Carpet's in and we are officially done!!

As I mentioned in my last post, we emptied out the entire living room to make way for new carpeting!

Well here she is, all done!!

For the first time since the living room addition was built, the room is one cohesive space. As soon as I walked into the room, my first thought was "holy crap this room is gigantic". Not a bad problem to have!

The carpet is the Beekman from the Martha Stewart Living collection, in the color "Potter's Clay". (It would be so fun to be the person who comes up with names for things like carpet and paint colors. There's some seriously extravagant and creative names for this stuff.)

There was a dingy carpet in the old part of the living room, but we've been living with plywood on the addition since construction was completed in February of this year. That's a long time to have been looking at this:

 

 It wasn't great, but we worked around it. The worst part was that even though the construction was done, we couldn't really use the new space without flooring so the expanded space didn't impact our daily living much. 

 

Still, it's really hard to believe that back in December 2011, the addition was looking like this:

 

 

And now, 10 months later, it's like this!:

 

Since the carpet went in this week, it finally truly feels like we've expanded the living space in this room. I know it's silly, but since we can now walk through here without fear of splinters and can actually sit in this area, the reality has set in!

 

 

The carpet is squishy and soft and the color is perfect. A good tip for giant dog owners: when you bring a carpet sample home, put a tuft of dog fur on it to see how well it camouflages. When I saw that Lucy's fur nearly disappeared on this color, I was sold. :)

 

 

We also recarpeted the upstairs hallway, which had a terrible greenish-yellow carpet on it since god only knows when. The new floor brightens up the whole hallway and feels so nice on your feet in the morning!

 

 

The stairs were carpeted as well. When we bought the house, for some reason somebody had pulled the carpet off of four or five of the steps, but left it on the rest. So for the last 2 1/2 years we had partially carpeted, partially hardwood stairs. Not ideal. Plus the staircase is the first thing you see when you open the front door. It looks sooo much better now!

 

 

I mentioned that I painted the running boards white on either side of the stairwell. It looks much better, but unfortunately some of the paint got chipped when the carpet was installed so it'll need some touch-up.

 

 

Back in the living room, we weren't sure how well the carpet would surround the hearth that Branden tiled in front of the fireplace. Luckily it is perfectly flush (he did such a good job!), so there's no weird lip or chance of stubbing a toe on the tiles as you walk by. It couldn't have come out better!

 

 

 

It's so hard to believe, but the house is now DONE. As in, finished. As in, no glaring things that need to be taken care of before the house is livable.

 

I'm totally in shock still. It's been a very long road!

 

Lucy is obviously loving the plush carpet and new padding...

 

 

There has been a lot of laying down in front of the fireplace and general floor snuggling...

 

 

Happy times ahead!





 

OMG OMG when is Christmas here??!

I wish it was the day after Thanksgiving right now. Why, you may be asking? Because I have a REAL mantel to hang stockings from! Dudes. Eight or so months after installing our propane fireplace in the addition of the living room, we finally have a mantel!

Check check check it out.

Building this was a lot of work and a bit of a brain teaser, but Branden and our bff-slash-handy-helper Josh were able to form a thinktank and construct the surround and mantel. I admit I wasn't sure how it would all come together, but it looks ahhhh-mazing.

We started with a 1x6 board of solid red oak, supported and secured to the wall (don't ask me how because around this time I was most likely just dancing around the room singing Christmas carols). Then we used leftover crown molding from our kitchen renovation to trim it out. This crown is beautiful--it's the same solid maple crown that runs above our kitchen cabinets and the installers had an extra huge piece that they left us, so it was great to put it to good use.

Oh, and see those gorgeous tiles for the hearth there? We special-ordered the large marble tiles (fancy!) and then found these nice stone and glass mosiac strips to trim it out. Branden did an A+ gold star job on laying these tiles a couple of weeks ago. Such a wonderful man, he is.

After the mantel itself was secured (again, I was la-la-la'ing in the background), we started building down the sides of the surround, adding 1x3 boards and rosettes at the corners.

Then we added fluted pieces on the sides, some more trim around the top, and the plinths (new word we learned... translation: the big blocky things at the bottom).

It was definitely starting to come together, but still looked a little disjointed because of the different woods. We knew from the beginning that we were painting everything white, to match all of the trim throughout the house, so I had to have faith that it would look seamless once it was painted.

And lookee there! A few coats of primer and white paint later, and it looks like one beautiful, glorious piece.

I can practically smell the chestnuts roasting. (Okay not really since this is a gas fireplace but whatevs, you know what I mean.)

I am so freaking psyched about having a real mantel to decorate for Christmas. I've talked about my issues with not having a real mantel before, and how upsetting it is. Those years of faking it are gone! (Is it December yet??)

Part of the reason why we finally had to jump on this mantel project now is because we are also finally having carpet installed in the living room! BIG THINGS ARE HAPPENING! This means that we actually won't have the plywood we've been living with for the last 9 months in the living room addition. Pinch me!

