almost....

its ALMOST time to move in!! things have come together the last couple of weeks and this has been the fun part! getting the kitchen cabinets set, the lighting installed and at least the trim for one room painted....its getting closer and i cant wait.

we've stuck to the budget fairly well thus far. we needed major things for the house....new boiler, some plumbing, all new electrical, insulation, air conditioning, water heater and water softener. those things add up FAST! which had me having to really budget all of the finishes and cabinets in the house. if you saw the post on the bathroom, i used a vintage buffet for the sink vanity, which i think i found for about $30, and i'm using a pair of mirrors my cousins gave me when they remodeled their house. i did however buy new lighting for the bathroom...thats a little harder to come by.

these are the sconces above the vanity

this is the main light fixture

i did the marble hex tile in the bathroom...it was a little bit of a splurge, but its perfect for the period of the house and its really, timeless. its not going to go look dated in years to come. its neutral enough, where i can change out my colors in the bathroom if i ever want to and its going to feel so nice with the in-floor heating we put in the bathroom. yes this is a 'restoration', but the modern amenities are SO nice!

just have to grout and get trim up and the bathroom is done!

im using a really neutral, warm color scheme for the house. accenting with navy blue, coral, red and greenish/blue tones.

i chose all benjamin moore colors. i use those most when doing design work, and know my favorites! i chose mostly warm greige colors for the walls. nice soft color.

the kitchen was a pain in the butt...seriously, a pain!! we had to move the cabinets several times to get them to fit right and then get the appliances to fit right. the walls and floor aren't exactly square, so it was a little challenge to get everything lined up and level...but he did it and they look exactly the way i thought they would! i ended up specing my cabinets from ikea. when i did a remodel at my house in mpls, i used ikea cabinets and i loved them! they're so versatile and you can make everything exactly the way you want. the possibilities are really endless. and there are SO many things you can do to make them look more 'custom' and 'built-in'. which we'll be doing once we get in the house. i'm going to build furniture feet for the lowers and put we'll put crown on the uppers. i also want to put some corbels under the uppers to make them look even more period to the house! lots of fine little details, but it will give such a gorgeous look to the project.

i was going back and fourth about color for a long time, but finally decided on white uppers and grey lowers. they look perfect with the tile on the floor and i love the contrast of the dark and light.

i am so happy with the herringbone pattern i chose for the floors!

we spent this last weekend putting drawers together, doors and panels on everything and getting everything set into place. thats the only drawback to ikea cabinets...you put everything together yourself...it wasn't as bad as i remember from the other time...it went pretty quickly actually. all of the doors and drawers have soft-close, which will be nice. i put some glass doors on the a few of the uppers to lighten it up even more, and we added puck lights in those cabinets and then under cabinets lighting to the rest. have i mentioned how nice it is to be married to an electrician?! and he put a docking station into the wall over by the fridge, which can charge 4 devices...i saw it at a someones house a while back and loved the idea!

i chose some period lighting, and then some fun pendents for over the island.

love the look of the old 'school light', so i chose that to go above the sink

this is what i got to hang above the island. love the industrial look of them and the cool huge edison bulbs!

the hardware is traditional, i don't want that to look dated in a few years either. i wanted to do traditional long pulls for the drawers and then knobs for some of the doors.

countertops have been a little hard to find....i need to stay within a certain dollar amount and what i've found so far is WAY out of it! so i need to keep shopping around!

em's room

in the previous post, i showed the chaos that IS the trim....it's been started and parts of it have been installed! it took a good full day to scrape, sand and repair just em's bedroom! her floors have been sanded, stained and have 2 coats of poly on them. so we'll install the trim and then the last coat of poly will go on. i decided to paint the trim once its been installed. first off because we don't have the room to really lay it all out and paint it....and also because i would rather not have to do a bunch of touch-ups once its put up. the crown however, i'll paint that before its put up! there's NO way i'm trimming in a ceiling AND a wall!! it went up better than we thought it would. there were a few missing pieces that got bundled in with other rooms, but each piece was found. and it fit back pretty good actually! i'll need to caulk a few spots, but it'll look gorgeous with paint on it!

