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.

Guest Bedroom Furniture

At some point during the past two years we got new/ old guest bedroom furniture. A childhood friend was having an estate sale and we bought her parents' bedroom furniture. I like that the front of the furniture is raised which makes it stand out and look more interesting against our wood walls. Some of these photos have a brown bedspread and some have a yellow bedspread. The yellow bedspread is what we have in the guest bedroom now.

I like the way the mirror is not centered on the dresser.

In addition to the dresser with the mirror and the bed, there is also a night stand and a tall dresser.

This is the bedspread on the bed now. It needs an ironing! If you look closely, you can see my
husband's giant amber Blenko bottle in the background. My mom thinks it looks like something
from a bad dream. It's too big she says.

This poster on the wall is from a circus my grandparents took me too when I was about 3 or 4 years
old. My grandpa got the poster for me from a shop in town that had the poster in the window. 

Where Do We Stand?

It has been a while since I have written a blog. I need to do a little update on where we stand right now. I haven't blogged because not a lot has happened since my last post. We have basically been trying to recover financially from the expense of all the work we did last winter. We also still have the financial obligations that come with still owning our old house. On top of those things I am feeling a bit poor due to the number of shoes I have purchased over the past year. For about a year now I have had very painful bursitis in both of my feet. (I think all of the cement floors in this house could be exacerbating the issue.) I have really struggled with finding comfortable shoes.  I would have much rather put the money I have spent on shoes into a new house project.

We were considering having the house painted this past summer. But, we did not get the roof damage I posted about here fixed until this past summer. We called in October of 2013 about getting the roof fixed and it took close to a year to finally get it repaired. The leak from the roof caused a lot of damage to the door frame of the storage shed in the carport. So, there was no point in painting until the roof was repaired. By the time the roof was fixed the weather wasn't very conducive to painting. The painting will most likely be next summer's project. We have no plans to make any drastic change to the color of the house. We just want to freshen it up.

We also have not had the yard and sidewalk repaired after putting in the new sewer line. We had to wait to let the ground settle. It has now settled and doesn't look quite as much like a giant mole went through our yard. Since the weather is cold this is most likely something that will be taken care of when the weather warms up. We would also like to eventually have some landscaping done to the yard. We are not planning to make any major changes but all of the bushes are very old (maybe even original). They have gotten very woody without having much green. We would like to freshen them up. There were also a few trees that were lost in the yard during large storms. There are some really key spots where trees are missing that we would like to have replaced. We also need to add some rock around the house to protect it from standing water.

Inside we still need to get a new dishwasher. Ours is really ugly and doesn't do the greatest job but it is limping along for now. Eventually we would like to get a stainless steel one to match the rest of the kitchen. We need to put new ceiling tiles in the family room (former dog kennel). The tiles that were there were sagging and didn't look very nice. Then when the toilet flooded last year some of the tiles got water damage. We also have yet to tackle the pink and blue bathroom. We finally have furniture in the guest bedroom. I will make a post about that later. Our family room is without a TV which is still at the other house. We need to eventually paint the laundry room. This isn't a pressing issue but when they stained the floor they got one large splash of stain on the laundry room wall which kind of annoys me. We also need to eventually get a new mailbox. Ours has an issue with collecting water. I will have to do a post about mailboxes at some point. I have found a cool one that I want.

As you can see there has not been a lot of action here so no new photos. Oh yes! I forgot to tell you that we got the door on the indoor kitchen grill repaired. It is now in great shape. Thank you to my wonderful cousin for taking care of that for us. I forgot to add the fireplace to our list of to dos. My husband would kill me if I forget to list it because I think it is at the top of his list! When we had the house inspected we were told they didn't think our fireplace was lined. Apparently not having a lined fireplace is extremely dangerous even though the fireplace has been used in the past. We need to have it inspected by an expert (along with the chimney to the kitchen grill) and then decide how we will proceed if it is not lined. There is a pretty good chance we will turn it into a gas fireplace.

Coffee Table...

