Tuesday, October 30, 2012

Slate the Great*

At last fireplace update, we'd ordered some pretty Montauk Black slate for the hearth.  And it came last week.  And it was the wrong size.  

We'd ordered 18"x18" tile, which would fit with no cutting into our 18"x72" hearth.  We're not afraid of a little wet-saw action now and then, but since we'd never used one before, we were wary of cutting our teeth (or potentially cutting our fingers off?) on such a high-visibility project as the hearth.  So when our would-be 18"x18" tile arrived measuring in at 15.75" square, we called marblewarehouse.com immediately.  Since we know less than nothing about tile, we weren't sure if maybe 18"x18" tile was like 2"x4" lumber (which is to say, nowhere near the size its measurements claim it to be), but the awesome customer service rep with whom I'd been dealing confirmed that there'd been a mix-up in the warehouse and that we'd indeed been shipped 16"x16" tiles.  Now, get this-- because marblewarehouse.com is TOTALLY AWESOME, they apologized for the mix-up, let us keep the 16" tiles free of charge, and sent the 18"x18" tiles out the same day.

(And all of this was after I, when placing the initial order, ordered the wrong quantity (I stupidly went by number of tiles rather than square feet, even though the website clearly states that you should order by the square foot).  My customer service rep called AND emailed me before shipping because something didn't look right about the quantity I'd ordered.  She helped me convert to square feet and corrected the mistake.  At this point I've had so many positive interactions with marblewarehouse.com I'm considering naming my firstborn child after it.  So if you're thinking about a tile project and live on the West Coast, check 'em out.)

And the tile. is. so. pretty.  It fits perfectly.  Here's a photo of the dry-fitting:
 

And from across the room:


Next steps: laying the tile, sealing it (which will make it look a bit darker), grouting the 1/8in seams between the tiles (I'm thinking dark gray for the most seamless look possible), and adding quarter-round to the whole thing.  The rugs I ordered should be coming in on Thursday and we're both buried under mountains of papers to grade this weekend, but we're hoping to totally complete the project before Thanksgiving.  And I can't wait to post definitive before-and-afters.


*other titles I considered for this post: Tile File, Definitely Stoned, and a lot of Duchess of Wales puns like Slate Middleton Weds Prince William or Waity Slate-y or Duchess Slate Dazzles In Jenny Packham At Charity Event!**  

**Except not really that last one, but I do love Jenny Packham. 

Wednesday, October 24, 2012

Hunt For the Rug October*

Ever since the sisal rug debacle of Early October 2012, we've been living without a rug in the living room.  And while we patiently wait for UPS to decide whether or not they will waive our return-shipping cost, the sisal beast is rolled up in the dining room.  I'm tired of staring at it, but if UPS won't send it back for free (there seems to be some confusion between UPS and the retailer as to who messed up, and I have a nasty feeling both parties are going to deny responsibility, at which point we'll be left holding the proverbial bag-- which is to say a 10'x13' sisal rug), we'll keep it-- the return shipping would cost more than the rug did.  And we won't complain, because 1) I'm the goose who ordered a stain-prone rug from a website that doesn't offer free return shipping, and 2) we can always layer a smaller Persian rug over it.  Like this slightly pixellated image I found on houzz.com:




This makes the Persian look a little more casual anyhow, no?  And at the end of the day, when you live in a wet climate, you can't beat a hand-knotted wool rug for hiding all manner of muddy sins, so a Persian it must be.  I've been looking for antique ones via this website that offers amazing prices and free shipping both ways (i.e., you can return it gratis if you don't like it in your house, unlike the sisal monster that's currently coiled in wait in my dining room).  My mom and sister have both used the site before, and the rugs. are. spectacular.  After carefully combing the site (read: staring at it nightly until I got dizzy and had to stop) for a couple of budget-friendly and modern-looking options, I found two awesome antique Bakhtiars:


