Goodbye, Orange

After a little more than a year of living with it, we decided that the orange in our living room was just a bit too strong. It seemed to suck all the light out of the space while caving in on us.

So, on a whim, we bought some paint, pulled our furniture back and in less than 24 hours did a little more home improvement.

It took a couple of coats of primer to make sure that the orange wouldn't be peeking through.

We decided to paint the south wall a kind of gray color, found a color chip that we liked and went to Benjamin Moore to get the paint. We used their Aura line, which is really nice, if not extremely expensive. We would have used their new Natura, no VOC line, but it didn't come in a satin sheen, which we really wanted.
The east wall we decided to paint white, hoping that it would make the space feel more expansive and clash less with the piano.
Paint always looks different on the wall than it does on the paint chip. The color we chose ended up looking a little more blue than we intended, but overall, we think it's a big improvement. Feels like we have a brand new room and all it took was a couple of trips to the paint store and part of a weekend.

Suck it, electricity

I put up the bedroom ceiling fan ALL BY MYSELF the other night, and I didn't shock myself once.

It went from this....

To this (if you can even tell what it looks like from this picture)

From the "what Lowe's had" category

Before:


After:

Fiat lux

We are so pleased to have new lights up in the place — the early 1990s, French-country vibe from our all-white ceiling fan in the living room wasn't working for us any more:


Also not working for us? The slasher-hotel, bare bulb look in the entryway and kitchen:


And, who loves a nipple light? Not I, especially not in the kitchen. (Please excuse the horrendous metering and light level editing.)


We replaced the living room and entryway lights with this fixture, which puts off plenty of light through its three compact fluorescent bulbs, looks decent and ties together the front rooms with the same look:


We have a technical problem that prevented us from using this light in the kitchen — we're now in the market for something that will make the clearance from a cabinet door. Flat, modernish and not too expensive...

But our hall light went from this...


to this:


And the office light used to look like this...


but now it looks like this:

This little light of mine

It's been interesting to pull things off the wall in this condo and see what's underneath. I found two layers of wallpaper under the light fixture in the office — one was green stripes and the other was brown with cream leaves.

Other than being interesting, it's been plain fun to rip off ugly light fixtures from ugly walls. We happily said goodbye to this bathroom beauty:

DIY warrior

This story from The New York Times (registration sometimes required) gave me a rare opportunity — to thank my lucky stars that I no longer live in Manhattan. We couldn't do this process in that city.


Make sure you take the audio tour for its photos and explanations.

Preview, part II

This is what we have to deal with this week:


This the wall of the kitchen that used to have the fridge (Happy Birthday, sister-in-law!), the sink and the dishwasher. We're fairly confident that the damage is mostly water-ish in nature, and we're hoping that it will be easy to replace, possibly with some hardi-panel, a water-proof subfloor.

This, on the hand. THIS. We have no idea what this is. It's the back of the closet in the second bedroom. Water? Cat? Leak? Mold? Any guesses?

Preview, part I

The work this week is low on the visual potential and even lower on the excitement scale. We're patching and sanding things of this nature:


(I don't know why my fingers look so stubby in that picture, but now I'm wishing that I had kept my hand to myself!)

Day 2

It's been really strange for me to help Tai with this demolition and see how easily things come apart. I guess my brain knew that stuff like kitchen cabinets, carpet and doors were at some point installed and therefore not part of a house's bones, but my mind always just considered them fixtures. As in, fixed. As in, shouldn't they be a bit more difficult to remove?

Demolition has been fun, and it's reinforced my newly recognized preference for good craftmanship.

Pictures coming soon.

Yikes

We stopped by the condo Sunday afternoon to formally take possession and take some "before" pictures. I left a little depressed — there is more work there to do than I could ever imagine. Well, here it is:

Living room



Kitchen




Bathroom



Master bedroom



Second bedroom/office



What's also missing from this collection is a picture of the entryway. Don't worry, though — it also has nasty green carpet and a crappy light fixture. I didn't include pictures of the rest of the light fixtures (beyond what ended up in these photos), because I imagine that we'll show you before and after as we replace them. But that step is so very, very far away right now...