Bassett coffee table

for the new coffee table books! Before our end table came we saw this coffee table we liked at an antique shop for a cheap price. We decided after our end table came in we would go back and look at it to see if it would match the end table. Yesterday we went back and checked it out. We decided it would match. It JUST fit in our car perfectly. If it would have been an inch bigger in any direction we would have been in trouble. After getting it home I decided it was a bit darker than our end table. It also doesn't have as beautiful of a grain as the end table. The coffee table is a more solid color and the end table is much more variegated and pretty. The coffee table is wood veneer (I think that is what you would call it.) instead of solid wood. I was a bit unhappy that the wood doesn't match everything perfectly and the style of the legs aren't the same as our other furniture. But, I have been informed that if everything matches it will look like we bought a furniture set at Sears! I really do like the style of the table! We will probably eventually get a different coffee table that is solid wood. For now, I have another place to put all of my new coffee table books.

Bassett coffee table

Happy Holidays!!!

I have promised some people photos of the house decorated for Christmas. So, here I am. The Christmas mess is finally picked up so I thought I better strike while the iron is hot. We still have a wimpy little tree from when I lived in an apartment 15 years ago. Maybe next year we will have big one! I have lots of great aunts, grandmas and students who have supplied me with decorations over the years. At first my husband thought maybe we had too many. But, now he seems to be enjoying them. For several years my aunt gave me Christmas Village houses that light up for Christmas.  We have a perfect place for them now on the fireplace hearth. We have enjoyed sitting in the living room at night watching the lights reflect off of the shiny new floors! I have also enjoyed finding things to decorate the openings next to the fireplace. Right now we are unable to use the fireplace because it does not have a liner. We hope to eventually get that taken care of.

This year I got some exciting new Mid-Century themed books from my husband for Christmas. The first gift I got was actually a very high end Mid-Century magazine that looks like a book. I think it will be coming quarterly. I got another book about Charles Eames. We would like to eventually get a white Eames fiberglass chair in our "office". He also gave me a book about Danish Modern furniture and a book by Atomic Ranch magazine. I really like the Atomic Ranch book because it has a lot of houses that are similar in style to ours.

New books I received as Christmas presents

If you look carefully you will notice that the new books are sitting on our new end table! It arrived a couple of days ago by Greyhound shipping. I had no idea Greyhound has a shipping service until I found this table. When we bought our living room furniture there was a very low end table between the two couches that made them look like they were connected together and one piece of furniture. We really liked the way it looked but the table had a black laminate top. We really wanted a wooden table. So we have been looking ever since for table to fit in that spot. But, it had to be the EXACT size in order to fit! Finding a table that is exactly 30 inches square and 15 inches high turned out to be a challenge. There aren't many 15 inch high tables out there. When we finally found one on Ebay that seemed reasonably priced we had to jump. It turned out to be exactly what we wanted but it has a bit of a wobble and more wear than we expected. We should be able to fix the wobble and the wear is not particularly noticeable. I do feel that for the value of the table we paid too high of a price and the seller was misleading about the condition. But, we are otherwise happy with it.

Our new end table.

We also added a new lamp to the room just this evening. It is actually new from our attic!!! This lamp originally was given to me by my great aunt who died about 6 years ago. The lamp is probably at least 50 years old I would think. When I was given the lamp I didn't like the original shade so I got a more modern one and added some nice olive beads on a ribbon that hung around the bottom of edge of the lamp. When my husband moved in he HATED the lamp. So, the lamp ended up in the attic. It turns out he actually just hated the beads! I told him tonight I loved those beads. I was just going for a different look back then! So, tonight we went out and got a new lamp shade that was a bit more subdued. We are both pretty happy with the way the lamp looks now.

I told my husband that my Aunt Emma would be proud!

Right now the chair pictured below is the favorite place for the cats! They LOVE these snowman and are always trying to cuddle up to them. Right now we have to flip the furniture cushions up if we are not in the room so they don't think they can sit wherever they want. We really would prefer that our living room furniture does not become their favorite place to sit. So, if you come over to our house for an unexpected visit and our cushions are all flipped up, please don't think we are crazy!! And, if you decide to sit by the snowmen you will have a cat sitting with you also.

Happy New Year!!!!

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!

Paint Palettes

We are STILL not quite done painting. We have some trim in the hallways and family room to still do. Thankfully we have had some help from my mom because my back is about shot from painting. We are close so I finally decided to take a few photos. I just tried to get photos of paint colors because we still have dressers with no drawers in them and boxes piled up and weird things like that! I took photos this afternoon at 3PM but the sun was already starting to go down I realized.  :(  So, the photos could be better but at least you get a sneak peak for now. All of the colors were picked from California Paints 20th Century Colors Of America which are authentic shades used from 1900-1985. All of the colors we used were from the year our house was built.

