more books, more furniture

In my last (content-providing) post, I mentioned the books in the new, upstairs bookshelves. Well, I'd hate to leave that undocumented, so here are three shots of the books in place (which are a portion of our fiction library):







Also, we've begun moving up some of our existing furniture: this dresser, which my dad gave to us when he moved to a condo (it was his second wife's before that), fits nicely in this space:

bastards

Due to a minor rush of spam comments, I've disabled commenting for this blog. If you have something relevant to say, and you're an actual human being, you can find an e-mail address here. But if you're some asshole trying to sell something - particularly if it's in a language I don't even read - I will send Yngwie Malmsteen to your house to unleash the fuckin' fury.

closets and shelves

Since our old bedroom was superseded by the new one, what happens to the old bedroom space (a/k/a "the green room")? Well, originally, it was going to be a room for Rose's sewing and beading projects - but she realized that, hey, the library (or "orange room") has a big window and way better light (she's photosynthetic; I'm part-vampire), so it'd make better sense to move the library into the green room (former bedroom) and make the orange room her sewing room.

We have finished the first phase of that: moving the library to the green room. Well, part of it: some of our books now live upstairs (fiction, in fact). And as you can tell, there's more room on these shelves; I'm going to go through the books exiled to the basement as less interesting and see which ones might be promoted to the green room's shelves.

Following are three shots of the room and the shelves. The new blue Ikea sleeper bed is, in fact, the very foldout bed that you yourself might sleep in should you ever be invited to spend the night here at our house.







(Here's the library in its former, oranger quarters.)

We also have reinstalled most of our clothing in our new walk-in closet upstairs. A lot of our clothes were stored in the basement; and since we didn't expect this project to last well into winter, cold-weather clothing was particularly well-hidden away. (Rose was getting tired of the same two or three sweaters in particular.)



More rearranging to come...

a house is not a motel, or...

Last night was our first night sleeping in the new bedroom - complete with new bed, sheets, pillows, and blankets. It's always a little odd, sleeping in a new place...perhaps odder when it's your own. You realize that all kinds of little details and rituals need to be worked out and reimagined: where stuff goes, habitual motions, gestures, etc., and of course the obvious getting used to a new bed. We discovered, for example, that the eyebrow dormer lets in a lot of south light later in the mornings: this won't be a problem on weekdays when we get up and go to work, but if we want to sleep later on weekends (and we do), we'll need to find a way to dim that down, without just slapping up something that blocks the light all the time. And of course, we discover minor things that either need to be changed (already, we moved one of the shelves in the closet, partly for cat-related reasons but mostly for functionality) or that we would have done differently had we been able to live in the space before building it. (Dammit - I knew I should have done that Sims thing...)

But for the most part, we're incredibly pleased: Rose's design mostly works exactly as we'd hoped it would, and we're so happy finally to have been able to do this.

new bed assembled, plus some other new items

Aside from the usual holiday concerns, we ended up spending quite a bit of time securing the shelves - and, in particular, securing the corner piece we put on. (We probably should have planned simply to slide one shelf behind the other - but it's really surprising to me that Ikea doesn't sell a square cover and hardware to go over the resulting corners when people prefer not to lose half their shelving space by shoving the shelf into the corner behind the adjacent unit.) Unexciting photographs, however - wow, look, it's a carriage bolt, and a piece of tile!

Here's the new bed, from two angles:





We got this lamp as a gift - I'm not entirely sure this will be its final location, though:



And here's another shot of the bathroom, looking a bit more lived-in with towels and such (although really, so far, it's not...):

more furnishings

We assembled the new sofa...



...and installed the ceiling fan and light:



This was the replacement ceiling fan. The original order would not have worked: the lighting sales guy made a mistake and didn't realize that the low-ceiling adapter we needed was not compatible with the remote we also needed. The wiring was already in place assuming the adapter...so we couldn't use the fan at all, since without the low ceiling adapter it was too low to use, both by code and for our comfort. But it also proved too huge for the space - something we didn't realize when we'd ordered it. So when the mistakes gave us the opportunity to replace the ceiling fan with a unit that could use both a low-ceiling adapter and a remote, we went with this much smaller fan, which fits the space far better and is plenty efficient for our needs.

a date with Ikea

I've built the bookshelves and the little storage cabinets that go under the main bedroom window...

Cats just won't stay out of the photos:



I had to lie flat on my back to keep my own reflection out of this shot:

cats roam free!

Finally, our second floor is finished! There's still some work to do (construction caused some minor damages to the ceiling of the first floor in a couple of places, which the crew is fixing; and the concrete at the base of the demolished chimney needs to be jackhammered away and filled), but essentially, what's left involves us assembling furniture and moving in. (We're also switching some things up on the first floor - I might as well document that process here over the next few weeks, to wrap things up.)

The completion of the work, and the absence of strange people tromping around in big boots, means we are finally able to let our cats back into the basement...and to explore the new area. There's nothing there yet (and closet and bathroom are temporarily off limits...some loose wires awaiting a replacement fixture in the bathroom, and packages covered in tape - which Lumen eats - in the closet), so it's big, echoey, and scary...as Oranj demonstrates, with his confused protest in this shot:



Here's a glowy-eyed Lumen, bravely exploring the new (and still rather dusty) territory:



Lumen walks about where the foot of our bed will be:



Oranj at the top of the stairs:



And finally, Oranj in the foreground, Lumen in the background, with a nice view of the front of the space (the alcove will be lined with bookshelves, and there'll be a sofa facing that window):



What do you think happens when a door is closed - truly evil in the eyes of cats - for six months, and the cats can hear that there are humans on the other side, talking and doing things?



Note the nice raw wood - claws are sharp! (That's the door at the back of our kitchen, which we closed to confine the kitties to the first floor for the duration of construction.)

handrails

We originally weren't going to put in handrails, being young and healthy...but seeing some older folks try to navigate the stairs - and discovering that it was pretty much required by code - changed our minds. (And then we remembered that someday we'll be old, too.) So here they are (not fully sealed and finished yet - and all the blue tape marks various paint touch-up spots, which should be happening tomorrow.)

metal and glass exact

Our glass shower enclosure has been installed. Here's what it looks like: