Rearranged

This summer, I found a pin on Pinterest that looked almost exactly like our living room. It was almost eerily similar.

Pin that looks like our living room

I really liked the way the furniture was arranged in this living room. All of the furniture was basically in the exact same place as our living room but the couches and chairs were more at an angle towards the walls and the dining room table is turned so that longest side of the table is not parallel to the longest side of the room. So, on a whim, I decided to rearrange our furniture. It was just a test and I really didn't think I would keep it. But, my husband liked the change so for now it is staying.

This is our new living room arrangement. It is almost the same angle as the living room in the pin
except you can't see the dining room table or the kitchen across the way.  

The dining room table used to go the other direction 

Looking at the room from the other direction. The amber lamp on the table has been destroyed by
our new cat who knocked it on the floor. A glass lamp falling on a cement floor doesn't have a
chance. The lamp had belonged to my great aunt who died ten years ago at the age of 96. 

I still need to write a blog about the envelope we got from the daughter of the people who built our house. It was full of ads they used to make decisions for all kinds of fixtures and appliances when they built the house. Some of the things we have ads for actually made it into the house. On February 13, work will begin on our bathroom. If you have been following along you know our bathroom has been quite an interesting topic. You can read several posts about our bathroom here.

It Arrived!!!

We can finally live in our living room again!! All of the walls have been stripped and stained. We put a very thin molding around the ceiling. You can't even really see it. It just makes it look finished and the edges look sharper. We had new vertical blinds put up last Friday. Our awesome guy who did the walls came back and put them up for free so we wouldn't mess up his work by accidentally drilling holes in the wrong spot. Now our walls will be protected from more sun damage. The kitties can also stick their heads through and look out whenever they want. I have decided there is a lot of green in the room. I love green but we need something else. I think I will eventually make some pillows that are a different color. Maybe I will blog about pillow ideas next. I still need to do a blog on the bathroom.

Today my piano came!!!! I have been so anxious to get it here and see how it looks in the room. But, we decided to hold off until the walls were done and new blinds were up as long as our old house hadn't sold. The mess from the construction would have been very bad for the piano. We have a few little things we would still like to do in this room but there is no rush. We will most likely eventually take the ceiling fan down. We think it detracts from the fire place. We will live through all of the seasons and see for sure if we can do without it. We are under the impression the fireplace is not lined. At some point we need to have a chimney sweep look at it. If it is not lined we will look into our options. We may possibly put in a gas fireplace. I read about unlined fireplaces. It sounds like they are a very bad thing. We have a pretty low open shelf that we are going to put against the window in the open space in front of the piano. We also have four more chairs for the table. We are waiting to move them back into the room because we still have some spots where stripper got on the floor that need to be scrubbed. If we are lucky we may even get our intercom system working again!!

Before

After

Happy Thanksgiving!

We are having 20 people here for Thanksgiving tomorrow so we have been trying to get all of the finishing touches on the house before then. We still have lots of stuff at the old house to "stage" it for a showing. So, things aren't quite like we would want. Most of the walls have nothing on them. We have no coffee tables in the living room. And a lot of our stuff that makes our house seem like ours like lamps, books, pottery etc. is still at the other house. I wish we had our kitchen painted but that was not a part of the plan. We decided to wait a while on painting the kitchen and bathrooms. We have taken care of some other things lately.

We decided we wanted to get 6 stools for the built in table that divides the kitchen and dining room. I liked the idea of stools because they could be completely slid under the table and out of the way. We had been looking for a while for vintage stools. But, it is hard to find them as short as we need and even harder to find six. So, I settled on 6 stools at Bed, Bath and Beyond. I found them a few months ago and decided I would hold out as long as possible to see if anything else I liked better came along. With Thanksgiving around the corner I had to bite the bullet and order them because we need the seats. Then a week or so later I saw the exact stools for $25 less and I liked the color of the wood better. The stools I bought are darker wood than I would like (and darker than our other furniture.) but after we refinish the walls this winter and they are darker maybe the stools won't stand out as much to me. We also finally reupholstered the dining room chairs.

Almost ready for Thanksgiving. You can see the new upholstery and one of the new stools.

One of the first things that really stood out to me when we looked at this house was a wall sconce in the downstairs hallway. It seemed so out of style for this house. I'm sure it was put in when the dog kennels were removed and the basement was remodeled. I finally changed it a couple of nights ago to something more modern and the style of the house. I tried to include some photos but taking a picture of a light is quite challenging I discovered!

This is what the old light looked like in the hallway.

The new light turned off (much easier to take a picture of)

The new light turned on

I think I have already talked about accepting our pink and blue bathrooms for what they are right now. I decided we would decorate with vintage ads for pink and blue bathrooms. I really wanted to have these up for Thanksgiving so maybe people would see what we see in our bathroom.  So, this afternoon we spent some time getting photos of old ads printed, buying frames, mattes etc. One of the ads is for two bathrooms (kind of like ours) and it is being advertised with twins. I thought that was really cute. Another one of the ads has a picture of blue prints in it and it is about designing a bathroom divided into compartments with a curtain on tracks (we have pocket doors on tracks) so that 4 people in one family can use that bathroom at the same time. It is much the same idea as our bathroom. I love that the blue prints indicate that YES someone did at one time actually plan this pink and blue bathroom with intention. I have included some photos of the ads below. I will take pics of them on the bathroom walls soon.

This is the ad for two bathrooms with the twins. It is in the master bathroom.

This is the ad with the blue prints. It is in the second bathroom.

This is also in the second bathroom.

This is in the master bathroom.

 Another thing that we noticed immediately when we looked at the house was that the refrigerator just didn't fit in the kitchen well. It seemed like it was the first thing you saw when you walked in and it stuck out way into the middle of the room. As most people know refrigerators are much larger these days than they once were. So, this apparently was the problem. We were told that at one time the house had a "gourmet" fridge and the second owners put in a "normal" one. I am very curious what a "gourmet" fridge is and what it looked like. We discovered that in order to solve our fridge issue what we needed was a counter depth fridge. If you are not familiar with this concept, it is a fridge that sits flush with the counter top (which most modern fridges don't) and they are about triple the price (or more) of a regular fridge. So, you have to pay more for less space!

We had no plans to buy a fridge right away. But, we happened to be at Home Depot and my husband was bored waiting in line and started looking at a black Friday sale ad. (Apparently at Home Depot and Lowes black Friday takes place all month.) They had an insanely good sale going on for a counter depth fridge that was actually a name brand. The cheapest price up until now I had been able to find on one was double this sale price for a brand I had never heard of. So, we decided we better take it while we could get it. We were a bit bummed out to find out they wouldn't deliver it until after Thanksgiving. Then the next day we were at Lowes. I don't remember why but we have replaced a few light switches lately so that could have been the reason. Lowes had the exact same sale (well actually $1 more) and they could deliver tomorrow. Woo hoo! We cancelled the sale with Home Depot and got our fridge from Lowes. It now has an 18 pound turkey in it! Happy Thanksgiving!

I don't think this photo shows off how great it looks!

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.