Our bedroom is my favorite color! In our old house our bedroom was a very deep burgundy color. Everyone hated it but me. I was finally convinced to ditch the burgundy because it was not appropriate for our house. But, I wanted something that still would compliment the bedspread, wall hangings etc. from the burgundy room. I decided I wanted a pinkish brown color but I DID NOT want pink. I was scared to death I would think I found something then get it on the wall and it would be pink. It is a miracle that I somehow found exactly what I had hoped for!! It has just a touch of pinkish and I think it also transitions nicely into the pink and blue bathroom. (I keep saying "I" because I tried to include my husband in picking colors but he didn't seem to have a lot of interest. He did give some input but he mostly let me choose.)

 I settled on University Square by California Paints. Unfortunately, the photos of our bedroom are the worst. I don't think they nearly show off how great this color is. I will have to get better ones later. You really should click the University Square link above to get a better look. I really like the way all of the colors we picked bring the outside colors inside. I believe this was one of the architectural goals of the style of our house which is one of the reasons for the large windows. Outside our bedroom window is a Japanese Maple Tree. The pinkish brown paint really brings out the pinkish purple colors in the tree. Unfortunately I didn't realize when I took the photos that the tree is quickly turning brown and shedding for the winter.

Japanese Maple tree outside bedroom window before it turned cold.

The view from our bedroom. The Japanese Maple is looking a bit sorry now. Just the other day it was still beautiful.

I wish this picture showed the paint color off better. I LOVE it! Ignore our horribly wrinkled bedspread.

For the second bedroom (originally the girl's room) that we are using as a dressing room, the family room and the upstairs and downstairs hallway I chose Gobi Desert by Behr. This was a neutral color that was much easier to get from Behr than trying to get a copy from California Paints but there are several similar historical California Paint Colors. It is kind of a khaki color. I love that it is very neutral but just dark enough to have a punch of color. It also goes with the burgundy items from the old bedroom and compliments the colors in the beautiful trees you can see outside from the large window in the bedroom.

The dressing room, family room and hallway colors. I'm not sure if the white trim was the right choice.

The downstairs of the house is a bit more modern than the upstairs since the family room was done almost 20 years after the house was built. I wanted blues in there and thought since it was more modern I might paint it a deep blue color. But, we have lots of blue pillows, wall hangings etc. so I came to my senses and decided to do the Gobi desert down there also. I decided it would compliment the blues nicely. And, my husband was more anti-blue basement than anything else having to do with paint.

The family room is not finished but here is a glimpse of the color inside a white trimmed shelf.

Our "hobby room" (originally the boy's room) is a steel blueish grey color form California Paints called Industrial Steel. I thought this color might go well with some black and white photos I would like to hang in this room. I can see some of the original blue paint color that was in this room peeking out in places. It looks like it might have possibly been a very similar color at one time. There is a beautiful deep, deep green magnolia tree outside the big window in this room. It is so green some of the leaves almost look blue which again makes the blue paint a nice frame for this window.

The kitty looking outside at the Magnolia tree.

The "hobby room"

We have our new dining room set home and we really like the way it looks in the family room. Even the orange seats which I immediately wanted to change look so nice with all of the wood and the style of the house. I would almost be tempted to keep the orange but it just isn't me. It is too vibrant and not peaceful enough. And, we already have olive green living room furniture in the same room so the orange and green would really be over the top! I already have fabric to cover the dining room chairs. Maybe this weekend I can do that. I need to do a little bit of research on upholstering tonight.

New dining room set. Can you spot the sleeping kitty?

New fabric for dining room chairs.

New fabric

Now that all of the colors are starting to come together I am getting really anxious to paint the kitchen. We saved it for last since it has no furniture in it that we will have to work around. Also, we were trying to decide what we were going to do with the cabinets before we painted. I think this winter we are going to have the cabinets stripped back down to their natural wood instead of white. So, I think it would be best if we paint before instead of after they are stripped. Then we don't have to worry about getting paint on the cabinets as much.

The kitchen will be an olive green color from Behr called Spartan Stone. It is another match to a historical California Paint color. I love the olive green and it will go with the olive green furniture in the dining room and living room since the rooms are all open to each other. My husband might kill me if I ask him to paint that room before Thanksgiving. We have done so much painting!! There are some really high walls in there and he has to do all of the high parts since he is 6ft 5in. But, hopefully someday soon I will have kitchen photos for you! And, some full house photos!! Hopefully you caught a few glimpses of the floors in these photos. Taking photos of the floors requires them to not be covered with boxes!!! Still coming!

