it's a wonderful house

goin all hildi on this house

yep, this is the weekend during which i wear black and channel hildi santo-tomas. i won't be wearing kitten heels for the occasion, though i do love my kitten heels. i'm just not made of the same matter as she is.

instead, we spend much of the day tomorrow shuffling between our house and hundreds of other houses in the neighborhood: it is the regent square civic association yard sale! every year, the saturday after mother's day, we find treasures large and small and end the day exhausted and smug. what better way is there to be? :)

and thanks to jack, don, tom, and whatever other plasterers have traipsed through our house, we now have rooms in which to put them! actually, it isn't all jack and the plasterers--they're just putting the gorgeous finishing touches on. first came destruction--starting months ago, crews of men came through every day, tearing out walls, sistering joists, framing studs and walls that had been torn out (including a load-bearing one--fun!), insulating, adding air conditioning, rewiring, plumbing, and probably other things that i'm not even remembering. but the past few weeks have been all about the pretty. plasterers came in and sanded down the texture (ugly, uneven, bleh) and made the walls and ceilings smooth, white, and soothing.

one room, the front entry, is ready for priming and painting. so today i bought two gallons of untinted primer for that room, a gallon of ceiling paint, and a gallon of paint for the walls. all of this is from freshaire choice, a no-voc (not even after the pigment is added) paint easily available from home depot. primer was about $25 per gallon, and the paints were in the neighborhood of $35 per gallon.

i also bought primer (though we have to take it back to get it tinted, because i forgot to request it and the woman helping me didn't think to offer it) and paints for the bedroom, which is our highest-priority room to finish. all the colors are inspired by fallingwater colors (really, by pittsburgh paint's collection of fallingwater colors). i wish i could post images of the colors from freshaire's web site, but it stupidly scripty and i can't even get a screen shot. grr! but you can see them here if you want. the ceilings in both rooms (all, maybe) are going to be a pale blue called nightfall (from the earth collection). the walls in the entry room will be canyon pebble (also from the earth collection), a cool beige. not my normal color, but i think that it will showcase andrew's framed photos beautifully, as well as setting off the white-with-crimson wedding certificate that will hang in there. best of all, i'm planning to put a slate-tile floor in there, and the walls should pick that up, too. the blue ceiling will provide cool contrast.

the walls of the bedroom will be a deep chocolaty brown called wildwood trail (from, you guessed it, the earth collection), which will be gorgeous contrasting with the pale blue on the ceiling. as an accent, i'm hoping to be brave enough to paint a way-oversized flower (think blown-up photo silhouette, not realistic or cartooned) in a lovely red called rhythm of red (from the botanical collection). i haven't quite figured out where or how to do this--i wanted to put it on the bed wall originally, but i also need an accent for the wall that you see when you're coming up the stairs. i'm still planning that.

and next weekend is memorial day, which means that we should be able to find a decent deal on a mattress (we already have a bed). yay!

the other rooms should be ready for painting by sunday as well, but i thought i'd start with two rooms to make sure that we love this paint. and, well, because i couldn't stomach paying that much all at once at home depot. :)

in landscaping news, i have a brown thumb and can never grow anything. this year, i used a white flower farm gift certificate from jen to buy four little plants. i planted them in the fall, and a couple of them were actually growing! i know! but then kimicata brothers, our lawn-mowing and sort of landscaping company, came and MOWED OVER THEM. i am so pissed! this is not the first time--it happened with a hydrangea a few years ago, too--but this time i put big rings of mulch around them. i thought surely they'd know to avoid that. duh!

last, i think that smartboy wants the contractors to finish more of the second-floor bathroom than i'd realized--we meet with the foreman (karl) and the general (sal) monday morning to go over the plan. they've framed and roughed in everything, but i think that he wants to have them do more, such as putting in the shower pan. not sure what else. we already had the electrician put in the light fixtures (except for sconces, which i haven't chosen yet) and exhaust fan. it'll be swell when it's finished.

so that's our weekend. i promise not to put any hay on the walls.

