11 Months In....

  The gestastional period for a human is 9 months. Apparently homes take longer. At least to redo. 

As of last week, we've officially been in our home for 11 months. It doesn't sound that long and yet it also sounds like forever. But in our gestational period, we've actually taken on a lot. 

We've shared most of our home projects here, but there are probably a few updates we've missed, and the last month has been a bevy of projects so we have lots to share! 

First, I have to say we finally sold out and hired a professional. I know, gasp. 

But Bill HATES painting, and he's been kind enough to paint every month for the last 10 months so lets give the guy a break on month 11, huh? And I don't mind painting at all but lately my weekends have been very busy with work and to be honest, I'm a little short and weak for those tall, long ceilings. 

So we hired a professional painter. At least for the living room and the den (a lot of ceiling surface!) 

Here was our living room prior to painting. Not bad at all, but hadn't been painted in 40 some years. 

And here it is now: 

Its a little messier, sure, but so much brighter and cleaner looking! 

And it was amazing to see what a difference hiring a professional makes. I was starting to get embarrassed he might look at our paint jobs... 

Haven't done much else in the living room yet - just switched out some pillows, curtains and stained/painted our coffee table. The bigger plans in there will come later in the form of build in bookcases where our tv now stands. 

We hadn't shared anything about our den on here in a while so before last week, this is what it looked like: 

 Its still a complete mess by my standards, but its much better than it was. We finally got all the quarter round down, painted all the trim and doors, and figured out a makeshift furniture plan with all of our hunking pieces (its a big room, but there's a lot of big furniture down there...) 

And Bill made this great stump side table. Picture doesn't do it justice. 

And obviously these will have some great art work in them soon enough. 

Future home of a gas fireplace.

And here is the room post paint job: 

(also you can see the mostly completed ottoman above) 

I suspect its a little harder to see the difference but its much cleaner looking and the brighter paint makes the texture less obvious. 

ALSO.... a beautiful new bath! 

Ok, there's one shitty picture of it thus far. Its a deep, dark, matte blue and we installed the new sink. I've got to come up with a plan for the mirror (not sure if I'm sticking with that one), add some blinds, and some accessories and its good to go. 

Speaking of baths, I'm not sure if we ever put pics of the upstairs baths up here - not that we've done anything new to them, but I'm too lazy to go through my own blog to see if we posted any at all. 

Ok, now that we got that out of the way. A few other shots of the house updates we've done over the last year... 

Bam!

(Do you like our model?)

Our massive upstairs room

Our guest bedroom! I actually love this room and other than painting the side tables to match and changing out that overhead light (and maybe for once ironing a sheet...), I like the room as-is for the time being. Probably will change it in a few years, but its a pleasant room in the mean time.


Our master bedroom (clean, for once)

The bedding will get changed out (getting a hotel-style white duvet cover soon) 

And that dresser is getting a coat of glossy, dark gray at some point. 

Our art-gallery (sans art!) foyer. Art is in the process of being made so we'll see what goes in there. 

  

With the poly'd chest and with a real camera... 

And now for the super big reveal......

Holy kitchen, Batman!

Yep, we painted the cabinets. Finally. And they look stunning, if I do say so myself. 

And if that wasn't cool enough, Bill also put a cement finish on our awful, neon-yellow laminate counters! It turned out really beautiful. 

He also installed a ton of super-sparkly LED under-cabinet lighting that makes the whole room look more expensive. 

Of course, our kitchen looked like this for about two weeks... 

But it was totally worth it! 

The floors come next once I pick out some damn tile (Bill would have had the whole floor installed a week ago but its taking me like 3 weeks just to pick a color). It will be in the same herringbone pattern that the current "brick" tiles are in. 

We also bought new lighting for the kitchen so we can rid ourselves of those nasty fluorescent lights.  

The other side of the kitchen basically looks the same. I chose not to paint the pantry cabinets because I like the look of them as a piece of furniture and I want to eventually do a two-tone thing with our cabinets, adding a darker-cabinet island in the middle to match the pantry. 

But here it is now (actually not now because this is an old picture as you can tell by peeking into our hallway there) ;-) 

... but Bill MADE this awesome bench. From reclaimed wood from a 100+ year old factory. With no plans! He's amazing. 

_

We are getting so close to a "done" mode in the house, which feels really good. There are still a lot of small projects (there always will be!) and there are some other larger projects that can get done down the road (built ins in the living room and third bedroom & redoing the tile in both bathrooms) but the house isn't embarrassing anymore, which feels pretty spectacular. After the tile is in and the new kitchen lights go in, the first floor (and den) living areas will just be there for the decorating! 

