, hazy pictures of our second stairwell.

My mom and I actually completed this project some time ago but it's never been posted here before so...

Yup, that's wallpaper on them there stairs!

I had seen something similar to this done on lots of DIY blogs so I set out to do it our way.

The cheap way.

We scoured the wallpaper books at Lowe's until I found something similar to this but at a price point we could afford. A cool $25 later and we were hanging with this pre-pasted, pretty paper!

The lamp at the top of the stairs I found at the DAV for $10 and painted it red with some spray paint.

All in all, not bad for under forty bucks!

Random Photos

I was looking through my house folder on my desktop and realized how much stuff I had meant to post about and how much stuff I just never got around to putting up, so I thought I'd do a real quick catch-up.

I work a lot on the weekends usually, so sometimes I'll make it home from work to find that Katherine and her parents have started on new projects.  This is a shelf that Katherine asked her dad to put in over the servants' staircase, and I think it's pretty nice.

And properly staged with cameras, bowl of fruit, and issues of Dwell:

If I remember right, this was also during the time that they were working on removing the sconces from our guestroom.  Thank God for handy in-laws, because working on this old of wiring gives me the willies.

We also hung a couple of new lights, the first one in the dinning room came from CB2 and was only about $40.  And the second one went up in the laundry room and was a DAV score.  It's amazing how difficult it is to find a good light at a reasonable price.

And speaking of the laundry room, this was the wallpaper that was left behind the paneling that we had to remove to put in the hookups for the washer and dryer.

Here's our neat, Donnie Darko-esque bottle opener:

And this is the office lamp that Katherine found at the DAV and spray-painted red to use on our staircase landing.

Anyway, those are just a few of the projects that has taken up our time the last year or so.  I was so consumed getting the central heating taken care of that really Katherine and her parents are mostly responsible for the visible work that's actually gotten done on the house in that time, and for that I thank them greatly.

And I'll have a big reveal fairly soon on something we've been working on for the last four months.

Painting

Since our plans were to get married at this house we of course set right away to painting over all the walls.  First was the bedroom, then the office, then the living room, the dinning room, the laundry room, and lastly the hallway.  So let me show you a few photos of us working on the office and the living room.

Yup, we painted over the old wood, and we've had more people lose their minds about that than anything else.  Some people act like I punched their grandmother, but everyone needs to just chill, the wood was not in perfect shape, and a lot of it would have needed to be fully replaced to look well again.  This was the best solution since we only had about three months to turn this place around before we were to get married...oh, and it also looks awesome now.

Anyway, here's the thing about painting: a good quality primer is your best friend.  Go to Lowe's and buy the five gallon bucket of Kilz2 and hit it.  Two or three coats of that stuff will take care of about anything, and you'll waste a lot less of your expensive paint trying to cover up the old stuff.  Here's another thing about painting: don't buy cheap paint.  Good stuff is thick because it contains a lot of pigment, and because it contains a lot of pigment it takes fewer coats to get to the color that you want.

We bought the expensive Valspar paints that they sell at Lowe's to do the bedroom first and it was so easy we thought we'd save some money and paint the office with something quite a bit cheaper.  It took at least twice as much paint to get to the final color, and every now and then I still notice a thin spot.  The rest of the house was painted with better stuff.

I don't actually have many really good 'after' photos.  I thought I'd shoot some yesterday before I went to work (I only work half-days part of the week), but it was cloudy and I really wanted some photos with sunlight coming through the windows.  So anyway, that'll be my next task...er, blogjective?

Interior Tour

We had taken some photos on the walkthrough, but rather than post those, I'll show you some photos that I took the first week that we had the house.  We hadn't moved in yet, because we had to repair the flue for the water heater and patch a couple of leaky pipes in the basement--credit for this goes to Katherine's mom who brought over her plumbing kit and with a few dollars worth of parts from the neighborhood Ace Hardware got everything going.

This is our living room. The wood looks alright in photos but it was honestly pretty heavily stained and marke.  The floor, however, was evidently refinished sometime in the semi-recent past and was actually in pretty good shape; everyone that comes in says, "oh did you refinish these yourself?"  You can also see our beautiful old windows that still contain mostly original glass--nice and wavy.

Here you can see our fireplace and mantle. Through the door to the right is our dinning room which is painted a slightly darker shade of purple.  You can also see our very nice sort of knock-off Danish Modern chairs; the one by the fireplace was $19.95 at the DAV and the one in the dining room was part of a set for $40 off of craigslist.  

This is our main staircase (there's a servants staircase that leads up from the kitchen).  It's actually a little crooked due to the house settling a little over the years.

The view from our dining room back into the living room.  Note the doors.

Here's our kitchen.  You can note the water damage on the ceiling, which I watched closely for a few months after moving in without noticing any additional evidence of water penetration.  I believe at some point in the past the upstairs bathroom was partially remodeled after causing the damage here.   On the windowsill is a little plastic cow that we found in the basement, shrink-wrapped and covered in dirt.  All in all though, the kitchen is good looking so it'll do for now, but it's on the list of rooms needing a remodel.

Another view of the kitchen.  You can see the back room that eventually became our laundry room. The electric oven works well and gets very hot; however, when we moved in there was no 220V outlet for it, only a gas-pipe sticking up through the floor.

Here's a view from the upstairs hallway showing, left to right, the "master" bedroom, the future office, and the future guestroom. The hallway, like the future guest room, is also white but it appears to be just painted over with primer.

And here's the "master" bedroom.  I think it was originally two rooms and they cut through the wall and added that archway.  This is the first room we painted, and you can see Katherine knocking the dust off the walls so we could get started with the Kilz. 

And at the back of the house is the sunroom, which was the only room in the house that was still carpeted.  Katherine tore it up one day and we shoved it out the windows.  The floors are very rough underneath, but Katherine's got some plans for it.