Loving all the oranges and yellows in this one, and it's almost as big as my room, though the sisal monstrosity would help it fill the room by adding about 6" all around.  I'm also crazy about its gray border and the really saturated navy in the interior corners, and it has a few pops of super-bright cornflower blue near the center medallion.  I think it's a little fresher than your average Persian-- maybe more suited to the Pacific Northwest?  Then there's this one:


It's slightly smaller than the other one (and slightly smaller than I'll need it to be if I can't layer it on top of the epic sisal school-carpeting), but it is soooo pretty.  I love that the diamonds aren't symmetrical, and I also love that the colors are so unusual-- there's the kind-of-teal color, some bright orange, a little navy, a touch of khaki.  And it doesn't feel too traditional to me-- the geometric pattern and lack of center medallion are less Old South and more Middle East.

Anyhow, these babies are on their way to me even as we speak, and I hope I heart them as much in person as I do on the laptop monitor.  Will keep you posted as always.

 *Honestly, this may prove to the the absolute zenith of my blog-post titling.  I have nowhere to go but down from this point.

Saturday, October 20, 2012

Master Sweet

Yeah, it's not a suite.  But it's sweet.  See what I did there?  Kind of like Siouxie and the Banshees.  It makes sense if you don't think about it.

I promised photos of Grammy's/Mom's/Sissy's old Persian in the bedroom.  And I also need some advice, so here are some photos I took this morning (by the way, I really need to learn to clean up all the little things on my occasional tables before I take pictures):

View from door, with Ray's watch and wedding ring on the nightstand and our can't-live-without-it box fan in the corner.


[Yep, we have a TV in the bedroom.  Incidentally, it's the same TV that my BFF Mrs. S. (over at Pirouettes & Gossamer) and I bought in 2002 for our first apartment in Ashland, VA.  We each paid $100 for it.  BEST. INVESTMENT. EVER.  The TV then moved into Mrs. S' first postcollege apartment in Richmond.  After that it moved into my dear friend Jilly's house with me, then to Charlottesville to keep me company while I was in grad school, then to New Haven and my first apartment with Ray.  Then it traveled cross-country in a POD (portable! on! demand! storage!) and lived in our rental condo for a year before moving into our house with us.  And every move has taken years off our lives since the thing weighs at least 300lbs.  So I'm quite attached to it really.  Plus if we didn't have it, we wouldn't be able to watch "The Colbert Report" every night before bed, and that is nonnegotiable.]


The rug looks pretty, non?  Here's another view of the room: 


Check it-- you can't see where the weird cabinet used to be AT ALL.  But you CAN see two things I need to change in that photo:  first, the curtains.  I bought them at World Market while I was in graduate school.  I only had one window in my room at the time, hence the two curtain panels.  Over the years we've become quite attached to them, as they darken the room like nobody's business.  Seriously, you can sleep in all day with these babies closed.  But I obviously need to buy more of them-- you can see this one's lonely mate on the other window in the first photo.

Second, the throw pillows.  All of those are really nice down pillows I bought on the super-cheap from TJ Maxx, like, half a million years ago.  I plan to make new covers for them.  And someday I will.  I'm thinking awesome olive-green and teal or golden ikats and block prints?  What say ye?

Third vista:



This picture includes the only piece of art we've managed to hang so far.  My grandmother pulled it out of a Dumpster some years back.  (Have I mentioned that my grandmother is totally awesome?  I don't know very many other ladies in their 80's who Dumpster-dive to rescue original watercolor paintings.)  

It also prominently features one of my most prized possessions: my headboard.  I rescued those tin ceiling tiles from my oldest friend Courtney's former workplace, a cool PR firm that was housed in a historic building in Richmond (check out Courtney's awesome house here).  The tiles had been taken down and were being stored on the second floor of the building, and yada yada yada, now I have two of them.  I drew a picture of the headboard I wanted, and my dad built it for me.  Because my dad can do that kind of stuff-- and also renovate bathrooms, fix cars and boats, hang drywall, do plumbing and electrical, and did I tell you about that time when I was 13 and I was swimming in the Bay and a ring slipped off my finger and my dad DRAGGED THE BOTTOM OF THE CREEK, ACCOUNTING FOR THE TIDES until he found it?  Yep, that happened.

