What Do You Call A Guy Who Hangs Out Against The Wall?*

Pardon the spotty posting-- we've been on the road.  But I did squeeze in a few quick photos of some progress in the dining room before we skipped town, and I thought I'd save them for a rainy day.  And today's rainy, so here goes:

 From the fireplace hearth:

From the front door:

From the kitchen, a better shot of what's actually hanging in there:

 

Top left and bottom right: two pieces of wrapping paper I bought for $5 each in a Portland gift shop-- the top left is a reproduction of a vintage tourism poster for New York (a special place for us because we've spent a fair bit of time there, got engaged there, etc etc etc), and the bottom right is a map of Paris with drawings of all the monuments drawn on in their respective locations (we have no connection whatsoever to Paris, other than the fact that Ray got mugged in Montmartre and I once got stuck in De Gaulle airport for like 15 hours, but the poster is pretty and it cost $5).  They're in IKEA Ribba frames ($24.99 apiece, so the total investment for these two big pieces of art was $60).  Bottom left: a painting I painted of a lighthouse near our place on the Chesapeake Bay framed in wood my dad salvaged from the deck of an old Navy ship.  Top right: A funky vintage map of the Lewis and Clark trail, found pre-framed at the local antiques shop for $29.  

I'm not quite done yet-- under the Paris map I plan on putting a little bench we can use for extra seating and accessorizing it with a stack of books and perhaps a vintage oscillating fan since we don't have air conditioning.  On the hunt for the right bench even as we speak!

*Art.

One Step Forward

Remember the other day when I posted this photo of the new screen door?

 

As proud as I was of the door itself, I kept thinking that there was something (a few things) really sad about this photo.  Suddenly it hit me: ugly, washed-out-looking, unfinished, undefined-looking concrete stairs.  I decided to do something about them.

Behold:

 

Maybe we should do a side-by-side?

 

 It's Behr Semi-Transparent Concrete Stain in Loden-- it cost me about $25 for an entire gallon (of which I used, like, 1/4 cup on this project).  I brushed it on, first in one direction and then in the other to get a sort of crosshatch finish. Nice, right?

Next up: new (not ridiculously tiny) mailbox, bigger and brighter doormat, landscaping, window boxes, etc etc etc etc.

Mock-up

I've done it.  I've bitten the bullet and ordered the midcentury-looking reversible-chaise sofa I've been eyeing / drooling over for two years:

Sort of.

You see, I ordered it, but clubfurniture.com will not start manufacturing until I give the okay.  Yesterday I received a ton of fabric swatches (about 1" x 3") from them-- which is all well and good, except I thought I was going to be receiving a larger (like, at least 6" square) swatch of the fabric I'd ordered for my sofa (which-- and this may surprise you-- is not the awful teal shown above).  So I called them and asked them to send me that instead.  Because hello, people-- fifty 1" x 3" swatches in a whole bunch of crazy colors entirely unrelated to what I want isn't going to help me make this decision.

Anyhow, I was checking out their website to see if I could find a picture of a sofa-- any sofa-- in the fabric of my choice, I discovered that I could save around $600 if I just give up on the reversible chaise idea.  I found this sofa:

Which I think is probably upholstered in the fabric I'm ordering.  And then I was all like, wow-- I really like that sofa.  And it's $550 cheaper than the reversible chaise one.  And I'm not really at that point in my life where the extra $550 doesn't really matter-- in fact, I sincerely doubt that I will ever arrive at that point.  But I have always wanted a sofa with a chaise, because (for reasons that are entirely obscure even to me) the idea of stretching my legs out in front of me while still facing the television is, like, the height of my aspirations in the world.  

Since it's not too late for me to change my order, I have a couple of days (until my swatch gets here for approval) to decide.  I called my mom for advice (full disclosure: I do this daily.  I'm thirty-one.  Sorry Mom!) and she suggested moving the furniture around the room to sort of mock up how it'd be with a chaise so I could decide how much I really loved it that way.  I may have mentioned this before, but my mom is brilliant, y'all.