In preparation for the installation, last night we had to empty out the entire living room (which meant shoving everything from that room into every other room in the house, but if it's temporary I can so deal with that). We also had to rip off the carpet in the living room, plus the stairs and upstairs landing, since we're recarpeting those as well.

So after some grunt work, we got the room cleared out and everything hauled off for trash pickup. (You know what's not so easy? Two people moving a piano.) It would've cost an additional $350 just to have the installers remove the existing carpet and haul it. For a few hours work, it was totally worth saving the cash on that.

Here's the upstairs landing, stripped of its decades-old green carpeting (god I won't miss that AT ALL):

 

And the staircase, with the carpet ripped up:

 

There was clearly a runner on these stairs for a very long time! I later put a few coats of white paint on the running boards that go up the wall on either side. It helped brighten up the stairwell quite a bit. I didn't get a good photo because I was delirious from exhaustion and huffing paint fumes for too long, so you'll just have to wait. Deal with it.

And finally here's the living room, all emptied out and ready for carpet:

 

Can't wait to show you what it looks like when it's installed!! Woop woop!

Sing me a song, piano man

Earlier this week we got a very exciting delivery for our living room...




...a player piano!

The piano belonged to Branden's grandmother and she passed it down to him. For years it sat at his dad's house, since he had no place for it to go. It finally made its way to the house and now fits perfectly in a corner of our living room!



It really classes up the joint. We used to have a desk with a computer over in that corner. Since we got a new laptop, we moved the computer up to the desk in the now-empty office (since I no longer work from home the office wasn't getting much use anymore).

I start grad school next week (yup, I'm getting a Masters of Education in Secondary English... not sure if I'm ready to write papers again but here goes nothing!) so I'll be using the computer in the quiet office to do homework very frequently, I'm sure.

I'm kind of amazed by how well the piano fits in the living room... it's almost made for it!



While it's a little out of tune, it's definitely still able to played. Branden has been working on the mechanics for the player part (you can see the tools in the shot above) and it's almost working 100%. For now, you have to stick some tweezers into the tape deck to keep it playing. :)



I'll have to take a video of the player piano in action and post it... we've been playing a tape of ragtime favorites and I'm pretty sure that the neighbors think we're operating a speakeasy. It sounds like a saloon up in here.

It's always refreshing to do a little reshuffling of furniture. To free up some space next to the piano, we swapped out an end table with one from the dining room and rearranged the table in that room (I'll post some pics of that soon). It's amazing what switching some things around can do to make a room feel fresh.

We also picked up a new pair of table lamps a month or so ago at Homegoods. They were only $30 each, with the lampshades. Love them!



They kind of remind me of spinal cords... in a good way? Each level has a pinkish/red ring painted around it, which matches the couch perfectly. It alllll comes together.



Lucy likes the new lamps, obvs.

Back to the piano, when I sat down at it I definitely needed some time to remember which keys were which. I hadn't looked at sheet music since I graduated college, so I was a little rusty! It's amazing how it all comes back to you though after just a few minutes of playing.
 


I'm really loving having it in the house, and find myself sitting down to practice for a bit each day. Maybe by Christmas I'll be able to play carols and we can all sing around the piano like in Little Women!

Changing it up!

After the holidays, I pulled down all of the Christmas decorations and left everything bare for a little while. Obviously, given my decorating ADD, that didn't last all too long. The buffet in the dining room felt huge and empty with nothing on the surface. I wanted to create a little tabletop vignette that didn't feel season-specific, and that I could stick with for a while. Here's what I put together:



There are some wintry hints, but nothing too literal, since I want to be able to leave it alone for a while.



That is one of my favorite photos of me and B, in a frame that I fell in looove with at TJ Maxx. (Oh, the Maxx. How I love and loathe you all at the same time.) The print in the back was my mother's from ages ago. I've always liked it, and the colors are almost exactly the same as in the area rug under the dining table. That silver vase stuck around after Christmas, when it was stuffed with sparkly stuff, and I added some texture with those balls in a vase.

On the other end of the buffet are some apothecary jars, which I love even when they're empty:



I added some cinammon sticks, but this could easily be switched up and anything could be added... candy hearts for Valentine's Day, leafy sprigs and wildflowers if the two billion feet of snow ever melt this spring... anything you want.

The prints in the frame are one of my favorite pieces I own. I made them years ago. They're polaroid emulsion transfers, made from old slides. The one on top is of my mom in the 70s, at Niagara Falls. She has enormous super sweet glasses on in it. (Love ya, Mums!)



