Christmas on Beachway

Hey Campers, long time no post.  I decided it was time to show you our new house all dolled up for xmas.  Below you can see the fireplace with our odd metal creche.  M's Mom gave us the 3 wise men two years ago, and we found  Mary, Joseph and the Angel at Pier 1 this year.  M got the red grasses and the vases from Marshalls.  It looks great in the daytime.

Below is our tree,  not a great picture, but not a great camera either.  We decided to put it next to the door to the deck, and it works fairly well there.

This is the dining room, over exposed but you get the idea.  In the center is a wire ornament tree that I found to display our White House ornament collection, M and I have one for every year we've been together, so we have 15 total.  This tree will hold 40 ornaments, so we'll have to split up after that.  Oh well.

Here's the kitchet space, we don't have any wall space in the kitchen by design...every square inch is used!  We hung those bows on the door pulls to make things more festive.

Heres' the kitchen from the dining room.  I have been pleasantly surprised at how spacious the kitchen feels.  It's got plenty of room for everything!

Here's one of th display nooks, with a creche we found in Old Town Alexandria a few years ago.  We will need to look for things to display in these nooks that are more in scale with the space.

This is down stairs in the den, we fixed up the mantel downstairs with shiny things.

Here's the wider view.    M and I got that small artificial tree years ago to display the White House ornaments, but they got 'lost' on the tree.  We're just using it for a little sparkle down there now, and it works pretty well!

Anyway. There you have it!

Merry Christmas EVERYONE!

S'all for now

cc

Stay Tuned for the BIG REVEAL!

M and  I are just past the 3 month mark of the end of the project (which was officially the end of August, when the punchlist was completed).  I took before pictures and will show before and after pictures in the next few days.

Since the project has ended, we've installed a bamboo floor in and painted the walls in our media room, hung pictures, and Friday (Nov 20th) we're having wooden blinds added to all front facing windows in the front of our house.  We are deeply grateful to my parents, who are giving us an extremely generous gift to help us pay for the blinds.  THANK YOU.  The blinds will make the house much more cohesive from the outside, with all front facing windows having the same window treatment (a design pet-peeve I inherited from my Mom).  Our windows have been a mish-mash of sheers, mini-blinds and (ugh) vertical blinds since we moved in 8 + years ago...it's a matter of $$$ and focus.  ;-)

Stay tuned!

cc

A busy, frustrating, exhilarating, exhausting weekend

On Saturday, I attempted to finish the quarter-round moulding on the bamboo flooring we installed a few weekends back.  M's task was to refinish the unfinished mantle piece that had been on our fireplace since we moved in.  We decided to stain it a cherry stain like the cabinetry upstairs, and give it a polyurethane coating.  We had a brainstorm about the credenza piece that we had in our entry way, a display case with sliding glass doors.  It's a piece that my mom bought for me at an estate sale about 23 years ago, there used to be 2 of them, and Mom gave me one and my brother the other one.  Mine survived, but my brothers' kids broke the glass in his, and then it was destoyed in a freak flood that happened in their townhouse.  We were looking for a replacement for it and couldn't find anything we liked, so we decided to try to update this piece.  Do you remember this?

M spent a lot of the day sanding it, and we have a plan to make it integrate with our new foyer.  Stay tuned.

Here's the scary rickety legs we removed from the piece.

Here's the Mantle piece that M stained...looks good doesn't it!  We polyurethaned it on Sunday, and can put it back up tomorrow.

Anyway.  My job was to finish the moulding.  I made my first trip to Home Depot at 10am, and I bought an electric nail gun, and some brads for it.  Long painful story shorter, the nail gun didn't work.  I threw a total of about 8.5 hissy fits and a truly awesome tantrum that M was concerned would summon the police.  The carbonized bamboo quarter-round was so hard that nails would not penetrate it.  So I tried to pre-drill holes in it with a 1/16" drill bit, and the eff-ing bit eff-ing broke!  (Queue tantrum, minus sirens) M was calm (only one of us is allowed to phreek-out at any time), he called Lumber Liquidators, and explained the predicament, they said someone would call us back shortly....and they actually DID!  The young man said that the last few batches of this product had been extremely hard, and they were using an epoxy to apply the quarter round.  I thanked him....Hung up...then Cursed them for not letting us know that when we bought the hateful stuff!

