January Wrap-Up

I cannot say I'm sad to see January come to a close.

Did you know the third Monday is January is called Blue Monday because researchers have found it is the most depressing day of the year? I believe it. Christmas is gone, budgets and pants are tighter, and winter seems like it could stretch on forever. January is historically my least favorite month and this year has done little to change that. I've been sick almost all month and work has been especially demanding (and yes, I'm aware that these two facts are related). I wasn't even finished with my strep throat antibiotics when I came down with a fresh new cold last week and I'm still sniffling and sneezing. But amid all the sickness and long hours at work I've still managed to sneak in a little bit of fun and even a few little projects around the house.

So without further ado, my January accomplishments around the house:

In terms of scope, my largest January undertaking involved taking down, packing up, and putting away Christmas decorations. I always hate this task, but a few (if you count 6 as a few) ornament bins helped to speed up the packing process and give me the giddy organized feeling. 

I also freshened up the content of my gallery wall:

Picked up two new throw pillows:

Took the SoRo nightstands a few shades darker:




Reorganized my Pots and Pans cabinet:



Cleaned out and organized my master closet:

Broke out my old art set to paint something abstract for the wall above my bedroom vanity (if it ever dries):

And last but not least, I hung Fred the Moose:

And to report on my progress vs. my goals, I've reposted my to-do list for the month originally shared here:

Finished:

• Organize my pots/pans cabinet
• Clean up the last vestiges of Christmas 2011 Decor (a few errant pine needles are still floating around)
• Rearrange furniture and accessories now that the trees are down
• Paint/Assemble/Hang an extra special Moose-type Christmas Gift
• Swap out the art in the Living Room gallery wall
• Clean out my master closet

Started:

• Find replacement pillow covers for the scratchy West Elm metallics (lots of online browsing, no decision)
• Freshen up my vanity area (organized vanity top and painted oil for)

Still need to do:

• Seal leaky windows
• Paint the inside of the front stair closet
• Investigate options for repairing the vitrolite in my downstairs bathroom  and/or Research removal costs

Drop Dead Fred

High on my Christmas wishlist was a charming little guy named Fred Jr. from the friendly folks over at Cardboard Safari. Imagine my delight when opening family presents Christmas Eve, I unwrapped dear Fred, a lovely gift from my brother. Hooray! 

Fred is made for the Mudroom. You remember the Mudroom. I blogged about it a lot before the Holidays and then sort of let it stall out 80% of the way done in favor or turkeys and trees.



Mudroom 'Before'



Mudroom 'Before'



Mudroom 'Progress' As of last update

I've repurposed an old shelf from the living room into a shelf-coat rack hybrid and  hung  it just under the exposed pipe (now less icky than before) which brought a lot more function to the wall, but the area was still in need of some pop and Fred is just the guy to bring it.

To prepare Fred for his new duty, I laid out all of his pieces (on cardboard) in the carport and sprayed the first side high-gloss Royal Blue and left him there to overnight to dry.

Unfortunately I forgot to tell my Mom about it so when she arrived the next morning to pick up Totle for daycare, she pulled right in to what appeared to be an empty spot in the carport, running over Fred in the process. Luckily, since the cardboard was still flat (I opted to spray than assemble rather than assemble first), Fred came through his accident virtually unscathed.

Before I got the other side of him sprayed blue, it started raining and I had to bring him inside.  Every time I planned to take him back out to spray the other side I was foiled by illness or inclement weather. This went on for like three weeks, but yesterday it was finally warm and dry enough that I could finish the job. Just a word of caution if you ever assemble an animal from Cardboard Safari, wear gloves. He may have been halfway to road kill, but Fred was not going to be mounted on my wall without exacting his revenge.  Three coats, dry time, and some nasty paper cuts later, I had Fred fully assembled and mounted in place.


Isn't he GORGEOUS?

Kitchen Remodel: Planning

I shared here in my 2012 house goals that I want to remodel my kitchen this year, and I told you all the many reasons why here (including some terribly sophisticated touched up photos) so let this post be the first of VERY many on the how.

Specificially, I need some help planning my kitchen. I've been wrestling with this in my head for MONTHS.

It shouldn't be that hard. The space is ample! But I'm struggling.