This photo also includes a phone charger lying on the floor (how did I fail to notice that when I took the picture?), a piece of quarter-round, and our TV remote.  Awesome.

This room still needs baseboards, and we obviously need to hang the rest of the art.  But progress is progress.  

What I've learned from this post is that I have lots of sentimental objects in my bedroom, including an old television.  Anyhow, see y'all siouxn.

Fireside Chat Part II

I spent the last two days leveling the hearth in preparation for tile.  This doesn't sound like a very glamorous process, and it wasn't.  It started out looking like this:


Not sure how it happened, but as you can clearly see, it's way too uneven for tile installation.  So I taped off the floor, thoroughly swept the hearth, and had at it with some floor-patching compound.


Here's my first coat drying.

Flat 'n' ready this morning:


Now we can talk tile: 18" x 18" Montauk Black cleft slate.  Why?  Partly because I'm guessing this house originally had slate, and the super-active multicolored slate that's everywhere right now isn't the kind it would have had.  We needed something that had little movement, even less color variation, absolutely no shine, and wouldn't require tons of cutting and grouting.  The hearth happens to be 18" x 72", and if we use a 1/16" grout line between each of the four tiles we'll need, we should come in just about perfectly with no need to rent a wet saw.  Yessss!

We found the tile here.  After pricing it through some local vendors and realizing that 18"x18" tile ain't so easy to come by, we discovered that nine square feet of tile would run us about $100-- but from marblewarehouse it'll only cost $66 including shipping.  Even $66 seems sort of spendy for four tiles (actual tile cost is only about $30) but, as I've said, it'll save us on wet-saw rental and prevent us from wasting a bunch of tile.  And if we consider the total cost of the fireplace makeover to date, ($14: free leftover primer from another job, $4 for the paint samples I mixed together to paint the brick, $5 for the quarter-round that will eventually frame out the hearth, $5 for the patching compound) it doesn't seem so bad.  I mean, $14 to go from this:


To this:



means I've earned $66 worth of tile, right?



Wednesday, October 17, 2012

Totally Floored: Win Some, Lose Some

First (fail), a new sisal rug.  It came in the mail two days ago after an impulse internet purchase.  I've been feeling ambivalent about the priceless-antique-and/or-yard-sale Persian (see previous posts) that was camped out in our living room for several reasons: 

1) It's a bit too small for the space and sort of appears to be floating around the room.
2) It has a slight worn spot (read: hole) in one end, and I don't want my high-traffic living room to make the damage worse.
3) It's very traditional, and I'm not sure that's the direction I want to take in the living room in our little house in the Pacific Northwest-- it seems a little dressy for a place where "business casual" means yoga pants and Skecher's Shape-Ups.  Not that I want my house to look like the interior equivalent of yoga pants.
4) I really, really want it in my bedroom instead.

So this website was having a major sale, and I scored an ENORMOUS $500 rug for $160 with free shipping.  It obviously wasn't the most expensive thing in the first place, but I had high hopes that it would be slightly grayish, a little knobby, textured-- if not yoga pants, then a comfy-but-stylish sweater. 

What I got kind of looks like industrial carpeting:



And please don't mind the utter lack of staging, unless you count my water glass on the coffee table, Ray's on the side table, and my raincoat on the Windsor chair.

See?  It looks like a big ol' sheet of beige elementary-school carpet, except nobody would ever make beige elementary-school carpet because beige carpet is horribly stain-prone.  It causes the corduroy side chair (known to everyone in my family as "the gold chair"-- it'll get reupholstered just as soon as I teach myself how to reupholster chairs) to appear weirdly camouflaged.  What's worse, it arrived dirty-- the plastic sleeve it'd been packaged in was wide open on both ends, and the UPS man thoughtfully laid it down under our carport with one end of the rug laying directly on our (wet, dirty) paved driveway.   

