Almost-Complete Bedroom

Our bedroom is one of my favorite places in the house.  It's so calm because there is very little in it.  Four pieces of furniture -- bed, bench, and two nightstands.  And I love all those pieces, so it looks so simple and lovely to me.  Our bed frame is from Ikea.  The nightstands are from Target and I love them because they look so much like the ones I really wanted from West Elm.  But these nightstands saved us $300! The bench is also from Target, and was a wedding gift my my sister and brother-in-law.

The bedside lamps are from JC Penney, the Jonathon Adler collection.  The navy blue curtains are from... Bed, Bath & Beyond, I think?  We've had them for quite a few years now.  The gray and green bedding is from West Elm.  The new decorative pillow was my gift to K for our 2-year wedding anniversary, and it's from Etsy.

I think of this room as complete, but there is nothing on the walls!  We should probably get some art and photos in the room, and we've talked about it quite a few times, but it's just so simple and relaxing in there right now without anything...  I'm not sure I want to change it.

Kitchen Tile

With the busy Formica countertops we chose, we thought we'd want to stick with white tile for the backsplashes in our kitchen.  We considered traditional subway tile, or other shapes, like a Moroccan-style.  And we decided on a long rectangle tile -- a 2" x 10" installed stacked, with light gray grout.

Light gray grout is visible on the right side

The "breakfast nook"

Getting So Close in the Kitchen

The kitchen is coming along!  The doors are on all the cabinets, along with all the hardware.  I love how the chrome pulls look with everything. Now we need to make decisions on paint and tile, and we think we know what we want to do.

For the paint, I had always been thinking of green.  Especially once I saw the old paint color-- I really wanted to replicate that color.

But now that we have the appliances and counters installed, K had me look at a blue paint that she had leftover from a project.  And this blue paint looks really nice with all of it.  I've also compared this blue paint and green paint chips to the dishes we'll be using, and I think the blue will be the better way to go.

I've been collecting Fire King Jadeite dishes for years.  I have a lot of bowls and platters that I love, which were packed away during the years that we were renting.  I have a few pieces of their Azurite, too. Once the kitchen is done, I will get those all out of storage and use them again. 

And a few years ago, I bought a huge lot of the dishware I've always wanted-- the Blue Heaven pattern from Royal China.  The blue paint will look so good with this pattern. 

Jadeite, Azurite, and Blue Heaven

There's a bit of the color we're considering on the right side of the sink in this photo

Organizing & Purging

Came home from work today and found that K and her bro had done SO much in our house to clean and organize it.  It feels amazing in here.

First off, the baby's room is cleared out and ready to set up for the little one.  Just about as soon as K had the trim up and the room finished, we started putting tools and supplies in that room-- just to keep them nearby.  Stuff that had been in the living room, until we got that couch and got going on finishing the living room.

Now, the baby's room is clean and ready to go.  Our spare bed is set up in there-- that's where family who visits will sleep while we have the babe in our room for the first couple months.  And my old Ikea bookshelves are in there, too-- I'll get some bins and see if they will be useful in there.  If not, we'll move them out to the alley and post a curb alert.

We had a ginormous sisal rug that took up almost our whole living room-- which was helpful when we used that rug to cover up the ram board on the floor.  We want a rug for the living room, but haven't decided on what to get, and it's low-priority right now.  So she cut that big sisal rug to a more useful size and put that in our living room, under the couch.  It looks pretty good.

Lastly, our beloved air hockey table is gone.  It's bittersweet, really.  We acquired the table from some friends when we rented from them, and we have moved it 2 times.  And it is a BIG MF-ing table!!

It took up a lot of room in our basement-- pretty much made us configure the furniture down there in a certain way.  Yeah, it was a blast to play at parties-- it was definitely a popular item in our house!  But K and I almost never played it, otherwise.  Eventually, it became more appealing to take back the space and let go of the table...

So when I pulled into the alley today, some guys were loading the table top into a van.  I totally hollered at them, "Yeah!  That's awesome that you're taking that!"  Turned out K had not posted any sort of ad online-- the guys had just been driving by and saw it.  She had it out there with all the pieces nicely piled, with the pucks and the handle thingies all ready to go.  Glad it's found another good home.

The awesome table at the rental where we got it...  Before we moved it 2 times...

Living Room is Almost Done!

The living room is just about complete.  The only thing remaining is trim-- just a few more baseboards and the trim around the windows.  It's so nice having a functioning living room... with a couch and a tv, and bookshelves.... 

A bit of history...

The only photo of the living room on the MLS listing (it looked like this when we first viewed the house):

At least 2 huge couches in here, lots of tapestries pinned on the ceiling.

