A Fresh Coat

Not of snow, but of paint!

My cousin Emily came up from Boston this weekend and helped us get our act together to paint our kitchen and the living room. We spent most of Saturday painting the kitchen and an hour or so on Sunday doing the final coat in the living room. It’s soooo great to finally have this done. Now, we just need to paint the trim. When our contractor was visiting the other day, he pointed out that his subcontractor hadn’t sanded the trim boards before putting them up. So painting the trim will be a fairly major job, involving sanding, caulking the spaces where the wood doesn’t exactly meet the walls, and spackling the nail holes. Ugh. But we’ll get there.

So now, without further ado, are the before and after photos:

First, here is the stove area before painting:

And now after:The glass blocks area of the kitchen before:

And after:The big picture kitchen before:And after:We used Benjamin Moore’s Silvery Blue for the kitchen.

In the living room, we wanted to switch out the too-cold Atirum White for BM’s Mascarpone. The photos may not do it justice, but the room definitely feels softer and warmer with this creamier color on the walls. Here it is before:

And after:

Another view before:

And after:

It’s very hard to photograph white, so you can’t see the subtle difference in tone here, but trust me, it’s a lot more inviting than what we had before.

And that’s it! We didn’t have time to get to the office/hobby room, but that will be a fairly simple job we can save for a rainy day.

This is the beautiful amaryllis my mom gave us, blooming in the kitchen window and reminding us the spring will come:

And finally, the gratuitous Ting-Tong shot. She somehow got tagged during the painting, prompting us to call her Spot for the day.

In Brief

So….where were we?

We did tell you that Wiley is back, right? The people who moved into our old apartment called one freezing morning in early January to tell us that Wiley was mewling outside their front door. Apparently, he’d been living underneath the apartment building. When we picked him up he was skin and bones, with a gaping wound on his haunches to boot. We took him to the vet for a checkup and were told he was fine. We were so relieved to find him all in one piece, especially after the cold snap he’d lived through, but already he is disturbing the fragile peace that Ting-Tong and Thumbs were finally establishing with each other. Our animal kingdom had finally found some order, but Wiley has a tendency to rule with an iron-fisted my-way-or-the-highway kind of demeanor when it comes to the other pets. As you can see here, he already has Ting-Tong on a short leash.

We’re hoping he calms down soon.

In the dining area, we finally put up the curtains we bought at IKEA back at Christmastime. They look great, though you can’t see much of them in this photo. I need to hem them a bit, which scares me because they’re really nice linen fabric with a nice lining, and I’ve never hemmed anything with so many layers and really don’t want to screw it up, but I’ll get around to it one of these days.

Our contractor, Ben is back from his two-week trip to India, which means 1) we owe him a lot of money, but 2) he will be coming over soon to tile our bathtub surround! This is very exciting, since we’ve been taking “shubs” (showers while sitting in the tub) for almost a month now. (Before that it was just baths, because we didn’t have our removable shower head yet. It’s amazing what one can get used to, isn’t it? No real shower for 3 months. Sounds pretty awful, but I don’t even notice the lack of it anymore.)

We’re also hoping to bang out some painting next weekend when my cousin Emily comes up for a home improvement visit. She’s got the energy to make up for our lackadaisical ways times three, AND she loves Sadie, to boot. So it should be a relaxing but productive weekend. Now, to get through the workweek first…

Shelves!

Do we have news for you! We’ve finally put the shelves up in the kitchen. Leon, our trusty electrician-turned-apprentice carpenter, used his laser level and mad skillz to get our shelving up perfectly straight and even. (I can’t find our camera memory card so had to take yet another iPhone photo–apologies.) I was a little dubious when I first saw the photos that Nick sent to me at work, but in person the shelves really look good. No more walking around the corner to the pantry for a bowl or a plate! I’m happy to report, too, that our dishes are pretty nice looking, and I’m not embarrassed at all to have them out on display.

Of course, we still need to paint the kitchen, a task that just got more difficult now that we don’t have empty walls to work with, but we never seem to find the time to paint, and can’t keep putting off the other things we need to do until that magical day when we’re able to block off a whole day for painting.

In other news, I made the executive decision last week to hire a cleaning person to really give our house the good, post-reno cleaning it needed, particularly of the floors. Our new wooden floors had been subject to workmen boots for weeks, and though I’ve vacuumed plenty, I kept waiting for the reno work to really be done before I got down on my hands and knees to scrub the floor. A good scrubbing is what it needed, too–no mop was going to do the job.