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.

Still Here

I have not dropped off the face of the earth. It has just been too overwhelming to think about rehashing everything in a blog post. Tomorrow it will be two months exactly since we closed on the house and the flooring people STILL have a key to our house. : ( They think they are done with the floor. We are not in agreement! The overall look of the floors we are satisfied with but their attention to detail has been less than stellar.

After the last post about how upset we were with the look of the polished cement due to the flaws left from the dog kennel we spoke to them about our options. We decided to have the cement floor stained a coffee bean color. Because they had already sealed the floor before we got to see it that meant they had to strip it all again. We made it very clear that it was not their fault (even though communication could have been better and time could have been saved had we been given the opportunity to see the floor before it was sealed) that at one time there had been a dog kennel in the basement. We felt good about the decision and decided we might like the stained floor even better.

We then got a call one Friday night telling us not to freak out but if we went over to the house the basement floor would be purple and there was purple stain sprayed all over the carport. Apparently the container of stain they used was labeled correctly but had the wrong color stain inside. I was questioning the truth of this to myself but we then saw the container and it WAS labeled correctly. THEN apparently the sprayer broke in the driveway and got purple stain all over the place. We were assured that it would all be cleaned up and rectified on Monday.

After this we felt like they gave up on our house and quit putting in a lot of effort. We could tell they would go days without working and the attention to detail was very sloppy. They had to strip the basement floor a second time and re-stain it. We are quite satisfied with the overall look of the correct stain color but they were very sloppy with it. They sealed the walls around the floor with plastic to protect it from the stain. A spot of the floor about the size of a baseball got covered by plastic and has no stain on it. They went ahead and sealed it!

They also had me go over and look at the floor before they sealed it. (I wasn't able to see the spot mentioned above because the plastic was still up.) I confirmed with them it was safe to walk across the floors. They said yes. The grass had just been mowed and I tracked in a lot of cut grass. They knew I had been in the house and I assumed would sweep the floor one last time before sealing. Nope! I was wrong. We now have grass permanently embedded in our floor. It's not really noticeable but for the price we paid it shouldn't be there! They also didn't finish some of the chipped spots in the terrazzo correctly. We are going to have to add some extra speckles to it ourselves just because we want to be done with them.

The last thing we are waiting for is a spot in front of the doorway to the furnace room where the stain doesn't go all the way up to the door so there is a strip of bare concrete showing in front of the door. It is a shame they were willing to have unhappy customers over such silly careless things. I could go on and on with the little nit picky things they didn't do correctly but I could go on for days. Many of the small things we are just forgetting about so these people will be out of our lives. We had asked them for an estimate on refinishing our living room walls. They never gave us one and never finished the test patch they said they would do on the walls.

Right now we are trying to find out what would be entailed in having the walls refinished now by someone else. We would like to have it done now before we move in but it will depend how much it costs and if we can find someone to do it. It has been a challenge! Yesterday we started painting. We have almost all of the ceilings done and the trim in the family room. We also have paint colors picked out. We have chosen authentic historical paint colors. The only rooms we aren't painting right now are the bathrooms and kitchen.

We had an offer on our house and thought we might have to be moved by October 1 which was going to be pushing it. The offer ended up falling through. The girl didn't really seem to know what she was doing or what she wanted so we weren't too upset about it. Though, we are hoping to sell our house sooner rather than later. We would also like to be in the new house ASAP so that we don't have to deal with getting the house ready for a showing while school is in session. We did get our new living room furniture reupholstered which has been one bright spot in this ordeal of trying to get the house ready for moving in. The guy from Saint Louis who did the cushions for us did an awesome job! You can see the completed terrazzo floor in the photo of the furniture. I will post more floor photos soon.

Living Room Furniture

Well, progress on the house is moving slowly so we made our own progress today. We took another trip to Saint Louis. We had much more success! Again, don't go to Saint Louis to antique shop on a Tuesday. It will result in a failure. We stopped in Rocket Century and found so many pieces of furniture we would have loved to own. Many of them were already sold! We came across the living room set in the photograph to the left. We bought the two couches and two chairs. They are in like new condition and the wood is beautiful. The label from the shop says they are Kofod style. It is likely that we will have them reupholstered. I am partial to a nice neutral olive green. Right now they are a bright green and blue herring bone pattern which is a bit vivid for my taste. They could be much worse.