Renovation!

It's getting exciting at The Cool House. The demolition of the master bath is done, the renovation is underway; fixtures are here - mostly. For example we have the Toto maple softclose seat but no word on the toilet yet. I'm in two minds whether to go with my first thought and frame in the tub with wood panels or tile the surround and place a piece of Caesarstone to match the vanity countertops on the half wall. For that matter I'm still not sure if I shouldn't just raise the tub up a foot (with the extra carpentry and plumbing that would entail!).


Still there has been definite and positive progress. In place of the one working light over the vanity and the very noisy fan/light combo unit, I have two recessed lights over the vanity, two more lights over the bath, the newly uncovered shower light, sconces on either side of the medicine cabinet and an updated super quiet fan/light/nightlight. To add more warmth we have a heated towel bar on a timer so we can wrap ourselves in toasty towels straight after our refreshing pulsating shower. The medicine cabinet has an outlet inside so The Guy's shaver will be hidden away when recharging - I'm all for a clutter-free countertop.
Next stop - plumbers let loose!

Unexpected Benefits

Since moving the bed into the spare room last Sunday we have slept better than we have in years. Five years to be precise. Turns out we had not installed the spacers correctly when the movers brought it into the house. Even though we have changed the room round four times since we moved in and flipped the mattress at least 10 times it never occurred to us to check we had those things in the right position. Roughly 1800 nights spent tossing and turning to get comfortable, complaining about the ridge in the latex mattress, blaming old age and wear and tear on the joints and it turns out we could have solved all our problems in, oh, TWENTY SECONDS FLAT! At least we can guarantee future Cool House guests that we have a very comfortable bed for them to crash on...

House Art

We are celebrating 2010 with some new art. The Homes for the Holidays show at Ripe Art Gallery finished so these two pieces, House in Flight and Anthill we had purchased by artist and author Nadine Bouler came home to The Cool House just before the work week started.



And with them these two images of The Cool House. I asked Nadine to paint one, and got a bonus picture full of surreal imagery to display with it.

At the moment they are leaning gracefully against the walls in the great room and the dining room but hopefully Nadine will stop by in a week or so and we can decide on a permanent place to display all four as a group. They are very detailed works and the two Cool House paintings are full of wit and symbolism specifically about the house, The Guy and me - they need to be viewed close up. But even in their less than ideal locations you can see what drew me to Nadine's work. Click to embiggen and enjoy!

Golden Walls

Now that we have the furniture back in the Great Room, I asked the Awesome Designer, Julie Napoleon Brown, to bring back this paper, Grasses by Mulberry in Red/Gold to see if it would work for the foyer. Being a star, she also pulled a few more wallpapers in the same colourway. After I had carefully placed them aroud the walls, The Guy glanced around and uttered the fatal words: The trees in the forest paper is looking a lot more appealing! We'll ignore him, though and move on...


My initial favourite: Octavio by Mulberry in Copper/Red


The Guy's favourite (if he were forced to choose): Gilded Fresco in Red/Gold from Mulberry.


The two papers together in situ - maybe my choice is too geometric?


After seeing them all in daylight and by CFL lighting I'm being seduced by this Red/Gold/Rust beauty: Palm Court, Cole & Son, from their Vintage Glamour Collection.


At first I thought it was too Arts and Crafts but in real life it really shines off the wall


as does this sample of Grasses that I started with.
I'm no nearer make a decision, so Interwebs, please weigh in with you thoughts!

All wallcoverings available from Lee Jofa (trade only).

We call it progress!

We have temporarily lost a bathroom (although that tub still has to be hauled out)


Gained a "media room"


Refurnished the spare bedroom.
(Thank you to the house elves for dismantling/moving/reassembling the bed)!

Demo: The dressing room

The thing about doing the demo yourself is you get to marvel over the little renovation discoveries; insights into other peoples' lives. For instance, had we engaged a crew to knock out the master suite I'm pretty sure they wouldn't have yelled "Come see what was behind the mirrors!"


And we would have missed the saffron flock wallpaper that had once complimented the yellow shag carpet and gold cultured marble bathtub and sinks.


The splendour of the '70s replaced by sterile '90s white on white fixtures and floor to ceiling mirrors, soon to be finished in uniquely modern style circa 2010.

Demo: Day 5

Collapse: The Guy put in a full 7 AM - 4 PM day in a last desperate push to get the bathroom clear. This was taken after carrying the last cement backerboard to the dumpster. Exhaustion! He did spring up once more to remove the 42" x 48" mirror that used to sit over the vanity before heading off to shower, followed by a stiff G&T and two Alleve.