Here are the options I am currently weighing:

Option A

 Pros:

• eliminates path from the back door to the kitchen door go through the cooking triangle
• puts sink in front of windows
• tons o' storage cabinet
• tons o' counter space
• both dishwashers get to be near the sink
• has an island

Cons:

• no proper table (just an island)
• presumably most expensive because it requires:
• entirely new lines
• lots of new cabinets
• more countertop lenght
• moving doors
• new windows



Option B

  Pros:

• Two sinks
• allows for multiple cooks
• Island could be configured of two pieces, one stationary the other on casters that could move as needed
• presumably less expensive than A because
• doesn't require that many more new cabinets
• second sink plumbing could be extended off the bathroom plumbing on the otherwise of the wall
• less countertop required (shorter runs)

Cons:

• path from back door to dining room cuts through triangle (but there are two paths so that helps a bit)
• cooking in the left back corner seems...Idk off?
• wasted space in back right corner
• no proper table, just an island
• not much more storage than current
• not much more prep space than current
• fridge is kinda far (10') from main sink, ideal triangle has no leg longer than 9'




Option C



Pros:

• presumably least expensive because
• only require minor appliance/line moves
• few new cabinets
• allows for table with banquette and island 
• leaves blank wall to  put a tv on

Cons:

• not much new storage or prep space (cabinets on back wall only 12" deep)
• not that different from current layout (but small improvements)
• dishwashers can't both be by the sink
• still have to cut through triangle from back door to dining room door

And now I ask for help. What do you guys think? Are there options I'm not considering? Major flaws I can't see? I need lots of input. Help me?

When Inspiration and/or Steroids Strike

2012 is less than a month old and in that time I have managed to squeeze in a nasty cold, a nice little bout of food poisoning then as the cherry on top, last week I was down with strep throat. Not an ideal way to start the year, but apparently I wasn't listening to my body when it was whispering to me to slow down, so it had to yell a little for me to listen. Message received!

The downside of this sickness is that it didn't leave much time for projects or blogging, but now that I've  recuperated, I thought I'd share an extra special glimpse into Mary on steroids (literally, the prescription kind). I flew straight from the "I'm too sick to move or speak" to "OMG, MUST DO STUFF, NOW" so that explains why I found myself on the floor of SoRo at 11pm a few nights ago with wipe-on stain and a foam brush  brush in my hands.  Staining my nightstands seemed like the ideal way to celebrate breaking my fever. Why? ROIDS!

I planned to take these outside and rough them up and evenly stain to take these nightstands a few shades darker to match other wood tones in the room. But it was late, I was juiced and I had energy to burn so I decided to throw caution to the wind and break out my staining brush to "test" the color.

After an hour or so of staining, they looked like this:







The job isn't perfect, but I don't exactly regret it. I think with a little buffing and one more coat (maybe two in a couple places) they're going to look great. I love the added richness the darker stain brings to the room. There was a part of me holding out hope that I'd like the yellow color on that headboard better once the yellow tones on the nightstands were canceled out, but if anything the bad yellow stands out more to me now despite the nightstand improvement.

SoRo is still feeling off to me. I don't like the Taupe walls, I'm underwhelmed by the 7 year old duvet, and I think the room needs a serious injection of interesting and/or masculine elements (not to mention a rug). But despite all the changes still to come, I'm pleased to have at least one SoRo tweak underway even if it was steroid induced.
And in the interests of full disclosure, I've done this kind of thing before. While recuperating from swine flu in 2009, I spontaneously decided to paint my the bulkhead in my apartment kitchen blue, and even though I used craft paint and a texture brush, it looked pretty awesome.





Kitchen Remodel: The Why

As I mentioned in my post on 2012 house plans, I'd like to tackle a kitchen remodel this year. Preferably this spring.

 

I'm pretty lucky that the space looked and functioned just well enough to hold me for the first few months of ownership, because I  haven't had the time or resources to address it yet but I'm hoping that by the time I'm into year 2 (which is only three months away) I'll be working on a new kitchen.

 

 

This is pretty much what my kitchen looked like when I bought the house:



I haven't done all that much to change the kitchen yet. So far I've installed glass panels in the empty cabinet doors,  painted the unfinished decorative window moldings white to match the rest of the trim,  hung some art, removed the old shutters that covered up my exposed brick wall (you can see it without the shutters here), removed the creepy little drawers that left too little space for counter prep, filled a hole,  killed some mold, and filled it with furntiure and cookware.

It is a large space, and not totally without charm, but I have some major beefs with materials and layout.  And since I've had to point most of these issues out to skeptical visitors before they understand and support my desire to remodel the kitchen, it only seems right that I share them with you.

So here is my list of things that don't work for me:

The passage ways are insufficient. Based on my research, all passage ways should be at least 3 ft and preferably 4, before considering space that is consumed when appliance doors are open.  With the dishwasher open, there are only 9 inches between the door and the island, making the main pathway completely blocked. The oven and the back door hit each other, the island is less than three feet from the yellow art wall so even that pass is a little narrow.

The layout is inconvenient. It requires the pathway from door to door to cross directly through the kitchen triangle, the leg of the triangle from fridge to sink is a little too long, and the pantry is 16ft away from the fridge.

