A clean slate

I think I may be getting a little bit slate-crazy. We're putting slate in the mudroom, I'm thinking about slate for the kitchen backsplash, and now Marc and I both fell in love with the look of this fireplace mantel.

Is it too much slate? Can you ever have too much slate? Will it look like a rustic cabin and not a Tudor Colonial? Oh, the drama.

Let there be light

It's the little things that mean so much.

We hired a landscaper to help us map out the hardscaping that needs to be re-done in the front and back of the house. (Did I mention that one of the many large machines that our contractor used during demolition completely collapsed our side concrete walkway? Not that we already weren't going to replace the 25 year-old cracked concrete anyway, but geez Louise! Thank goodness we hadn't already tried to replace it a few years ago!)

The landscaper suggested this low-voltage light for our backyard garden and along the back walkways. It's a sweet light -- and I'm queer -- but I love the light and I just love ticking all of these decisions from my list!

Now let's just hope he can still order them from the manufacturer. In the words of Roseanna Roseannadanna, it's always something.

I see a brown door and I want to paint it red

We've reached the stage where my contractor is asking me for paint color choices for the exterior and for the second-floor bedrooms. Sounds easy enough, right?

Even though we've already decided on the trim (Tudor Brown -- why mess with perfection), we can't agree on what color to paint the stucco. The current color is too yellow for my liking, but I don't want to paint it too white-white, either. I'm also obsessed over the variety of red hues available to paint our front door. Can Benjamin Moore's Heritage Red have a heritage with us as our front door?

As for the bedrooms -- don't even get me started. You have to factor in what kind of bedding you're going to have in the three bedrooms to be painted -- Claire's room, Ben's room, and our soon-to-be-unveiled-yet-again guest room (the room formerly known as Ben's room, or in the style of Prince, TRFKABR), what kind of furniture will be in each room (which in Ben's room is actually an important point), and there's no way that I can accurately determine natural light in these rooms with all of the craziness going on within them. Maybe it was better when we just painted everything Decorator's White and just left it at that.

But it will all be OK. Because today -- I'm just going to gaze lovingly at the light fixture I picked out for Ben's room from Rejuvenation Hardware (a lot of our lighting fixtures have come from Rejuvenation, and I'll be ordering interior lock sets and pocket door plates from them, too. Check out one of my fave sites at www.rejuvenation.com).




I just feel warm and fuzzy when I see it, and I hope Ben does too when he hunkers down in bed at night.

It's not exactly true to the period.

But sometimes you just gotta go with what you love.
I wanted to bring slate into the house design, somehow. I tried the master bathroom first, but since it's not a huge gigundo master bath, I thought it would make the room too dark and cave-ish. I wanted to put it in the kitchen flooring, but I got nervous about flaking and slipping and cracking and all that good stuff.

I had given up on it entirely until I went to a friend's house and saw it in her mudroom. "Wow!" I said. What kind of ceramic tile is that? It looks just like slate!" She told me that it was indeed slate and that even with three rambunctious boys and a pool in her backyard, which invites all kinds of wet feet back and forth across the mudroom, she LOVED the slate floor. Couldn't get enough of it.

So I decided to put this 12x12 field tile in our mudroom at the back of the house. I picked a palette that incorporates the browns, blacks, and yellows that will be in the kitchen, which you enter after leaving the mudroom. I hope it turns out OK.

You know, because I have nothing better to do right now

Now that we're ripping out the living room ceiling and taking out the original radiator to put in recessed cast-iron ones, and refinishing the floor and adding recessed lighting, well, heck, why not fix up the fireplace mantel, too?

I'm not sure what to do, but the mantel has been damaged during the renovation and we may as well do it now if we want to change it. The tile in the hearth needs to be replaced, and the bookcases on either side are kinda blah, but I don't yet know how to spruce it up. Too much tile might make it too bungalow-ish, too much wood (like we have now), looks like a mish-mosh.

Sadly, I don't think we can ever bring the brick back to what it was, since there is one serious coat of black paint all over it.

Here's an idea that I like, though. Maybe with large bluish-gray slate tiles instead of ceramic ones? Sure, Kathleen, just take on another project while you're at it!

All I want is a roof somewhere

It's just shingles, really. Laminated asphalt that's water-repellent. I'm sure the technicians at Owens-Corning could ooh and aah about the properties of roofing shingles ad nauseum, but it's just not my thing.

That said -- it was another decision that my husband and I agonized over. Initially, I wanted a real slate roof (of course!) but when I realized it would cost me almost as much as the entire addition itself...well, I got over that one fast.

I love the look of the faux-slate rooves (sp?), but I just didn't think it would look right with the slope of our roof. And we really need to go with a brown tone, since we're sticking with Tudor Brown trim and that beigeish-yellowish exterior color found on so many cookie-cutter Tudor Colonial houses. Gray or green, which looks great in the faux slate, just wasn't gonna cut it with our color choices.

So we went with the shingled look, to make it look a bit more Tudor-ish. Thatchy, if you will. I'll post a photo when the roof goes on over the weekend.

If anyone is interested, we chose Owens-Corning Oakridge Pro 40 Series -- in Brownwood. Geek that I am, I actually looked up roofing at consumerreports.com and this brand got a thumbs-up from the good folks at CR. I don't even buy toilet paper anymore without checking with CR. Maybe there's something wrong with that.

Why do they call it the powder room anyway?

So I think I picked the pedestal sink I want for the powder room. It's a Toto sink, which matches with my













Toto Clayton toilet.





If I had more guts (and more time), I would have sought out a vintage pedestal sink in terra cotta or vitreous china, but I just don't have it in me right now.

I think it will look pretty cool with the beadboard tile.

Slowly, but surely, I am crossing these mountains of decisions off my list -- one by one.