Oh happy day! The building inspector has approved both the interior and the exterior framing, so we can now start to cover the Tyvek, once and for all. I cannot even begin to describe the joy that filled our hearts when we pulled up to the house and saw this amount of siding actually in place. We've chosen to use white cedar shingles, rather than the more typical red variety, because it will eventually fade to a beautiful silvery grey. Plus it's a completely biodegradable material and we won't be using any toxic stains or paints all over the exterior of the building, so it makes more ecological sense. Our little house is now beginning to look like a home, rather than a construction site. Supposedly things are going to start moving along quickly now... I'm just going to keep my fingers crossed and my mouth shut. If any of you out there want to send positive vibes our way, I will happily accept them.

Check out the insane looking faucets we've just bought for the sink in our upstairs bathroom. They are made by a company called Sign of the Crab, that specializes in reproduction plumbing. I never would have chosen these from a catalogue, but when we were over talking to our good pals at George Taylor Specialties about refinishing the sink, they took these out and we fell in love. The sink has separate hot and cold faucets, so the long nozzles will help make it easier to feel both temperatures at the same time while washing our hands. I can't wait to see how they look when they're finally united with the sink!

And on an entirely different note, you should all go check out the new website sprig.com. Not only is it a great resource for all things green, it was also designed by Helicopter, my husband's graphic design company. So it looks great! (excuse me for bragging, but a wife's gotta do what a wife's gotta do...)

So you've seen a drawing of the front door. We're waiting to hear (even as I type this) from the folks who are making it... hopefully they'll tell us it's done and on it's way. Boy am I looking forward to having real doors on the place.

But once you have a door, you have to choose hardware. This decision falls under the category of nothing-I've-really-considered-before-in-my-life. We collected tons of brochures, ripped out tons of photos in magazines, etc etc, but had come up empty in terms of hard core decisions. So one day, in the pouring rain that has typified the past few weeks here in NY, I went up to my favorite hardware store, Gracious Home, determined not to leave without choosing hardware for the mythical front door. I ended up making two trips, but finally decided on this lovely set from Baldwin, in a finish that matches the back door and window hardware. Here's a photo, courtesy of the folks at Baldwin:

Nice, simple, and super high quality (the folks at Gracious Home couldn't say enough nice things about Baldwin). This particular lock set is a mortise lock, meaning it is made of one solid piece that requires a rectangular hole to be drilled into the door for installation. They are more stable than the tubular kind (where  the knob and the latch are two separate pieces) which I now appreciate, given our recent theft. PLUS they happened to be having a 40% off sale, and you know how much I love a bargain. I threw in matching hinges as well. Of course, the set is made to order, so we'll be waiting for awhile before we actually see it, but hopefully the door will be home and ready by the time I pick up the goods.

So much attention has been paid to the back doors, what with  them being stolen, then partially replaced (they were delivered without any locking mechanisms, so back they went to get properly suited up) etc etc, that we hadn't really considered what we were going to do in the front. Luckily, my husband Josh is good with a pencil, and we (together with our architect) came up with the above idea for a front door. It's going to be super wide (over 40") and made out of the same antique pine as the floors. But with a fairly large window area, so that some light can come in through the front. Right now, it's pretty damned dark in that area. It's going to open onto the screened in porch that is currently being re-assembled in the front of the house. Right now, it's still a bit of a fantasy, though we did send the drawings off to the folks who are making it several weeks ago.

One day soon, we will have real doors instead of nailed in boards, I swear!

We're taking a break from construction duty this weekend and marching in the MS Walk to help raise some cash for research. Click here if you're feeling especially generous and want to donate to the cause.

OK, OK I know it's Tuesday, but whatever. It's been raining and really cold around here these days and I'm having trouble getting motivated to do anything, much less report on the very very slow progress of our house. Which now will be habitable sometime in June (instead of the end-of-May that was recently promised) Of course, there are all sorts of good reasons for this, but still... it's ANNOYING to say the least. I was too depressed to take a photo of the back of our house this past Saturday, as it looks the same as the week before, but here's the door at my parents' place:

At least we're not the only ones making no visible progress.

OK hold on, I need to shut up. Lots has happened. First off, the basement has been painted with Drylok, a masonry sealer that both helps keep the moisture outside of the basement AND makes the room look a thousand times brighter and less scary. See?

I have all kinds of plans for what I want to do with this space. First off, we're going to need to hang some really bright curtains to make it seem less like a bunker whilst covering the boiler, air handler, hot water heater, etc. If anybody has any ideas on great places to go find amazing fabrics, let me know. I need to start looking now.