My second trip to Home Depot was at about 2pm.  I returned the nail gun, and bought epoxy and liquid Nails.  I must have looked scary.  No one would approach to help or see how I was doing. 

The liquid nails did the trick.  I first miter cut all the pieces to fit, then enlisted M to help me glue everything in place.  Here's the pics from  Sunday morning.  It work pretty well actually.

Here's next to the fireplace, this was one of 3 places in the room where it sort of gapped away from the brick.  I'll try using a sturdier drill bit and hold it in place with a wood screw.

Here's the other corner of the room.  On Sunday, I hid those speaker wires, so they're not on the floor anymore.

So here's the exhilarating bit....Our furniture arrived!!!  The guys delivered it from BiF at about 6pm on Saturday.  I'd honestly forgotten what it looked like since we ordered it in MAY!  But, the delivery made our room look like the Furniture Barn: 

COME ON DOWN Y'ALL, WE GOT VALUE, VALUE, VALUE.  THIS SUNDAY ONLY WE GOT HALF SMOKES ON THE BARBEQUE AND SAVINGS FOR U!  BRING GRAMMA, BRING THE KIDS...HECK BRING THE DAWG, TOO!! CAUSE, FOLKS, YOU DON'T WANNA MISS THESE SAVINGS!

See what I mean?

Here's some detail...2 love seats in a tan leather..it's hard to tell in the picture, but the arms have a slight curve to them.

And 2 arm chairs, of the same style in a ruby leather.  Its not this red, when you see it in person. 

After some manuvering (big ass captains chair upstairs, ugh, disassembling the table we cannot sell), here's what we have.

'Scuse the mess on the coffee table, we're still working an maintaining order.  Here's the other side.  The dark brown/black chair in the corner, will have to find a new home. It's not staying there, but its where it is now.

Now, the other 2 chairs went to the den.  We'd originally thought they'd be upstairs in the new space, but they work better in the media room.  You can see the sekhsi curve on the chairs here.

When we get the couch cushions re-covered in something else (Mom...be thinking of options), it will all work together much better.  Doesn't that "Ruby Red" on the walls work well with the new chairs?

So thats' what we did this weekend. 

THOUGHTS?

S'all for now.

cc

A Fireplace Painted, a Media Room Reborn

Last week, we bought paint at the Benjamin Moore place over in McLean.  Our colors we chose for the den are the Ruby Dusk (henceforce, referred to as RD) color we used as a 'pop' color in the New Space, and 2 colors that are really close together on the Ben Moore Palette one called Twisted Oak Path (henceforce, referred to as TOP), which we used in the foyer and hallway, and the other called Marble Canyon (henceforth, referred to as MC), which we used in the Dining room cove space and the wall of the peninsula in the Kitchen.  Our vision (after much deliberation) was to paint the wood paneled walls MC in a flat latex, the wall behind the sofa and on the wall where the TV nook is RD also in a flat latex, finally on the blah brick fireplace, we would us a satin semi-gloss finish of the TOP color.  Now, I am really not a fan of painted brick, especially when it's interesting brick, but our fireplace was placed in the corner of the room, so it's not a focal point and never can be, and while we use it occasionally, its a highly inefficient gas fireplace that we will have to replace eventually, and it's really hard to light...so it's practically unused.

We spent all day on Saturday painting, M focussed on the fireplace because it had to be primed first, and I started on the walls.  We finished up at about 5pm and went to a neighborhood party.  It was a Miami themed party replete with Cuban food and a Latin jazz combo!  They even played my favorite "Girl from Ipanema"!  

I bailed on church on Sunday, thinking that Providence would forgive me because I had a goal in mind...even though I was working on a Sabbath.  I was able to finish the walls and apply a first coat to the fireplace before noon when M got home.  After lunch (a squash and pepper fritata with the last squashes and peppers from the garden this year :-( [sniff]  ), M went to work on a second coat on the fireplace and I spot painted and started putting the speakers and the room back together.  One caveat that I didn't discover until I was about half way done with the fireplace, the guy a Ben Moore's mixed up the paint can tops, and he put the TOP lid on the MC, and the MC lid on the TOP can.  So our fireplace is actually MC and the wood paneled walls are TOP, the colors are so close that it's not a huge deal, certainly not enough to redo it.