Behold my mock-up:

 

I used my West Elm dhurrie ottoman, placed about 10" to the right of my current sofa (since the new sofa will be about 10" wider) help me visualize the whole situation.  A few more photos:

The whole room as seen from the dining room:

Most of the room as seen from the front door: 

 

Where's the yellow corduroy chair that is totally getting reupholstered this summer, you ask?  Here:

I like it there.  

Actually, I like this whole arrangement a lot-- it feels like it makes sense.  But as you may have noticed in some of these photos, the side tables on either end of the couch create a bit of an issue:

When you walk into the front door, quite a bit of your immediate view is a big ol' lampshade pretty much right at eye-height.  I thought I'd solve this problem by moving the lamps to a long, narrow console table to be placed behind this sofa-- I've been lusting after this not-cheap shaker drop-leaf one:

-- but this morning I tried making a mock-up and putting the lamps roughly where they'd be if I got the table above, and they look exceedingly weird silhouetted against the big picture window.  Like, just bad.  So bad I couldn't even bring myself to take a picture.

And I'm definitely not down with getting smaller / shorter lamps-- my grandmother made those mismatched fire-extinguisher lamps, and together they comprise one of The Coolest Things I Own.  They couldn't possibly go anywhere else in the house.  Those are dedicated living-room lamps if ever I've see such a thing. 

So what to do?  To chaise or not to chaise?  What's the answer to the lamps / table(s) conundrum?  How great would the chaise sofa look with a round coffee table like this vintage Lane Acclaim one?  

Help meeeeeeee!

Big Screen

When we bought our house, it kind of had a screen door.

Kind of, you say?  

Yes, kind of (per this photo from August 2012):

So, yeah.  Not cute.  It was 1) unpainted, 2) torn, 3) incorrectly installed-- see the big silver hinges screwed into the door molding?  And it didn't have a pneumatic closer (obviously), so if you wanted to hold it open, you had to do it like this:

 

Yes, what you're looking at is the old screen door TIED to the front of the house.  

My dad removed it for us (along with the dead bush that was tied to the house on the other side of the door) about a week after we closed on the house.  He tried to buy a new hinge for it and reattach it properly, but by that point both the door and the door frame had been damaged beyond repair.  There was pretty much no way to make that door work.

So we went nearly a year without a screen door-- not really a big deal except that none of the other windows in our living room / dining room area can be opened.  So when it's hot out, it's also pretty stuffy in the living area.  After a bunch of warm, beautiful days left us sweating profusely as we watched TV, on Saturday we finally decided to head over to the Home Depot and see what they had in the way of screen doors.  

Our minds were totally blown when we walked in and encountered the perfect door for $148: already the exact same color as our front door (how in the hell does that happen?), precisely the right size, in stock, etc.  And it promised an easy install (which we were not stupid enough to fall for-- we know by now that there's no such thing as an easy install).  So we handed over a $50 gift card we had left over from Christmas and coughed up the remaining $98.  Feeling cautiously optimistic, we headed home and started the install.

And really, it was easy!  Well, it would have been easy except for three tiny little things:

FIRST SNAFU: While we were hacksawing the frame pieces to fit into our door opening, our hacksaw blade snapped in half.  That left us to find the other (broken) hacksaw and change out the broken blade for the whole one.  If you've ever tried to change a hacksaw blade, you know you have to fit two microscopic pins through two microscopic holes on either end of the tiny blade, then quickly jam the whole thing into the hacksaw frame before the pins fall out.  Time lost due to the broken blade: 15min

SECOND SNAFU: We were supposed to drill the holes for the door handle with a 5/16" drill bit.  We didn't have one, but we had a 1/4" bit.  We were much too lazy to go all the way back to the Home Depot after a drill bit just 1/16" bigger than the one we already had, so we decided to make it work.  We eventually succeeded.  Let's just leave it at that.  Time lost due to our stubbornness: 30min

THIRD SNAFU:  During the drill-bit-too-small-for-the-job disaster, I somehow managed to drop the teeny-tiny spring mechanism that fits inside the door handle.  The spring bounced, and we could. not. find. it. anywhere.  This culminated in me sweeping the entire driveway and then sifting through the dirt with my fingers.  I finally found it.  Time lost due to my clumsiness: 1hr.