 
The appliances are old, ugly, and falling apart. From what I can tell, the appliances in my kitchen were top of the line in 1996 when they were installed by a previous owner, but their day has passed. It is time for stainless and upgrades and gas. Yes, for some reason I have an electric cooktop installed in a kitchen that has a gas line already running to the island. The oven has broken. One of the door shelves in the fridge is broken, etc. And while it would be cheaper just to keep the same footprint and swap out for more modern appliances to go in the same places....


 The appliances are too small for the kitchen and the home. This kitchen is roughly 285 sq ft, there is in theory plenty of room for generously sized appliances yet those in my kitchen are minuscule. The oven cabinet is 30" wide meaning that the oven itself is only 27" and cannot accommodate a full size cookie sheet nor multiple dishes at once. The fridge (and fridge opening)  is also small capacity, I'm guessing on the order of 22 cubic ft based on the width and depth of it. And although under normal circumstances that would be plenty of fridge for one person, I like to entertain a lot. So the small fridge causes  problems around parties and holidays when I can't fit all the food in the fridge and have to chill drinks in tubs of ice.  And the cooktop only has two burners. Yes it has a griddle, but only two burners?

The island is WEIRD. Yes, most of you probably find it charming, and I love a old farmhouse table as much as the next gal, but I object to hacking into the middle of it, inserting a cooktop, and putting it on a bizzaro tile pedestal. It's strange, and it has to go. Also, it is not far enough away from the row of countertops behind it and is positioned badly for the layout of the room.

The upper cabinets are different heights and for some reason that drives me complete insane.

                                                                                         

 The window over the sink looks out into the carport. 'Nuff said.

The countertops are white laminent, or perhaps it should say mostly white, because they appear to have been here a while.

The pantry is 8" deep. Its woefully shallow and barely holds a box of cereal.

The hardware is positioned badly on the cabinet doors. I love cup pulls. I really really do, but they belong in the middle of drawers and almost nowhere else. If handles go on the inside edge of doors they should be positioned vertically and cup pulls would be ridiculous vertically thus confirming they don't belong on doors. And because they are the wrong hardware for the doors their holes are in the wrong place, meaning that to reuse the doors, I will have to fill, sand, and repaint them all. Bah!

 The kitchen lacks a proper backsplash. While the countertops have a connected laminet "backsplash" it doesn't protect the rest of the wall from moisture or food or kitchen stuff, and its a missed opportunity for pretty tile.

The utility closet doesn't have a door.

 Two sets of cabinets have different doors than the rest for no apparent reason.  Most are shaker style with two recessed panels per door, but two sets are shaker style with only one recessed panel per door and I just don't understand why!

There is track lighting and other underwhelming light fixtures. True the light fixture over the island is supposed to double as a pot rack, but its so low, I couldn't hang a pot there without being hit in the face by it.

Some of these issues are major and impede function, while others are minor (or just hurt my eyes) but I'd still like to improve upon them all. I'm really grateful that I didn't have the resources to revamp the kitchen right away, because living with it for the last nine months and using it to prep countless meals, two big parties, and two major holidays has given me a lot of insight into what I really need from the space. I share this all with you not to be overly critical (because as far as kitchens go in 152 year old houses I know got pretty darn lucky with this one) but to give some background so maybe you guys can help issue spot as I propose new ideas.  

I feel like I've been talking about remodeling my kitchen since the first time I saw it live almost a year ago. And even though it is a long time coming, this process is going to take a while! Hope you'll stick with me :)

Crate and Barrel After Christmas Sale

A couple days after Christmas I ran up to Indy with my little siblings for an evening of shopping and hibachi and encountered a lovely After-Christmas Sale at Crate and Barrel when I ran in to replace a water goblet that fell victim to Christmas 2011. That broken glass turned into a very happy accident indeed when I was able to pick up 12 Lustre Green Napkins for the bargain price of........ $12.20 (tax included). The website has these beauties on sale for $2.95, but thanks to a labeling error in store, I got them for less than a buck a piece or about 80% off!


















I also snapped up two of the Bennet Pillows in Cayenne on sale for $19.95 to add a stronger orange pop to my living room sectional.

I would have posted this almost two weeks ago, except it took me that long to take a picture of them. Oops. Here's one in scene:

Gallery Wall Update

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When I first hung the frames for my gallery wall way back in May, most of them were empty. Those that weren't empty were sporting whatever they'd held the last time they were displayed and in many cases they weren't even oriented in the right direction. 

Because I still had zillions of rooms to paint and sinks to plumb and bunch of other crap to do, I didn't want to put a lot of time or money into filling the frames in the short term. Aside from the largest print I bought by Toni Carmine Salerno called Trilogy of Light,  I just stuck stuff in them.

It was a big improvement to have all the frames full and facing the right direction, but since most of the filler was never intended for the wall (old Halloween photos that happened to already be in the frames, Anthropologie wallpaper samples, random doodles) I knew I'd have to upgrade them eventually.