Down to the studs - cement board in the wet areas removed at last! That stuff is nasty, dusty and wicks water on to the wood - especially if you didn't use a liner between it and the joists. Instead of leaving a 1/4" gap between the shower base and the board so the board doesn't sit in water the last contractor had gone for a generous 3/4", which meant water had poured through the space - and down the stairs! See that gloopy grey stuff on the floor? That's where the tiles were mortared directly onto the plywood subfloor. This will be smoothed down when I get new pads for my trusty hand sander - and a few more dust masks!


Surprise! The Guy uncovered an electrical outlet behind the sheetrock in the shower. This is what I have been wanting for five whole years - a light in the shower. Can someone please explain why this was covered by board and tiles? Here's hoping the electricians can transform it into a wet location approved light without too much drama.

Demo: Day 4

The Guy is racing to get the cement board off the shower walls and the 70s mirrors out of the dressing room before he goes back to his paying job on Monday morning. The haste led to a little whoops moment: he chipped the last floor tile off and the screwdriver he was using as a lever shot out of his hand and down the void under the shower. The only way we'll see that again is if we take off the wallboard in the kitchen that hides the front stairs. Not Going To Happen. We'll leave it there for a future renovator to puzzle over.

Ye Gods of Snow!

I was JOKING about the snow, Gods of Irony! At least it's 2" not 2', but as Laura points out even a little snow around the dumpster makes hauling out the debris more treacherous - and increases the clean-up 100-fold.


Still, the tile is off, the wallboard too, in many places. Considering the leaks we had from the shower and the tub, it's amazing there is no visible damage to the cement backerboard, the floor or the walls behind. No mold, either.
This bathroom should be stripped down to the studs be Saturday, then the plumber and electricians can get in. Tiles arrive Jan 8th, vanities Jan 25th; all other fixtures except the Toto Nexus toilet (delivery scheduled for the second week in January) are here and waiting. After everything has been installed I can get the Caesarstone fabricators to measure for the countertops and the shower door people to fit the glass door. I'm hoping to take my first shower in this bathroom Valentine's Day 2010. That doesn't sound too optomistic does it?

It was twenty years ago...

I guess we now know the last time the primary bathroom was remodeled (I'd always guessed late eighties, early nineties, nice to have a more exact date, though). A piece of house history brought to you courtesy of the back of the medicine cabinet... That, by the way, is the best preserved material in the room, so maybe we should keep it?

What's Missing?

I waited in all day but the dumpster I ordered before Xmas (to be sure of getting one delivered on the right day) didn't arrive until 3:30 this afternoon - but better late than never, no? Well, no, actually, because they had put the 10 yard dumpster on the largest truck on Long Island, which meant it couldn't get onto our drive. The dumpster would fit, the truck wouldn't, or not without driving right across my neighbor's lawn! The driver assured me he will ask for an early delivery tomorrow and that it will arrive on one of the medium-sized or teeny-tiny trucks specially designed for the narrow roads in the Incorporated Village. Until then, The Guy is piling up debris in front of the den window. Hope we don't get 2' snow tonight...

Deja Vu

Hmm, where have I seen this before?


and what is The Guy going to do with all that packaging material?
Winter holidays - the best time for relieving stress by tearing down tiles and hitting terrazzo with a sledgehammer.

Merry Midwinter

We did get the tree up this year - even managed to throw on lights and ornaments with the help of 6' steps. It's much taller than we envisioned when it was leaning against the others at Halesite Firehouse's tree sale... Next year, just to make our lives easier, we are going to measure the thing before we bring it home - it's either that or get an artificial, pre-lit, pre-decorated one!

Big Blue Sectional Reveal

Ta-da! Drum roll please for the stunning reveal of the formerly pink super-sectional sofa


After: Original to the house 1968 Harvey Probber sectional re-upholstered with Kravetsmart in blue chenille by awesome designer Julie Napoleon Brown and her team.


New rug is Chinese Chippendale design by Windsor Smith, also through Kravet, a 9' x 9' square terracotta silk and wool blend with a gold design and border. It's amazing what an appropriately sized rug does for the scale of the room. The sectional floats on the rug just as if it were made to measure.


Before: The sectional in its original rose pink fabric, faded by 40 years of sun streaming through those huge windows (and a little pet-related wear and tear); the too-tiny 5' by 8' rug we'd placed in front of the sofa as a temporary solution five years before. The pillows were hiding a huge split in the seat cushion that had been there for longer than that, which we'd originally covered with reindeer hide! Just out of view is a pink throw covering another hole and more than a few cat claw marks


During the re-covering phase the rug became a patch of carpet cast adrift in a sea of parquet. At this point I knew I had to go rug shopping. I can't say enough good things about the whole rug shopping experience at Kravet - they also have a fun blog Inspired Talk that is, as the name suggests, full of designer tips, resources and drool-worthy photos.