Other stuff has happened as well... I'll keep you all posted throughout the week. I can tell how excited you all are. For now, I'll leave you with this drawing of Mickey Mouse that we found nailed to the side of the house:

Talk about out of our league... When I thought about renovating this place, the majority of my daydreams concerned wallpaper choices and wood floor finishes. The thought of a heating system never crossed my mind. Luckily, it had crossed my husband Josh's mind, though only in so far as he insisted that we find a central heat AND air conditioning system so he didn't have to look at those horrible window AC units. (I, of course, have grown up with those units and have never even thought about central air. Ever. It's for office buildings, right?) Well, now it's for our place, too. And Josh actually went online and did the research and found this great system by a company called Unico, which, because it is comprised of flexible tubing and a modular air handler, works really well in an old home with not much room for fancy duct work. Here's a photo of some of the snake-like ducts squirming through our walls:

The only thing you'll see are these small wooden rings around little vents in the floors or ceilings where the air will come out. So no huge unattractive grilles in the floor or the walls. Here's one of the vents now, pre finished wooden ring:

Of course, we have no idea if this baby really works, but they say it's whisper quiet, 30% more efficient than the traditional systems, plus we included a humidifier to regulate the moisture in the air. All very exciting. Once we get the whole thing all hooked up, I'll give her a test run and let you all know how it works out.

Here's another view of the old kitchen, featuring the bar that was almost a deal breaker for my husband Josh, when we were first considering the house. He hated this bar more than any man should hate an inanimate object. No one could accuse him of not being passionate about design. The new peninsula, as I have recently learned to call these semi-islands, will be counter height rather than bar height, and hopefully made out of some of the wood we've salvaged from the house.

Here's what the same angle looked like on Saturday:

Windows are in place of the old door, and there are stairs where before there were none. Supposedly this is going to look like a real kitchen in a month's time... we'll see.

Lastly, here's the dining room back in the day:

This picture brings back memories of that great hanging light by Scrapile, purchased at our favorite design store in the 'hood: The Future Perfect. I expect to be doing quite a bit of shopping there when the time finally comes to buy things other than front door hardware. Plus you can see the old staircase on the far right.

Here's that same view, again from this past Saturday:

Basically the whole wall that you see in front will be glass-- French doors flanked by two large windows. Right now you can enjoy the planks that are nailed in place to help keep intruders out while we wait for the replacement doors to arrive. (Our first set were stolen off the hinges, or more accurately, with the hinges, if you haven't been following...) This is supposedly happening in the next week or so. It's more than I can hope for, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

Ahhhhh, our cute screened porch from back in the day, when we had grass, and doors that you could open (rather than boards.) We had to take it down in order the dig the basement. We've carefully saved the floor boards, red paint and all, to put back down when the new porch goes up. Here's what it looked like on Saturday:

We've lost the window, but the new front door will have glass in it to let in the light. I just hope that it keeps some of the charm that the old porch had... so often the new version sucks in comparison...

But on to the inside. Here's a shot of the living room that I took back in September:

Cute, right? If not a little haphazard. We've moved the chimney over to the right hand side of the room, which will give us a much more open feeling. And as for the stove... There's a funny story. Both Josh and I are very attached to the idea of a wood stove, both for warmth in the winter and for aesthetic purposes.We made a big deal about saving the stove during our initial meetings with our contractor.  While we were packing up the house pre-construction, Josh took a long look at the stove and decided that  something was amiss. Knowing that these stoves often have their manufacturing information on the back, we wiped off the cobwebs and the soot and shone a flashlight behind the stove to reveal one simple word: TAIWAN. So much for our decision to carefully preserve the "original" stove. Turns out that this stove was made in the eighties and put in by one of the renters that had been in there while my folks owned the place. Josh got online and found a great stove from a company called Good Time Stove that was actually built during the mid 1800's. It's a much more efficient wood burner, plus it's style is more in keeping with the simplicity of the house. I'll take photos when it gets delivered.

Here is what the living room looked like this weekend, just for comparison's sake.

The new stove will go on the far side of the staircase. We've also gained almost a foot of ceiling height in the living room because of the unnecessary layers of wood and linoleum on the floors, which makes a huge difference in the feeling of the room. I'll post the rest of the before shots tomorrow. Wouldn't want you to get bored with all of this scrolling...

I came upon some photos I took of the house before we started this project, and I must say that I secretly love what it used to look like and am having to convince myself that we were right to tear it all up. Of course, the leaky ceilings, windows that didn't work, essentially no heat, lack of foundation, etc, are why we went ahead with this whole thing. But right now, it's hard to remember any of that when all I see is this:

Voila... the same view, in a photograph taken about 3 weeks ago. One day, hopefully in May, we will all be convinced that the work has been worth it. Boy am I looking forward to that day. More before/during photos to come...

Just got back from a few hours at the house meeting with Carl, the architect, and making a plan for the next few weeks. We've got to be thinking about a kitchen sink (vintage, I'm thinking) as well as tiles for the bathroom and a toilet for upstairs (we already have that crazy Kohler hatbox toilet for the downstairs sitting in storage... I won it at a silent auction over a year ago) Plus we're trying to come up with a good way to use the rest of the old siding from the original walls-- it's old growth lumber, and really beautiful, so it'd be cool to reuse it somehow. Any suggestions would be much appreciated. Photo below:

As of now, by the way, the race between our house and my folk's guest house is starting to look like a tie. Here's our place today, all boarded up post robbery of the french doors:

and here's the guest house:

go figure...