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

Intermission

This is where the story starts getting really good. But, before I get to the good stuff I have to tell a little bit more about the house and post some photos. The house has an intercom system! It also includes a radio. Our inspector said it doesn't work but I have read stories about people who have been able to fix them very easily or even just had to let them warm up for a while and they cranked right up. Eventually we would like to try fixing it or replacing it with a new version.

Control center for the intercom system

Intercom at the front door

There is a charcoal grill in the kitchen, a built in mix-master in the kitchen, a warming drawer under the stove, and a funny little outlet to plug in a special griddle that goes with it.

The charcoal grill- We will need have to fix the latch so that it doesn't need a piece of string to hold it shut.

The Mix-Master

The warming tray under the oven

The strange outlet for the griddle

The griddle

At this point you might be asking yourself what the heck a Mix-Master is. Well, we didn't even notice the thing the first two times we went to the house. When we finally did see it we had NO clue what it was. It was our friendly home inspector who enlightened us. It is a motor built into your counter with many different attachments like mixers, choppers, food processors etc. Basically, it's a built in Kitchen Aid. It sounds really cool to me and apparently you can still get them. The new ones look almost exactly like the old ones. The inspector says ours doesn't work. I would eventually like to try to get it working or replace it with the new version.

The house also has a bathroom scale that folds out of the wall!! According to Retro Renovation these things are one of the three most collectible vintage bathroom accessories. We also have the "concealed lavatory" discussed on that site as well as the relaxation unit which can be seen next to the toilet in the photo below. I would like to attempt getting the foot prints off the scale. Speaking of the bathroom. We still have not discussed the pink and blue bathroom issue. That is still coming.

Master bathroom scale

I like to joke that the house was built for the Jetsons. It appears that most of the Jetson type attributes were made by a company called NuTone which still exists today. Their website says they are the leader in Central Vacuum systems. I have a feeling there are still some other little nifty things we haven't yet discovered in this house. And, there are a few that are so neat I am going to save them for their own post.

I will mention the dog kennel right now. Yes, I did say dog kennel. As I said, the house was inspected and got an excellent report. We were told the house was built and maintained in a top notch quality manner and building with the same supplies today would put the cost through the roof. While the inspector was doing his thing I decided to look at the plans again. I can only look at them for a short period of time because they are very musty. I'm not sure why. They are currently stored in a kitchen cupboard but at some point they must have been somewhere else. The musty smell makes me feel sick. (This is part of the reason we have been coming across information in small bits and pieces.) On inspection day I noticed there was a dog kennel on the plans. Somewhere in the basement there was a dog kennel. Where?? Why?? What kind of dog gets their own indoor kennel? A cute little spoiled poodle? What was it's name? When did it live? So many questions and no answers! Back to my quest. I HAD to talk to the original owners of this house!