We can spend year 2 on some outdoor projects (like that pond...) and just maintaining our home. There are a lot of utility items with our home that have been put on hold (cleaning out the air ducts, inspecting and repairing the chimneys, getting a new AC unit, etc) and it will be nice to spend money on those things without it feeling like "Oh, well, I guess now we can't redo the ugly bedroom this year". 

So all in all, Year 1 has been pretty fantastic and I'm very happy with where we are at. Especially since 2014/15 will be pretty wedding related (more on that fun planning soon!) 

Next month on May 23rd, we will have our official 1-year in and I'm hoping to do a house tour then with video and legit before-and-afters, so stay tuned for that as well! 

P.s. A special shout out to all of our friends and family who helped us with this crazy house - we seriously could not have done it without you! Thank you, thank you, thank you! 

The Big Reveal!

So we just (well, about 2 weeks ago at this point but you know how quickly I post these...) survived Snowmaggedon. Not one of those "our driveway got coated in snow and it was cold out" Snowmaggedons. This was a 6-days without power Snowmaggedon. It wasn't what I would call pleasant, or even quaint. It sucked. But, absence makes the heart grow fonder and now that we have it back, we cherish this good ol' electricity probably more than each other right now.

In the celebration of electricity, I thought it fitting we share our most airy and light-filled transformation yet: Our foyer.

As a reminder, here's what the room looked like upon move in:

Sexy, thick navy carpets, granny-approved floral wallpaper (pre-stained), and a broken, dim lantern. 

For the first thing guests saw when they came in, it was pretty bleak, and entirely unwelcoming. 

So after some careful thought, and a little help from my friends, I decided the space needed brightening up... 

And more "Progress".... 

Sorry for the shitty iPhone pics, but immediately after getting together the space, we took the furniture out to sand it and restain (which we are in the process of doing!). So these were some pretty quick captures. But hopefully you can see we went with gallery-white walls, a glossy-black door and mod light fixture and painted the risers on the stairs. 

We plan on putting up some original artwork and some fun frames to give the space some more character, but I'm a big fan already. Once the chest gets some poly on it and we get it back in there, this room will be 90% complete! The result? I hope a general mash-up of the following: 

Hoping for that kind of artwork... 

Those stairs, similar black door, and pops of turquoise glass and natural greens.

All on a super white background with a few modern elements. 

Hope it looks like we are getting close! 

We've been cranking through a few other small projects as of late (and by we I mean Bill)... 

An awesome stump side table that will be making its way to the den

Our welcoming new house numbers! 

And we may have given our dog a mohawk.... 

Stay tuned for more house updates, life updates and dog hairdos! 

Holidays in Photos

It often takes me a while to write a post - there's some editing involved, I have to try to be witty, and the actual writing usually takes an hour. Thus, I don't do the post. So instead of waiting another decade for me to think of something funny to say about Christmas, I'll just post the pictures. You'll see the gist of the holiday was all of us being obsessed (rightfully so!) with baby Leah, anyway. So description needed. 

(this girl got read to a lot...) 

(Dr. Mike!) 

(Yeah, that's Bill in a cabinet. He was glad he didn't decide to a plumber by trade...) 

Our Engagement

People who know us really well already have heard that we got engaged over the holidays and most have heard the story. For those who don't know us well think we got engaged or married like two years ago.

I thought for a while whether or not I wanted our story to make its way to the internet. We had a very personal, beautiful moment when Bill proposed and I wasn't sure if we wanted that bannered across the web. But then I realized I'm not Gwyneth Paltrow and no one reads this blog so I said f*ck it.

Actually, what I really decided was that I wanted the story to be written down some place before I forgot what happened with my twenty-something Alzheimer's.

So here's most of what I remember:

This really should be a two-part story. Bill should tell you his end, the 6 months or so of planning and having to keep a big, juicy secret from the person he lives with. But here is my side of the story - which was a total of like 2 hours.

The weekend before we went away for the holiday, Bill and I decided to have a couple dates. I would plan a date for Friday night, with our good friend April (who was apparently in the know the whole time!), and Bill would plan something for Saturday. I planned a good outing for Friday and he said he had his night planned as well, though he was going to make it a surprise. I didn't really think anything of that. Bill is a good date planner and romantic so he making it a surprise isn't out of the ordinary. Plus he was really casual about the whole thing. The day of he didn't make a big deal out of it, almost like we could go or not, it didn't matter. The only thing he told me was that the event was late and that we should go out for a few drinks before.

