Full Circle

I had an itch to see my house today, you guys.  I clearly don't hold back from stalking the house, but mostly I limit my hovering to drive-bys.  In one of today's slow, creepy, drive-bys, I saw a big box in the front yard, and after a moment's consternation guessed that they finally brought my bathtub.  I've been dying a little, since, to run in and check it out, but I didn't really get a chance during the day today and was waiting until after the kids' bedtime to go visit.

Imagine my grouchiness, if you will, when my husband came home from work and said that the keys in the lockbox were missing and he couldn't get in to the house.  It's happened before that someone pocketed the keys for the evening, and it's not really a big deal, except that I wanted to see my bathtub RIGHT NOW.  Like the stubborn goat I am, I went to the house anyway and scowled at the empty lockbox.  Then I figured out how to get into my house.  I'm not going to tell you how, but I'll assure you that I didn't break anything (on the house or myself).  I'll also assure you that my method of entry was not a dignified action for a middle-aged mom, but it was more dignified than the gymnastics I had to do yesterday to slither into our stuffed storage unit to extract the kids' Halloween treat bags.  I'll finally assure you that there was no way I was going to be denied entry to my own house, and that's that.

And y'all, my hijinks and resulting loss of dignity were so worth it.  First of all, I did get to see my BEE-YOU-TEE-FULL bath tub.

Cue angels singing, etc.  I almost didn't come back to the apartment.

So comfy.

Lovely as my awesome bathtub is, it got upstaged tonight.  This is not what had my clapping my hands, jumping up and down, and shrieking a little with delight (alone, in an empty house, deranged fan-girl stye).  Before I tell you what did, we have to go back a little.

Remember this?

When they first started to destruct the house, they uncovered this old wallpaper in the bathroom, and I was so overwhelmed by its awesomeness that I became a little obsessed.  I started googling "pink bird wallpaper" and hunting vintage wallpaper sites, convinced that I needed this in my new house.  I never did find anything even remotely close (probably a blessing that I didn't), but I did come across a zillion "pink bird wallpapers."

I found one I particularly liked, and as I kept searching I found myself coming back, again and again, to this whimsical and happy "Early Bird" pattern.  It wasn't hot pink water birds and giant water lilies, but it spoke to me.  I decided I NEEDED a whimsical and happy wallpaper in my house.  I kept searching, but I knew as I looked that I had found the wallpaper for me.  I finally screwed up my courage to buy it, no mean feat given that I know beans about wallpaper in general, but in the moment of decision, I noticed a tag on the thumbnail of my wallpaper: "No Delivery Outside NL."  NL? I thought.  Dangit.  The Netherlands.  I had become convinced I needed a wallpaper that I'd have to go to Holland to purchase.  I called Holland and spoke to some super-nice Dutch folks, who assured me they were unable to ship to the US.  Thwarted.  At the eleventh hour.  I put it out of my head and started looking for other "pink bird wallpapers."

That wallpaper was meant to be with me and would not be thwarted by anything like the Atlantic ocean, however.  My beloved college roomie's beloved sister is currently living in Holland due to a military posting!  I hatched a plan.

I ordered the wallpaper and sent it to Sista, and she kindly agreed to accept shipment of the wallpaper and send it to me.  No customs issues, no delays, no nothing!  And tonight, you guys, tonight I got undignified and scratched an itch to get inside my house no matter what, and I walked up the stairs and saw this in my laundry room:

There are no pink birds on my wallpaper, but it's pink and it's got birds, and it makes my laundry room just about the happiest place in the entire universe (which is pretty impressive for a laundry room!).

Cue clapping and jumping and shrieking.  This calls for even more than angels singing, but I can't think what that might be.  It's just awesome.

I picked my blue knobs while the wallpaper was still making its trans-Atlantic flight, and I hoped they'd look right with the wee blue birds on all that pink, and oh, it makes my heart happy to see that I think they do.  This looks like a room where I can fold endless boring piles of laundry and still sing.  This looks like a room where I'll want to sit for hours and sew curtains for the roughly 8 million windows in the house.  It looks like a new room with functional plumbing where I won't get whacked with the back door or the pantry door that nonetheless belongs to my sweet old house.  It's worth breaking in, and clapping and singing, and I hope there's a little happiness in the house, too, that it has some pink bird wallpaper again. 

Solid Surface Materials

I've mentioned before that we took a loooong time planning for this house-fixing.  Two years for architectural plans alone.  I'm not naturally a patient person, though I'm working on that, so those two years were making me pretty stir-crazy by the end.  So I started picking stuff out.  I picked out all my plumbing fixtures, for example, LAST September.  And all the tile I picked just before the start of 2014.  You know, three months before we even got started.  

With the plumbing, it seemed my advance work served me well.  Everything was handled, and I didn't have to get stressed under a deadline.  With the tile, my impatience got the better of me.  I picked some stuff that ended up being outrageously expensive (5 times! the cost of the less expensive stuff I found to replace it).  I picked some stuff that came with a 10-week lead time.  And I picked some ridiculous stuff that I think no sane person would put in their house but that I love.

The problem with tile in particular is that it is so permanent.  Yes, you can take it out, but it's expensive, and messy, and hard work, as one of the tile guys likes to tell me every time I see him ("Trabajando duro, Señora.  Para usted."  Reproachfully.  I know!  I'm sorry!  I'd say I'll pick easier tile next time, but I hope there will be NO next time.  I've just started hiding from the tile guys.).