My greatest thanks, however, go to designer Julie Napoleon Brown without whom the project would never have gotten started, let alone turned out so spectacularly. She spent time trying to make an off-center sofa fit more cohesively in a trapezoid room; here she is considering the configuration of the 12-piece sectional


and shown here pondering the choice of pillow fabrics.


She tolerated my control issues as I vetoed swatch after swatch and sample after sample, then had to repeat the process with The Guy, who doesn't respond well to imposed change (unless he is doing the imposing) but in the end, as you can see from the photo, is delighted with the redone great room.


As Julie says, it needs a punch of the orange on the pillows and a few well-chosen accessories, which will come eventually (I can generally sneak one thing past The Guy each quarter), but for the moment - and most importantly - it has been cat tested and fully approved.

More Great Room before and after photos here

Standing straight

I was feeling we'd hadn't accomplished much over the past season - we'd started half a dozen projects but none was actually finished - but one item we can cross of our list, with gratitude, is the fence on the south side. It's up, it looks pretty and it withstood 12+" of snow. You can read about the drama last winter here, here and here, or you can just admire the way the snow peaks on the flat caps look just like giant ice cream cones...

Tails 'n' Fur

Three images from a morning at MoMA.


Appropriate for this time of year, Tim Burton's Deer Topiary from Edward Scissorhands, part of the Tim Burton retrospective that runs through April 26, 2010. Look at Rudolph's rear, it's almost wagging.


Merrit Oppenheim's sensual Object, a fur cup, saucer and spoon from The Erotic Object: Surrealist Sculpture from the Collection. Until January 4, 2010.


Mobile Matrix (2006) the breathtakingly beautiful reassembled sculpture of a whale skeleton, part of the Gabriel Orozco exhibition that runs though March 1, 2010.

Climbing the walls

Lots going on, some things I want to make into a special post, others are barely worthy of a tweet let alone a line on this blog but for the moment here's a quick update:
We have granite pavers as an apron outside the garage, we do not have asphalt meeting that because the sealant places close for the winter. Check back mid-March for after photos, one "during" photo here.
The electricians returned to patch the hole in the wall. Apparently they are not carpenters so normally they'd just leave a big hole! Good to know that in advance because I would just have left the old outlet there. Also, where I come from this is known as being bloody lazy! The white cable down the outside of the house was "temporary" as one guy had run out of black and they knew they'd be back in the New Year to work on the master bath! This might have worked as an excuse had I not agreed with the other guy that there were three possible ways to do this:
a) pop off the baseboard, run the cable, tap back the moldings.
b) run a new cable in the wall from basement to the new outlet
c) run the cable up from the old outlet, through the void space and down the other wall.
The electrician favored option c but couldn't fit self into void so decided not to bother with a or b but to go outside and DRILL HOLES IN MY REDWOOD SIDING. This is the easiest fix and is known where I come from as being an idle bugger; this is also the reason we don't let Verizon anywhere near out house. I think they understand now that no one touches my redwood siding, OK? And surprise, they decided option a was the best way to remedy the situation. I guess I'll be paying for their time twice though...
New extension brackets for the wood blinds in the master bedroom have been mailed and these guys are really sorry...
We have the big blue sectional and rug in place... but you'll have to wait for Friday for the big reveal. Until then: sneak peek
The tree is still outside...

Images of The Cool House

When Nadine Bouler popped in to The Cool House a month or so back to drop off an invite to her Homes for the Holidays show I was so taken by the image on the invite I asked her if she would consider painting a portrait of my house. Things evolved and soon the Cool House portrait doubled down into two analogous images.


Here are a couple of shots of the house taken from angles Nadine thought would inspire her



Now pop over to Nadine's site Bouler Architecture to see her artistic interpretation of The Cool House and our lives in symbolic detail!

Cat Assessed

... and found wanting.

We failed at putting up blinds, making the tree stand up, screwing the tree base to a plywood board and - spectacularly and devastatingly - I failed at overseeing the electricians' cable installation last week. We caught the damage today. I can't even speak about let alone post but let's leave at there is a huge hole in one wall and a white wire running down the side of the red-brown house. They will be back to make it right next week. (Promised). My Handyman would never have dreamt... and I miss him more than I can say.

Facelift*

A desire to get things moving on the decorating front, plus a free five minutes on a Saturday morning prevailed over the sensible solution of waiting for two strong guys to come along and move the blue sofa out of the great room and into my office. Lift and slide was the answer - and muscle power, baby!


It fits perfectly on the wall opposite my desk, perfectly that is for a random cat - in this case Hermes - to take a nap


or for me to lounge, and work my way through that stack of magazines I haven't gotten round to reading. Somewhere in that pile is the final edition of Metropolitan Home...

*Borrowing this title from a comment by Why S in yesterday's post