it's curtains (again)

It's been an absurdly long time...but you know, things got pretty damned busy, and the last batch of curtains weren't the highest priority in the world. (In fact, the same fabric will be used to make a curtain for the window at the top of the stairs...still not done.) But here it is:



And that (if anyone's still reading this) is that. We've been moved in for about half a year now - it's wonderful. The only minor adjustment is we need to tweak the a/c system a bit to move proportionately more air upstairs...but it's not that crucial, and hopefully a simple matter.

That's it for this blog. I hope you've enjoyed it.

I will resist the obvious Couch Flambeau reference. For once.

Rose sewed sheer curtains to complement the more functional, light-blocking set she'd made a while back - obviously, those were rather more necessary immediately than these. But they look nice. Two shots - one a dramatic one without flash, the other giving you a bit more even rendering of the scene.





We've been pretty busy with other things...and so the temporary bathroom window treatments have done for now. Those, and the hallway curtains, are all that remain...other than incidental things like artwork and the like which tends to get accumulated over time.

it's curtains!

Our bedroom curtains are up (or at least the main curtains: sheers will be put up in a little while, as soon as Rose has time to finish them).



Here's a shot from the side: you can't really see our view out, due to the light blasting out the image...but still there's a sense of how the light enters the space:

the home stretch

We've mostly finished rearranging the former library, now Rose's sewing/beading room (but generally known - for reasons made obvious in the photos below - as the "orange room"). Amusingly, it's sort of ended up as the repository for aging furniture (Rose has long-term plans to learn to refinish the wood): both the sewing machine table and the library table came from Rose's family, while the cabinet made from an old Victrola case was found at a rummage sale held by one of Rose's cousins, if I recall. The old futon's seen better days, but we probably don't need to buy two new sofa-beds when it's perfectly functional (and in fact, probably more comfortable than the new one mentioned a few posts ago).

We had to touch up the walls a bit...probably should have repainted entirely, as the paint doesn't match perfectly even though it's the same batch. Or maybe we just need to do a thorough cleaning!

The quilt in the top photo was made by Rose's sister Barb and was a wedding gift.





We also managed to add a few finishing touches in the upstairs addition: we mounted a large mirror in the walk-in closet:



And we found a place for a lamp we'd picked up from a friend's rummage sale when they moved to New York City: the lamp didn't work very well (it burned too hot), so I replaced the guts of it (with some clever improvisational adaptation of some parts and features) and now it works fine. Here's a dramatic shot, sans flash (with a stool in lieu of the I'm-too-lazy-to-get-it-from-the-downstairs-closet-tripod):



The last major thing we need to do in the main part of the house (basement rearrangement and editing is sorely needed!) is repaint the first floor bathroom ceiling. Our contractor on the remodeling job primed it for us, since the need for its repainting arose from some accidental damages they caused during the work, but since we no longer had the original paint and decided to change the color, really, that's more work than they reasonably could be asked to do under the circumstances. So priming it was the compromise.

We also want to repaint the walls on the first-floor back stairs and leading down to the basement...but that won't happen till spring. And lest this turn into an even duller, occasional document of various household tasks, I won't be detailing that work! Probably one more post for this, when the first floor bathroom's done...and that's about it.

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.