The other problem with tile is that a wee sample can look so different from a whole room full of tile.  So as the tile has started going in, I've been holding my breath.  I peek around corners, one eye closed, ready to hang my head and admit my failure in choosing a tile, ready to live with the consequences of my impatience for 20 years.

You guys, so far, so good, as far as I'm concerned.

Laundry room

Kitchen backsplash

Guest Shower

Guest

Master 

Master shower floor

Boy's shower nook

Girl's shower nook

Kids' floor

Kids' floor

So you really can't go wrong with white subway tile, as far as I'm concerned.  And I love that we've restored the hex tile that was originally in the downstairs bathroom.  And you'll just have to wait with me to see that floor for the kids' rooms revealed.  I think 99.9% of everyone who ever sees it will think I have lost my mind, but I think it's spectacular.  And the stuff in the Master bath just fills me with joy.  This floor is everything I hoped it would be, and I am pretty good at hoping high.

Seeing the tile go in feels like a reward for all of my patience, as well as a reward for all of my impatience.  Like everything in the house, it feels like a reward that I don't deserve even a little bit, but I'll enjoy spending the rest of my life trying to.

A Teaser

I can't wait to tell you more about these things:

Pretty Things

I still drive by the house several times a day because I can't help myself, but I try not to go inside when dudes are there working unless I have a real reason to be there.  I'm sure people see my driving by and stalking my house, but I don't want to interfere with anyone's actual work or make them think I'm critiquing or spying.  Or getting in the way.  But occasionally, happy day!, I have an excuse to be inside the house, and I get to see things like this happen:

IT'S A MARBLE COUNTERTOP!

I know, we already established that I'm excited about it.  But still.  LOOK! It's IN MY HOUSE!

I may or may not have gotten a little weepy about how pretty it is.  I definitely resisted the urge to lay down on top of it and refuse to move ever again.  I swear!

The timestamp on these photos say that was September 25 (I've been running around, you guys.  This week I thought it was Thursday by Monday afternoon.  I've got to rely on my phone for stuff like this).  On October 1, my stalking allowed me to catch this:

That's my island.  It got covered up for it's own protection pretty quickly, but it looks like this up close:

Honed marble feels like dreams come true.  It just does.  Come pet it with me and see for yourself.

DI(Sort-of)Y

I like to think of myself as moderately handy.  I can change a tire and use a drill.  I assemble my own Ikea and Target furniture happily, and once I built some shelves (of my own design, even!) that were only kind of wobbly.  And I don't even need to mention the masterful caulking, spackling, and super-gluing that was holding my house together before we started the renovation.  Old houses take a lot of goo.  This renovation, however, has been strictly a pro job, from design through execution, which is  super good thing when I take an honest assessment of my tolerance for mess, stress, and hard work (virtually nil for all three).  I've not been sad that we're not doing it ourselves, especially since the dudes who are doing it are super, super awesome.

But I'm not someone who will reject a gift that falls in my lap, even if the gift is a little bit of work on a hot day.  That gift was the fun afternoon of doorknob wrangling that I mentioned last time.  And here's how that went.

Roughly four million old screws

So the deal was that I had a collection of doorknobs, spindles, escutcheons, hinges and screws that all came from different places, and I had to find a way to make them all look like they belonged together.  I could have just polished them all up, and I would have liked that, but some of my pieces had been "aged" (with a belt sander) by the lady who lived in my house before and THEN lacquered.  In order to make them shiny, I would have had to either strip them and then polish whatever brass was left, or strip them and then have them re-plated.  I like old stuff, but that was a bit much.  And I liked how they looked as they were, so I decided to make everything else match their level of old-ness.

So after sorting everything out,  I made them all clean and shiny.

I used hot water to get the last bits of paint off, then used toilet bowl cleaner (recommended by the dude at the antique store!) and some 0000 steel wool to clean everything up.   See how pretty these are shiny?  It was a little hard to do what I did next, but I was spurred on by something you might notice--though all that brass is lovely, it doesn't all match.  Some of my brass is "rosier" than others (look at that really pinkish one at the back right).  The Internet says that before the 60's there was no standard amount of copper included in brass even from the same manufacturers, so there's pretty wide variation in color.  I wouldn't mind the non-matchiness, myself, but I like where I ended up.  Stay with me.

I dropped each bit in something called "Brass Ager."  Truth in labeling, there.  I don't know what it is.  I googled the heck out of it, and I still don't know.  Here's what happened in about 30 seconds when I did that.

Shiny...Dark.  Magic.  Or chemistry.  You know.  But I wasn't going for super-dark "Oil-rubbed Bronze," so I used some more of my super-fine 0000 steel wool to back the finish off a bit.

And there you have it--matching finishes.

Here's some before and after, because nothing's better than that.  And here's some before and after on my hands, because I DID use proper gloves and safety equipment (until my hands got really sweaty and that was TOO gross to bear).  This did not wash off.  I had to get a manicure to cover my zombie nails, and even then it was a good week before all the skin on my hands PEELED off and looked kind of normal again.

But here's the after that matters:

Those are the doors to the library.  This room was built a few months ago. Those doors have only been hung for a few weeks.  But with those knobs, don't they look timeless?  Don't they look like they belong to the rest of the house?  I think they do.

And here's another knob on a door that requires a mortise:

That backplate is what I was trying to match.  And here's the other kind of knob.  We used all of those downstairs.  They're just so pretty it hurts.

Totally worth some peely fingers and black nails.