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.

Something old, something new

The whole rhyme applies, you guys.  I'm wrangling hardware for the house, and old, new, borrowed, and blue actually all apply.  I've read that the tradition as applied to marriage helps connect the new bride though the institution of marriage to her ancestry (old), her future (new), her community (borrowed), and the creativity it takes to make a marriage work (blue) OR the sorrow attendant any life, you know, if you want to get all depressing about it.  And we have all four in our hardware choices--entirely unintentional, but no mean feat.

I've told you about the doorknob store.  I didn't mention that while I'm choosing brand-shiny-new doorknobs for the exterior doors (the better to thwart crooks, my dear), I'm using old knobs for the interior doors.  Before the contractors smashed parts of our house to bits, they kindly took the interior doors off of the hinges and saved them and the hardware to use again.  I knew I wouldn't have enough doorknobs and hinges to manage all of the doors for the new house.  My nice contractors also explained to me that the hinges I had (they have ball finials, or top-bits) were old and hard to match, and that if I wanted to use old doorknobs, they'd probably have mortises, which are boxes that fit into a space inside the door that contain all of the twisty and lock-y bits.  And while they'd be glad to help me source standard stuff, I'd be on my own for finding antiques.  I wandered around antique stores, as I'm apt to do, but doorknobs in good condition are expensive as well as hard to find.

Enter my sister-in-law's parents, the heroes of this tale.  Mr. and Mrs. C had a box of glass doorknobs, with all of the mortises and escutcheons (which are the flat bits that are the pretty parts behind the doorknob on the outside of the door) that they had rescued from an old house years ago.  Y'all, they let me have them, and now I have beautiful glass doorknobs for my house.  I can't even wrap my mind around how wonderful this is.

So now I had a box of old hardware from my house that my contractors kept, and a box of old hardware that Mr. and Mrs. C sent me, so of course I emailed my contractor and asked when he wanted all of it.  He told me I'd better do some wrangling first; put together clean and working hinges, mortise, knobs, spindles (the rod between the two knobs) and escutcheons for each door and deliver them to him ready to go.  Eep! I know that cleaning and matching old hardware isn't exactly standard house-building work, but I'm for sure no expert.

He did send me to a nice dude at a nice antique place who helped me put everything in order.  And while the nice dude was not interested in cleaning and refinishing my hardware, he did teach me how.  Tomorrow I'll wander over to the house, bag of chemicals (from Home Depot that make me feel like I belong in an episode of Breaking Bad) in hand, to scrub and polish and age all of the metal bits so they look like they belong together.  I'm both terrified and excited, and if I don't die from the fumes you'll get a nice DIY entry for once.

So there's your old, for the knobs and hinges that lived in my house from 1914 until this Spring.  And new, for the shiny deadbolts from the store that should be called Wall-o-Doorknobs.  Borrowed covers the beautiful glass knobs from my family's family, though I do think they're letting me keep them.  Blue could cover the glass knobs as well, as my antique doorknob guy was excited to tell me that my knobs were the rich, sparkly glass made with manganese and lead, rather than the crystal clear selenium glass made after about 1915.  These manganese knobs will change color with lots of exposure to the ultraviolet radiation of the sun and turn "sun purple," a pretty lavender shade that some collectors love and some abhor, believing it's ruined the original piece.  That's not my blue, though.

I could have blue for the interior paint that's going up inside the house:

"Jetstream" for boys

"Jubilee" in the library and master bath

(Here's some pink, too, just because):

"Loveable" for girls

But that would be a stretch, because it's not hardware.

Not only does my nice antique place have a doorknob guru, they also have tons of old and reproduction glass cabinet knobs, and some of those, for sure, and blue-milk glass, which I'm going to put in the laundry room.  Blue glass knobs, for whimsy or sorrow, put the cap on the blessing I hope for my house.  Now I only have about 90 more knobs to pick and source, but the important part is clearly handled.

Bonus Post Script:

Look at the attic of this antique store that's in an old house.  It's the greatest.  Go here if you're ever in Houston.

Il est arrivé!

Doorknobs of the Universe

I've been spending a lot of time in hardware stores lately, and since I have not been able to drag you with me, I have some stuff to show you to help you share in the joy and agony of these places.

I don't actually think a crystal butterfly as a sink knob fully qualifies as craziness, but I do think that whoever has to clean it will probably cry every time.  I'll pass.

I kind of like this one, too, but I think you'd have to love dolphins A LOT to get a faucet shaped like one.  Twenty bucks says everyone who gets this also has a dolphin tattoo.

This is even better because it's pretty terrifying.  I cannot imagine a small child encountering this faucet without screaming a lot.

