All the Trimmings

Although perhaps not the most obvious piece of a transformation, trim work really does help make a space feel truly finished.  Just ask our kitchen, who recently got some trim work and is looking more and more fabulous!  The door and window casings are now finished, and baseboards that match the style in the rest of the house have been installed in most areas.  You can see the difference it makes–here’s the doorway to the mudroom before the trimming:

And after:

I pulled out one of the pocket doors too to show what that will sort of look like.  They actually ordered and installed the wrong doors so the correct doors won’t be in for a little while, but you can get the idea.  We really wanted pocket doors here so we could have the option to close them off if we had guests and there was a mess in the mudroom.  Or if we just didn’t want to see the mess!  Here’s a shot of the other new doorway with its finished trim:

This is the pocket door that will close off the hallway to the two front bedrooms as well as the bathroom (which, otherwise, you can see from the dining room!).  We’ve also already discovered that it’s  a great sound barrier during naptime!

Perhaps even more transformative than the trim around the doors are the other two things the carpenter has built–the mudroom bench and cubbies:

Sorry for the weird angle–the space is pretty tight so it was hard to get a good shot.  We’re also thrilled that now in addition to the carpet upstairs, we no longer have this scary toddler death-trap cliff going on:

But instead we have a beautiful and very sturdy railing:

Here’s a close-up shot of the detail:

And the stairway heading downstairs towards the kitchen:

Clearly we still need to paint and/or stain all the new trim, but we’re planning to do it probably once we’re moved in since the trim will always be exposed and we won’t have to move furniture to paint it (as we’d need to with the walls!).  Given that we don’t have nearly as much time as we’d like to spend on the house we’re trying to be very strategic about which projects we take on right away! 

I’ll try to post more pictures again soon!

Cheers,

G

Magic carpet

Things are really happening at the new house these days.  In addition to the renovations in the kitchen/dining room, we’re having the roof replaced, and we finally had the carpet installed in our “everything” room!  Recall that the original space had old unevenly faded yellow carpet and beige walls:

Once we finally got our hands on the space we got to painting it a nice light blue and ripped out the icky old carpet:

We selected a light neutral beige carpet to keep with the light and airy feel of this light-filled second floor room.  We had to wait a little while to actually have it installed though because of all the other work going on downstairs.  But the wait is over, and now we are thrilled with our newly carpeted family room/guest room/office/playroom space!

Of course there’s still plenty to to (especially noticeable is that we still need baseboards, but those will go in soon!).  I’m also excited to get my hands on that yellow light fixture and give it a good coat of spray paint.  But it is just nice to have room where Sydney can run around without too many things she’s not supposed to touch as is the case on the main floor where most of the reno is happening.  Plus the carpet feels super nice on our feet and we’ve all taken to just plopping down on the floor for some impromptu play time.  The nice thing too is that now that the carpet is in, there aren’t any really major things that remain to do in the room so we can start to move stuff into the space now.  Even though we don’t plan to move for another month or so, it will be really nice to have a room that is more finished that we can hang out it while we finish moving in downstairs.  

Cheers,

G

New stain sneak peek

The floors are done!  After considering four options, we selected Minwax’s “Dark Walnut” stain to be the new floor color on the entire first floor:

And I’d love to share lots of pics.  Really, I would.  Unfortunately most of them are currently covered up by thick protective paper so that they don’t get damaged as work on the kitchen finishes up.  But I just couldn’t wait to share a sneak peek of how they turned out!  In the room least affected by the kitchen work–the master bedroom–they didn’t need to cover the floors so I quickly snapped a pic. Let’s see the transformation, shall we?  Recall that after pulling up this original blue carpet:

We found these lovely maple floors:

Okay, mostly lovely:

The floors were starting to look much better after being sanded down:

And now, (drum roll please!) here they are showing off their new “darker side” in their sleek dark walnut stain:

Try to look past how dirty they look–it is still VERY dusty around the house since it is still very much under construction.  We’ll try to keep ‘em clean once the renovations are over and we move in.  The floors in the rest of the house are all oak (not maple) so the stain looks slightly different, but still lovely from what I can see poking out!  I can’t wait for the paper to be removed so I can take some additional pics and post soon!

Cheers,

G

One step forward, two steps back

Remember the amazing transformation of our back hallway from this:

To this?

