Candy anyone?

We live in a pretty cute neighborhood and had been told at settlement to expect quite a few trick-or-treaters. The count? 3 small groups of appropriately-aged children and 1 group of teenagers (who didn't even have the decency to wear costumes). We have a lot of leftover candy...

And the winner is....

Teal!

Actually it's coincidence that teal won the poll. It was my favorite choice anyway, and might have been what I picked regardless of results. This particular color is Sherwin William's Grand Canal. It's a little too bright for my liking--in the end we decided that we may like bold but it has to have some muted grays in it. However, we discovered our lack of love for Grand Canal after we had put down one coat, so it is destined to stay. Especially since we already switched colors once:

You can see that the right wall has a different shade of blue on it. That version of teal (SW's Blue Mosque) was way too "little boy's room" blue and we hated it immediately. So we re-primed that area and went with something different. We're not switching again--too much effort for a bathroom.

I'm happy to report that we were able to change the bathroom light fixture from a really old and dusty model to something a little more modern. Unlike the dining room, the fixture fit into the electrical box. I also put up some shelves and hooks, so the bathroom is looking mighty nice. Now if we could only use it (we were advised by the paint store to wait a week before showering).

More results: the HVAC guy came today and fixed our problems. To solve the problems with the upstairs, he bled the system and got rid of some air bubbles, even letting us keep the pipe he used to route the water out the window. As for the thermostat issue, apparently our zone valves (something I didn't even know existed until today) were set to manual, meaning that the pipes from the boiler to the baseboards were open and allowing water to run regardless of what the thermostat said. He switched them to automatic and we are good to go. The best news: he didn't charge us for any of it!

And after a month of trying at Home Depot, Lowes, and a local hardware store, we finally got spare keys made. It took a trip to a locksmith (not the people who rekeyed our doors) during business hours, but now we should be set, with 10 keys. The locksmith said that our locks are totally normal and blamed the stores' poor maintenance of their cutting equipment as the reason it took so many tries to get working keys.

And finally, so I can at least have a picture if the whole thing comes crashing down:

It's not done yet (the light edges of the cabinets will be covered and we still have to put door pulls on) but it's pretty darn close. I love it. Now I just hope it doesn't fall down...

One of Many

So thanks to an unseasonably cold week, we had to turn on our heat only to discover....(drum roll please)....a malfunction. We have oil-powered hot water baseboard heating and we think that all the symptoms lead to two possibly unrelated issues:

1.) Several of the baseboards aren't working. Specifically the main floor bathroom and the upstairs bedrooms. The main floor bedrooms, living room, dining room, as well as the upstairs bathroom all are heating, to various degrees. When we had our home inspection, one of the upstairs bedrooms did not have working heat, and the previous owner had an HVAC contractor come in to fix it. The other upstairs bedroom was working, so we know that at least one of the two should be on. Since they're not, we hope that it's something the repairman did and something we can have him refix. We have the receipt for the repairs in our closing packet, and are planning to call the company up and having them send someone out. (Unless, of course, anyone has any suggestions we can try first.)

2.) The heater does not seem to respond to the thermostat. When we finally caved in and turned on the heat, our thermostat read 55 degrees. We set the temperature to 68 and turned on our furnace (up until yesterday, the emergency switch was off). The heat continued all night and this morning, it was 75 on the main floor, where the thermostat is located. It's much cooler upstairs, since the heaters aren't on--per problem 1--but there's no thermostat up there to affect the heat settings. We turned the heat off on the thermostat and the heat was STILL running. The only way to finally turn it off was to flip the emergency switch to the boiler. Our knowledgeable friend told us to try troubleshooting a few things, so we replaced the battery to the thermostat and check the wires, removing one that was linking the heating to the cooling (the thermostat downstairs only controls the heat). No dice. We're going to go to Home Depot today to get a new thermostat and see if that helps, but if not, the probably could apparently be at the boiler end of things. We hope that our service contract with the oil company will cover that...

As always, suggestions are welcome!!

What's been keeping us busy?

After all the posts about our plans for the guest bedroom and living room, it seemed about time to give an update.

The bedroom, complete with burgundy curtains, lamp shades, and duvet. I think the red looks nice against the gray and purple:

We've been spending most of our time on the living room. First, we settled on curtains for the bay window. Eventually, we'll put up a second bar for the white ones, but for now we have them all strung up on the same rod:

We put a beautiful fan D's grandfather gave us on the mantle. It exactly matches the burnt red accents we've already bought:

What's really been keeping us busy is the wall unit we've been putting together from Ikea cabinets and Elfa shelving. It looks weird without shelves, but we're getting to that part. We're buying wood today to stain, using Minwax English Chestnut.

(I took that photo before we put the fan up...)


I'm spending Columbus Day priming the bathroom in preparation for paint, even though we still don't have a paint color. Someone gave us the good advice to find curtains and rugs first and then match them to a paint color. Unfortunately, we like black and white accents, which still keeps all our options open. D is just going to run to Sherwin Williams sometime this week and come back with a surprise, since I'm much more indecisive on this than he is. In a meantime, keep voting in our poll.

What to do with the bathroom?

The black and white tiles in our bathroom would go with pretty much any color wall, which is leaving us frozen in indecision. Vote in our paint color poll or leave a comment with your suggestion of what color we should paint our walls. We want something bold, not pastel, but other than that, we are at a loss.

