Entries from February 2009 ↓

Hallelujah!

1. We’re doing another walk through with the contractor tomorrow evening and he’s promised that the first of the floors will be in and the grey paint options for the den will be up. You know what that means. Lots of pictures and democracy at work, people.

2. On that note, Tung pointed out that I’m missing valuable brain matter and I will start using Flickr to compress my images to a Wordpress-friendly size. This means you’ll finally see pictures of our jaunt to Hawaii and my recent birthday celebration. Trust me, you don’t even know what you’re in for.

3. I hate giving money to people I don’t genuinely like.

A few weeks into the renovation it suddenly dawned on us that we’re idiots for not doing the fireplaces. There are three fireplaces in our house all with crumbling, disgusting tile. We were already stripping them. Why weren’t we having them also replace the tile. And just like we decided to do it.

But finding the tile was exceedingly painful. It’s a strange space with a lot of constraints and, naturally, we wanted a unique tile size. I want it to be nice and “us” but also not unique in a way that you would think “well, that certainly wasn’t original.” Which is a little odd considering the original tiles made me gag. And so what followed was about 30 hours of painful googling, several fruitless phone calls and 2 weekends of interacting with rude, snobbish salespeople. I can only imagine that when I said “for our fireplace” the salesperson actually heard “no commission to speak of.” Fine.

In the end, we settled on 2 x 4 tiles from Ann Sacks in an ivory for the dining room and a silver grey (which is super pale) for the parlor. Of course, it won’t arrive for 6 weeks which will delay the completion of the project. Sigh.

This is one of the tile designs that we really wanted but just didn’t work out…

We considered doing something a bit more fabulous but then realized we hadn’t yet won the lottery.

4. The contractor is super excited about our vacuum wire solution. Every time I talk to him he mentions it and beams with pride. I’m pretty certain we can expect those suckers popping up throughout Brooklyn in the future.

For Fat Tuesday we decided Mexican would be delightful. What? That’s how we do it.

So Matt, Jackie, Tung and I headed to Playa which ended up kind of sucking but whatever. We had fun.

And Matt met some shady character outside from whom he purchased a very sleek bicycle. Hotness.

All in all a pretty good beginning to the week.

Because it looks freaking awesome!

The floors have arrived! 8″ planks of gorgeous white oak.

Hello, beautiful stairs, hell-o.

…contrary to what Anthony Hopkins said on the Oscar’s this past Sunday. But he’s awfully nice to look at. Whatever you think of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, it’s made of some pretty cool technical stuff.

And if you’re not familiar with TED you should be. Now. If anyone knows how I can get invited to the next TED I would be willing to do you some very special favors.

Go get yourself a free wedding in Atlanta, bitches! Julia - that’s all you!

It took a whole lot of convincing but I finally caught Jasper on his new bed. Or what I’m pretty sure he thinks of as “that thing on floor” because his real bed is with us. But once we are back in the house I think he’ll like having a place to sleep when we’re hanging out in the kitchen or den.

Thom wants a BIG TV.

Which meant we had the contractor build out the wall to support the TV. Just for shits and giggles I bet Thom that he couldn’t do it without any wires. Or, maybe it was more of a demand. Whatever.

The result is a genius solution with some in wall PVC and a central vacuum outlet. All the wiring will go through this and be totally hidden.

Now we have a newly naked fireplace, mirror and pocket doors. All baby fresh and waiting for stain.

And the kitchen is starting to go back in. Even covered in dust and garbage you can just tell those floors are going to be killer.

While we were there we made use of the tools and prepped the wood for the milk bottle chandelier.

Try to control your delight. This week the floors are GOING IN!