Johnny Jolly

Our kitchen demo revealed this little gem. It has a date on it somewhere but I don't remember what it was. I love that he signed it Johnny Jolly. For serious. 

Minor miracles

Courtesy of the Mr, also known as my hero. God knows what I will do when we have a working bathroom. Swoon, most likely.

The armadillo has left the building

The armadillo has left us, and no one seems to know when or how. Given the current state of the project, I can't really blame him at all. Via con Dios, Senor Armadillo. 

I tried to take pictures but it was kind of hard to understand the overall effect of cabinets piled in every room and dust all over. So I made a little video for you. 

Check out our sweet rotted floor joists that were hiding behind the grody kitchen ceiling. Wait - are you not supposed to let sewage sit on those for years? Really?

So, new plan. We need decent floor joists. Then we can have plumbing and electric. Then we can have a bathroom, then we can have paint and floors and all of that. Maybe, sometime before we pay off the mortgage, we can live here. In the meantime, I'm trying to convince the Mr. that we should just put in a glass floor tub/shower. So people in the kitchen can enjoy the light and the... view. It'll be a feature. 

He's not yet convinced on that bathroom design, but he did 'rough in' the new sink and faucet in the half bath for me. I like the pedestal sink and I think the size is just right... except for the part where I now have this tile problem. The holes in the tile (and wall) were from prior sinks, sinks which were apparently taller. I liked the faucet on the sink in person but in the picture it seems a lot taller. Hmmmm. 

Please to note how our wall is not 90 degrees. It's not too bad in this picture but the gap is pretty noticeable in person. No idea on what to do about it yet. Maybe I can replace the damaged tiles with black? Is that too weird? I'd love to take out some of the accessories. Two soap holders and a toothbrush holder and a towel bar is an awful lot of stuff on the wall for a tiny half bath. I think they are 70's era so I don't think I'd be destroying history. 

When googling possible sources for vintage peachy pink tile, I happened across this site: Save the Pink Bathrooms. I haven't taken the pledge, but I'm doing my best. Truly.

The big day

Well our big day has been very big indeed. We finally decided on the paint color for the kids room! Tada!

Just kidding. We did decide on his paint color but that certainly wasn't the biggest action of the day. It's hard to say what the biggest accomplishment was today. Maybe we should have them fight it out. In fact I think we should have a cage match: new gutters vs. no kitchen!

First up, the interior contender, our former kitchen!:

Surprise! We found a chimney!

We have a lot of kitchen cabinets in strange places right now. Like, they are three times bigger in the middle of the room than they seem on the wall. You can still swing if you don't mind getting up close and personal with an ancient mouse nest we discovered in one of them. 

Technical foul! What happens when you have guys coming to destroy stuff and the dumpster doesn't show up until 5:04 (ten minutes after the guys had to leave?) This. This is what happens. It's all gone now, no big deal, and totally on the dumpster people (and perhaps the people ordering the dumpster). 

The challenger: new gutters!

I am sad to see the copper gone. It was so lovely and added such character, but it was literally destroying our house with its complete failure to direct water in appropriate directions. So I will use as much copper as I can reasonably and stylishly afford on the inside. Sorry, house. 

I said a lot of prayers for these guys. At one point the Kid was shaking their ladder. (!) 

I hustled him off to school. 

Our aluminum/copper combo is now all aluminum. Sad face. But a dryer basement! Preserved masonry! 

I hear these are worth big bucks. I also love them and would like to use them for something, but I'm not sure what that would be without causing undue damage. Like, a planter? That I could cut a bigger hole for?

Also, I like money. See: no kitchen or bathrooms

The Kid is the winner! "Hey look at my muscles! I'm a super hero!"

In other news, the electrician is scheduled for next week, the guys are coming to take down ceilings on Friday, and I have a big dilemma in front of me for next week: refinishing floors or painting cabinets? Stay tuned!

Behold, my skills of a hunter-gatherer

I'm about to have some shiny new pictures of progress for you all, and let's be honest, that's why you really come here. I know. So I thought I would do some wordiness now so you can enjoy some progress pictures tomorrow. 