Follow me downstairs and I'll show you:

This is heading down to the den from the hallway.  Monday night I covered the speaker wires in an ivory colored wire-concealer that blends fairly well with the TOP, so the wires are sort of hidden now.  I have pics of that below.

That's the stairwell down into the den, and part of the RD wall.

This was taken Monday night after I'd put the speaker wire in a concealer, no dangling wires, however when I removed the tape that I'd been holding up the speaker wire with it pulled the paint off the white trim, so I'll need to do some touch up on the trim.  You can tell how close these colors are here.  The MC is a fraction darker than the TOP, the only bummer to me is that I really wanted the brick in a semi-gloss instead of a flat paint.  Oh well.  The mantel came off really easily, it was held on by that bevelled strip you see below.  M wants to stain it and polyurethane it.

Here's the wall behind the sofa in the RD color.  I really like this color, it's bold and warm.  The windows are currently covered by dirty, dated vertical blinds.  Our next BIG chore is to order wooden blinds and get rid of these hideous things.  Eventually, we need to do something with this couch, but it's ok for now.  M cleaned it really well after the construction was done.  We want to replace the cushion and pillow fabric with something less "southwest-y".

That box below in the corner is our electrical junction box.  I wanted it to be the RD color so it wouldn't draw as much attention to itself.  I am going to hide the wires on the other side of the room tonight.

Finally, heres our TV in its nook.  The room is still not 100% put together, of course.  As I said the wires are going to be concealed tonight.  We still need to install the quarter round to finish the floors (there goes another Saturday!). But we feel like we're over the hump now, that the painting is done downstairs.

We'll that's all for now. Have a great week eer-one!

S'all for now,

cc

Finished Fireplace

Alan stopped by yesterday and finished the Slate fireplace surround.  He installed a tile topper that I'll tru to show in the next picture.

That's not a great shot but you can kind of get the schmoo. 

He added a final coat of a finishing compound, that gave the whole thing a unified sheen.  It's lovely.

Thoughts?

cc

Crouching Ardvaark, Hidden Wombat

Hey folks. I know it's been awhile.  We've been on vacation, and I am finishing up a course at our local community college...time is precious.  So I won't waste your time either.

We received the bamboo flooring from Lumber Liquidators the weekend  before Labour Day, and we journeyed all the way out to Chantilly to get it..packed a lunch and everything!  It's  really close in color to the red oak floors we have. 

M was absolutely convinced that we could do it ourselves, and I sort of believed him.  We lacked mitre saw and a table saw, and the know-how and what not, but that wasn't going to stop us from trying.  Actually we'd bought the mitre saw for  the base of the wall unit so we had one of those, the table saw was purchased last Friday night on a desperate foray to Home Depot...another Ryobi product...only $114, and I still have all my digits, so it must be ok.

Saturday it took us all day long to get the area prepped and ready to go for the install.  I had to dissasemble all the A/V stuff down there and keep it safe until we were done.  M and I had to clean, and move all the furniture and boxes out of there except the sectional, which would have been a screaming horror to move.

After we actually started we did have to make one final trip to Home Depot to buy a $12 rubber mallet, which we forgot we needed until we'd started...at 4pm on Saturday.

Below is the lovely green and black laminate flooring which is probably the original 1955 floor finish.  Yecch.  The previous home owner had covered it with a carpet remnant and it was passably ok to look at if you didn't look closely.

The blue stuff is called Quiet Step, its' made from 'recycled materials' (prolly old Pampers and used Kleenex!), it's about a 1/3 of an inch thick and a bitch to  unroll and cut (a working box cutter would have helped but we didn't want to make another trip to Home Depot).

Here's the first box of planks, the rubber mallet really made things cruise.

I think this is around box 4.  We were really getting the hang of it.

The area behind the pantry/closet area were tricky.  It all ended up looking ok, and it's behind a door, no one will look too closely.