 

Once all my pretty Christmas decorations were gone, so were my distractions so I finally got my act together to start swapping some of it out of the worst offenders.

Here's a blurry photo from far enough away to see the whole collection (I really must start taking pictures with my camera instead of my iPhone....)





And a few closer up:

  





 





My very favorite. Kindred Spirits from Story People. A Christmas gift from Corbin in 2003.  





Other Noises You Don't Want to Hear Coming From the Bathroom

Don't let the post title fool you, this is not about excrement. It is about two "old house" issues I've encountered recently that were brought to my attention via troubling noises emanating from two of my bathrooms.

 I try to keep things pretty real around my little corner of the blogosphere because if the blog was all sunshine and rainbows regarding owning a 152 year old house, everyone would know just how totally full of it I am. So I'm telling it like it is.  I LOVE my house. I'll say it again, I LOVE MY HOUSE! But sometimes, owning a house that is more than 5 times my age comes with some aggravation, and sometimes that takes the form of scary bathroom noises.

Noise #1: The Gurgle
Sometime after Thanksgiving, among all the Very Mary Christmasing going around my house, I noticed a strange gurgle noise every time I turned on my shower in the main upstairs bathroom. It took a little while for me to figure it out, but I eventually traced the sound to slight gurgling in the bowl of my spaceship toilet. As the noise did not seem to be causing an immediate serious problem (nothing was clogged/visibly leaking/overflowing) I opted to monitor the situation. Over the course of a few days, I discovered that my toilet would temporarily lose flushing power immediately following a shower. Not ideal, but not exactly emergent so I called my home warranty company (HSA) and requested a service call. While waiting for a response, the situation worsened. So much so that both upstairs bathrooms were totally out of commission by the time the warranty company finally got around to scheduling a plumber three days later. Cut to me googling, suspecting I had a blocked plumbing vent, and calling in a local plumber. I was thrilled to hear they could be out the same day to address the problem (less so when I found out that they sneakily charged me an extra hundy for "1 hour service" without disclosing the upcharge). To days and over a thousand dollars later, they determined that the blockage was not inside my house (yay, not at all my fault) but instead in an exterior section of very old pipe that had corroded and been filled with tree roots (boo, very expensive). Thankfully in the short term, the problem has been mitigated and I have functional upstairs bathrooms again sans gurgle, but I still need to have the rusted root section of pipe replaced.

Noise #2: The Crash

The second bathroom noise was a lot less serious, and a lot more hilarious. After an evening out at the Brick, eating delicious burgers and drinking a sneaky number of beers, Caleb and I were dropped off at my house. Being slightly inebriated, I went immediately to the kitchen for water and B-12 and Caleb went towards the downstairs bathroom. I heard him shut the door followed by an epic CRASH and a small string of expletives. Thinking he must have accidentally knocked over the metal toilet paper stand, I wasn't immediately concerned, but a few seconds later he emerged holding a large broken piece of Vitrolite tile and making the best "I didn't do it" face ever. This was funny because we were a tiny bit drunk and also because Caleb's luck presents more than his fair share of "this could have happened to anyone" moments. He did nothing to cause this calamity other than close the bathroom door. I'm guessing the reason the tile spontaneously broke up with the wall might have had something to do with the installation (see giant blobs of some kind of adhesive left behind.) So I'll have to do something about that too....  While this style tile is charmingly vintage, it isn't period for the home, so I won't be heartbroken if I can't find the right spares somewhere in the carriage house. I'm hoping to figure out a repair or replacement plan sometime later this month.

New Arrival Favs from Crate and Barrel and CB2

After picking a few favs from the Pottery Barn/West Elm new arrivals, I was thrilled to discover that Crate and Barrel has FINALLY put up some new offerings. Crate and Barrel is probably my favorite place for serveware and dinnerware and table lines, and I picked up some really cute yellow plates (the radio dots and modern florals) this time last year so I was extra excited. Unfortunately (or really forunately since I don't need new plates) all the new dishes left me feeling very meh. I did spy a couple of other pieces that set my heart a flutter. Here's what I'm digging this mont at Crate and Barrel and their sister store CB2.

Crate and Barrel

Well that Ming Chair is just divine. I love it so much I'm almost inspired to stop stalling on greening out my Chinoisere dining chairs. I think maybe the ampersand would be a nice punchy pillow to add to my collection on the living room sectional , but I'm not totally sold And those napkins? They will be mine.

Details here

  

Details here

 

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CB2

CB2 always has fun pieces but also tends to be a little too young, modern loft for me. I really get a kick out of the political inspired leather filled bookends, and I've already waxed on about my love of buffalo plaid, so it should be no suprise I'm digging that pillow, too bad it isn't available in other colors! And that shower curtain is just gorgeous.

Details here



Details here




Details here