potty mouth

we had to choose fixtures for the second- and third-floor bathrooms last night and this morning, because the plumber was tearing out old plumbing and roughing in new stuff. we spent a little time with karl the wondercarpenter and dan and dave the plumbers finalizing the layout, but they needed details, so off to the internets i went. i already had a basic design in mind, of course, and i knew that we wanted caroma toilets. here's what else we chose:

two vanities, one for the big third-floor bathroom

and a slightly narrower one for the small second-floor bathroom, both from home depot.

the faucets and showerheads are from cifial, a company recommended to us by our architect. we're doing a rainshower head in both showers:

along with a handheld from the same suite (techno) on the opposite wall in each shower. i love these.

finally, the lavatory faucets, also from the cifial techno line:

i didn't have to choose a sink yet, but i tend to like chunky vessels or super-shallow ones best.

our house in the middle of our street

see this? now it looks like this: we're going green, you know, and a hole in the floor uses 100 percent less water than a flushing toilet. why go halfway?

okay, okay. we are putting a toilet back there. we just have a lot of work to do between now and then. tomorrow, the carpenters will tear out the boards inset between the floor joists and the plumber will tear out the existing bad stuff, replacing it with good plumbing where we want it. we're starting to choose fixtures and finishes for this, which will become smartboy's bathroom primarily.

remember this? this is the reading nook in the master bedroom that i loved tearing apart so much. ha. i thought *that* was tearing apart? i hadn't seen anything yet. check it out now: that's insulation (hooray!!!) peeking out of the access panel in the eaves over there, and the radiator (see that little baseboard heater?) has moved from behind where our headboard will be over to the little reading nook. it's going to be so pretty and cozy--i can't wait. and see this corner? it looks like this now: (yes, that's plywood keeping us from plummeting through to the first floor.)

here there's now a big old gap for our tv and components: and here is the same wall on the other side, where our carpenters are building us some shelves specially sized for doovdes: and here in my study sits a still-huge pile of furniture. see at the bottom there where there's a big yellow wood dresser? that's where bethie's shower gift is, along with my bulky and super-bulky yarns, other finished objects, and gift wrapping. yeah. i'm going to be able to get to that. in time to finish the gift before the shower. this saturday. yeah. that's happening.

but that's okay. i am so very excited at all the progress that our contractors have made and so pleased to call this ramshackle house our own. especially as we watch newscast after newscast talking about people losing their homes, i am very, very grateful for our falling-down house.

why, yes, it *has* been a while.

oh, lawd. the house is in that frightening state during which it looks like we're gutting the whole place and rebuilding it from the inside out. it might look like that because that's pretty much what we're doing in some places.

i finally got around to taking a few photos today, but they suck even more than usual--blurry and grainy, both because there's little light upstairs and because i'm sick and shaky. all i want to do is sleep and stop my sinuses from feeling like death dropped a big, wet sandbag on my head (and it stayed there). but the house progress is just too fun not to share :)

so here is the first shot. one project was to tear out the wall that divided the first-floor apartment from the second, converting the house back to a single-family home (yay!). so you can see the gash where the guys tore out the wall in this pic. the electrician rewired the switches that used to be on that wall (on the door side, for the tenants' entryway, which you see in the left side of the photo) to the wall that will now be on the left as you enter the house through this, the front door. you can also see where a lot of the ceiling plaster is falling down. fun, i'n't it?

this
is the newly exposed ceiling in my craft room. every ceiling--not just the dropped acoustical-tile ceilings, but all the plaster and lath beyond it, all the way up to the framing--on the second floor has been ripped out. you can see a frighteningly slight jack holding up the bedroom-closet floor above us. and in the bottom of the photo, you can see the roof. neat, huh?

this
is the same room, just a bit to the right of the previous photo. the silvery snake going up the wall and into the ceiling is the air-conditioning duct. the second and third floors are receiving a high-velocity system that we're eagerly anticipating using this summer. those shiny new joists you see are the sister joists that the guys put in this week. turns out that, after they exposed the ceilings, they discovered that the house had shifted quite a bit and that therefore some of the joists had been pulled away from the beams supporting them. they also learned that the joists were smaller than they should be under at least the current code. apparently, if you have a 14-foot span, you need 2x9-inch joists set 16 inches on center. ours were 2x8-inch joists set 24 inches on center. so they're sistering all the joists with 2x10s in all those rooms. along the way, it's making the ceilings flatter, if not level. this is very cool.

