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....

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.

83 Durant Mysteries, Continued

This post is part of an ongoing series exploring the mysteries of 83 Durant. You may remember previous posts, like WHHHHHHAAAT part 1, part 2, and part 3. Whenever we take on a project, we always uncover new mysteries about the house.

The recent work in the pink room has raised some questions. Readers, we'd love to hear from you -- explanations, scientific or humorous -- are always most welcome.

Without further delay, answer me these questions three:

Question 1:
What kind of plug is the one on the left?


Question 2 (same as 1, but different picture):
What kind of plug is the one on the left here? I think it looks like cable, but there's no actual cable coming out of it. There are two of these in this room.


Question 3:
Have we made a serious mistake in covering up the box that's photographed here?
This is a mystery box that was in the wall, a little bit below where the doorbell is attached to the wall. It seemed to have no wires in it. Why is it here/what does (did) it do, and now that it's covered by drywall, are we in trouble?


Bonus Question:
What's up with this door?


I know, trick question. There are many things wrong with this door. First, there's the pink accent, which is not our fault. Then there's the red accent on that top section, which is our fault, because we were trying out a color that we thought we might be able to just paint over the pink (no dice).

If you look at that door, you may notice that something besides the color is off-kilter. It's just not-quite-right that there are three rectangles -- it just seems like they're not spaced appropriately, right? Yeah, now that you mention it, it does look kind of off.

That's because this door apparently is not an original door for this spot. If you look at the bottom, you will see that this door has been made larger with an extra couple pieces of wood attached to make the bottom 4 inches or so. This door was originally meant for a doorway that was shorter. Also, it's pretty clear that it's not really supposed to be an exterior door. It's not nearly as thick or sturdy as the other exterior doors in the house. This has me wondering what happened to the original door.

That's all for today. Hope you're having a lovely weekend. It's hot and rainy here. Sigh.

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.

Some improvements

Today we did an overhaul of the living room. We moved all the audio equipment into the TV/video cabinet, and got rid of the ugly and mostly inaccessible corner shelf that previously held the stereo. It makes for a little more space in the room, and makes the stereo actually accessible, which is all for the good.

Also, this makes it so you can see the door, including the patch of dark red paint where we were testing a possible color for the room (the color failed). You can also see the very sorry state that the yellow chair is in; I think it's time to start shopping for a new chair or at the very least, to invest in a slipcover. You may also have noticed that mountain of Lucy toys that towers over our living room. The kid has a lot of stuff.

We also installed a new closer on the front screen door. Try dragging a stroller w/ kid, plus the dog and whatever else you need through the screen door that will not stay open, and you will realize what a HUGE improvement this little device is. When I realized that I wanted to replace our old closer, I wondered what that little thingy was called. I figured that there must be some sort of technical name for it, perhaps something involving the word "pneumatic." But to my delight, I discovered that it's simply called a "door closer" and in fact they're quite easy to find on the internet. I wanted a particular kind of closer though, one that would easily hold itself open, but also easily close after we'd entered or exited with our sundry parcels and creatures. The "Touch N Hold" door closer was exactly what we needed.



Their website claims that the touch n hold is a "revolution in door closers," and, I have to say, though I laughed at that claim initially, it is a huge help. OK, my product endorsement time is over, and I hope we get nice fat check from the touch n hold folks for that.

One other big improvement was the addition of a medicine cabinet to the downstairs bathroom. We were keeping medicines and the like in the vanity drawers by the sink, but it was ill suited to the purpose (the bottles fell over and leaked; the drawer is also too accessible to a certain soon-to-be exploring little one), so we searched for a cabinet. We actually bought a couple at Home Depot, but returned them because they were terrible looking. I found this one on Amazon -- it's made of bamboo, with recycled glass for the doors.



Hooray! I think we might have to get a second one for the upstairs bathroom, which has the same problem.

Improvements, Swedish Style

So I finally got to IKEA the other day while Jake was on Lucy-duty, and I (surprise!) made a few purchases. We got a new dresser for Miss Lucy, but of course, we have to assemble it, so it will be a while until it appears in her room and/or on the blog. But in smaller, easier-to-install projects, I have two:
First, new curtains for the pink room.

Here is a close-up of the pattern:

I'm not sure about them yet -- whether to hem them long or short, or really, whether they're an improvement or not. The old sheers were OK, but they were too short, and on very sunny days, they offered little protection. I think these curtains are better on both counts, but I'll need some time to get used to them.
Small improvement Number Two: New recycling bins for the kitchen:

A huge improvement over the cardboard boxes we were using.

Re-Arranging and Decorating

We got a lovely new piece of furniture for the pink room today -- a TV cabinet. Thanks, Tony & Stacy, for passing along this great piece! It does wonders at hiding the clutter of the TV-related stuff!

We moved things around a bit in the pink room to make it all work. Check out the room:

This is no doubt the last time it will be this neat, ever. As you can see, Carter is enjoying it all. He does seem a bit confused by all the activity around the house. Just wait til later this week, pup.

Here are a few more shots of the finished baby room. It too is probably the neatest it will ever be:



We'll let you know when there's something to know!

Storm Door Installation

Today Jake installed the second of the two storm doors we bought at Lowes' a while back. It's on the door that leads from the pink room to the "L" porch. It looks great, and it seems like it went a lot more quickly than the previous one. Carter even helped with the installation, if by "help" you mean "took a nap on the instructions."



Now that the heat is on, this storm door should help keep us toasty and energy efficient!

Oh, and by the way, HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

New Additions and Status Update

No, not THAT new addition yet. But we did get our new glider/recliner, in preparation for the new addition to the family. It is wicked comfortable. Check it out:


In other news, there have been no further night-time noises from the critter, so we are hopeful that he/she has found a different home. We never got the traps out, but haven't heard any more signs since that one I mentioned in the last post.

We haven't posted much lately, as it has been a busy time. Jake has been working away in the bedroom, and I've been staying out due to the toxic mix of lead paint and new paint and whatever else is up there. But it's coming along and looking quite nice!
This is the area by the closet. You can see that it kinda looks like two different colors of yellow, but it's just the way the light is hitting it; it's really just one shade of yellow for the whole wall.

Here's the area by the entry door and built-in:

And here's the slanty ceiling/wall by the window:

Jake is up there right now painting the trim with glossy white paint.

New Walls, Step 2

Today Francisco came to tape and mud up our new drywall. It's coming along, but he will be back tomorrow to continue the job. Here are some mid-progress images:

This is the inside of the closet:


Here's the area around the old built-in. It looks like it's going to stay. We might (later) cover it over with larger shelves in this area, but for now, the easiest thing was to dry wall around it. The corner looks nice and sharp.


In the world of Bridget's Nano-Projects (TM), I did a couple of small things around 83 Durant today. First job (this has been on my mind for a while now) was to tone down the ostentatiousness of the pink room. No, re-painting the pink room a non-pink color does not come under the heading of "nano-project" (oh that it would!); I just changed the lightswitch cover from the very gaudy golden one to a simple white one:

I wouldn't mind having something a little more interesting than plain white here, but this room is already SO bright with tons of white trim (and some pink-accented trim) that simple seems to be the way to go. Uncle Ernie, please note that I learned well from you: the screws are at 12 & 6!

My other tiny project was to install a screen in our front door. Yes, it's a bit late in the summer to finally be putting in a screen, but I think it will be a big help with all the dust we're raising in this whole drywalling project. Now I just have to find a safe place for the storm window, which will be going back into the door in not too long.