The kitchen is painted but the tacky carpet remains

This is where we started in June 2004, flowery wallpaper and vinyl blinds, dingy ceiling and brown indoor/outdoor carpet. Practical, but not our style. Our Impala aluminum chairs and cafe table look really odd amongst all the abstract florals. The two Marcel Breuer chairs got repositioned to the basement where they remain.


I couldn't live with the flowers so within a week or so we had white walls, and the dresser and table from an upstairs bedroom took a pause on their way out of the house and stayed in the kitchen for the next 40 months.


Earlier this year we hung the plans of the house above two Andrew Geller sketches and that just seemed to emphasize the grotty ceiling. So we decided that rather than wait until the kitchen is updated, we'd just give it a coat or two of paint and clean it up a bit.


We chose eventually to go with Benjamin Moore Cloud White on the ceiling and Titanium on the walls. Half way through painting I skimmed the Pottery Barn catalogue, (I usually throw it straight in the recycle bin) and discovered Titanium was a Pottery Barn colour.



I feel the same way about PB as Phoebe in Friends so I tried to persuade Steven we needed to pick a different colour but he wasn't having it, and as he was wielding the paintbrush, he won. Just as well, I'm really pleased with the colour in here now.


We had to move the dresser and table to paint and we couldn't bring ourselves to put them back so it's looking a bit empty right now. I'm searching for a walnut credenza that will fit along the wall, something similar to the ones I cannibalized for the dining room and the great room. I'd also like to replace the cafe-style table with a larger oval Saarinen table, or this round Rondo Lapalma table but I'm not sure that would ever be in the budget. Still, we are making progress. Now if I could only get rid of that looovely brown carpet......................

Outdoor decoration

I gave my neighbor a huge bag of pine cones from that giant fir tree in the photo, and we clipped some Hinoki (False Cypress) and Holly (in foreground of photo) from the front of the yard. She provided the bows, wrapping and expertise and made this beautiful mail box cover. Isn't that awesome?

We raised the ceiling

Well not really, we just painted it. But it sure feels higher, and cleaner than before too.



This is Steven doing all the work. So far it's been a day to prep, a day to put one coat on the ceiling and all this morning to touch up. He's hoping to put at least one coat on the wall before this evening. We'll see how that pans out.



The animals are all seriously freaked out, including Jefke the cat who is watching from the safety of his perch on the microwave.

Thanksgiving Paint Colors

It seems a shame to paint over these swatches, doesn't it? The first square on its own didn't look right, the next couple were better, but adding the last two colors makes the original one really pop.
Top row from left to right: Sweet Pear; Titanium; Crystalline; Iced Cube Silver. Bottom row: Wind Chime; Titanium. All by Benjamin Moore USA.
We decided that the sagey-grey will work best (although I'm still hankering after the Sweet Pear, especially with the Titanium next to it) and the lighter tone is the one we chose. Which just happens to be? Titanium. Yes, that's right, the color we painted the dining room walls and the powder room, too. The strange thing is that in the dining room it is more grey with an undertone of green and in the powder room, which has no natural light, it's definitely grey. I put two coats on the swatches on all the walls in the kitchen and it registers from sage green to silvery green. Certainly not grey. I really resisted this color because I didn't want the whole house painted the same but it just looks right. I hope we are still happy once the whole room has been painted.
But first we will be tackling that beige ceiling.

What did we do before blogging?

My beloved iBook went terminal on Friday and I am unable to do anything blog-oriented like post photos or type, or even read emails on a regular basis. If you're keeping track, that's three computers in one year that have bailed on me. Unfortunately the iBook pretty much contains, if not my life, then certainly my address book, my photos, my music and all resources for the house.
I was in the middle of transfering files to an external hard drive when it crashed so Friday and Saturday were given over to weeping and gnashing of teeth. On Sunday I decided I had to do something other than sit there and try to restart the iBook again and again, so I tried out a few more colour swatches on the kitchen walls. At this point there is very little wall left that doesn't have a trial colour on it, and I'm beginning to think different coloured rectangles on the wall is a look that might catch on!
I sent Steven to get the colours this time. It was getting too embarrassing for me to keep going back to Aboff's the paint store. He chose shades of green: Benjamin Moore Wind Chime and Crystalline in trial pots. Naturally he likes the darker more sagey one and I prefer the lighter greyish tone. We have until tomorrow afternoon to pick one if we want to paint on Thanksgiving Day. We've invited people to come over and way in on our choice (and paint too if they're so inclined) I'm making Rogan Josh and there will be "likker".
That's plenty to do and hopefully it will stop me from fretting about my mac for a while.