Unfortunately, the cleaning team I hired, a mother-daughter duo on the recommendation of another cleaning service that was too booked to offer us a one-time clean, didn’t quite get the job done. The house was clean when I got home–vacuumed, tidied, and the stove, sinks, and bathtub were all sparkling–but the floors were no better than when I left them this morning. Apparently, I didn’t specify that I was looking for elbow grease, not a wet mop. I’m a little bummed out because the whole reason I hired someone was to do the hard labor of scrubbing floors. Argh.

But the house looks good, nice enough that it motivated Nick and I just a little bit more to clean and organize. I guess for that reason alone, the cleaning team was worth the cost.

Okay, not quite. I really wanted those floors clean.

Christmas Miracle

A few days after Christmas, we got the most amazing gift: my cousins Emily and Toby and my Uncle Bill came to visit, and they went crazy helping me organize, fix, and move stuff around. I took the week off because Sadie’s daycare was closed for the week, and as it turns out I came down with an awful, energy-sucking cold. Nick worked the entire week–including the weekend–so I would have been totally on my own if it weren’t for my awesome extended family. (I should add that my sister-in-law, who lives here in Maine, also pitched in on Tuesday, leaving 2 of her 3 kids with my brother in order to do so.)

I knew my cousins and uncle were coming to visit, but had no idea that they were going to help me with the house. The first day, Emily, Julia and my Uncle Bill helped me clear a path through our “library” room. They carried boxes to the basement and helped me sort a lot of our “stuff” in a much more efficient manner than Nick and I could possibly be capable of. I realize now that Nick and I hem and haw and analyze–paralysis by analysis, I think it’s called. Not good. We needed neutral parties to come in and tell us what to do.

Emily and Bill put together the folding Ikea sewing table Nick and I picked up on our way back from Christmas at my dad’s house in Massachusetts, and I was finally able to unpack my sewing machine! The rest of the books went onto the bookshelf, and decisions were made as to what to do with a lot of …. stuff. Now we can actually sit in our “extra” room and I can imagine all the arts and crafts Sadie and I are going to do in there someday when she’s just a bit older. Here’s a picture of Emily taking a picture of Uncle Bill with Sadie and my niece (also named) Emily.

The other major, long overdue project Toby and Bill tackled was creating a new coat rack out of leftover pieces of trim wood and some hooks that we had picked up at Ikea on the same post-Christmas run. We borrowed my brother’s Skil Saw and they cut down the leftover pieces and made the whole thing fit perfectly into the corner where the wobbly coat rack used to stand. (My uncle then cut the coat rack down to Sadie-size, and we put it in her room for sweaters and hats.)

I’ll get a photo of the final product up here eventually, but trust me when I say it looks really cool and makes our coats and jackets feel much more organized and like less of a jumble.

Here’s Emily screwing in some outlet plates. There were all these finishing little touches that really made the house feel more organized and finished. We still have a long way to go, but it’s amazing what a bunch of borrowed hands can do for your house–and your morale.

I guess Nick and I have sort of hit a wall (ha! no pun intended) as far as the decorating/final renovating goes. There are just so many choices and we stall on making them, or else we make the wrong ones. For example, I was certain we wanted white walls in the living room and dining areas, to “brighten” things up, but the color we finally chose–Atirum White–looks much too stark. I think we need something creamier, at the very least, or need to pick a color. I dreamed of having a clean, modern, bright white space, with touches of rustic warm modernism, but you know what, I think that looks better in magazines than it does in real life. I have a kid, a dog and a cat, and we live in Maine, where it’s snowy half the year and muddy for the other quarter. I just don’t think white is gonna work. (I think my friend Kenda warned me of this way back…) Also, as I read over on the The Home and Garden Web in one of the forums, white really looks best when the architectural details of the house are already there. Otherwise, it tends to highlight the lack of character.

For example, here is our dining area. I love the space. We’re using the kitchen table from my childhood home (which needs to be sanded and refinished), Nick’s dining chairs, and a new pendant lamp from Ikea. I like how the space looks clean and crisp and modern, but it’s lacking some warmth. We have curtains we plan on hanging over our bank of windows, but I’m thinking now that we really need a wall color to warm it up a bit. Your thoughts?

Some Updates

We’re still straggling along here at Two Cats. Last Sunday, while Nick was working, my mom came over and forced me to helped me straighten up the living room. This took all of about 15 minutes while Sadie was napping. We put all her toys away in bins, vacuumed the rug and upholstery, and moved various dribs and drabs to their proper places, most of which were not in the living room. As my mom said, we needed one sanctuary, a room that was “done” and where we could sit down and just really relax. When Nick came home that night, he was visibly relieved at seeing that one place of calm in our little house, and I felt it, too.