But now we have a functional, attractive screen door that lets the fresh air in!  And it doesn't have to be tied to our house!  Hurray!

Pardon the disgusting iPhone photo as always.  Anyway, as you can see, we have lots of work do to on the landscaping front.  We've done a ton to the front of the house (installed house numbers, chopped the 10ft hedge that obscured the house from the street, painted the mullions in the big bay window, painted the front door, weeded, etc etc) but we know we have miles to go before we sleep.  More on that in a soon-to-come post.

In the meantime, meet my new friends on the back deck:

Juniper spiral topiaries!  On the hunt for the right pots.  Onward and [outdoors]ward!

Back In The Bathroom Again

So we've got big plans for the summer.  Our families will be coming to visit us, which means we'll have a few extra sets of hands and lots of free expertise for the projects we've been too scared to tackle by ourselves.  The first visit will be from Ray's parents and his awesome Uncle Pat and Aunt Kim from Michigan.

Now, in addition to being all-around cool people who we totally adore, Uncle Pat and Aunt Kim also happen to be bad-ass house-flipping machines.  They're a reno-minded family-- for example, two of their four kids have bought houses and DIY reno'ed them beautifully while still in their early 20's.  And I mean really renovated-- like, new floors, new kitchens, new bathrooms, basements, decks, plumbing, electrical, you name it.  And Pat and Kim have agreed to help us finish the bathroom while they're here, for which we are insanely, hair-tearingly grateful.

What's left to do in there?  A lot.

1.  Rip out the Blueberry Beast:

 

Yes, it's time to bid a not-so-fond farewell to the blue-plastic faux marble shower surround!  

To be honest I'm a little worried about this part, because-- as with everything else in this house-- the person(s) who installed it didn't do us any favors. It's sort of loose from the wall. And the corners of the plastic surround are rounded, while the corners of the walls are square.  Which means you can stick your finger down between the wall and the Blueberry Beast.  And if you'll recall, when we moved in there was this soffit-y thing:

(I'd already knocked a hole in it when I took this photo at 10pm one Wednesday night-- when, due to my dad's speakerphone encouragement, I decided to see what was in there).  See how the paint is all bubbly along the bottom of it?  That's because the soffit trapped water vapor over the tub after every shower, and the ceiling vent in the middle of the room was powerless to draw out the moisture.  So eventually it beaded up on the ceiling and ran down the walls behind the poorly-installed Blueberry Beast.  The soffit's gone now:

Please pardon the shower curtain hanging so low-- this photo was taken minutes after I finished painting my freshly skim-coated walls.

But we know there's going to be unholy mold behind that thing since water ran freely down behind the Beast for probably thirty years before we yanked out the soffit.  Like, call-the-mold-remediators-and-pay-them-$5000 mold.  Rebuild-the-wall-because-the-studs-are-rotten mold.  Tape-off-the-bathroom-from-the-rest-of-the-house-while-you-work-in-there mold.  Hairy, sticky, smelly, awful, deadly mold.

But, as our pal Franklin D. once told us, we have nothing to fear but fear itself.  And mold, but whatever.  Off comes the Blueberry Beast!  After we do whatever we have to do with the moldy walls back there, Pat and Kim will help us install backer-board, apply subway tile, and grout it.  Yay!

2.  Fix the subfloor.

[All the rest of this is dependent on how long it takes to deal with the Blueberry Beast, because we're not trying to make Ray's family spend their entire trip to the West Coast slaving away in our bathroom]

As we discovered when we tried to repair the leaking toilet a few months ago, there is actually no subfloor under it.  Yes, that's right-- the toilet is basically hovering on top of the sewer pipe, gingerly balanced on some Marmoleum that's just floating above our floor joists.  Which means that the asshole who installed the Marmoleum a few years ago (we know who you are, just sayin') KNEW there was no subfloor under the toilet and he just chose to go ahead and put the flooring down over a gaping void.  Special place in Hell, yada yada, yada.  Anyway, we're going to fix that, either with Ray's family or with mine (we'll get to our plans for their visit in a soon-to-come post).  That'll mean ripping up the fugly Marmoleum (not going to lie, I'm pretty excited about that part) and then we'll...