Around box 6 or 7 we had to move the first part of the sectional to the other side.

This was about box 8 or so.  It was 8:30pm.  We broke for dinner, and had two tough steaks and a baked potato each.  All that chewing revived us. 

After dinner we had to move the other sectional to the done side of the room.  Our friend Bobby and Marti Brom (along with son Carson and friend, Colonel Tim) dropped by and offered Apple Crisp and lots of encouraging words. 

Nearly done here, it was about 10pm, at this point. 

Cutting to Chase.  We finished at midnight.  M was concerned that the saws were making too much noise, and we were pretty much toast.  All that lifting,  crouching, sawing, hammering, etc, had this 47 year old carcass a'hurtin.

This bit won't show, because it will be behind the TV, but it still looks good!

Cut to Sunday afternoon.  We get it all back together, mostly.  M used a co-workers' shop vac and went over every inch of the couch.  I put our A/V system back together, and [sniff] put our 46" Samsung LCD HGTV back in it's rightful place.  The rug is a family piece that is on loan to us for the last few years from M's brother in law, I have always liked it, but I think it goes down here fairly well.

The next BIG project is painting, we're going to bring some of the colors upstairs, downstairs, and try to jazz it up in here.

Thoughts?

S'all for now.

cc

The Slate is partially installed

Alan brought Duke the tile guy from outer darkness Virginia, over to do the slate surround yesterday.  It isn't finished but you can tell that it's coming together.  It's different than I pictured it but we like it. 

I didn't picture the slate as being 1 inch thick slabs.  It was the one thing we didn't see a drawing of before hand.  Its still unfinished, but there will be another piece at the top.  Currently theres a brace up there to keep the pieces together.

You like?

Thoughts?

We're headed to Seattle to visit our buds Kurt and Craiggers.  We'll be back on Tuesday.

Chat laters, taters.

Cc

The Burro Has Landed.

Yep. We haz slate.

M and I had an alarm system installed on Friday. Nothing at all against any of the folks we had working here...with the possible exception of Grampa Munster, but we think he was harmless, just creepy. We just felt more comfortable going with a more secure option.

Today, M calls me and said, " I don't have Alan's number and we need to tell him about the alarm system!!" We'd forgotten about telling him about it! I called his cell and he said he was sitting outside the house waiting for the slate and for our window to be delivered. He actually didnt need to go into the house, thank Providence, but if he did it may have been a mess.

I don't know if I have mentioned the window before. The window on the side of the house facing out to the deck was delieverd and installed and they determined that it wasn't tempered glass, which is 'code'. So they'd sent the wrong thing. The correct window was shipped and arrive right before we moved back in, but one of the panes was cracked, so Alan sent it back. So, now we have a complete window. WooHoo!

I hope he's going to be able to fix the fireplace before we leave!

Stay tuned,

CC

2 down, 1 to go...

I have no idea what this .gif file means but it somehow spoke to me.

We have a working dishwasher now. Alan B was able to stop the leak, we re-christened it last night without incident. Whew. That's a relief.

The innards for the middle pendant over the breakfast bar arrived, and Alan installed them, so now all 3 pendants light up when you flip the switch. We practically wept with gladness.

Sometimes, it's the little things.

There are several minor things left on the punchlist, but the biggie is the slate surround for the gas fireplace. Which is still not done. No word yet on when the burro will arrive with the slate. The poor thing was last seen in outer-darkness Kentucky, laden down and plodding along.

Stay tuned.

S'all for now,

cc

Coming Together...but don't look too close

Hey, ok, so the saw horses are gone and the boxes are mostly dealt with, but we've still got a ways to go. No art on the walls yet, but hopefully soon.

Below is our new Stickly dining table that arrived on Tuesday, much to our surprize. We didn't expect it until October. We purchased 2 arm chairs for either end and it came with 2 extenders. So, no more squeezing 6 or so guests around a table meant for 4. We didn't get the side chairs yet, they will be another expenditure down the road, in the meantime we'll make do with other chairs. Currently we're using the chairs that came with the round maple table, that co-incidentally, we are selling on Craigslist and Ebay...for the low, low price of $499! But wait there's more!! Not only do you get the solid maple table with 4 matching chairs, but you'll also receive all of our round linens AND our vinyl table pad! Channeling the late Billy Mays...so sorry. Seriously it's a nice table and if you know anyone that needs a nice table for 4 let them know about these listings.