Well, that calm sanctuary lasted all of about 3 days. On Nick’s next day off a few days later, he emptied a bunch of boxes, the contents of which ended up strewn all over the living room. He also installed more door knobs, light switches, caulked the trim under the front door, and sprayed some expanding foam in the gaps around our basement windows. Somehow, setting up house isn’t that easy when you are also still fixing the house. And finishing the house.

As for finishing, we decided we couldn’t wait until every wall and piece of trim was painted to fully unpack and set things up. So two nights ago, we assembled our Ikea bookcase in the office, and last night we emptied out the boxes that had been sitting in piles for the last 7 weeks and finally filled up the shelves. It’s nice to feel some breathing room in that part of the house again, but the room is a long way from being finished. At some point we’ll have to take all those books down again so that we can move the bookshelf and paint the wall and trim behind it. But we’ll get to that…

We are hosting Christmas dinner at our house on Friday, which just means that my mom will be coming over to spend the day with our little family. I think it’ s a perfect way to christen the house. We bought a little tabletop tree that we’ll put out on the deck when the season is over, and we’re putting some lights up in the window, and that’s about all the decorating I can muster this year. Here’s to hoping that by next year I’ll be a lot more organized and it will begin to look a lot more like Christmas in Casa dos Gatos.*

*A note on Two Cats:  A few weeks ago Wiley ran out of the house when the door was open. We haven’t seen him since. We miss him terribly, but we’re comforted knowing that he lives up to his name and truly has the ability to get by on his wits and wile. We have faith that he has found a home somewhere that better suits his wandering spirit and his wiley ways. His spirit will always live on at Two Cats, and in Sadie, who calls every cat she sees Wiley (including Thumbs).

Brightening the Corners

It’s amazing what a little light can do for a room. This night-time iPhone photo doesn’t really do it justice, but in the dining area of the kitchen we just placed some small Ikea lamps on either end of the long bench running along the windowed wall, and what a difference. Having some light in the corners makes the room look bigger, warmer, and more “done.” Next up: curtains, our large wood-framed mirror, and some artwork.

Top 10 Ways You Know Your Renovation Is Not Yet Complete

1. You find your daughter’s sippy cup standing upright inside a ring of painter’s tape on the kitchen island.

2.  You store your cupcake pans in the oven, with bolts and screws inside the cups. Oh, and if you’re in our house, your oven has no door, because you’re still waiting on parts.

3. You no longer think it strange that you take a bath instead of a shower every morning because you still haven’t ordered the tile for the tub surround you insist you can tile yourself.

4. You don’t see a safety hazard in your toddler’s room where the outlets are not yet screwed all the way into the wall and aren’t even covered by a plate. You just see an unfinished project.

5. Toilet paper holders? What a waste of money.

6. You see your contractor more than your see your friends. In fact, at this point, your contractor probably knows you better than your friends do.

7. You don’t see what the big deal is about not having any hallway lights when you can just bring a flashlight upstairs when you need it.

8. The cardboard boxes in your house have become your toddler’s favored medium for her works in crayon.

9. You’re beginning to think primer is an acceptable wall finish.

10. When you come home from work, you no longer notice the lack of siding on your house and think at least your Typar looks better than the guy’s down the street.

I’m sure there are more. I’ll add to this post as they come to me.

Housewarming

My father, whom I call cappy, gave nick and I this clock as a housewarming gift. He built the case for it 25 years ago, and the clock hung in my grandmother’s house until she died in 2003.

We also finally got around to hanging our Matisse print. It’s starting to look like home around here!

Leveling shelving

We built a storage nook off the kitchen with the intention of someday getting some efficient shelving custom built to the space. In the meantime, we’re making do with a shelving unit from Ikea. We had some trouble getting the whole thing balanced, as you can see in the glorious shot of the level on top of a can of refried beans. But we shimmied it up with a piece of wood from the basement and filled the whole thing with some long-lost kitchen items, and now it looks downright homey. And we emptied some boxes tonight, which is major progress.

Meanwhile, our carpenter continues to trim out the windows and baseboards, and it looks great. Pictures on the way.

Blast (literally) from the past

We’re really late on posting these photos (they’re from over a month ago, before we moved in on November 1), but thought you might want to see just what we went through to get our sewer pipe running. They cut a giant hole in our street!