We might be grown-ups

Today, while Jake was putting the finishing touches on our new media set-up, I realized that we might be grown-ups. We now have a living room that is:

1. Not hot pink

2. Painted -- professionally -- in a color we actually chose

3. Has three pieces of furniture that we bought from a store. More importantly, we are the FIRST owners of these three pieces.

4. We have a large (in my opinion) TV & attached media equipment

5. Said equipment is arranged nicely in a cabinet, with dedicated electrical switches that don't involve an elaborate set of extension cords crossing the room.

6. There are actual curtains, actually hemmed to fit the particular windows in which they hang.



I know, some of you might have said that buying a house, or maybe, having a child, were rather obvious signs we were grown-ups. Or the fact that I am updating this blog on a Friday night. OK, fine. We're grown-ups. But here's the evidence:















If you'd like to see how far we've come, you might enjoy a walk down memory lane through some old blog posts about the room formerly known as the pink room, such as this one, or this one, or this one. We've come a long way, baby.



I will try to post some more details of the changes, but for now I wanted to post this so that certain people (Moms, we're looking at you) could see the results now!

Changes Afoot

I told Lucy we gave away our TV. I realize that this might be seen as cruel. We did in fact give away our TV -- or more appropriately, we returned it to our kind friends who gave it to us. This is because we are getting a new TV! We have not yet told Lucy this part, but she definitely knows something is up.

For the past couple of years, this cabinet has been the keeper of our television:


But this cabinet is rather large and bulky. While I like the fact that it keeps the TV & media out of sight when we're not watching it, it does take up a lot of space in this room. In the corner opposite this cabinet (both literally in the room and in the figurative sense of the opposing contender for media storage) is this built-in cabinet:

We have often thought that it would be nice if this could be our media center. It would completely re-orient the room. There are shelves on top (obviously) but there's also a neat little cabinet down below, which, sadly, has been blocked by the couch for all these years because of the current media/seating configuration.

Can you guess what's coming next? Well, you'll just have to wait. I'll update as we accomplish the transition -- it may be a couple of days. Stay tuned....

New Couch Alert: Our First Stain

I don't know exactly when it happened or what (or who) caused it, but we have our first stain on our brand-new couch. It's a black mark (magic marker? grease? paint from one of Lucy's projects?) EXACTLY in the middle of the back. It's not huge (maybe 2 inches long) but it's noticeable -- actually, I thought it was a piece of fluff stuck on it. Sigh. I need to look into stain removal. Suggestions? I have been warned NOT to use water, as it will only spread the stain around.
Time to first stain: less than one week. Eek!

Bring on the Chili and Red Wine!

It's Super Bowl Sunday, and we get to watch the game on our brand new couch. Like our nation, we have relied upon the electoral college system and ignored the voting public (see the comments) and made our decision:


I like how it works with the other pieces here:

And it makes our old couch look really shabby:

P.S. We're trying to get rid of it! Please? Would you like to have it? A genuine, certified relic of 83 Durant Street!

It's ready for nappers:

Look how far we've come:

This is the pink room in October 2006. Wow.

While writing this post, I shoo'ed Carter off the new couch for the first time (it has been in the house for less than 45 minutes). Hrm.

The room formerly known as the pink room

Some of you already know about this and have been asking for pictures. It's finally done! While we were away, our wonderful painter came and removed all the final traces of the PINKNESS (and there was a lot of it!). Here are some shots:

The wall color is "Stratford Blue" and the trim is "Acadia White."

I realize that this news is really not as exciting as being in a movie, but it is pretty exciting for us. Now that Carter is a big movie star, we have to make sure his crib is appropriate to his film star status. The pink room was simply unacceptable. Here are a couple more shots. Unfortunately, there's a big nasty scratch or something on the lens, so that weird spot is not on the wall, but on the camera. [Camera lens cleaning suggestions are warmly welcomed!]

My mom is visiting and hemmed our curtains so that you can now see the woodwork beneath the window area (before there was pink trim paint there):

Jake has hung some of our pictures:

That's all for now. More posts are coming about our NEW STOVE and the adventures related to it. Stay tuned.

The room formerly known as the Pink Room

You may recall that we live in a house that has a BRIGHT PINK room. You may also recall hearing me say that I saw the PINK ROOM in the photos of the house way before we bought it, before we had even seen the house, and I said "I can't live in a house with a pink room." We bought the house anyway, and I figured we'd change it immediately. But for numerous reasons, we had not gotten around to doing anything about the pink room. For one thing, it's right in the middle of the house, making it a bit of a hassle to take care of such a project. For another, the room is old horsehair plaster with wallpaper, and then paint over wallpaper, and then a wallpaper border over that. It was going to be a project. A big one. And today, that project began.

Here are a few before shots. I'm not putting a whole lot of them up here, since I think most of our readers are well-acquainted with the pink-ness in question. If you're not, take a gander at some of the older posts (like this one or this one) or at our flickr pages, where you're sure to see shots of the pinkness in action.




If you're wondering about the wallpaper that was under the hot pink you can check out a small patch here:


Last night we emptied the room of all its worldly possessions.


Every other room in our house is now over-stuffed, and things are a bit nuts, but the pink room was empty, and ready for the arrival (at 7 am today) of our plastering team.

We're very happy with the work Brian Daly and his two workers did for us today. He was recommended to us by our good friend Matt, who's quite an expert carpenter and house restoration expert. The coolest part of the job was the fact that two of the guys wore stilts to do the job.

Our ceilings are 10 feet high, so this was kind of necessary. Lucy was fascinated by the stilts. I think she would have preferred to stay home from daycare today to just watch them working.

Here's a mid-project shot:


The drywall (before it was covered with plaster) was this dark blue-gray color, and we actually liked the way it looked. We're thinking of a dark slate blue as a possible color for the room (but we really have no idea what we're going to do color-wise).

The last time we did a drywalling project was for Lucy's room, but back then, we actually demolished the plaster. That was an incredibly dirty and trash-producing job, and we swore then we would never do such a thing again. This time, we sensibly decided to just put the drywall right over the plaster, making it an easier job for us. It did make things a bit tricky though, since the wallboard had to go on top of the bottom molding. We could have removed the molding, but this too would have been quite a project, and quite possibly would have ruined some of the molding. We think it turned out pretty well.

We're especially pleased with the ceiling, which had a lot of cracks in the plaster and is now nice and smooth:

Here you can see some of our nice, sharp corners:


As you can see, there are still some PINK spots, as illustrated here on the medallion. We're hoping to be able to paint over them. The guys did a nice job of trimming the drywall around the medallion, and bringing the edge right up to it. A few pieces broke off, so the guys suggest that we spray paint it, since it's in pretty delicate shape.

The room is filled with dust and smells funny, but we're pleased with the job. We have to wait at least a week, and probably two, for the plaster to completely dry before we can paint it. So we have a pretty much empty room in the middle of the house, which Lucy is really enjoying.

Do you have a color you'd like to suggest for the room formerly known as the pink room? Do you have a new name we can call the pink room, besides "the room formerly known as the pink room"? We look forward to hearing from our devoted readers!

By the way, I wrote most of this post on Tuesday, but didn't have a chance to get it finished. So all the "todays" here refer to Tuesday, June 23rd, for those of you documenting and keeping track of such things.