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.

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:

more doors, more floors

The end keeps getting nearer, as a lot of detail work continues. We've assembled the preliminary contractor's punchlist of all the outstanding items, most of which should be completed next week, the rest of which we'll walk through with the contractor shortly after that. What's left after that point is our own work: assembling and placing a lot of furniture (most of which we bought at Ikea), and rearranging the two downstairs "bedrooms" (currently a bedroom and a study: the bedroom will become the study, the study will become Rose's "crafts" room). That should be finished by Christmas, if we can find time to put everything together.

Here are some photos: the stairs were sanded and refinished, and they look like this (still some trim to be applied along the tops of the pieces on the wall):



The door hardware has been installed on the two pocket doors: the single one on the bathroom door -



- and the set for the closet:

yesterday upon the stairs...

Work on the stairway has begun. Below are two views showing the existing wood, sanded but not finished. The stairs were a darkish brown, with lots of layers of varnish and wear, even to the point of a slight depression in the treads. Rather than replace them, we opted to sand and refinish them. As it turns out, there's a variety of wood: the landing is, if I recall what the floor guy said, maple, while the treads are birch and the risers...something else? This view shows the stairs from the bottom landing in the back hall: sanding isn't complete yet, but it's nearly done:



Here's a view from above, at the top of the stairs on the second floor. You can see the floorboards of the landing quite clearly in this shot:



They expect to finish the work tomorrow. As noted in the previous post, what's been going on is fine detail work, which is all but invisible to the untrained (or non-obsessed homeowner's) eye: that's nearly finished. What's left? A legally mandated handrail in the stairway; a bit more detail finish work; cleanup; installation of bathroom hardware; and various issues elsewhere in the house, ranging from reinstallation of the shelves in our front hall closet (which, you may recall, was shortened to accommodate HVAC) to remediation of various issues that arose during construction (minor ceiling damage in the library, replacement of some wood paneling removed for access to plumbing, that sort of thing). And the last major item, utterly outside the realm of our contractor's work: the installation of our shower surround. That's scheduled for December 8 and 9.

But once the contractor's work is done, ours begins: we have lots of furniture to assemble, various other items to deal with (such as window treatments, etc.), and - a late addition to the project's scope, entirely our doing - moving the bookshelves from what is now the library (the "orange room") to what is now the bedroom (the "green room"), with the orange room becoming Rose's sewing/exercise/craft room, and the green room becoming the library/study. Finally, there's a bit of business involving moving the wireless router and cable up to the second floor, and trying to figure out the best way to get sound in the new library/study from my laptop. (Right now, it looks like simple external computer speakers are the likeliest bet...unless Apple's AirTunes - which I already use to port music from the computer to the stereo system - can switch between two sets of speakers. I need to do some research...)

So the contractor's work should be finished by the end of the first week in December, with punchlist and final cleanup, etc., happening early the next week...which is the same time the shower surround will be installed. Also around that time, our new ceiling fan (replacing the bad one we had to remove) and missing bathroom light (weirdly, misaligned post so it wasn't level) will come in as well (we're installing those). We'll have a couple of weeks after that for assembling new furniture, installing window treatments, and disassembling and moving stuff between the green room and the orange room...our hopes are that everything will be completely done and set up by Christmas. That's longer than we'd anticipated (as I think this blog has made clear), in fact longer even allowing for the 6-8 weeks of unanticipated delay...but right now, as we can see what things are going to look like, we're pretty damned happy.

Not least, cats will once again be able to roam the whole house, and their litter box will be restored to its old location, in the basement, well away from us, so we no longer have to clean up stray bits of clumping litter on the first floor... Whew!

adored

Much of the work that's been done the last week has been very fine-tuned detail on the woodwork and trim...the sort of thing that's nearly impossible to notice at first, much less photograph.

But yesterday, our bedroom door arrived, and today, it was installed. Here's what it will generally look like, open (which, the upstairs being entirely the private portions of our us*, will be most of the time):



Here's the view of the door closed, with a better view of its detail, as seen from the hallway area at the top of the stairs:



And here's a similar view from inside the bedroom. (The little irregular dots are bits of cork, there to protect the glass, which will be removed.)



* What, you don't like my abstract poetry? That was supposed to have read something like "the private portions of our house" - entirely different from "the private parts of our house"...which would be, I dunno, the plumbing for a start. Or an end.

avoiding all bad puns related to "plumbing"

Our plumbing fixtures are installed. Of course, I have photos...and since who doesn't love a photo of a toilet, that's what's first:



Originally, a failure of communication made it likely we wouldn't be able to get this toilet and would have to settle for your normal, everyday-looking toilet. Oh no: nothing but the finest for our posteriors...the plumbing crew came through and figured out how to make this one work. We thank them from the bottoms of our hearts.

Next, half of the pair of sinks:



The shower hardware, and the ceiling fan (which informs that "humidistatic" is too a word):



Finally, the bathtub and tub fillers:

What's not here yet is the glass shower enclosure, which will probably be the last thing to be installed of the entire project. We needed to wait for the tiling to be done for them to come out and field-measure the project, and then there's a couple of weeks' lead time until the actual glass is made and can be installed. (At least we hope it's the last item to be installed!)

fiat lux!

The lighting is nearly complete! A few minor adjustments here and there, and once we're moved in and furnishings are in place, we'll reevaluate which bulbs go in the fixtures, but here it is. All the photos are without flash but brightened slightly and color-adjusted.

The tour: we begin with the lights above the stairway landing window (because I had loads of work to do, I took these photos quickly...which meant I stupidly nearly obscured one of the two lights in this shot: don't kill me):



At the top of the stairs, we have this fixture illuminating the hallway area between the stairs, bathroom, and bedroom (we have three of these lights; subsequent shots display the fixture itself more clearly. That red plastic thing is a wrap for the fire alarm which needs to remain in place so long as workers are spreading dust about):



Into the bathroom: here's a shot of the main lighting above the sinks. Only one of the sinks is in place, and the mirrors (two of them, placed between the sets of lights) are not up yet either:



Above Rose's bathtub (it's Rose's because she'll be using it way more than I will), there's an overhead light to facilitate reading:



On to the bedroom: here's a shot of the lights flanking the east window bay:



And here's another shot of the fixture that's also in the hallway and just inside the bedroom door (no photo of that particular one, for some reason):



The light and ceiling fan in the center of the bedroom is partially installed, but it's not shown here both because neither of the two shots I have of it are very good, and because its position has to be adjusted a bit. Instead, the last photo in this entry is of our closet light (whoo.):