• The front porch trim has all been primed. It looks way better. What you can see of it around the kitchen cabinets, that is. They haven't been moved to the garage yet. 
• We have a whole saga about the new doors, which have literally taken over a month to order, escalated us to the Assistant Manager at the blue store, gotten us repeat follow up "I'm so sorry if I pissed you off" calls from the orange store, and have required multiple conversations with the factory about our strangely sized doors. But we have paid for them, and they tell us that they will come. Sometime. 
• My cousins Chris and Casey have been super helpful and Casey is going to help us out a bunch this week too, working on demo in the kitchen and mudroom. I think my life will be a lot happier once that kitchen ceiling is down. Dumpster #5 is being ordered tomorrow. 
• Almost all of the old plumbing is now gone including the giant cast iron 'stack' - that big hunk of metal running from the top of the roof down under the basement floor, down which everything drains. The stack is coming back in au courant PVC and we are looking forward to being able to flush like champions (albeit with our bucket water delivery system) once again. It's not really picture worthy, and yet, it is excellent. 
• We have selected an electrician and had our plans approved by the electric company, so the service and breaker box will be moved and updated soon as well as installing new circuits for the mechanicals. That will be a huge relief and an important first step towards not setting the house on fire. 
• As for me, well... I have tried to be helpful. We are in a strange spot where things are advancing in some areas and moving backwards in others. Handling the kid, housesitting, cleaning for showings and jumping through all the hoops before I go back to work has actually kept me pretty occupied. In the meantime, I have been shopping. It sounds like an unimportant, trivial and perhaps even counterproductive job, but the fact remains that someone has to do it and that someone is me. There is a lot of data processing involved, between reading reviews and price comparing and coordinating with other stuff. And I want someone to appreciate my hard work, so here are some things I have recently purchased: 

allen + roth vanity light at Lowes.com. In your face, stupidly expensive schoolhouse lights! 

This is for the upstairs bathroom. 

Also at Lowes.com, The Aquasource Norcroft faucet for the pink and black bathroom. Hoping this is a winner because it's about half the price of the Moen Brantford version at the orange store (way, way less than half of what BB&B is selling it for) and the Moen Brantford tub and shower kit comes without the shower head and is mildly affordable and is what I would like to use upstairs. 

I know a whole lot more about bathroom fixtures than I want to right now. 

The Gaston corner pedestal sink, to display the aforementioned faucet in the pink and black bathroom. Apparently, corner pedestal sinks are stupidly hard to find, I only like this one, and it is only sold at three places that I know of and two of them have them backordered until 9/30/13. Thankfully I got a tracking number on mine tonight (free shipping!) courtesy of Signature Hardware. 

And now for some color selection action. 

Dining Room Battle of the Turquoise Winner: Valspar 'Sprinkle'

I finally concluded that 1) there was no reason to deny myself the ease of using paint colors I liked by trying to force them to match up to a Benjamin Moore equivalent and 2) there just isn't very much light in the dining room and 3) therefore BM's Jamaican Aqua was too dark and too blue because it just never got enough light. Pantone's Bay was a nice option in the lighter, green direction but ultimately was too green. Someone looking for a lovely vintage green might try it out. Valspar's Sprinkle just glows on the wall, and that is what I was looking for. Keeping my fingers crossed that it will make me as giddy with excitement when it's all over the walls instead of just on my sample poster. 

I put sample paint on $0.32 posters from Target. Because otherwise I would have to clean the walls to put the samples up and ain't nobody got time for that. 

The living room color was actually pretty easy to find. One sample of Pantone's Ecru and we were good to go. Likewise, Benjamin Moore's Palladian Blue is a winner for the master bedroom, but I had to get it off the porch (and away from the blue carpeting) to see how much I really liked it. 

The surprise loser was Benjamin Moore's Yarmouth Blue, which was slated for the other upstairs bedrooms. It was just too dark. The next sample to go up is Valspar's Cincinnatian Hotel Abbey. I have never typed Cincinnatian in my life, and yet there it is. We tried the Icy Blue but it was really light, and CHA is the next color on the paint chip. We'll see. It's a much more aqua shade than I had planned, but the kid really loved Palladian Blue and after I drew the line at having all the bedrooms the same color he was pretty stoked about the 5004-9 card. He was so cute at the store today ordering his sample. The men gave him a blue sucker while they mixed his paint, because why not? That kid gets more swag than anyone I have ever met. 

Also, I spend a lot more time re-shelving paint chips than you might believe. I'm actually getting really good at it. That kid loves him some paint chips.