Admiring the colors

No, not in the kitchen. I'm having a respite from staring at the paint swatches on the walls and looking at nature instead.



Pretty spectacular, I think.

Choosing paint colors, driving myself nuts

I was at the paint store yesterday trying to pick out chips and this is what I heard "This is so difficult, I'm getting a headache". I went to the store again today and another customer was appealing for help "I can't find it, it was here a moment ago, where did that pot of color go?"
I'm glad I'm not the only one totally overwhelmed by the choice of paint colors out there. You'd think it would be easier now you can view colors online, but the color on your monitor and the color of the paint chip aren't always the same, sometimes they're not even similar. And those little trial pots of paint? It would be better if they had them stacked by number and not by shade because those rows of greys and off-whites start to merge into a giant blur before long, hence the woman having a melt down because she couldn't find the pot she wanted. She had the number but that wasn't helping her get in and out and back home to slap a 2' square of Benjamin Moore HC-36 on the wall. Then of course when you get the swatch home it may look totally different on your wall, with your light and furnishings. So why would I put myself through this process?
Because it will be at least another year before we get round to the kitchen reno and the unpainted wall behind the refrigerator and the water-stained and dingy ceiling are getting on my nerves. Of course the fact that the refrigerator is just sitting there attached to a random wall is also irritating but that's not something I can tackle alone.
I decided to paint the kitchen over Thanksgiving and I wanted to get some swatches on the wall this week. That way we can make sure the colours look good in all light. It should have been an easy task, the moldings and doors are all stained, the cabinets are burl wood laminate and the ceiling will get a coat of Benjamin Moore Cloud White because it's worked in other rooms.
A buttery cream we thought, so I went to get some. I came home with 10 of those paint chip cards, 4 paint chips from BM Aura line and a trial pot of Voice of Color Pineapple Delight. Two coats of that and I knew it was a mistake. Too light, too creamy for our architecture. We needed to go greener, perhaps.



Or greyer?



I was already starting to wilt. Luckily I had the paint chips to help me. I narrowed it down to Sesame and Anjou Pear, plus the Lemongrass color I found on the Benjamin Moore Canada site. Unfortunately even though I had the dedicated number for Lemongrass that didn't help me get a Canadian color out of an American paint mixer. Can't be done. They have their colors, we have ours. Tough. Move on. There was also no sample of Sesame but I was not leaving there empty handed so I chose two trial pots that looked (to me) quite similar. The Anjou Pear and Sweet Pear.

On the walls the difference was startling. Anjou Pearhas a muddy quality to it while Sweet Pear is luminescent. I'm a little disappointed with the Anjou, it's from the Aura by Benjamin Moore range so it's low VOC and only requires one coat. I'm trying to be environmentally friendly but the texture is thick and it goes on streaky. Like mud all ways round, really.



I think we may have a winner, although I'll need to leave it up a few days to make sure.



Why did I really chose this color? Perhaps it was subliminal.......

My Favourite Tree

This is my favourite tree and it's not even in my yard. It's over a couple of roads in the historical Baycrest district of Huntington Bay. The Incorporated Village consists of smaller areas based around five private beach associations like Baycrest and some areas that don't have any affiliation to a beach club, thus increasing the opportunity for more rules and bureaucracy in this part of the Land of the Free. We belong to one beach club, Baycrest starts a hundred or so yards to the north-west of our property, and my neighbours opposite are unaffiliated. Go figure.
Anyway, back to the beauty of nature in the fall. I've been walking the dogs past this tree all week monitoring the changing colour. I think the reason I like it so much is the sculptural quality of the black trunk and branches, balanced with the soft round shape of the foliage and, of course, at this time of the year, the rich red and orange tones of the leaves. Enjoy.

