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.

It's starting to come together.

Well, the exterior walls are up and the Tudor-style rooflines have been placed.

Oh my God. It's really happening!

Carrera is carrera is carrera

Sorry I don't have more pictures of the exterior lately. I promise I will head over there this weekend to capture the progress on pixels.

The good news is that I have finalized tile choices for the bathrooms. I didn't let the Artistic Tile lady strong-arm me into choosing beveled subway tile for the kids' bathroom. I stood my ground and asked for handmade flat tile, which looks like true subway tile. This cut her to the very core of her Artistic Tile being, but she wrote up the order anyway. I also wondered aloud if the vanity I ordered with carrera marble countertops would match with the carrera subway tile she suggested for the master bath. Her response? "Carrera is carrera is carrera." Which is now my mantra for the week.

I'm also planning to order this ceramic beadboard tile for the powder room. It's from Hastings Tile and they make it in 8x32 panels -- not all chopped up like the beadboard tile that WaterWorks sells (and a heck of a lot cheaper). I'm kinda in love with it.

The only question that remains is...how fast can the tile get here? My contractor is on vacation all week and sorta forgot to let me know that last week. So now I've gotta wait until he gets back to get square footage for the order...and keep my fingers crossed that this will all work out.

One man's ceiling is another man's floor

The second floor is framed out! My contractor is working his tail off to make up for lost time on the foundation reinforcement.

Now, of course, I'm a nervous wreck that we've used too much of the lot size for the addition. Which my husband really enjoys discussing with me. At 4 am. When I wake up in a cold sweat and try to stave off a full-blown panic attack.

I'm such an Irish Catholic that it's ridiculous. When life hands you lemonade, ask for more lemons (and pits) in it. Sheesh.

The Way We Were

Can it be...that it was all so simple, then? Or has time rewritten every line? If we had the chance to do it all again (and by "it" I mean remodeling the kitchen) -- tell me, would we? Could we?

Remember when you didn't have as many choices? When appliances only came in white, harvest gold and avocado green? When you didn't get any kind of countertop other than laminate? When you probably didn't even get to choose the hardware that came with the cabinets? (I'm thinking that hammered black strap style that everybody's mother had with their '60s Danish-style cabinets in their kitchens. It opened the cabinet door, for God's sake. Who cared what it looked like?)

Ah, those were the days. These days -- I'm arguing online with my husband whether we should get soapstone or CaesarStone countertops. This is just too complicated!

Something's Gotta Give

Here is my REAL dream kitchen...Diane Keaton's kitchen from "Something's Gotta Give".

I never even saw the movie but I saw many layouts in decorating magazines over the past few years that paid homage to it. Apparently, it's been the most requested room ever sought by clients to be recreated by their designers.

But my husband is not a big fan of black and white kitchens. Sooo...au revoir soapstone countertop. So long black onyx cabinet knobs and cup pulls. Farewell shiny white, pillowed subway tile backsplash. We shall meet again...someday.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-choices

OK, so maybe I did finalize more elements of the renovation than just the kitchen sink.



Here's the style of our kitchen cabinet fronts.





Ours is actually a maple cabinet in a nutmeg stain with a chocolate glaze. (So it looks a little darker than this color and has a nice rubbed brownie-ness in all the corners of the multi-raise panel on the front of the cabinet.) Mmmm. Maple. Nutmeg. Chocolate glaze. Makes you just want to rip a door right off the hinges and eat it, doesn't it? I mean my God, it sounds like fudge.





Here's the granite that we've chosen for our countertops. It's called Juparana Santa Cecelia. I love it!












We chose an "antique black" finish for our kitchen island, to offset the maple cabinets, which should be kind of cool. I wish I could post a sample of it on the blog, but you'll just have to trust my artistic vision. Our kitchen designer suggested using a different color for the island top. Marc heartily agreed, so I bit my tongue and consented to his idea of a solid-surface countertop that will do better than granite with wear and tear over the years.




Here it is. It's CaesarStone and it's called Gold Abyss. And it will outlive me, hopefully.







And here's the accent light that I'm currently drooling over from Rejuvenation Lighting. Once I figure out the correct length for island pendants, I will order three of them to hang over the island. I'm still vacilating between a solid pole and a chain pendant with the same finish and shade. Any thoughts?

I was framed

The framing on our addition has begun!

I took this picture last week. My beautiful basement space is all snug as a bug underneath, and our contractor is working hard to raise up the addition. What you're looking at now is our soon-to-be first-floor family room (hooray!) on the left. If you squint really hard you can just see the flat-screen TV between those two windows on the far wall, can't you? I wish.

The remaining open space will be the larger part of our kitchen, a small mudroom and back entry. The brown tarps hide huge gaping holes that were once the exterior walls of our house and sliding doors from the dining room to the recently demised deck.

I'll post more pictures soon since they have been jammin' on the framing and actually finished framing out the entire first floor at the end of last week.

Everything but the kitchen sink

Well, actually, I have almost nothing ordered except the kitchen sink. And it took me only three, maybe four months to decide which one to get. I mean...it's a sink, for God's sakes. I'm not choosing my firstborn's name out of a baby book, for crying out loud.

But I'm a perfectionist. And a nutjob. And a cook. So I really hemmed and hawed about it. And here it is.



Sink. Say hello to the nice people. You, too, prep sink. Say hello.

Soul Kitchen

This is how our kitchen used to look. Nice, right?









So who in their right mind would turn it into this?






I don't care how much of a seasoned home renovation-esque person you are or how much time you've spent at Home Depot. Nothing prepares you for this. It's truly shocking.

The Basement Tapes

Ohh, now tell me where can you party, child, all night long?
In the basement, down in the basement, yeah.
Oh where can you go when your money gets low?
In the basement, whoa down in the basement
And if a storm is taking place, you can jam and still be safe
In the basement, down in the basement, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah -- Etta James

The new basement space is on its way! No more scary dropped ceiling tiles falling on our heads! Usable space with eight-foot ceilings! A cleaner, brighter basement with a spankin' new laundry room and more space for the kids to play and extra guest space and...

It's just cement blocks and a poured concete floor, I know. But it's all ours. And I'm a little bit excited about it.

Castles made of sand

So we learned this week that our house was built without footings. The house was built in 1929, so it's pretty common, but still a little -- if you forgive the pun -- unsettling. Our contractor needs to create an underpinning wall to support the foundation, so there will be a bit of a delay in pouring the foundation for the addition. Serenity now.

We also learned that a small bump-out addition that one of the previous owners created in the 1950s was REALLY built without footings, which explains the sloping floor and occasional leaks in that part of the kitchen. Our contractor really wanted to take the excavator to it and demolish it once and for all, but our architect intervened and found a way to support it properly so we can build a second floor over it. We narrowly escaped the loss of our kitchen in a 24-hour period.

I can't wait until they start demolishing to see what's underneath these floors and in these walls!

The Way We Were

This used to be our backyard.

















Not no more it ain't.









Construction has begun on the Harris House. It's official! Check our blog for regular updates and photos. Aside from the chaos, the confusion, and the craziness, this home renovation stuff is a lot of fun. We swear.