here's a picture of the little peanut :) this is her room that i'm showing photos of this post!

here were the floors before they were sanded, after sanding and right after the stain and poly went on...they look shinier than they will be..the poly was still wet. but i chose a satin finish. im not a glossy hardwood floor kind of gal! so, i originally had the vision of having dark stained floors throughout the house...i was talked out of it. ended up going with a warm medium nutmeg color. i have to say, they look amazing! the guy that did them does AMAZING work!!!

they were actually in great shape. the carpet had been covering them for DECADES. i'm pretty sure the carpet was from the 60's! this is a 'before'

we had to pull all the staples out before the sanding started

whoohooo!!! almost ready for the stain!

done!

here are a few photos of the original trim put back on. its so pretty.....don't let the sanding spots, the multiple colors of paint or the roughness of it scare you....you have to look past all of that and imagine what it will be like once it has a coat of fresh paint on it! the detail of it is gorgeous!

look at ALL of those pieces....i'm still thinking 'hell'.

looks in pretty rough shape here! but its all intact and ready for new paint

it's moving along! the next room we'll finish trim in, is the guest room. the floors are finished in there too. the only room that doesnt have trim is the bathroom. at some point in the 80's it was remodeled and the big original trim was taken out and replaced with some ugly 80's floor tile. sad. so we will have to find some trim for that room from a salvage place.

here's a sneak peek at the kitchen floor!! the next post will be about this room. i'm LOVING how its turning out!! cabinets are going to be installed this weekend hopefully!

welcome to my hell....

so, i was sort of kidding about titling the post as 'welcome to my hell'...but once you see what i'm talking about, you might agree with me. don't get me wrong, i LOVE our house...but oh my gosh, this part is going to take forever. and i mean, forever.

we're getting to the point where the 868 pieces of trim can be put back on upstairs. and just looking at it all is so daunting. it makes me wonder what i got us into. maybe because i'm sort of responsible for most of the 'finish' work from here on out. i'll have to scrape and sand down ALL of trim before we get it back on and then repaint it. i would love to strip it, but i would be at that for years. there's just way too much. and it has about an 1/8" of paint buildup on it...thats years and years of paint. i dont have the time to strip each piece, unfortunately. its fir, it would be gorgeous...but i digress. anyways, with taking the plaster and lath off and then putting sheetrock up, the trim is going to fit back together differently. the plaster was 1/4" thick in some spots on the wall and almost 2" thick on other parts. the husband tried furring the walls out so they would at least be flush with the window frames and door frames...which took forever and a huge pain in the butt! some of it worked, some of it didn't. SO, we'll have to be retrofitting some of the trim to get it to work properly. and there are places where there wasn't trim, that we need trim and vise versa. so it'll be a long drawn out puzzle to get it back. and we'll still have to go to some architectural salvage places to find some trim to match.

this is a photo of the trim JUST for the upstairs. and the room that its in is about 16' x 12'....and its piled about 3-4' high. just looking at this picture scares me. i have to say, once its up though, and painted, its going to be beautiful....

the second part of my hell, is this.....since the siding was put up on the house, i don't think it was ever repainted the right way. im thinking there was never scraping the old paint off before the new paint went on. the outside is ridiculously alligatored and peeling and chipping and in general, scary as hell. it is going to literally take me ALL spring and summer to prep and paint the exterior of this house.

do you see this? some of it scrapes off, some of it doesn't.

heres a photo of one of the architectural detail pieces on the exterior. you can see how bad the paint is! on a happy note, i love the shade of green peeking out here.....i wonder what all the combinations of colors the house was painted in?!?!