3. Tile the floor.

I think we're going with this:

Plain, pretty 2" white hex tiles from here (please note the hilarious caption under the photo on the site) with nice pale-gray grout.  2" hex tile is such a classic look, no?  And since we know this most likely won't be our "forever" home, we're trying to go with something that will please the maximum amount of buyers AND be pretty and cost-effective.  However, because I have champagne taste despite my hex-tile budget, I've been daydreaming about this:

I know I can't do it, even though I've found it for as little as $5.90/sq.ft.-- I need to keep this house as neutral as possible-- but I loooooove it and I can't promise it won't wind up as my kitchen backsplash.  It comes in a bunch of colors.  I need it.

And then we will just refinish the tub (right, like anything is that easy) and be DONE with the bathroom.  D.O.N.E.  Done-zo.  Yay!

A Million Little Projects

Long time, no post-- we haven't done much of substance around here lately.  We've arrived-- much sooner than I thought-- at the point where all the things that need to be done are a) infinitesimally tiny and more or less invisible to the naked eye, or b) absolutely massive and impossible to do by ourselves.  Even still, in the couple of weeks since I posted, I've...

1.  acquired a new dining room rug which is totally the wrong color but I might keep it anyway
2.  painted one dining room chair a darker gray to see if I like it (I don't)
3.  finished the RASTs with hardware I painted to match (photos of all this in a minute)
4.  repainted the master bedroom ceiling
5.  lost out on a midcentury Baker console table I really liked via an eBay auction
6.  worked some more on the bathroom ceiling
7.  re-patched the master bedroom walls where the spackle I'd used had shrunk
8.  killed / vacuumed up about 367,721,003 flies
9.  finished half the rat-proofing around the foundation (more on that in a bit), and
10. weeded the front yard.

Obviously most of that stuff is tiny and inconsequential-- like, I know I shouldn't really list "killing flies" as a home-improvement project.  But when your house has dead rats (hey, at least we know the poison's working, and this time we couldn't smell it/them) and there are literally tens of huge furry flesh flies on the lamp in your laundry room, killing them feels like both a job and an accomplishment.  And losing an eBay auction is also not a project, but it did take up quite a bit of my time.  The table was gorgeous, but I plan to console myself by... well, we'll get to that in another post.

First things first: the dining room rug.  I have no distance photos, and between all these projects the dining room is way too messy to bother photographing now (from my current vantage point on the sofa, I can see two bags of grass seed, a tube of wood filler, tin snips, my shop vac, a gallon of ceiling paint, my yardwork shoes, two screwdrivers, etc. etc. in the dining room), so this is the best I can do:

Yeah, we'll talk about the pizza-box-with-primed-hardware-on-it in a minute.  For now, the rug.  It's an indoor/outdoor, which I thought was a really good idea for the Pacific Northwest, but the real reason I bought it was its shape: a 6'7" square was exactly what I needed.  I didn't find too many options in the 7' square arena, and this one promised to be a very inexpensive (like, less than $100) gray and ivory quatrefoil-patterned godsend.  It is, in fact, the right size, and I really like it.  It's one of those Safavieh ones and it looks and feels like a nice flatwoven rug.  However, as you may be able to tell from the photo, it's not really gray.  It's more of a French blue.  And that is pretty much the ONLY color not found in my living-room rug.  Ugh.

I've decided to keep it while casually looking for another 7' square to replace it-- when I find something, this one will go outside to our covered patio, where it will someday be joined by two comfy armchairs and some kind of cocktail table.  

Anyway, the French blue leads us to our next conundrum: what to do with the dining room chairs?  As you can see in the above photo, the light gray I chose when I first bought them looks like primer, but the Home Depot didn't have any other appealing gray options.  So the last time I was in Salem I stopped by Lowe's (yes, the closest Lowe's is forty-five minutes away) to check out their spraypaint selection and I came home with something that promised to be a little darker.  After patiently waiting months for the weather to warm up, I finally took one chair outside and sprayed it on Friday.  Results:

You're right, it is not gray.  It is teal.  This is obviously a no-go. 