And the coup de grace:

It's a monkey cabinet handle.  You have to wrap your hand around the monkey to open the cabinet.  This is a thing that people pay money for to put in their houses.  They choose to wrap their hands around a little brass monkey shinning down a pole holding some kind of jug with his tail every time they open a cabinet.  And they probably pay a whole lot for the privilege.  People.

So this above is what I do while I'm waiting for the helper people to help me with stuff--walk around taking pictures and snickering about stuff that I think is weird.  But really, a trip to the hardware store is all about this:

That's a (kind of blurry, sorry!) WALL OF DOORKNOBS.  Seriously, did you know that there are so many doorknobs in the world?  This is maybe a fifth of what there is in this ONE store.  Today I made my second trip to this particular doorknob store; I planned to just do all of this picking in one go the first time, but I had to go in, wander around, and run away because there was just too much.  Today I returned, armed with Consumer Reports reviews and my own opinions from driving around looking at doorknobs for a few weeks.

I discovered that doorknobs are something you have to try out.

NOT the doorknob I chose.

Maybe I'm an outlier, but it really matters to me how a doorknob feels in your hand.  So I have about a zillion of these shots, both as a test for myself, and to show my husband, who won't be testing the knobs himself, the relative sizes of all of the hardware.

Also, bin pulls.  And cabinet knobs.

And hinges, and doorstops.  I didn't even know I had to choose stuff about hinges, you guys.  These three below have different radii--which is how relatively sharp or curvy the corner is.  That's in addition to the size, number of screws, type of bar thingy holding the hinge together, number of hinges per door, and finish of the metal.  And brand.

I knew I'd have to choose stuff, but it does seem at a point that you could just go into the one doorknob store and say "I'd like a doorknob that works, please," and BOOM, there you go.  It's a delightful chore to have, I know, to be able to choose from among a zillion nice and exciting doodads, but in this moment, I kind of wish I had that dolphin tattoo to narrow my choices for me.

Or, you know, this:

Drywall sanding

That title is unfair, I know it is.  There is much, much more going on at the house than drywall sanding.  BUT, every day when I drive past, it looks the same.  Now that everything that happens, happens on the inside and I have to actually walk inside to see what'g going on!  I know, cry you a river.  

Here's something exciting, though:  The outside is mostly painted!  Check it out:

No, we're not leaving the porch steps green.  I promise.

The main house color is "Jersey Cream," which I think is lovely, but to be honest, I just think "Sunshiny Yellow!"  It may be too much sunshiny for some, I guess, but for me there's no such thing.

SUNSHINY!

The trim color is called "Rain," which I also love (am I the only person who completely rejects colors I would otherwise like if I don't like the name of the color?  I refuse to have any "Taupe" in my house because it's a dumb word as well as the color for pantyhose.  Yuk.).  All of the stakeholders are not fully on board with the blue yet, so we'll see if it needs changing later.

It's blue.

And of course, we have porches with properly haint blue ceilings.  I've read all sorts of things about blue ceilings on porches, and I think, in the end, that it's just what people like to do.  It looks peaceful, I think, and I can see that the light color likely helps make the otherwise shaded porch reflect more light, but people love to make stuff up.  The more reasonable explanation is that the blue tricks pest insects, especially wasps, into thinking the ceiling is an endless sky, and they won't build their gross-looking and bothersome nests in the corners.  The internet is full of people who claim to have proof that this works, and if it does, I'll take it.  I've spent enough hours of my life whapping dirt-dauber nests and running for my life.  The less reasonable explanation, which is of course the one I give credence to, explains that spirits will avoid a house will blue porches because they think the blue is water.  And ghosties of all varieties can't cross water or iron, which everyone knows, right?  Really, I like to believe I'm a logical person, but I spent a lot of time growing up with a grandmother who believed she had "the sight" as her grandmother did, so I'm not going to reject anything that keeps scary things away, even if it's totally illogical.

It keeps the dead people out.

Inside is where it gets a little frustrating.  They ended up painting the outside of the house SO fast, that when they said they were ready to start the interior paint, I'll admit I expected to show up one afternoon to a finished interior.  Instead, they're being very thorough and careful, and priming and sanding every bit of everything until it feels like well-washed cotton sheets and I find myself cuddling a doorframe.

They did the insides of the cabinets first, which was pretty exciting, but it's been days now and there are stacks of primed shelves, drawers, and what-have-you everywhere.

Kitchen!

Shelves!

Drawers!

Somethings!

I feel like there's kind of a doppler effect going on in the house--I look at the time when I expect the house to be finished, and it's approaching dizzyingly quickly.  Then I look back to how quickly the time has passed since they first knocked in the old bits of the house, and that, too, has screamed past.  But where I'm standing right now, gazing at trim work that's been being primed for 6 million years, and time is moving very slowly.  Which is really for the best, because I have to choose a lot of hardware.