you can see here where one of the joists has been notched to fit properly; it's also been laminated with a length of plywood so that it doesn't shear along that cut edge.

hard to see, but the dark parts in most of this photo are the shadows in the roof framing. these are the ceiling joists in the same craft room as the preceding photos, but above us is the third-floor storage closet (the floor and walls of which are in the left portion of the photo, where you see the grey-green cast of the insulation there), and to the right of that closet is just roof. we're on the second floor, but the roof is gabled (see the photo at the top of the blog--it's a queen anne who's lost much of her glory). i love the exposed framing and would keep it that way if we could structurally and insulationwise. but it'll all be plastered over in the coming weeks.

now we're in the living room. the doorway in which i'm standing leads to the hallway, to the left of which is the craft room we just left. through the doorway visible on the right of the photo is the room that will be my study. the cutout in the wall is being built out for us for our television, which will sit on a bracket and swing out into the room as needed but is otherwise going to be flush with the wall. the components will also sit in that former closet, beneath the television. to the left of the tv cutout is the fireplace--you know, the pretty white one with the mirror above it? all that's covered up to protect it from the unbeLIEVable amount of dust--fine, powdery, sooty grey and black stuff that gets into EVerything. and above us, you see the largest trunk of the a/c system snaking above the ceiling joists and their sister joists.

here, we've moved to the left in the same room--just more joists and sisters. we love how open the higher ceilings make it all feel. and you can see how great the natural light is in here, even on a cloudy and grey day like today.

these are the joists on the wall opposite the fireplace, the wall that separates the living room from my craft room.

and this is the wall between the fireplace and its opposite, the wall containing this bay window, through which all that natural light pours. you can see that they've added some framing above the windows as well, though i don't remember why. karl, our carpenter foreman, has been awesome about keeping us informed about any decisions we need to make, the pros and cons of all the alternatives, and sometimes his own recommendation (if we want it). he rocks. :)

this is just another shot of the ductwork from the space pak a/c system. the space it's occupying is the eaves on either side of the bedroom above us, which also provide us with a little storage.

this is the same stuff, just in my study. i've never been one for stained glass, especially not if it's not of the arts and crafts persuasion, but i love that i have this pretty stuff in my study. the walls around it will likely be a warm medium green; all trim in the house will probably be repainted in a very white white. i'd originally thought we might strip them all and stain them, but i think that karl thought that they might be just paint-grade wood.

in this photo, you can see the electrician's work waiting for him. he'll be running new junction boxes in all the rooms, but we needed to get all the wiring out of the way for rocky, the demolition guy, to work. you can also see in the lower left of the photo the place where the wall a/c unit had sat. we're going to look for a recycled window--perhaps stained or other decorative glass--to put there instead of just closing it off. construction junction often has such goodies.

and here you see the stairs that were my pride and joy when they were installed just a couple of months ago--clear and bright maple, now carpeted in the sooty dust that is everywhere above us. we've tried to keep as much of it as possible contained to the second and third floors, though there's a light coating on a couple of things that have returned downstairs from up there. my poor beautiful yarn and needles are up there, protected from this fate only by plastic drop cloths. i fear opening the drawers below them when all is over.

this pathetically dark and grainy photo is of the storage closet on the third floor. they decided to use this to hold the air handler for the space pak system. it's actually really good--there's still plenty of closet space for off-season clothes, linens, luggage, and whatever else we have to store up there. the light hole in the left center is shining through from the craft room below.

this little gable is on the far right of the master bedroom. we'll see out the tall, skinny window that's providing the light in this photo when we're lying in bed; i'm standing about where the foot of the bed will go. we plan to put in an armchair, a little table, and a reading lamp to create a cozy little reading nook; the baseboard radiator you can see (barely) in the right center, atop the pile of now-filthy flooring (for the staircase landing), is going to move to just beside the access-panel cutout you see there to keep the reading nook warm. the access panel will provide us with a little storage, albeit uninsulated, for things like seasonal decor (yes, i'm finally going to start doing that, now that i'll have a place to store it--i already started planning independence-day bunting for the porches!).