Dining Room Update

Houseblogs.net, the community for those obsessed with home improvement, is running feature stories this month on four topics, one of which is the dining room. We loved the dining room when we first saw the house, it was large, lofty and had a great beamed ceiling but it was beige - beige ceiling, beige walls, beige carpet and beige vertical blinds. I could have lived with the beige while we tackled more urgent projects but when the previous owner removed her furniture she left behind those bright blue patches on the walls. A tad unsightly, no?



The off-white walls had grey grime where they met the ceiling. For a long time I worried that this was where the roof leaked but it proved to be just where dust from the heating system settled. There was a matching line around the edges of the carpet.



Not attractive, but at least it wasn't a major structural problem. Apart from this the room was dark because the rhododendrons and pine trees outside the windows totally blocked out the light,



and the dusty, vinyl vertical blinds had to go.



We hung framed museum prints we had from our last house over the blue rectangles and had the electrician rewire and hang our 1970s Tre Ci Luce Cesare Lacca "Alien" pendant lamp that we had lugged from Belgium. It had spent the last four years in a box because we didn't have a space in the last place for it but it goes perfectly here.



For three months we couldn't see out of the window



But eventually we chopped back the shrubbery elevating the light levels a gazillion times.

Originally I wanted a sand color on the walls and we pinned up lines of swatches from Benjamin Moore but nothing spoke to us. We progressed to buying try-out pots of paint in golds and shades of café au lait but they all seemed to make the room dingy. I'd been avoiding the greys because I didn't want the dining room to be cold or sad but when I came across Titanium I knew we had a winner. Titanium is such a bright modern-sounding word, isn't it? When we slapped the Titanium over 1968 beach blue it just looked right.



The Guy gave that wall two coats, I touched it up, and touched up the Navajo white on the adjoining walls as far as I could reach. We couldn't paint the rest of the room without buying a long ladder, and we didn't trust ourselves to paint the ceiling without dripping on the beams. We ended up living with this odd colour combination for over a year.



Meanwhile I had a "Eureka!" moment when we took out the built-ins from the boys' bedrooms.



I cannibalized the desk parts to make a new cabinet for the dining room.



Then I went to the local stone fabricator and had tops cut to fit in Carrara marble.



This worked so well we got over-confident and ordered a second top for the cabinet in the den. Unfortunately we failed to measure this accurately so we had a 4' piece of marble hanging around doing nothing. A few weeks of searching and we found this wrought iron wine table in Crate and Barrel that fitted perfectly. It's taller than the console so it's not too matchy-matchy.



The room was coming together but we knew that we had to replace the windows before long so we held off doing more.



In 2005 we put in new windows and I spent a couple of weekends getting the stain right on the frames. The first go at getting window coverings for the room was a bust. We ordered red dupioni silk roman shades from Smith & Noble but they came in with white splodges on the crimson.



We now had curtain rods but nothing to hang on them. While we searched we had the room professionally painted using the Titanium on the walls and BM Cloud White on the ceiling and baseboard. So much better than buying a ladder or scaffolding and they did a great job. In the end the wall with the prints on got a total of five coats of Titanium (two by Steven, one by me because I wasn't happy with his brushmanship, and two by the painters) and the other walls just got two coats.



In the end I found an even better solution than the roman shades, drapery panels in red silk, darker with an almost invisible pattern that gave a depth to the drapes. Even better, these were on sale at Pottery Barn.com and cost less for 6 panels than one of the wrought iron rods we had had to pay full price for at the Pottery Barn store.



Last year I found a great painting on ebay and had it framed at a local store. After some discussion we hung it in the dining room because we loved the way the colours in the painting complemented the grey, white and red of the room.



