Sheffield Serenade & Saturated Shingles

I didn't beat my old record and make it three days in a row with blog posts. I still need to post about paint colors and take some photos of the original labels on the bedroom doors. It seems like I am never home during the daylight to take some nice photos of the paint. We haven't really had decent internet since we moved in. To make a long story short. Stay away from Mediacom Cable if there is anyway you can possibly avoid them. Much of the past month we have been frequenting coffee shops for most of our internet needs which has limited my internet time.

Instead of telling you about paint I decided to post a photo of our new china. This photo is not really of our new china but it is exactly what our new china looks like and probably a much prettier photo than I could manage without breaking a few pieces in the process. We got it at the same place we got the Catherin Holm pot I posted about last time. George's Resale is a great place to find quality stuff at a decent price. George always has furniture that is much higher quality than anything your could find in most furniture stores today. When we bought the Catherin Holm pot I saw these dishes and I loved them except......they are yellow. I liked that they looked kind of retro without going over board. I think the tea cups that are a different color on the inside than the outside is what really got me. I always love that! But, I wanted olive green. So, we went back a few days later to look at the stamp and see if we could do some googling and find them in olive green. Turns out they were never made in olive green but George gave us a bargain we couldn't refuse so we settled for yellow. The china is called Sheffield Serenade. It is by Homer Laughlin who is also responsible for the well know Fiesta china pattern.

Another bit of excitement has happened since I last posted. I woke up the other night and heard an awful banging noise. I thought it was one of our cats being "bad". I decided if I ignored it they would stop but they didn't. Then I decided maybe it wasn't a cat. At this point I thought about waking my sleeping husband up because he obviously wasn't waking up on his own. It was around this time I realized that I very likely could be murdered by a serial killer in my bed and my husband would not wake up to save me. I was on my own! I laid there and thought about where the sound was coming from and what it could possibly be. It was very repetitious so I decided it was not a serial killer unless he was unsuccessfully attempting to bang down the front door. I finally pinpointed the sound to the shed door which is off the carport and under our bedroom. I realized it was raining and decided the door had blown open in the wind and possibly a critter had even gotten in there and was banging around. Again I told myself if I ignored it the noise would stop. After a bit longer I realized the noise was NOT going to stop and I was not going to be able to sleep.

So, I decided to wake my husband up. He went outside with the flashlight. After some time he came back and reported that our roof was sagging and it had pushed the door open. At first I thought it sounded quite dramatic and had visions of the roof sagging down and almost touching my car. We had known there was a small leak on the carport roof but didn't realize how serious it was. It was pretty amazing what happened and how quick. The physics behind the whole thing took me a while to figure out! From what I understand the frame around the door filled with water, it expanded and started coming apart and caused the door to come open. On Saturday we had someone come and take a look at it. He didn't seem to be too phased by it and thankfully it is just the carport roof and not the whole house. We think it is very likely the original roof! We don't have an estimate on the roof yet. We are hoping it is nothing to exorbitant and the people are of higher quality than the folks who did our floors. These people come highly recommended (as did the floor people). So, maybe soon I can post some photos of our new rubber membrane roof and gutters.

Weekend Finds

Hopefully someday our art glass shelf will look something like this.

OK, I said I would post more about our weekend finds. Besides the dining room table we also found four pieces of art glass. There is a shelf above a kitchen cabinet that divides our kitchen and living room. It catches the light nicely and we thought we would fill it with mid-century Blenko and Viking art glass. My grandma had a lot of Viking glass when I was a kid and I always thought it was neat looking. Orange seems to be a very popular color. (That is what my grandma had a lot of.) We are trying to collect greens (especially olive), yellow, amber, browns and blue (turquoise). We have not done a lot of research on the glass at this point but it seems that most of it was marked with stickers that have long ago fallen off so it can be hard to identify what is authentic. Right now we are just collecting whatever strikes our fancy and has the right price and we aren't worrying too much about authenticity. Apparently the kitchen cabinets they sit on are not original to the house. Everyone was telling us we should tear them out because they block the light that comes in the living room windows. At first I didn't like that idea but I am becoming more open to it. I think even if we do eventually decide to remove the cabinets we will keep the shelf. I have a Pinterest board for all of the Blenko glass I love.

The newest pieces of glass are the farthest to the left, fourth from the left and the two farthest to the right. The two turquoise pieces came from my grandmother's house when she passed away.

Our new olive green Catherin Holm enamel pot.

We also found a Catherine Holm enamel pot yesterday. We first got two hand me down Catherin Holm bowls from my husband's grandma. After doing a little research we found out how collectible they are. I really like the way they looked and I was especially fond of the fact they were olive green. Right now our kitchen is still white but soon the kitchen and living room colors will be olive green. So, when my husband found this Catherin Holm pot at a reasonable price I was all for it. It comes in several colors like blue, yellow and I believe orange. I am partial to the green. We found some yellow china yesterday that looks very similar. I would have snapped it up if it was green. I wish we would have taken a look at the brand so we could look it up and see if it came in green. We may stop back by tomorrow and see if we can get the name.