and looky here! it's the living room on the second floor, visible through what was once flooring on the third floor! cool, huh? like it's a loft, only it's not! the floors in this place are in pretty lousy shape, so i imagine that it was just easier to tear up since they knew we were flooring over them. maple is the plan, though sometimes i long for the rich red-brown of cherry.

the last stop on our tour is my little dressing corner. karl is building a window seat to cover this ductwork, so i can have a little reading nook here, too, but the main purpose of this gable is for my dressing table (which is in the long box on the floor to the left). so excited. the electrician is putting in receptacles beside the window seat and the dressing table for task lighting and hair appliances :) i love that we get to plan all that stuff.

finally, a little peek at the filth that my feet picked up just on this little trip upstairs and back down. i hate when i forget to put shoes on :)

now we're cookin' with gas!

well, okay. really we're still cooking with electric; we aren't touching the kitchen for a good while yet. but you know--it's an expression. an idiom. one that i hope means, "we're busy doing stuff!" or some such thing. because we were busy this weekend. i started it last weekend by getting two chairs and an ottoman off to the upholsterer, making room in the living room. and i put up the tree last week, which just made me smile, smile, smile. it's a vintage evergleam aluminum tree i bought off of ebay and i LOVE it. it's in excellent--not new, but excellent--condition. we have a sad and paltry assortment of ornaments, but we'll get there. we have years.

then george bought us a new television and tivo, so he moved the old tv, tivo, dvd player, and cable box up to the bedroom (where there is, as yet, nothing else--i hope to remedy that this week by buying a bed, finally). and today we cleared both dressers (huge vintage ones from a yard sale this spring--veneered and not beautiful, but roomy and well built) out of there and into my craft room. we also set up the blocking table in there, and then i moved all the drawers and yarn i could find back into the room. it looks better, as does all the space it was occupying before :) he is a happy husband. *and* he spent a long time today mopping--with a commercial bucket and mop (a commercial mopping bucket is way cooler than it sounds)--the linoleum tiles in the living room. they've been covered with dried plaster and paint since at least the last renovation. he mopped with simple green then a couple of times over with water, and i went behind him with a putty knife to get the plaster globs up. there's still plenty of paint on the floor, but at least it's a reasonably clean and smooth surface now. i wish the tiles were in good enough shape to keep as the surface treatment--i love linoleum--but they're just wrecked. we'll be putting maple hardwood flooring down after more renovations are finished. but at least now we can use the room--w00t! the reupholstered chairs should be home in a couple of weeks; meanwhile, we're sitting on my old vintage chair (old as in i had it reupholstered in the late 1990s; vintage as in a hand-me-down from my parents, who bought it in the late 1950s), a beanbag, and dog beds :) that is, unless george brings the ikea lessbo sofa upstairs.

eventually, we're planning to build a mod-looking platform for our queen bed for the living room, making a big lounger sofa, and the lessbo sofa will probably return to the entry parlor. but we also have to get our new bed for the bedroom before we can do that, so it may be a few weeks, at least, before that happens.

meanwhile, the second-floor bath continues to be disgusting. i have fantasies of ripping out the old vanity, sink, and faucet fixture and putting in some kind of cabinet i find at construction junction (what's your function?) that i'll cut just perfectly (because i have *so* much experience with power saws and sanders) to hold the green glass bowl we bought at the highland park yard sale as well. i took one look and knew it would be the perfect vessel sink. but i think that's a project that will have to wait, not only because of my stunted carpentry skills, but also because the faucets that make me drool cost way more than i think i could bring george to want to spend right now. (yes, i could go buy one myself, but i'm terrible at keeping things from him. and he'd flip out when i told him what i spent. so i wait.)

my study is the sad room right now. it's piles and boxes and bags of everything imaginable. it's the de facto storage room right now. i hope to get it more organized--or at least consolidated and into covered containers--before more of the dropped ceiling lives up to its name. (ever since we took a tile out to see what was awaiting us after we remove it, it's been sagging and slowly dropping tiles onto the floor. ew.) and before the hvac and insulation guys start work, which will be soon.