Three years after we started we consider this room "done". Well almost. Home improvement is never really finished, is it? At some point we want to change the carpet but that will have to wait until we are certain about the plans for the den and the kitchen floors.



Right now we have a dining room that we love, great colours, great light and warm enough to eat in even in winter.

USA and Canada not compatible

At least regarding Benjamin Moore paint. For reasons best known to themselves but I think it's to ensure I go stark, raving mad trying to pick out colo(u)rs for the kitchen, BM Canada has different names and a different numbering system for its paints. Why? Why would they do this? It's just cruel. Canadian paints have CC before the number as in the examples above. I did not know this. Armed with the numbers I wanted to get paint chips of I went to Aboffs, my local BM store. They had a paint fan with Classic Colours on it. CC- Classic Colors. Wouldn't you have assumed that was what the CC stood for? They even had a CC-700. It was called Enchanted Forest in American and is a dark greeny grey hue. Nothing like the Smoky Green that I was going for.
Likewise Lemon Grass CC-648 in Canada or 339 here.



Really, isn't there enough to divide us already without this?

Schmapped again

I've been Schmapped again, this time for the Brussels edition. It's great that my considerable ahem photographic skills are once again recognized, though I can't think why they didnit choose this one entitled "Man with Cell Phone and Strange Blue Dot"



or even this piece of art, "Girl with Cell Phone and Shopping Bag"



at least this one is in focus (almost)



Surreal Spring time on the Place St Catherine/Sint-Katelijneplaats, Brussels, May 2007.

A modern house makeover

A bout of fluey colds forced us to forgo our usual Friday evening cocktail and dinner and instead stay in to watch mindless TV. We didn't hold out much hope for entertainment but sometimes there are gems out there in Friday night TV land. Clinton Kelly the host of the US version of "What Not To Wear" was making over his house in the Connecticut hills.
A makeover show, decorating a house, critiquing someone else's taste - what's not to like? But wait it gets better - it's a modern house, better still a 1969 house with odd shaped rooms, wood ceilings and distinctive windows. It's like my house (although nowhere near as gorgeous of course).
The really great thing for me was that he used the elements that I've been toying with for the master bath: wood paneling around the tub; 24x17" tiles on the walls (that look remarkably like the Porcelanosa Ferroker tiles we used on the boys' bath floor) and mosaic on the shower floor, giving me an idea of the final look for our space without spending any money.
And we got to see someone else gagging in disbelief at the price of home renovation. Priceless. Watch the repaeat if you can, otherwise the Hartford Courant has photos and a Q&A session with Clinton.

Lighthouses: not just for keeping ships off rocks

Honestly how cute is this? These replicas of Huntington Lighthouse sit atop the street signs in the incorporated village. We were living here for about a year before I first noticed them, which gives you an idea of how aware of my surroundings I am. My excuse is that they are fairly high up and I know the roads so I don't need to look at the signs, but still...
They slightly bug me because they aren't functional in any way. I think they should have little doors at the back so birds can nest in them, but they are purely decorative. Not much use as foghorns either, rather like the original which is still silent since it's latest malfunction.

Manako Floor Lamp

For quite a while now we've been looking for a lamp to go in the corner of Steven's office. He is always complaining he never has enough light in there but he hasn't liked any of the obvious solutions, like better task lighting.
Then I got an email from Room & Board this morning that featured this beautiful Manako floor lamp made of mango wood. It seemed to be just what we were looking for. But a click on the "room views" made me think that the proportions would be wrong for the space. This thing is huge. It's also $699 + $79 delivery so it wouldn't be happening anytime soon, but I still think it's a gorgeous piece.

Not quite peak

We seem to be a lot later than usual getting to the real autumn leaves display. This year the season has been the warmest on record and despite the frost last night only some dogwoods and the oaks are changing color. The maple by the bridge is still vibrant green. Normally it would look like this:

.

I'm really interested to see how long we will go until we get to the peak, I don't really believe it's autumn until then. Of course a week later when all the trees are bare I think it's winter.