So it must go back from whence it came.  We've already rolled it up.  Sigh.  On a positive note, we moved Grammy's Persian into the bedroom and I love it there.  Photos to come.

Second (win), Phase II of the fireplace project (Refinish Damaged Hardwood Floors) is finally complete.  It started when we ripped up the huge tile pad that had been installed over the original skinny hearth and about a foot of the wood flooring.  The wood looked awful, but we thought we might be able to salvage it.  Here's a flashback to my dad ripping up the giant tile pad:


Ugh, hard to believe the fireplace used to look like that!  Anyhow, here's a close-up of the floor after we cleaned it up some:
 

And a wide shot of the whole living room.  As you can see, it looks pretty rough:


After Dad pulled up the tile pad, I asked my mom's advice on how to repair the damage.  How would I ever find a stain that would match the rest of the flooring?  I mean, this house is 60-some-odd years old.  Without missing a beat, Mom glanced at the floor and said, "I'm pretty sure that's Early American."  Now, at this point I'm old enough to know that my mom is always right, especially where interiors are concerned.  So, realizing that no more research would be required, I bought some Early American.  And after some careful prep-- sanding, filling holes, damp-mopping, sweeping-- I applied a coat of stain.  My faith in my mother's omniscience was confirmed all over again.  See where I've applied the stain in the following photo?  PERFECT MATCH:   

 
(How in the hell she knew that, I'll never be sure.  But she did.  Magic?  When I asked her, she replied, and I'm not kidding, "Well, I knew it was too light to be Special Walnut."  The woman knows her stains.)

And so three days and three coats of polyurethane later we have just-about-perfect-looking hardwood floors in the living room.  If you know what to look for, you can still see a dark line on the floor on each side where the tile pad stuck out over the floor (it wouldn't come out despite all my sanding), but I'm pretty satisfied with the final result: 


See that stack of white marble subway tiles on the hearth?  We were going to use them there, but I think that's too much white.  On the hunt for 18' x 18" Montauk black slate instead.

Next step: leveling the hearth to ready it for tile.  Woot! 

 

Saturday, October 13, 2012

Cleanup on Aisle 9

No, despite its title, this isn't a post about shopping.  It's about doorknobs.  Specifically, cleaning paint off of them.  I know it's exciting, but you're just going to have to try to contain yourself. 

Our house was built in the 40's, and since then it's had its share of owners.  After a quick look around the house, one can clearly see that each of these past inhabitants must have decided to change just one doorknob in order to, I don't know, make the place seem more current or something?  This means that from my present vantage point on the sofa in the living room, I can see five different kinds of doorknobs.  And I can't stand it.  Some are shiny brass, some are "antique" brass, some are the original patinaed brass, and one is chrome (why?).  They're all different sizes and shapes.  But this is also not a post about replacing the mismatched not-original doorknobs with vintage ones, which is going to require some good luck and perseverance and a lot of Googling.

It's about the three doors in the house that still have their original forties hardware.  Over the course of the past sixty-some-odd years, everyone who painted the trim added his (or her!) own special paint color to the hardware.  It's like a bunch of kindergartners painted the place.  Is it really too time-consuming to a) paint carefully around the metal hardware or b) remove the doorknobs and tape the hinges before you do your very own Jackson-Pollock-and/or-Mark-Rothko-style paint job?

The hinges are so paint-covered it's a wonder they still work.  And being my mother's child, I cannot bear paint-covered hinges. (Side note / shout-out to my mom, thanks to whom my sister and I can paint anything quickly and neatly.  We did a lot of family interior paint projects in my childhood home, and Mom does not mess around where crappy paint jobs are concerned.  You prime when necessary, tape when it'll save you time, and buy quality supplies.  Or it will look like... all the paint jobs in this house looked when we moved in.  Shudder.)  And the knobs' brass backplates all looked like this:


I mean, seriously.  That is ridiculous.  It's been making me crazy since before we even bought the house.  