and the third part of my hell is this....the windows. yes, we're keeping the original windows. people have tried to talk me out of this....many many times. one things is the cost factor, one is the 'look', one is the efficiency. i did a TON of research on using original windows in old houses. and found that the air basically escapes out the cracks and out of the frames. the glass isn't exactly the culprit. IF they are insulated well around the window frames, and the glazing on the windows themselves is air tight, the windows are going to be almost as efficient as brand new ones. this made me feel good....but then i realized how much work it was going to be to get them to that point. the husband did a great job of insulating really well around the frames, so that will help tremendously. but the windows haven't been touched in decades. most of them are painted shut and most dont have screens on them. most of them do however have storm windows. which also have to be scraped, repainted and reglazed. AND about half of them have been broken during the demo...which actually makes me sad, because you can't just go to the store and get the old, wavy glass anymore. if i wanted to put that kind of glass back in, i'll have to go to salvage places, find old windows, take them apart and use the glass...hmmmmm. so besides doing all of that work on the exterior of the house, i am going to have to scrape, sand, repaint, and reglaze every single window. oh and there are around 40 windows. i think maybe 36 to be exact...? PLUS a storm window for each window, PLUS building new screen windows for each window. sounds fun, right?!

this is the shape every single window is in...BAD, HORRIBLE shape. and i'm sure its layer upon layer of lead based paint. so i've had a mask on the whole time while scraping. i'll have to look up the symptoms of lead poisoning...this house could kill us. it could.

so to end the post on a HAPPY note....our bathroom sinks JUST arrived. i had to unpack them and put them on the vanity to see what they look like! i think they're going to look great in there! a nice pop of white on the vanity to bring the room all together!

another FIND, and bathroom update

we've been so busy at the house! and when i say 'we', i really mean my husband :) i JUST started doing some things this last week. its finally MY turn to get in there and do things that i'm able to do. but he's been so busy and done such an amazing job on everything!! AND i don't want to forget to mention all the friends and family that have been such great help as well....we are so very appreciative!

OK, on to the new 'find'. during demo upstairs we realized that the house was originally built with all vaulted ceiling upstairs. can you imagine?! first of all, design wise, gorgeous. but practicality wise, that house had to have been FREEZING! the vaults were actually built right into the roof framing....meaning that there was no airspace between the vault and the roof...so no space for any insulation. not that they had any insulation anyways...but still...COLD. we also discovered that the upstairs was maybe only 1 or 2 rooms when the house was built. the vaults were sort of all connected and it seems like the guest bedroom and our dressing room area were all one huge vaulted room at one time. and emma's room may have been tied into it as well. i SO wish i had photos of that house when it was built! i have to do some digging and find something.

we (and again, when i say 'we' i mean the royal we...which means the husband...but 'we' in the sense that i made the design decision...you know, so i can be included in the 'we'!) decided to re-build the vault in the guest bedroom because there was a window in the attic which was included in the vault. it didnt work out to have the vault in the our dressing room area, because i'm a symmetrical fanatic and the vault would've been off center in the room....and it would've look weird. i am SO happy with how it turned out...and the 'guest' will have the coolest room in the house..

here's a photo of the ceiling...hard to tell what it is, but the 2x4's are actually the dropped ceiling someone put in at some point, over the vault. not sure WHY they ever covered it up...so the original vault was plastered and had a few layers of wallpaper on it...with some glorious water damage spots.

and here's the original vault before the husband rebuilt it. structurally it needed some reinforcement and needed to be pulled up a bit and leveled out. so that little window on top, was covered up at some point when they put the dropped ceiling in

and here it is after it was rebuilt. LOVE it!

and look at this...PROGRESS!!! this was just taken last week. this room is going to be pretty cool!

you remember the bathroom, right?! well last time i posted, i was lamenting over the tile and color selection. after about 7 trips to the store, i finally came up with the tile selection. and guess what, they didn't have enough in stock. so its on order, but should be here next week so we can get it laid. the husband and i were however able to get the tile set in the shower. and i am loving it. its classic, clean and fresh. i tried to chose most things that would be period to the house and added a few fresh updated pieces....but still in the traditional scheme.

i originally was thinking of doing a sort of 'rug' or center design in the bathroom floor, in one tile and then doing different tile. well, that didn't come together. i couldn't find anything that i liked together. so i ended up going with a marble hex tile for the entire floor. which i think will look lovely. we're also doing a sort of border around the floor in the pencil tile, so it brings in the subway tile look down to the floor, from the shower. i chose standard white subway tile for the shower surround....and added a cut marble tile border, just to break it up a little and to add some marble to connect everything in the bathroom.