A Do-It-Yourself Living Room

D has diligently been reading Apartment Therapy and come up with some really interesting ways to do our living room. We both love books (remember this?) and wanted them to take front and center in our room. Of course, we also need a place for the TV, various players, and unsightly cables. And we don't have the money for a custom-made wall unit.

After a thorough measuring session, we made a scale blue-print of what we want to end up with, so there will hopefully be no surprises (our scanner isn't plugged in yet, so I'm photographing everything):

Basically, we want to have covered cabinets below the TV and then shelving everywhere else. D read that a great value for 132'' of cabinet is to actually use the wall cabinets from Ikea's Akurum kitchens. We're using the one that looks something like this:

It will be on 8'' legs to rise above our baseboard heating and the doors will have hardware that will hopefully make it look less kitchen-y. Here is the current state of said cabinets:

 

Oh Ikea! Your flat-packed boxes and assembly-required pieces are always such a joy...

For shelving, D found an ingenious system from The Container Store that only requires us to put one line of screws into the wall, instead of in every level of shelving (neither of us wanted to ruin our newly-painted walls).

The Elfa shelving system all hangs from one strip at the top, which can be hidden by a shelf. The vertical strips will be visible, but we plan on sufficiently covering them with books and clutter. Elfa supposedly doesn't need to go into any wall studs, but we are trying to locate a few anyway. 2 full-length and 2 half-length shelves full of books all held up on a tiny strip of screws sounds both miraculous and scary. Instead of using Elfa's cheap-looking veneer shelves (which are over-priced anyway), we're going to buy untreated pine and stain it ourselves.

So with Ikea cabinets on the bottom and Elfa shelving on top, I think we have a plan for one wall. We're even leaving room for a larger TV, in case we ever decide to upgrade.

We are also test-driving curtains and trying to decide between sheer and heavy:

For now, inspired by a design magazine someone gave me, we're going to try several panels of sheers with a thick gray panel on each end, all on one bar. We've tentatively decided that our colors for the room would be brown, teal (check out that rug!) and burnt/brick red. But I couldn't find a single set of curtains that pulled in two of those colors, so rather than have a brown on brown area (curtains and sofa), we're sticking to grays that complement the walls. All those colors together seems to look OK so far, but suggestions, as always, are very appreciated.

Electric Boogaloo

D and I have already learned in our two short weeks of home ownership that nothing is as easy as it looks. I bought a beautiful hanging lamp for the dining room to replace the one that is there now. It seemed like it would be an easy one for one replacement. Not so...

The new one on the left (with glass sconces on all the sockets) is supposed to replace the old one on the right (note the lovely white paint--wonder how that happened?).

The problem is that the new lamp has completely different hardware, which doesn't appear compatible with what is actually in the ceiling. The old chandelier (which D kindly put back in place after admitting defeat, so we wouldn't have to look at a hole with wires sticking out) is completely oriented vertically. It has an adapter piece with threads on it to screw into both the lamp and the electrical box. I can't find a picture online and forgot to take one when the hardware was exposed. The new one has what all the online how-to guides show as normal:

Except that the hole in our ceiling is too small to even fit this horizontal bar inside. We are stumped. We think maybe this would require cutting into the drywall and replacing the electrical box. And we're not sure if the ceiling can even support the weight of the new lamp if we did try to install it ourselves (the old one was about 4 lbs., the new one about 8 lbs.). The old hardware in the ceiling is obviously outdated, since I can't even find a picture online in the how-to guides.

So I suppose we have to admit defeat completely and call an electrician. Except that it seemed so easy and I don't want to throw money away for something we can do ourselves. This was going to be the first step to replacing all the ceiling fixtures in our house, mostly with ceiling fans. I think that after this failure, we are probably not capable of more advanced lighting installation. If you have any ideas (besides "call an electrician"), I would love to hear them.

But hey, at least we remembered to turn off the right circuits!

Edited to add: My friend and her handyman husband informed me that, indeed, my wiring is out of date. Apparently a box that would fit the horizontal bar inside is the smallest kind installed today. So we need an electrician to reoutfit us...

The Painting (in pictures)

Almost a week without Internet was very painful. Verizon had to come and clean or replace a lot of lines leading up to our house. Fortunately, there was no problem with the wiring inside our house, so we were spared that expense. Since moving in and unable to update to my blog, I have tormented friends and coworkers with stories of bugs, electrical problems, and fridge issues. But since it's late and I do not want to think of those problems at the moment, I will show you lots of photos of last week's painting.

First, the office, transformed from a rather bleh yellow into Sherwin William's "Leisure Blue." Lesson learned: We didn't bother to prime since we were putting a dark color over a light color. We just washed down the walls and started painting. Big mistake! We had a lot of trouble covering up the yellow, because (I think, anyway) we were painting matte over what seemed like satin. The paint just wouldn't stick. We got it eventually, thanks to D's persistent rolling, but I think priming would have helped.

Here's pretty much the same view (at night, with a flash, but I think you can get the idea):

Now, the living room, in Sherwin William's "Knitting Needles" with a satin finish. It covered up the (matte) yellow very well, supporting my hypothesis that the shininess of the finish matters.

This is a completely different view and a photo taken more to showcase our book addiction than the color,  but I like it:

 

Last but not least, two pictures to show that the cats were pretty cool with the move, all things considered. They loved the chaotic mess of boxes and furniture and, after enduring a painful car ride with me, have been enjoying the new house with its bay window and basement full of bugs.