The photo we took during our final walk-through, on the day we bought the house:

Blank slate - popcorn ceiling, vertical blind, floors and walls that needed love

In between, it was mostly a storage room.  For years, just boxes and bins and stuff waiting to move into other rooms. 

And now....!!

Just needs the trim on the windows!

And the wall of shelves:

The shelves are pretty bare right now.  I gotta get some more BOOKS on there soon.

Running Water in the Kitchen!

K got our faucet and our dishwasher running today!  It's going to be so nice to have a working sink on the first floor again, and not have to always go down to the basement to get water.  And we can probably start using the dishwasher, instead of washing our dishes in the utility sink, too.  What a luxury!

Our faucet is the touch-on kind, which is really cool.  And we have a disposal, too.  I don't think we've ever had one of those in any of the places we've lived.  There's a cute little chrome button on the counter to turn on the disposal.

The overall view is just so nice when we come into the room.  And it's just going to get better--  Tile, paint, trim, and light fixtures to follow.  And installing the chrome pulls on the cabinets.

We're almost there!

Taking Down The Tree

First of all, I want to say that I really have mixed feelings about this particular project.  It's been very hard for me to participate in the destruction of such a large living thing...  But I was able to talk myself into being positive about it because of three things:

1)  The tree was not healthy.  It has some kind of disease-- not Dutch Elm, I don't think, because the bark is fine.  But the leaves were really weird looking last year-- it looked like bugs were burrowed into them.  I'm still trying to identify what caused that.  A bunch of the big branches had been dead for years, and it was scary to have those reaching near our house and power-lines during storms.

2)  K needs to build her garage.  Where this tree stands is the best place to put the garage.  It's right behind the house, just off of the alley, and it makes the most sense for moving vehicles and her work trailers in and out.  The sooner she builds this garage, the better!  There are so many projects for the house that she can be working on in the garage -- shelves, kitchen cabinets, trim, etc.

3)  We have so many other trees!  Last year, our yard was just a JUNGLE!  It was all leaves and barely any sunlight hitting the ground.  Once this tree is gone, we will still have a bunch of medium-sized trees along the alley, a line of tall trees along the railroad track, a large ash in the side-yard, another huge elm just outside of our fence, the craggy crab-apple tree in the front, and at least 2 trees along the street (these probably belong to the city).   We are basically ringed by trees, which still offer great protection from the wind, and probably still give more shade than I want.  I'd like to have a garden this year.

K and our neighbor have plans to do a great trade this year -- he used to be a tree-trimmer, so he helped us cut down this tree!  And in return, she'll build him a nice-sized shed in his yard.  A couple days' work for each of them and everyone wins!  Bartering is still alive and well, when it comes to home-owning neighbors.

Three hours of work on the tree on Saturday, and about 1/5th of the branches were cut down.  This is what resulted:

My adorable lumberjack

And then a FULL day of work on Sunday.  We were out there all day!  K was out there way past dark.

Now it's down to just the trunk!  Amazing!:

We also have a gigantic brush pile, now, with all the branches.  We'll rent a chipper and turn this all into a huge pile of mulch for the garden and yard.  And more firewood than we'll need for a while!  Next year, these logs should be ready to burn.

Cape Cod Style?

Our little house is a pretty traditional Cape Cod style, which was popular in the 1950s.

Picture from About.com

K is thinking of putting a couple of dormer windows out the front of the house, to make it a little more interesting.  And that would still fit with keeping the style authentic to the time period.  It would also change how the roof is vented, so we wouldn't need those square vents on top anymore.  The ones that are on there now are rusting, and I wish we didn't need them because they interrupt that long, continuous roof.

Picture from About.com

But in doing dormers, I thought it looked a little too traditional, considering that we are going for mid-century modern on the inside.  We can do whatever we want to this little place, let's make it fun! 

I pulled out my newspaper and magazine clippings and showed K a few houses that really caught my eye.  The difference between most of these houses and our house, is that they are ranches with long, low roofs, where ours is a 1.5 story with a totally different roof line.  But K understood what I meant-- let's incorporate some of these lines where we can, and she hopped back on Google Sketch-Up and started altering her plans.

How can we mesh a look like this with our house?  We're working on it..

We plan to do cement-board when we replace our siding, and so we started looking at our color options for that.  There isn't a huge color selection, so it was pretty easy to come up with our "palette." 

Cement board palette + door paint

I can't wait to paint the front door something bright!!  I'm leaning towards a turquoise or teal, right now.  I had been thinking about an intense green, but once I saw these siding colors, I think that something with blue in it will be better.