Although we only about 75% finished with the space (still planned to add a curtain to the window and re-tile the floors), we had to put completing the space on hold since the big kitchen reno was starting.  Unfortunately, all that time and energy we spent priming and painting the heck out of the space a few months back is now mostly moot:

Yep.  Unbeknownst to us, as part of rebuilding the stairway to upstairs this stairway got a bit of a makeover too: brand new drywall!  Don’t get me wrong–I’m perfectly happy with drywall instead of paneling.  I just wish I hadn’t spent so many precious hours painting that dang stairway in the middle of winter with the door open!  So really, the only progress that remains is the painted back door and the stair stringers (previous yellow and dirty beige, respectively).  And we did get sconces installed during the process which will really help.  Previously the only light in the entire back hallway (which serves as the entryway from the garage and back yard) was a battery-operated little push light that was barely better than a candle.

Looks like it is back to the paintbrush and roller for us!  We still have plenty of the paint leftover from the first time we painted, so we’ll most likely just paint it again.  I’ve already purchased the fabric to make a curtain for the back door, the vinyl tiles, and the hook rail you can see in my inspiration mood board for the space:

But I think I might wait a little while until some of the other paint colors in the other rooms are up.  Who knows?  I might like something else even better and this might be a blessing in disguise.  For now we’ll just prime the drywall next time we have the primer out and see where we end up in a month or two.

Cheers,
G

Choosing a stain

When we purchased our new project house, one of the big draws for us is that we knew that underneath all the dusty faded carpet throughout the first floor of the house were wood floors that from what we could tell we’re in great shape.  Soon after closed on the place we started ripping up the carpet–and for the most part we weren’t disappointed.  The floors had been covered by carpeting for at least 40 years and they were in pretty good shape.  Although the stain was a bit lighter than we probably would have chosen, we figured that since they weird in good shape we’d just keep them as they were rather than have them re-finished.

However, we found that not all the floors were in great shape.  In the master bedroom under some blue carpet, we found this:

Further, as part of the major kitchen renovation we’ve been doing (read more about that here and here), some of the floors had to be patched and other areas needed to be completely replaced:

Once the put in the new oak flooring we were then left with this weirdness:

We figured since they’d need to do some sanding and staining anyway, that as long we weren’t living at the house (and thus wouldn’t have to move too much of our stuff), we may as well go ahead and have the floors re-finished on the entire first floor in one fell swoop.  This meant we now had options for the stain of the floors–and we could now do a richer, darker tone we had been craving.  We wanted something that wouldn’t be overly trendy, but that would still look fresh and modern (our goal with all these renovations, really).  The construction site manager put down our top four Minwax options (we chose these four from Minwax’s website) in the middle of the dining room so that we could choose:

They even jotted down the names of the stain colors next to them, which I though was actually kind of cute!  It is a little hard to tell the colors from the photos, but we had a really difficult time deciding!  Any idea what we chose??  If you said “Dark Walnut” then go grab yourself a beer/cocktail/glass of milk/cookie or whatever your vice is!  We liked that it was a darker tone but not nearly as dark as the “Ebony” color on the far left.  And we thought it felt warm without being too red-ish.  

It was so strange seeing the floors all sanded down, but it sure did make them look new again:

We’re really excited to see the finished product and I hope we made the right choice!  Any especially savvy readers my have noticed that I already updated my kitchen inspiration mood board to have darker floors when I was deciding on the new counter top!

Cheers,

G

The not so rad rad(iator)

In my last post I mentioned how incredibly motivated DH has been with our “everything” upstairs room–he did about 90% of the painting himself:

and has since proceeded to rip out the dusty, old faded yellow carpet:

in order to make way for new carpet in this lovely shade of beige (boring, I know, but sometimes neutrals are the way to go):

Things were all going along swimmingly until he went to tear out the last strip of carpet–that’s when we realized just how weirdly this attic conversion was done 30+ years ago.  Apparently the previous owners installed the carpet first and then the baseboard radiator.  You can sort of see what I mean in this picture:

And even better in this close up (you can also see how yucky the carpet looks):

DH and tried everything we could but we couldn’t figure out a way to remove the carpet in that area!  Luckily, we had pushed back the carpet installation by a week due to some of the other kitchen-related work that was going on down on the main floor.  We’ve called a contractor that we’ve worked with several times at our condo (he installed our laundry closet, opened up our master bedroom closet, and did the built-ins in the nursery). He’s going to have someone come by and either remove it or at least trim the carpet right up to the radiator so that the carpet can be installed next week.