this is the marble hex i chose for the flooring, along with the subway tile pencil trim

here's the shower surround detail next to the flooring

the progress. and i learned that we work really well together :) he did the cutting, i did the tile install

here's a photo of it finished

 oh and how could i forget to give an update on the bathroom vanity....its been finished now for about a month. i chose a deep navy for it. i used milk paint, to give a nice chippy finish and i turned out perfect for the bathroom! and i ordered two rectangular white vessel sinks to be installed on the top.

here it is! don't mind the huge shiny thing sitting on top..thats just our kitchen sink that got delivered yesterday! whoohoo!

detail

the upper level bath in the 1870 victorian

its been AGES since i've written a post on the victorian!! SO much has changed since the last post...and once i get all of the new photos downloaded, there will be another post on the construction part! husband has been so busy there getting the upstairs and kitchen gutted and now its almost time to start putting it back together!!!! so with that, my job finally starts...the design part....the fun part...

the major things i've been getting figured out are the kitchen and upper level bath. lighting, color scheme, furniture pieces, sinks, tubs....all SORTS of good things!

i've decided on a pretty neutral color scheme for the walls and add pops of color with window coverings, rugs and pillows. in my last house it was the opposite....so i wanted a change. and i want the architecture, moulding and details in the house to speak more than the 'color'.

i 'think' i've decided on everything for the bath....here are before pictures of it...

 

the wall that juts out next to the toilet is the old chimney...we took that out and gained a ton of new space!

it's a pretty good sized bathroom, so it gives me room to do a few special things in there. with us getting rid of the old chimney's, it gives us an extra space of about 3' x 4'. which i love, because now theres definitely room for a big soaking tub!! my one of two MUSTS for the house. one we got into the demo, we realized there were tin ceilings and moulding UNDER the awful dropped, wallpapered ceiling. they sort of hacked into it, when they installed the bath fan in there, which made me sad.

bathroom ceiling tin crown

bathroom ceiling tin

its a little rusty from an old huge basin that was placed in the attic, that dripped onto it. i'm guessing this basin was to catch rain water at one time, to bring water into the bathroom. but over the 150 yrs...its leaked, rotted and ruined part of the tin ceiling. we also found tin ceiling in the kitchen!!! another great find :) its cut into down there as well, but we'll be able to re-use enough of it to do the ceiling in the bathroom again. its a little different pattern than the tin pictured above, its really pretty...

the kitchen ceiling tin

so the plan as of now, is to use the tin ceiling from the kitchen in the bath upstairs. unfortunately, the wood flooring under the layers of linoleum isn't salvagable. its pretty rotten and there were actually big holes cut in the floor to accommodate the old plumbing. so we'll have to either find some old plank flooring to put in there, or tile. if we tile, i want to keep with the period and style of the house, for the most part. so i'd want to possibly do a basket-weave pattern...possibly marble???

something for sure in the white/grey color family with accents of black!! im doing a light blueish/silvery/greenish color for the walls in there...

and i found these really fun, industrial/glam sconces and light fixture...

i LOVE having the exposed edison bulb. it gives the fixtures a more 'period style' to the house. and of course, doing what i do...i'm not going to just go to a big box store and get a stock bathroom vanity....i was looking through my inventory this week to see if there was anything that would work for the vanity....and i FOUND it! and the best part is, its perfect size for 2 sinks. we're actually moving the tub to the other side of the bathroom and putting the vanity where the old tub was. its gives the space such a better flow, and allows us to have a larger tub and vanity...

here it is!!!! i'll find 2 rectangular white, vessel or drop in sinks to put in/on it and then have 2 mirrors above with the sconces! so the dilemma now is.....what do i do with it. the tub is going to be white...flooring will be light with black accents...and i MIGHT do beadboard halfway up the walls, which will be painted the trim color (which is a chalky white), and then have the blueish/silvery paint on the top half of the walls. im THINKING of painting it black....a little distressed...and stripping and restaining the top. its sitting in my workroom at the shop...we just brought it up this morning. and i'm just anxious as heck to start working on it!!!