So we do. Its like 9:30 (way later than I would normally start a night out because I'm that old now) and we start to get ready to go out to a nearby bar. We have a couple of drinks. I'm a bitch about how the place doesn't have ambiance. He still decides to propose later that night somehow.

Then we head to Bryn Mawr, where its completely dead and no bars are open. I begin to guess that we are going to the Bryn Mawr Film Institute - a little boutique art theater that holds film discussions and film theory classes to stuck up snobs like ourselves. I figure they are having a one-night midnight showing of something fun, like a Christmas classic. I'm excited for that, but don't put much stock into and just enjoy our evening. Then we park outside the theater, we start walking towards it and Bill says, "Ok, we are seeing a midnight showing. That's the surprise!" Perfect. Just like I thought. Plus I get to have popcorn after my two dark and stormies. Ideal.

We walk in and its dead. There is one young man at the concessions counter. He greets us and Bill says he wants two for the midnight showing. The guy says sure, and then casually mentions that no one else is there, that's its probably going to be a quiet night because of the holiday. I don't think anything of it - makes perfect sense. Then he says that their ticket machine is down so he has to give us old-school, blue raffle tickets. They had just undergone a major renovation of the theater and just reopened so I still don't think anything of it. I hug Bill's arm and ask if I can get popcorn. We order a big thing of popcorn and walk into the theater. No one is there.

I think this is really fun. I run to the bathroom, smile at the concession guy, and go to my seat. Bill and I make some jokes about being the only ones there, about how we can talk during the movie and be on our cell phones. I begin to munch away on the giant tub of buttery goodness.

The usual before ad-titles are playing on the screen: advertisements for local car dealerships and the like. They played a few "coming soon" scrolls for the theater, one of which was for White Christmas. I'm sure that's what we are seeing and even say so. Then they play the "turn off your cell phones" bit. Then its movie time.

But instead of Irving Berlin's WWII opener coming on, our piano, in black and white, is huge on the screen. I'm confused. I recognize it, but it doesn't click. Probably those two dark and stormies. Then Bill comes on, stage right. And I realize what's happening. He's going to propose. After I realized that, I mostly was just giggles and overwhelmed. I said in retrospect that I was so overwhelmed that it was hard to pay attention to what was actually happening. Luckily, Bill made the video on the big screen himself, so we've had time to review it since.

Not to go into detail about the video, but Bill started with a piano song, after which he wrote on the screen a few lyrics to "our" song. Then, the video stopped and in the dark theater, Bill got down on one knee in front of me and asked me to marry him (the exact phrase is one I'll keep for myself). I think I just squeaked instead of saying yes, but some place in there was an affirmative, then a hug, and then a very sparkly something slid onto my finger. Then Bill sat next to me again and the film started back up. It was a collection of images from our life - the things that brought us to that moment and made us partners. I made little squeaks and fanned my face like I was in Steel Magnolias the entire time. Then it ended and we hugged again, and snuggled. Then I immediately said he was crazy for letting me give into by two biggest vices, booze and popcorn, before such a major event.

Then the great actor who was the concession worker came in with a picnic basket and a camera. Bill opened the picnic basket, which had a bottle of champagne and a couple of glasses and the nice young man took a picture of us, me still giggling and being overwhelmed. Bill was pretty much relieved (not for me saying yes, but for the whole thing finally being over) at this point and cool as a cucumber. We then popped the bottle, filled our glasses and I started staring at the sparkle on my hand. Bill tells me he designed it himself, with the help of a jeweler friend of ours. I'm even more overwhelmed. And he did a great job - it looks antique but its super strong and has much more meaning to it.

Then one of our favorite movies starts playing, Moonrise Kingdom (which is what we named our "grande estate", by the way). We sip our champagne as some of our favorite scenes come onto the screen. I don't want to moment to end. Bill is happy its done. He tells me how much he wanted to tell me every day what he was doing, the newest development, how it was coming together, my opinion on the ring. Such a big thing and he couldn't tell his best friend. I'm glad we get to finally share again too.

It really was the perfect proposal, regardless of the popcorn, booze or the being so overwhelmed I barely knew what was happening. But I'm so glad it did happen and it feels so good to look down at this ring on my hand and think about that night and all the nights we have coming to us.