At the moment I'm thinking I sand the hell out of them, beef up their joints a bit, and go semi-gloss white.  I'm kind of feeling the Hollywood Regency thing these days, and if the question is WWJAD (What Would Jonathan Adler Do?) then the answer is always glossy white.  Thoughts?

Let's go back to that first photo for a minute:

Yes, you are absolutely looking at a pizza box with a bunch of hardware on it-- I needed something into which to screw the hardware for my RASTs while I painted it.  This pizza box happened to be handy, which is strange because we order pizza about once in NEVER out here.  

Tangent: the pizza in Oregon is absolute shit.  Shit, shit, shit.  Yes, I was a bit spoiled by New Haven (before you even say anything, Modern is the best apizza, and I miss it ALL. THE. DAMN. TIME, like sometimes I have dreams where I'm eating it), but even if I hadn't lived in the land of pizza perfection, I still wouldn't like the super doughy, yeasty, extra-sweet-saucy, limp-dishraggy disaster that passes for pizza in the Pacific Northwest. 

Anyway, we ordered pizza last week because we are stupidly optimistic people and we always think that just this one time the pizza's going to be okay.  Spoiler alert: it never is.  But anyway I had the pizza box so I screwed in my faux-bamboo hardware:

A short handle for the top and bottom drawers of each RAST and a long handle for the less-adorned middle drawers.  These came from coolknobsandpulls.com, which had the least-expensive faux-bamboo pulls, and since I planned to paint them it didn't matter that the 5in. ones were nickel and the 7in. ones were bronze.

I primed 'em with some metal-bonding spray primer:

Painted 'em with an artist's brush:

Drilled holes in my drawerfronts, and screwed 'em in:

  

Oof, horrible photo quality.  Let's try that again:

 

Even worse.  Well, I tried.  

Anyhow, I think the RASTS look pretty boss now.  No guarantees that I won't decide to do a little something with the awkward space under the bottom drawer, but that'll have to wait til I get a jigsaw.  And my birthday is coming up in just four short months (Dad)!

[Feint]

Check it:

Yeah, I couldn't live with the chartreuse.  So I decided to find a different color in the rug.  Here's a different shot for color-comparison purposes:  

 

See it there in the fourth band in from the outside?  

And yes, I did attach the fretwork this weekend!  Thanks for noticing.  I really like it.  Here's what it looked like sans fretwork:

So much better with the fretwork, no?  Here's a little breakdown of the my RASTS went from here:

Through here:

 

To here:

My fretwork came from myoverlays.com (highly recommend, by the way) in the mail on Monday, so I painted it chartreuse.  I was still planning on going ahead with the whole chartreuse thing, but over the course of the week it became clear to me that it was the wrong direction.   I mean, I want to be a chartreuse kind of person, but I guess I'm just not.  So I picked out the new color (this one's Black Pepper by Benjamin Moore).  I filled the pre-drilled hardware holes on the drawer fronts with wood filler, sanded them down, and painted everything.  I waited for all the components to dry thoroughly, and this afternoon I attached the fretwork with some gel superglue (SO MUCH BETTER than the regular runny kind, seriously).

On Friday I popped by T.J. Maxx because you just never know, right?  And I picked up two down-filled zippered ikat pillows for $16 each-- I figured I couldn't make 'em too much cheaper than that, so it seemed like a good deal.  Then today while I was in my office on campus this morning (yes, I was totally working in my office on a Sunday morning) I grabbed a pair of lamps I've been keeping in there-- I think matching nightstands necessitate matching lamps, and I only have one useable outlet in my office so I had no need of a matching pair there.  I bought these at Target last year, and I really like them.  I used some of our excess hardcover books (we have a lot of those floating around) to make the lamps a bit taller.

As for the RASTS, I'm done save for the hardware.  In keeping with the Hollywood Regency theme I was going for, I've ordered some faux-bamboo drawer handles which I'll paint to match the dresser.  Lots of texture for the win!

Let's go back to August 2012 for a minute:

Oof.  Now May 2013:

Much better, non?