This is a minor set back of course, but definitely one of those things that makes me want to ask the previous owners what on earth they were thinking!  Soon after we get the carpet installed we’re planning to have a carpenter build a long, low radiator cover for the rad since unlike the ones on the main floor, this one gets really hot.   Since this is going to be a family room and play room we want to make it as safe as possible for our dear little girl and any friends, cousins, etc. that visit!

More soon!

Cheers,

G

Feeling blue

Last week I posted DH’s amazing surprise start to getting our upstairs “everything” room painted (read more about the room’s multi-purpose aspirations here):

And now (drum-roll please…) the finished paint job!

DH was pretty motivated to finish what he started, so he grabbed his ipod and headed over to the house and finished it while I was at work the other day.  I only did a very small portion of the painting in this huge room (I cut in around the windows and door) and DH did the rest, including lots of time on the ladder to reach the high ceilings!

We’re excited this is done, and as you can see, DH also got a start on tearing out the carpeting too (more on that later!).

Also, do you see that we stopped painting before we got to the floor?  Well, that’s because whoever finished off this room did a lot of strange things, one of which was not installing any baseboards.  So once we get the carpet installed we’re going to have our contractor come by and install some baseboards for us so the room looks more finished (it is a really inexpensive fix, which is nice!).  We’re still planning to paint the trim in the room; we’re not fans at all of the medium tone stained oak and it really doesn’t flow with the rest of the house at all.  Not sure when that will happen, but we’ll definitely need some nicer weather before we embark on that adventure since we’ll need to have the windows open for quite awhile!  I am encouraged that despite this long winter we can’t seem to shake (and the crazy weather that flooded our basement…), Spring may finally be arriving in Chicago.  DH snapped a picture of the buds on the tree in our front yard just starting to open:

A spring bud and a dumpster–a juxtaposition that I think sums up our lives right now pretty well!

Cheers,

G

A little illumination

Although so far I think the most exciting part our kitchen/dining room reno has been getting the cabinets installed, a close second was getting our lights installed!  In addition to several can lights on dimmers and under-cabinet lighting, we now have some lovely pendants over the new island.

And we now have sconces.  Here’s the one in the stairway going upstairs–I just love the crisp linen shade!

I had wanted to use this same sconce in the stairway going downstairs as well, but it was too large to fit in the space so we went with this one instead:

I must say that trying to find sconces for a hallway is no easy task.  At least from all my searching–both on the internet and in brick-and-mortar stores–it seems to me that most sconces are meant for bathrooms and not hallways.  Thus most of the sconces I was finding would have looked out of place in a stairway and stuck out much too far!  I’m so glad I found these two options.  The larger scone (two pics up) is actually the same sconce that some of our friends have in their living room.  I’ve always loved them so I asked for the details of where the got them and ordered one for our house!

What I didn’t have trouble finding, however, was the perfect chandelier for our dining room.  I’ve had my eye on this beauty since before we even thought about buying this house.  I had actually considered buying it for our condo dining room at one point.  You can see it takes its place front and center in my kitchen mood board!

And now is it actually installed in my house.  I can hardly believe it!

Ignore the plastic wrap around it–we’re just leaving that on since there’s still some pretty dusty work to be done.  Here’s another pic of the chandelier and the island pendant so you can see how they relate (both are shiny and silvery) but they don’t match exactly:

 I can’t wait until the plastic comes off and we can put in some bulbs!  Even better would be our dining room table and some delicious food, a glass of wine, and some dinner guests.  But I think that’s still a few months off!

That’s the illuminating news from here at 2BB.  Enjoy!

Cheers,

G

Great angle! Or, how our condo was staged.

I realized just the other day that with all the focus on the new house renovations, I’ve failed to mention that or 2bedroom condo–where we’re currently living–is on the market!  We listed it about 6 weeks ago and have had  pretty steady stream of showings.  We’ve never sold a property before, so the whole process continues to be a learning experience for us.  The part of the process that has been the most fun though was staging our house!  I found it an interesting challenge to allow a (mostly) stranger (our realtor) to come into our home and critique it with fresh eyes.

The biggest hurdle was deculttering everywhere.  I’m always a fan of decluttering in general, but I didn’t quite realize just how much decluttering we’d need to do.  Even though our closets were pretty organized and looked orderly, we had to reduce the amount of stuff in them by roughly half so they looked spacious.  I guess the idea is not to show empty closets, but to make them say something like “Look how spacious I am–there’s a bunch of stuff in here but there’s still plenty of room left!  Buy me!”  Or something like that!