In a fit of madness this afternoon, I decided to do something about it.  Practice for the hinges, which I think will be a much bigger job since their backplates have actually been painted into the wood, like, fifty million times.  I wanted to see if a little scalding-water soak and some elbow grease would restore the brass to its pre-careless-paint-job appearance before I tried detaching all the hinges.

So I detached the knobs and the backplates, and off to the sink we went:

    Top backplate: one I'd scrubbed; bottom backplate: one that'd just gone into the bath.

And then I screwed them all back onto their respective doors, and this is the final result:


So much better!  I know it's a small thing, but at least I can sit on my sofa now without obsessing over the entry closet's sloppy appearance.  

Next up: hinges.  And buying vintage replacement knobs for the rest of the doors in the house.  And putting flooring in the bathroom, kitchen, and laundry area.  And renovating the third bedroom.  And gutting the kitchen.  And painting the guest room.  And putting up baseboard.  And tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow...

Thursday, October 11, 2012

The Thrifty Gourmet-- Chinese Edition

You know when you've been trolling Craigslist FOREVER, hoping to find a set of 4-6 Chinese Chippendale dining chairs within driving distance that cost less than $550 per chair (looking at you, Jonathan Adler)?  Like, a lot less?  Because you don't have several thousand dollars to spend on trendy dining chairs?  But you sincerely doubt you'll ever find them because everyone knows they are worth a ton of money and that's why they're upwards of $1000 per set on eBay?  And why would anybody sell them for cheap when they could make a ton of money instead?

Well, maybe you don't know about that, but I do.  We've been living here for a nearly two months with no dining chairs, which probably wouldn't be a big deal if 1) we weren't staring directly at the dining room every time we sit on the sofa, which is where we've had to eat dinner since we didn't have any dining chairs, and 2) we didn't have an epic list of people whose dinner invitations we need to return.  And the chairs needed to be small (the dining room is 10' x 10' and the table is only 48" round), but not so small that a man couldn't sit comfortably.  They needed to be visually interesting since the open dining room can be seen from basically every other room in the house.  And they needed to be cheap.

I settled on Chinese Chippendales because they are SO HOT RIGHT NOW (aside to Zoolander fans: Hansel) plus Tori Spelling has them in her kitchen and I love Tori Spelling.  Is that weird? 


After weeks of obsessive / fruitless antiques-store-, thrift-store-, and Craigslist-stalking, I finally hit the jackpot.  Four Chinese Chippendale-ish chairs for $75 in Salem, OR.  A mere hour away! We picked them up immediately.

Couple of problems: one, they were cherry red.  Nothing against red really, but the shiny lacquer was just taking the whole Chinese thing a bit too literally for my taste.  Second, the red paint was in pretty tough shape.


 Our grill looks like a sad little gray ghost in the background.  Ha!  Also note the old hearth tile it's sitting on.  Awesome.  

 Bit o' damage in the paint finish.

I'm not sure what color they'll wind up in the end, as we have a lot of other, larger color-related decisions to make-- upholstery on new sofa we will someday get, new upholstery on corduroy chair, rugs, etc-- so I defaulted to my standard choice of gray.  Two packs of extra-fine-grit sandpaper, a whole Box o' Rags, and three cans of Rust-oleum later, this is what we're working with:



A herd of wild dining chairs (plus bloody-looking rags used to wipe 'em down after sanding) in captivity on our deck.

They still need more paint-- a couple of them need some light repair before the final coat, and I ran out of ammo before I fully finished spraying the last chair-- and eventually they will get cushions upholstered in something awesome for maximum Tori Spelling / Jonathan Adler-ness.  But for now they're looking pretty comfortable in the (completely unstaged, artless, accessory-free-for-the-moment) dining room. 


Definitely not loving the enormous glare from the odd desk-lamp-y light fixture in the dining room.  I've got big plans for you, buddy.  And by that I mean I'm throwing you away.  Or maybe taking you to the Habitat for Humanity Re-Store where perhaps you'll be adopted by a family of people with horrible taste?