I'm really happy with this general setup, so maybe my design ADD won't rear its ugly head and everything will stay in one place for a while... ha ha, yeah right. :)



OH, I also don't think that I ever drew proper attention to the painting hanging to the right of the buffet. B and I got it at an antiques store a couple of months ago... it's an old portrait of a Saint Bernard! I know that probably makes us like crazy dog owning people or whatever, but we don't care. We both genuinely liked the painting and the frame is gorgeous walnut. It's kitschy and kind of weird, and we like it that way.


Over on the other side of the house, I switched up the shelves above the television in the living room (again). After the Christmas stockings were down, they just looked pretty bare. So I decided to shop around the house and see what I already owned that I could put up there. We still have boxes of things that haven't been unpacked, so I dug around and had actually forgotten about some stuff!



Those three ceramic vases I picked up for $1 each, I think. They're each a different texture and they look exactly like the Ikea ones that I've seen pop up around some design magazines.



In "shopping my house" and making use of what I already have, I found a stash of postcards that I collected while living in London. I spent a lot of time at different museums and galleries in the city (the Tate Modern and National Gallery were my favorites) and I'd buy a few postcards from the gift shops here and there. The one in the frame above is of a Gilbert & George installation. Amazing stuff. I have a bunch of different cards, so it will be fun to switch them out from time to time.



I also dug out this woodblock painting that I bought a number of years ago from a local artist in Portsmouth. The colors are so vibrant, it just makes me happy.



So there you have it. Everything un-Christmas-ified, and probably staying put for a while. Did anyone else feel the itch to ditch their holiday stuff pronto?


In other news, we've been getting dumped on with snowstorm after snowstorm around here. Lucy is loving it, of course, but I don't know how much more I can take! Here she is just soaking it up during one of the (many) storms last week:



(Oh, and see that tiny sliver of reddish wood near the fence back there? That's the retaining wall that we built this summer. It's about 2 1/2 to 3 feet high, and you can barely see it at all... When is spring, again?)

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

Happy 2011! That sounds weird still. We had a wonderful Christmas with lots of sah-weeet food, presents, and family time. My favorite gift was a gorrrgeous diamond pendant necklace that Branden gave me. He's such a good boyfriend. :)

Right around New Years I got the itch to start de-Christmas-ifying the house. I love the sparkle and festivity of the holidays, but after a while it gets to be too much. After everything was taken down and tucked in bins the house instantly felt so much calmer and more spacious. I'm loving it.

In a crazy cleaning spurt, I decided to move the telephone table (remember how we refinished it?) into the corner of the living room where the Christmas tree was. And I instantly loved it. Somehow sticking it in that corner made the room feel much bigger! I'm guessing because it draws your eye to the corner and just how large the room actually is.



Now, I've been thinking and planning even more updates. First of all I want to buy a pair of matching chairs with a smaller footprint to replace that beige one and the black leather recliner on the other side of the room (I hate that chair). I'm toying with the idea of an art gallery wall on the right-hand wall. And I love the look of a sunburst mirror above the sofa (even though B isn't a fan, he might get overruled....)

Here is my game plan:



(Please excuse my poor Photoshopping/cloning... I was being lazy.)

I've been eyeing the Tullsta chairs at Ikea (above) and at $99 each they're super affordable. I have no idea what they're like in person though, so they could be super flimsy. I'll have to see.

The spot next to the TV where the telephone table used to be was a little bare, so I plopped down a red ottoman that we had there as a placeholder. I'm not sure what will end up living there (if anything). For now I'm liking the more open feel of this wall without the table there:



I'd like to add another Tullsta chair (or something similar) to this side of the room where the recliner now lives. Here's roughly what it would look like:



If Branden had his way we would have a cigar store Indian or taxidermy standing black bear in that spot, so I'd better figure it out soon...

The faux-mantle, holiday style

Soo, remember when I showed how we hung shelves above our tv to mimic a mantle? That was mostly spurred by the terrible realization (in October) that because our house doesn't have a fireplace, come Christmastime we wouldn't have anywhere to hang our stockings! (BTW, I don't really know how our 90+ year old house doesn't have a fireplace, but whatevvvvs.)

I've been the crazy Christmas fairy the last few days, adding little decorations and dashes of holiday cheer throughout the house. I made some quick changes to the "mantle", adding some snowflakes, jars of ornaments, and of course our stockings!





You know my love of sticking stuff in glass containers...



Works every time. Plus sparkly ornaments make the easiest prettiest decorations!





We decorated those stockings a couple of Christmases ago and they've held up well. I meant to embellish Lucy's last year but didn't get around to it. I wanted to make a felt goose to put on it (since that's her nickname... Goose, Lucy Goose, Goosey, Gooseinator... she's smart and responds to all of them) but then forgot about it. Maybe this year!



So there you have it. Nothing too crazy, but a little added holiday sparkle. It might be a fake mantle, but it holds our stockings. Even the dog's. And someday we'll buy another house with 1,481 fireplaces in it to make up for this one. :)

Oh, and we put the Christmas tree up last night, so I'll post pictures of that in the next day or two!!