So DH and I undertook a massive purge–some things went in the give away pile, a bunch of seldom used things were packed up and carted over to the new house, and the remaining things were stashed in places no one would look (under the bed for example).   We also took special care to clear out space in our closed storage areas (drawers, cabinets no one would likely open) for last minute items we might need to stash if we had a short-notice showing .

I thought the photographer did a great job using some kind of wide-angle lens to make our place look especially bright and spacious and I thought it would be fun to share some of the photos used for our listing.  For example, here’s shot of our living room bookcases and TV area before we undertook the serious decluttering process:

You can see how hard it is to get a good shot of the space.  Here’s what the photographer got!

And from another angle:

He also got a nice shot of our tiny bedroom.  Here’s my attempt:

And here’s what he was able to show!

Here’s my latest shot of the nursery (pre-decluttering):

And the staged photo with the special wide angle lens:

My shot of the dining room:

And his–which makes the dining room look huge!

My shot of our tiny bathroom:

And the photographer’s shot:

I cant’ believe the difference!  Finally, I’ll leave you with a few shots of the hall:

and of the kitchen:

So far we’ve had lots of interest in our place, but so far no offers.  We’re hoping something comes in soon since it is looking like the new house will be ready for us before to long, which I can hardly believe!  Wish us luck–we’re pretty tired of living in a house that is on the market; it feels like living in a museum sometimes.

Cheers,

G

Roadblocks

Just when I thought things with our reno were moving along (Cabinets are in!  What could go wrong?), I got a call from our designer that the counter tops we had fallen in love with back in January were on back order until at least late June.  Womp womp.  For reference, the beautiful tops were a key design element in an otherwise rather neutral space–”Bellingham” from Cambria:

Perhaps it seems like this wouldn’t be a huge deal, but what we found out was that all additional work on the kitchen (installing the sink, appliances, back splash  etc.) had to wait until the tops were in–meaning the entire project would grind to a halt and be delayed by at least 2 months.  DH and I debated for quite awhile about if it was worth it to wait for the tops to come in.  It is a pretty big chunk of our overall budget for the space after all–and we’re not planning to redo the kitchen for a loooooong time.  And we knew that when we did our selections for the space back in January, this was by far our favorite option–nothing else came even close.  But then our designer let us know that there were some new options that had come out since we had done our selections, so we agreed to look at other options since we REALLY didn’t want to delay the project (we’ve been planning this since November and not having a kitchen is what is keeping us from moving in!).

Our designer was nice enough to drop off samples of some other options at our house so we could see them with the installed cabinets.  She also dropped off some of the penny tile we’re using for the inset nook above the stove, which we chose specifically to coordinate with the Cambria Bellingham counters.  We had a very difficult time deciding, but putting together two mood boards helped a bit!  Here’s the first option she mentioned–Cambria’s Praa Sands:

We thought this one was equally beautiful and we really liked it.  However we worried that the bluish tint in the veining made the overall balance of the space feel too cold, especially since the rest of the kitchen was white.  I think in a kitchen with dark warm-toned cabinets this would be a fabulous counter, but that’s not what we’re working with.  The second option we considered was Cambria’s New Quay:

This sample has the same warm tone as the Bellingham but without any of the black marbling, and definitely still looks great with the penny tile.  It was a difficult decision because we still love the Bellingham so much, but we’ve decided to go with the New Quay in order to move the project along.  We’ve had a lot of time to think about it and because it is even more neutral we’re thinking that we might like it for an even longer period of time, and it will give us greater flexibility to change the feel of the room with the seasons and over time.  I just hope we end up loving them as much as we loved the other design and never look back.  And they’ve already scheduled the install, so we won’t need to wait long!

The title of this post was “Roadblocks,” plural.  The other road block?  Chicago got a massive rain storm the other day and we, along with most of the city, got a flooded basement.  We were surprised because there was no evidence of the basement ever having water issues in the past.  The frustrating thing was that we’ve been storing all our extra stuff down there, so we really had out work cut out for use sorting through everything and moving things upstairs.  I had to take a half day off work and DH and I spent many, many hours carting buckets of water out of the basement.  Luckily, very few of our things were actually ruined–mostly because we caught it before it sat there for too long.  But it did mean that we lost a weekend that we could have been working on other projects to working on tearing out the old carpet that the previous owner had put down.  Needless to say, DH and I were pretty sore after all that!

Here’s hoping the next week goes much better!

Cheers,

G