but my priority project at the moment (when i'm not--gasp!--working) is knitting the last gift we have for christmas to send off in the mail. just two little-girl sleeves left; you wouldn't think it would take me long. cross your fingers that i can finish them during the game tomorrow! (because then i can cast on something for me!) :)

hm. not so much progress as...more or less the same.

so, george and i finally got around to going upstairs to looking at the finished staircase. as you can see from tonight's photos they aren't so much finished as they are...pretty much the way they looked yesterday. this is odd. team staircase left at about 10:30 this morning, while i was on the phone with the cable company. i heard lots of noise before and during the phone call, lots of power tools running, and, while on the phone, i heard them in the entryway, but they go in and out a lot--to get more materials, to have a smoke, to get a snack, whatever. i don't know--they're grownups doing their work, and i don't want people watching me like a hawk when i work, so i didn't. but i realized after a while that the house was totally quiet and they seemed to have left. fine, i thought, they must really not have had much to do this morning if they were here for just more than an hour. i pretty much forgot about it until tonight, because i was swamped with work (how unusual, i know). but when george and i went up to see our new staircase, we were very surprised to see it looking just like it had last night. it was very bizarre. now, i'm sure they did *something* since yesterday, but i can't figure out what. the landing has no flooring, still, and the stairs aren't polyurethaned or anything. looks like i'll need to phone or email sal to find out what's up.

i will say, though, that they are solid and beautiful. we were both cooing over how quiet and solid they feel, and we know that they'll be fantastic when they're finished. we just wonder when that'll be!

monday, team hvac comes for an hour or two to go through the detailed layout of the ductwork. this is much less exciting now than it was this summer, when i thought i would die from my heat-induced migraines every day. but (a) part of this process includes getting insulation installed in places where there is none (there's a reason that novelists always refer to houses like this as "drafty, old" almost as one word), which will make the house much more comfortable and more economically and efficiently heated (we hope!), and (b) we will have it all done six months from now, when it's sweltering outside. yay!

(on the migraine front, i'm sad to report that, after five days straight with no headache bad enough to medicate--a record in i-don't-know-how-many years--i'm now on day two of such a headache. i was so, so hopeful that my new alpha-lipoic acid supplements + my new splint that's readjusting my bite and helping my jaw muscles not to spasm so much had made the headaches stop. so i'm a little bummed out now that they're back and i haven't beaten them after all.)

stringers, risers, and treads, oh my!

actually, i misspoke yesterday. the stringers were already in place--it was the trim on which we were waiting today. team staircase returned this morning for a couple of hours, but i haven't gone upstairs to look at the finished project; i try to wait for george to get home before i peek so we can see it together for the first time :)

the treads are the horizontal slabs--in our case, maple--on which you step when you go upstairs. risers are the vertical panels that run perpendicular to our treads, which you can see when you look at the staircase head-on. ours are also maple. stringers are the sides, basically, that support the treads and risers; since we'll be painting ours to match the rest of the trimwork, we went with paint-grade wood for these. (oak or pine, i forget.)

our staircase has fully enclosed stringers, which is one of the things that made ours a staircase that was difficult and expensive to repair or replace. the staircase runs inside a stairwell with walls all around, and the stringers were actually built into the walls on the sides. the treads and risers had been fitted into routed-out slots in the risers. to repair the broken treads that we had, because the treads and risers were beginning to slip out of the routed grooves and were almost all cracked lengthwise, we had to have team staircase tear out the whole shebang. all of it. they put in new stringers all the way up, both sides, both flights, a new landing platform, and then placed the new treads and risers on the stringers. as far as i know, there's no routing back into the wall, which is why you see a gap between the walls and the edges--the walls and floors are all uneven (surprise), so, to make a level staircase, they built the stairs the right, even dimensions and put in trim to conceal the gaps. kind of like you do with baseboard trim to conceal gaps between walls and floorboards.

what we really wanted, but would have cost us way more money than we wanted to spend on one project, was an open staircase--ideally, without even risers--like this one from mylen stairs. but that would have meant tearing out all the walls in the stairwell *and* constructing all custom pieces. it would have looked amazing, but we couldn't have afforded a/c or insulation or even our diy floors and new furniture. so we opted for a design that mimicked what's there already but with greater stability. but you can see that it has no risers--only treads--and the stringers are beneath the stairs for a floating, clean, and modern look.

