Autumn Leaves

We've taken a break on home improvements after the Housewarming Party and decided to focus on the holiday season instead. But that doesn't mean we could ignore standard cold-weather preparations. And so today we tackled the leaves...

We raked the front yard once shortly before our party, but had deliberately ignored the back--which no one can see from the street--until most of the leaves fell. By late November, "fall" was over. D used the blower while I raked (I wanted too--I needed a post-Thanksgiving work-out). We filled 5 tarps-worth of leaves, which we dragged to the front curb. Fortunately, our neighborhood has curbside pick-up that runs on a cycle, so we don't even have to bag the leaves. There are still a lot of leaves in the back but we made a nice dent in it. We also re-raked the front yard. I'm sure I will be sore tomorrow.

We also finally got around to shutting our outdoor faucets. It took a while to find the right knobs, since we completely forgot that kind of useful information we got during our home inspection. But we figured it out, and have the outdoor faucets open with the indoor part shut down. As soon as we find them in the garage, we will also dress the faucets with the cute little booties my parents gave us.

What didn't we do? Well, we have some unfinished wood on our back steps that we planned to weatherproof.

The problem, which we just noticed today, is that Thompson's Water Seal requires a few days of dry, warm weather. The instructions state that 2 days of above 50-degree weather is necessary. We may have missed the boat on this one. Hopefully the wood won't take too much of a beating this winter and we can take care of it in the spring.

Another thing we didn't get to, but that is on our fall prep list, is fixing our window sills. The front bay window was already on our list of to-do's:

Then D's dad noticed that we have some rotting outside our upstairs windows, and that we should treat it before it rots too deeply.  The upstairs bedroom window is much worse than the bay window. It's practically hollow in there:

We need to buy some wood filler and exterior primer and paint. By default, we tend to go to Sherwin Williams; but I think this job doesn't require a particularly nice paint, so we'll probably just go to Home Depot. Paint recommendations are welcome. We're also considering just replacing the upstairs windows, which are original to the house and do not have storm or screen windows. If we do that, the sill will get replaced too. Alternately, we could just install storm/screen windows to the existing structure, which means that we will still have to fix the sill (that could be a tongue-twister). We're still doing research and it's all pretty expensive, so we'll probably just stop the rot and deal with the bigger issues later.

A Warm House

I've been meaning to post a quick thank you to everyone who came to wish us well (or wished us well from afar) at our housewarming party a few weeks ago. Over 40 people stopped by and I think fun was had by all, so our inaugural house party was a success. Best of all, we did not run out of food (thank you, Costco, despite your daunting quantities). Here are some pictures, all of which we took before our guests arrived. I planned to snap a few at the party but was too busy having fun!

Thanks to D's aunt, who sent us a beautiful flower arrangement that arrived with perfect timing, our table looks complete.

The only ones not happy about the party? The cats. Can you spot them both? Our skittish one is that lump to the left of the gray one. He dove under the covers the second the doorbell rang.

Chandelier Hanging

Our house included a free, already installed chandelier in the dining room.

Unfortunately, we hated it.

So J got a second-hand chandelier for a nice discount and I promised to install it. I took down the old fixture, begun unraveling the electrical wires, and got a minor case of "electrocution". You really DO have to turn the power off. After tripping nearly all of the circuit breakers (poorly labeled box!), I turned off the power. I took it down, picked up the new fixture, and quickly realized I had a problem, as was chronicled by J on October 2nd.

I resolved (after re-installing the old chandelier) to worry about other things. Unfortunately for me J REALLY didn't like the fixture, so she began pushing me to get an electrician. Which I was 98% against since it SHOULD be easy.

Fortunately for us, my grandfather read the blog and (in short) told me it WAS easy and gave me some pointers. I was concerned because the box we had didn't have the corner screw holes to attach the cross-bar. My grandfather pointed out that these boxes are standard and the holes almost certainly hiding underneath the plaster. Yes, he was correct. The next problem was that the center nut/U-bolt system to hold the fixture up didn't fit together. A trip to Home Depot yielded an adapter to make them work together.

After some gentle tugging and twisting (we have old and crusty canvas-coated wires) we got it installed.

Our cat P immediately demonstrated his confidence in my fixture hanging.

It's been hanging for about a month now with no issues, so I'm calling this mini-project a success.

Next on the agenda are windows! We've still got the original windows, drafty and sans screens. I'm inclined to keep them warts and all since I hate getting rid of something that's lasted 60 years. We plan on getting some quotes for storm windows. That should help with the draft and screen issues.

A Dining Room, at last

One and a half months after ordering our Basque dining room table, bench, and chairs at Crate and Barrel, they have arrived! We are very excited to welcome they into our home where they will be filling an almost-completely empty room. While waiting for them to arrive, we hung blinds (Roman shades, to be exact. I am slowly learning the vocabulary of window dressing.) and even successfully hung the lamp that caused us so much trouble last month (maybe D will write about that in a little more detail later), after getting more advice and doing more research. We're still working on table decor and other little details, and will eventually get a nice, bright-colored sideboard to contrast the sturdy lines of our table as well as a rug, but otherwise, the dining room is DONE!

Isn't that wine rack cool? A cheap find at a garage sale in our neighborhood. I think I'm going to like living here.

Incidentally, this is so far the only room we haven't had to paint. I love the soft brownish green the previous owners painted in here. We have yet to go through the old cans they left us in the garage--I hope we can find some of this color for some touch-ups.