M and I took Friday off, to do more stuff around the house. Friday afternoon, we made trips to the outer-darkness of Chantilly to visit Lumber Liquidators. I wanted to do business with them because they are supporters of NPR, as are we, and they offer an assortment of sustainable wood flooring like bamboo and cork. We're in the market for flooring for the den...you'll see it below...horrorshow that it is. We went to their showroom out in Chantilly, and ordered from an animated salesman ("Everyday is Friday at Lumber Liquidators!" he exclaimed...he exclaimed everything), a 240 sq.ft. of a medium brown carbonized bamboo click-flooring, we believe we can install this our selves...stay tuned.

I mention this because while we were out on Friday, M wanted to swing down to Crystal City to the Danker that we bought the dining room table and 2 chairs from, which has been going out of business for nearly a year, and look for a rug for the dining room. He shocked the 'H' out of me by buying this rug! He even haggled the rug seller down $200! It's got all of our colors, and we're very pleased with it.

Moving on, Alan completed the message centre last week. Here it is closed up.

Here it is opened up. We have our ugly rechargers, phones and building access badges here. The little drawers are excellent for scissors, small tools, etc.

Here's the front door with the floor all cleaned up.

Alan also finished Tim's display nooks with these tiny puck lights. They're perfect for displaying glassware, and I am so glad that Melissa Chernick, Designer Extraordinaire of Commonwealth, insisted that we go with a bold color in the backs of these nooks. The objet de arte in the nooks are not permanent, but only so we can have something there for the time being.

Kitchen is looking a little more lived in. The dishwasher has a leak in it that occurred after Alan came back to reattached it to the granite counter top, Steve came out on Friday morning, but couldn't find it. It's probably an easy fix, but a Dishwasher repair person will have to fix it.

Here's the behemoth music storage units, partially put together with albums and stuff. M wanted me to leave a couple of those holes empty in each cabinet, so we'd have a space for knick-knackery. This is un-finished, but it's coming togther. The slate is STILL not here, for the fireplace, Alan says it's supposed to be in this week. I cannot imagine what the hold up could be. Also, the middle pendant at the breakfast bar isn't working, and the innards are on order. Those 2 things are the most irksome, because they make the space look 'under construction' still.

Here's the breakfast bar. About 3 weeks ago, we bought these chairs on a whim! We were going to go out and look for bar chairs for this space, and on our FIRST stop at Pier 1, we found these cool and comfortable chairs...on CLEARANCE!! That never happens. We liked how they played off the curves in our space with the oval holes on the backs. We almost went with 2 chairs, but I am really glad we bought the 3rd one. They were only a little over $100 each.

Now for the horrorshow...this is what they don't show you in the Divine Design-type shows. The OTHER ROOMS. Here's our den. As soon as the construction was done, we tore out the carpeting in this room, as it was absolutely filthy, with dust. The room is still a sty, but there's hope on the horizon with the bamboo flooring we ordered on Friday. We believe we can do it our selves, and it's going to look really nice.

urgh. We are going to have the cushions on the couch recovered, btw, but not until we get the floor in. I haven't got my 46" Samsung lcd tv back in either, it's still upstairs in it's box.

Ew, we need to dust that lamp.

So there we have it on August 23rd. Hope y'all had a great weekend. We certainly did. Saturday we had our first guests for dinner. Sunday we went for a morning kayak on the lake, and had an upclose encounter with a juvenile beaver, he didnt see M until he'd almost swum into M's kayak, and he did a quick reverse manuever that only beavers and Michael Phelps can manage. We attended a production on "Dirty Blonde" at Signature Theater, with our theater pals, Bugs, Raj, Maurice and David, and had dinner at Carlyse in Shirlington. Dirty Blonde is a lot of fun if you are in the DC area, I'd highly recommend it. It's based on the life of Mae West.

S'all for now.

cc