maple is a beautiful thing.

look at this. does that not bring a tear of joy to your eye? well, it does to mine. after a nearly full (9ish to 4ish) day of hearing lots of crashing, banging, and power tools, we now have this beautiful staircase in place. team staircase comes back for a couple of hours tomorrow morning to finish them--i hope that means stringers and clear poly. sooo beautiful!

the staircase replacement has begun!

i have been anticipating this day like it's christmas or my birthday. more, maybe. today, the staircase-replacement subcontractors started work.

now, for those of you playing at home, i'll catch you up: this staircase, which consists of two short flights and a landing, connects the second and third floors. second floor = craft room, living room, my study, a couple of closets, a second bathroom, and george's darkroom. third floor = master bedroom, storage closet, and the room that will someday be our master bathroom. so this is a key bit of structure in our humble abode.

so this is the top flight of this staircase, looking down from the third-floor landing, just outside our master bedroom. and this is the same flight from the bottom. fear not--those stairs were already broken. in fact, they're the reason we're replacing the staircase--all the stairs are on their way to that state. but we'd already taken the carpeting out, more than a year ago, so that's not really the progress shot. the real progress is on the landing. this is the landing now: do you see that? no stringers on the steps, and a beautiful new plywood subfloor, all even and nice, on the landing. this is exciting.

team staircase left after just a few hours this morning to go cut stuff this afternoon (at least, that's how they put it to me--i'm sure there's something more to it than "cutting stuff"). they'll come back to replace all those broken treads and risers with beautiful, select maple, and replace those stringers with paint-grade oak. and they'll lay 3/4" maple flooring on the landings. we still have to order the boards for the second and third floors, but they'll wait until the hvac guy (who'll come in a couple of weeks to install central air on the second and third floors) and insulation guy (who'll install insulation--surprisingly--in all three stories, mostly blown cellulose, but some fiberglass batts as appropriate) finish up in a few weeks. and then we'll remove the dropped ceilings, paint the walls, and put the floors in. did i mention that i can't wait?

building permit, ho!

not building-permit ho (i love building permits, but i'm not a ho for them). not you're a building permit, ho (i would never call you that). but building permit, ho! as in, today we applied for the building and zoning permits, got the go-ahead to start work, and let's go! i'm excited! the contractor has already spoken with the stair guy and is arranging to meet with the architect and the hvac and insulation guys together. i am SO EXCITED. i started researching beds today, since one of the first things we'll do after the third-floor a/c and insulation are finished is have a new, king-sized bed put up there. we're converting our queen-sized bed to a lounge sofa in the second-floor living room. did i mention that i'm excited?

for the master bedroom, i want to use a mix of shades of blues and browns, but i'm not sure of the configuration yet; the ceiling is angled, with a flat center and sloped sides, so i'm not sure whether to paint the sloped parts the same color as the walls, the same color as the ceiling, or some other color. we'll use a shade of one of those colors on the hallway wall that will frame the master-bedroom door. i cannot wait to get started.

the bed part is easier, though, i hope. i have a couple of beds in mind from west elm; we want a platform bed and a good king-sized mattress. another thing i can't wait for. i think we'll also try to put the small sofa that we have in our living room right now into the bedroom along the longest wall, so give us some seating, the dogs additional sleeping space, and, when needed, a guest a third place to sleep (it's a twin sleeper). this is my current favorite:

adding to the home and nesting fun today, i received all the goodies i'd ordered for thanksgiving from williams-sonoma. this year, i'm making the featured thanksgiving menu on williams-sonoma's web site. i've had good luck with their menus before, and this one looks delicious. yay! we'll have rosemary-parmesan icebox crackers; butternut squash chowder; cider-brined turkey; cheddar-chive mashed potatoes; brussels sprouts with radicchio and pancetta; wild mushroom, chestnut, and sausage dressing; molded cranberry sauce, apple pie, and a pecan and pumpkin-butter trifle. i even bought a trifle bowl for the occasion! and little leaf-shaped cookie cutters for the pie top and the crackers. squee!!