This evening we made an attempt to go shopping for fabric to recover for the dining room chairs.  We arrived just as the fabric store was closing. We are supposed to pick up the table and chairs tomorrow. Maybe tomorrow I can post some more pictures of the house. I haven't really posted finished photos of the floors or paint because things are still a bit of a disaster. But, maybe I can post some small peeks. I will save the overall photos for when ALL of our stuff is finally moved. (Hopefully that will be sooner rather than later.) There is a big hole in the living room right now because my piano is still at the old house. Last night as I was getting ready for bed and brushing my teeth I thought of another little odd thing about this house we didn't discover until we moved in. The bathroom sinks are REALLY low. It is very strange. I'm not really sure why they were made that way. Maybe I will have time to post again tomorrow and break a record by posting three days in a row.

Slowly But Surely...

Slowly but surely we are making progress. We are moved into the house.....sort of! We had an open house at the old house on October 6. We wanted to be living in the new house by then so we no longer have to deal with trying to get the house ready every time there is a showing on top of trying to work. So, we moved the weekend before the showing but we still have a lot of stuff at the old house. The floors at the new house are FINALLY done! We are not 100% pleased with the job but at least they are done. We are extremely pleased with the overall look of the floors but the attention to detail was horrible. There are lots of little things we are going to have to take care of ourselves. We are going to have a lot of their less than stellar work finished this winter.

We finally found someone to refinish all of the wood in the house. He actually builds house and does really great work. We called him just hoping for a referral. He said if we could wait until this winter he would do the work himself. We are so thrilled to have someone who does such good work. All of the paneling throughout the house is badly faded from the sun. It also has a blonde wash on it. We have been trying to decide if the wash is original. We don't think it is. He is going to refinish all of that. He will also strip our kitchen cabinets back to wood. Right now they are painted white. He is also going to put in new stair treads since the work the floor people did on them is NOT pretty. He saw them and said, "What are you going to do with your stairs?" What a sure sign that they need help! He is also going to make us thresholds going into the bathrooms and he will probably do a few more odds and ends.

Right before the move we painted the entire house. That is why I may appear to have dropped off the planet. The painting took about 10x longer than I expected. The whole entire house has painted molding which I decided to paint white. I am starting to think that may have been a mistake for several reasons. First of all, oh my gosh!!!! Who ever thought of painting trim white (or any color for that matter) is a crazy person. It takes for ever and a day!!! This is the first house I have ever lived in with painted molding. Why would anyone think this time consuming craziness is a good idea when you can have natural wood. There were some places were I could literally only reach by putting my back to the wall, bending over and looking under my right arm upside down!???!? I feel like my insides are permanently damaged from all of the contorted positions I had to get in while painting. I am now thinking it would have been in keeping with the style of the house to paint the trim the same color as the wall. It looks like that is what was always done in the past. All of the painting is pretty much done. I do have to finish a small amount of trim in the family room and both hallways. We decided to wait a bit on the kitchen and bathrooms. I am extremely happy with our colors. They are all authentic colors from 1960.  I will do another blog post later on the paint with photos. Right now there are still too many boxes for photos but they will come soon.

We are making lots of new little discoveries about the house now that we are living here. While we were painting my husband was up on a ladder and noticed that the top of the bedroom doors are labeled in pencil "Boy's Room" and "Girl's Room". I want to get a photo of that and post it. I am getting much more used to the pink and blue bathrooms. We think we will keep them for a while and decorate with ads of pink and blue bathrooms from the 1960's.  I already have a few picked out. I have been trying to decide if I should paint the bathroom walls white or blue to match the tile. I noticed just yesterday that I can see old paint around the windows and it looks like the walls may have originally been blue like the tile. There is a blue surround over the tile in the shower. I have been wondering if this is original. I assume it is not. I'm wondering why it was added. Someone thought maybe the tile underneath is bad. If that is the case I would like to look into replacing it someday. The den has a smell that I love. At first I thought it was the smell of wood. Then I decided there is a smokey smell. But, it doesn't smell like nasty cigarette smoke. Tonight I decided it kind of smelled like my grandma's church which would maybe be the smell of incense. I mentioned it to my husband and he said maybe it is the smell of the wood and someone who had smoked a pipe in there.

Our new dining room table and chairs. 

 

 

 

 

We have a long weekend this weekend and for the first time in ages we were able to have a fun carefree day with no painting or moving. We went to several antique shops and had a lot of success. Our greatest find was a dining room table for $100!!!! It has six chairs (Two of the chairs in the photo are not a part of the set.) and two leaves that can be inserted. It is not exactly what we are looking for. It is just laminate and not solid wood. The chairs are also not as "interesting" as we would like. But, it is pretty close to the style we are looking for so we decided that for $100 we could take it until we found exactly what we want because we think it's going to be a while. And, now we can have people over for Thanksgiving dinner!!! We are going to re-upholster the chairs. I am hoping I can find some inexpensive fabric and do it myself. I will try to make another post tomorrow on some more of our finds from today. Hopefully very soon we will have some more boxes out of the way and I can post some photos of the new paint.