Kitchen

So, the kitchen for the place we are buying needs a little work. And by a little work, I mean that it needs to be ripped out.

The layout is not that great and it is, well, ugly. It feels so cramped and chopped up as it currently is. Here are a couple of photos of the kitchen now.




So, what we want to do is open up the kitchen a little bit. This is a hard task because it is a small space, but we want to take out the island and wrap the kitchen in an L around the wall. We will lose a little bit of the dining area to do so, but I would rather have a more comfortable place to cook and in a 950 square foot condo, you probably don't need a gigantic dining room.

Here are some renderings of what we would like to do using the Ikea cabinets that Kersten mentioned earlier in the blog.




The tile back splash in the rendering isn't exactly what we want to do, but it was the only texture option I had in my rendering program. We would likely do something like this:

Hitting a wall

We're getting excited to close on the Center Street condo on Monday (fingers crossed that all goes as planned), and we can't wait to get in there. Among the other things we'd like to do to that place is paint/refinish every wall surface, including a currently papered wall in the larger of the two bedrooms. Neither of us has ever dealt with wallpaper before, so this is a brave new world for us.

If we were fabulously wealthy and had multiple thousands of dollars to spend on ONE wall, this is the Brooklyn-based company and paper we (ok, I) would use:


Not only do I LOVE the bright colors, the hand-screen printed process, and the design, but this pattern would be a fantastic homage to the wallpaper in my mother's childhood room — a psychedelic color palette of fuchsia, lime green, and yellow tulips running floor to ceiling.

Sadly, however, we do not have thousands of dollars to spend on one wall. We probably need to make a decision and order the paper and supplies within a few weeks, though, so the search continues...

You know you're (a) ______________ when...

...this gets your body temp up:


From here, if you're really interested: "The DITRA mat combines the functions of waterproofing, uncoupling and vapour equalisation with good bonding performance and direct load transfer into the substrate. It is therefore an ideal installation aid on critical substrates both indoors and out."

(It's a sub-layer for tile.)

Help us fill in the blank.

IKEA

The day after we went under contract on the Center Street condo, we took ourselves waaaaay south to the one and only tourist attraction in Draper, Utah:

I felt like I was going to Costco — a gianter, bluer, particle-boarded Costco. Ah, but how could I not love Ikea? I furnished one-half of a very ghetto Manhattan Chinatown room entirely with the cheapest furnishings Ikea had to offer. (My design sensibility for that particular shopping trip, which was just before I started my second semester of grad school funded entirely by student loans, consisted of how much does it cost?, and, do they have it in stock?) I did a bit of work looking into the deal that Draper, Utah, set up with the retailer in order to lure it and all its sales-tax glory to within city limits. And I watched for months as the crews poured one impossibly large concrete slab after another, coated the exterior with what must have been millions of gallons of blue paint, and expanded the adjacent frontage road all in preparation for the onslaught of grateful, budget-minded clients.

This particular trip was to scout Ikea's kitchen cabinets, the praises of which many, many other reviewers have sung before — here, here and here. In all, it was a pretty successful trip, minus the labyrinth of double-wide baby strollers, two brief power outages inside (no riot — good job, Utah!), and infant-themed bulk justification banners.

Generally, I can't complain about Ikea's philosophy — decent design at ridiculously low prices — but some/most of their stuff ends up looking cheap. Our conclusion was to avoid any cabinet touted as an "effect" of one wood or another. The "effect" is a laminate surface with similarly colored plastic tape along the edges of the cabinets. Looks. Cheap. Really. Really. Cheap. But you know what? It is cheap, so I guess that's OK.
I think that we're going to opt for something in the "abstrakt" line of cabinets — possibly a red, possibly a white. We might throw in some frosted glass with metal frames. We're not really sure because the kitchen in the condo is pretty tight. But we're not crazy about the idea of passing off something as wood that isn't wood, so we will studiously avoid all "effect" products.

Buying

In other purchasing news, we are under contract for a condo on Center Street in the West Capitol Hill neighborhood just north of Salt Lake's downtown. It's at approximately 480 North and 150 West. Wish us luck!