State of the Living Room

Our $1000 media wall is now complete:

Before we became homeowners, $1000 would have seemed like an insane amount of money to spend on a single wall. After spending large amounts of time comparison shopping, $1000 is actually a solid value to outfit a wall of this size (142 inches wide, about 95 inches high). (That price is not including the TV, books, stereo, etc. Just the cabinets and shelving system).

Our criteria for this wall was: cabinets (important to hide clutter), book shelves, space for a TV, and <$1000. Another issue was the a baseboard runs along the wall, so ideally, whatever we choose will rise above it so as not to insulate the room from the heater!

When trying to find a source to create a media wall our first inclination (and still is for any furniture need) was to see what Ikea had. The Ikea Billy would be the easiest option. They have multiple colors and a wide variety of accessories to integrate a TV into. The problem is that the Billy isn't the sturdiest or most attractive furniture set. The system is plastic veneered fiberboard masquerading (poorly) as wood. It does the job, but not in a aesthetically pleasing way. Most depressing of all, a Billy system to cover the wall is nearly $1000, which we had set as our unofficial budget for the wall.

                                   

The next option I seriously considered was the Ikea Ivar. It's made of unfinished pine wood, which after being stained or painted could be a very attractive piece. It also has options for cabinets, which though plain could be enhanced by gluing some trim to the doors. It would only cost around $600. The major deal breaker was the TV - the shelves are only wide enough to accommodate a 32'' LCD. Which happens to be the size we currently own, but we hope to upgrade to something a little bigger in a few years. I looked into making wider shelves, but the Ivar shelves have a custom metal bracket on each end that would have been very difficult to fabricate.

After two strikes, I came up with my best and final idea. Ikea kitchen cabinets for the base (~$600), container store elfa shelving brackets (~$250), and premium pine shelving that I would cut to size and have J stain (~$150). It's a strange idea on (e)paper. Kitchen cabinets? Closet shelving system? But it gave excellent flexibility in determining the width and height and had the added benefit of the cabinets rising above the baseboard heat. I'm very pleased with how it turned out. We did buy handles for the doors, but I think we will keep them off. The "expanse of wood" effect would be lost with some handles sticking out.

So, along with the fireplace wall,

the living room is coming into form. We still have to design the entry way portion of the living room:

                                      

The current plan (at least in my mind), is to replace that arm chair with a love seat. Behind the love seat will go a Ikea Expedit arranged horizontally. The two rugs will be replaced with one large, rust-colored wool rug. Beyond that, I'm not sure. We'd like to have a coat and umbrella rack. More book shelves and storage could be nice. I'd like to leave some wall space available to hang paintings or photographs. Maybe some modular cubes arranged like a triangle? Lots of options....

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.

 

Home at last! With no Internet.

It's been a busy weekend. We moved completely out of our apartment and spent last night in the new house for the first time in a bed (there was one night last week on the deflated air mattress, but that's another story). And now our cats are here, so it is really home.

Unfortunately, our DSL isn't working. D is going to experience a "first" tomorrow--first time having to stay home to wait for a repair-person to show up. Verizon has told us to expect them between 8am and 7pm. Very helpful. D, a well-read tech geek, tried pretty much everything that could be tried, so now we wait and see what the pros find...no updates for a little while until our Internet is back at full strength (I'm connected right now through a mobile phone).

Guest Bedroom, part 2

Last week was crazy and we painted 3 rooms. I'll save the other two for a different post and put up more pictures of the guest room. D is still not convinced that the colors will go with our burgundy decor, but if it doesn't match then we'll just buy some new curtains and a new bedspread (I'm thinking deep teal--I love dark colors). It's more important that we like the room colors.

You can go back to here to see pictures of the bedroom before we started painting, but here's a reminder:

 

We primed and also tested 3 colors for our lighter walls, called--from top to bottom--Samovar Silver, Nuance, and Knitting Needles (those who know me and my hobbies may realize that when faced with many shades of similar colors, I am apparently drawn to names).

We spent at least an hour taping before priming and painting, only to realize 1.) that you should not tape before priming, especially in our case, where the previous painters were sloppy and the burnt orange had crept onto the baseboards, door frames, and ceiling. We missed those spots with primer because of the tape and had to go back anyway after we pulled the tape off. And 2.) that freehand painting with a nice beveled brush gave us a much better edge than the tape anyway.

Without further ado, here are the finished walls. Since these pictures were taken, we also painted the trim white:

Now we just need some furniture...

Our Guest Bedroom

The furniture currently in our bedroom in our tiny apartment is going to be used in the guest room in our new house. For a few months though, we'll sleep in this so-called guest room while we slowly accumulate the furniture for our new bedroom. The paint colors and decor, then, have to match the reds of our current curtains and bedspreads as well as the stain on our wood furniture. This is the existing decor we're working with:


D and I both like bold colors and I somehow managed to convince him that purple wouldn't necessarily be disastrously feminine. On our families' advice, we're relying on Sherwin Williams paints. We were lucky to catch some sales on Duration, their best paint (I also like that it's low VOC and relatively green). Here are the colors we went with:

The one on the left is called Mythical. The name evokes a little girl's fantasies of unicorns and princesses. Not helping my argument that purple can be genderless. On the right is Samovar Silver. We decided on that one after considering a few different off-whites and grays.

We used the purple on an accent wall and gray for the other walls, with white ceiling and trim. I'm having trouble visualizing if purple is the best complementary color for the burgundies and reds in our curtains and bed spread, but I guess we'll find out soon enough. I'll post before and after pictures of our room once I can get to my camera again (computer's at the apartment, camera's at the house). This weekend we are painting up a storm. The office and the living room are getting a face lift too, and I'll post the details to them later.

Photo tour of the main floor