Luckily, we made very few mistakes in the whole ground floor reno process. One of the few was putting some of the halogen pot lights too close to the kitchen cabinets. Hardly a mistake really, more like a fudge, a little boo boo. But still it required some patch work as well as the services of our favourite Hungarian curmudgeon, László, to make it right. True to form, László entered the Tall House without even so much as a hello:Cutting...
Thursday, 25 November 2010
Monday, 22 November 2010
Looking for fixer upper?
Mr W, our ancient, crotchety old neighbour with the heart of gold has moved out and put his house up for sale. We saw the pictures online. Save for the staircase, there are no original features, just an empty shell. There is nothing to show for a lifetime of living in that house but a bunch of linoleum flooring and some bare walls. Growing...
Wednesday, 10 November 2010
We're in!
All the trim still needs paintingThe range hood needs to be installed. The smoke alarm goes off every time we open the oven......we're missing the backsplash tooOne day we'll hang the real plates, these are just photocopies...The future coat closet. The antique doors need to be hung and painted.We've been living in the new space for a couple...
Monday, 8 November 2010
The summer of the great Stejoine
Behold the great pirate shipArgh! And she shall be christened the StejoineThe Jolly Roger flying aloftThe summer of 2010 will forever go down in Tall House history as the summer of the great pirate ship, The Stejoine. One fine august day while I was busy unpacking and organizing the first floor, Manu came up with the most inspired idea to...
Tuesday, 29 June 2010
Vestibule floor heartbreak.
Our layout of what could have beenI realize that in the grand scheme of things, being heartbroken over a floor is pretty silly. So lets just say that we are bitterly disappointed. We had found the perfect tiles for the entrance way. Manu had first spotted them while lunching at a sandwich shop in the old part of town, and had told me about...
Tuesday, 22 June 2010
Mouldings
The artists at workIt looks like the mouldings have always been there. Good sign.Crown is on. Door frames and baseboards need to be done......window frames too.Manu and I have a thing for mouldings. We first discovered their power to transform a space when we lived in The Condo. Aching for a DIY project, but finding very little to do, Manu...
All over the place
The, ahem, view from the kitchen door. We planted some Virginia Creeper along the fence to the rightin the hopes that by next year, when we are ready to attack the yard,the fence will be covered in lush greenery.Midway through: the doors look better, the stairs and the siding look worse.I spray painted some old terracotta pots black. Added...
Friday, 4 June 2010
The kitchen
The kitchen cabinets, island and counter top are in. We are so close to the finish line that we can almost taste it. I am loath to name an end date for this whole first floor reno extravaganza as every time that I do, we seem to overshoot it by a country mile. My birthday! Gone. Christmas! Nope. Valentine's day! Unfortunately not. Easter!...
Friday, 30 April 2010
The floors are finished
Well the floors are finished and they are nothing short of spectacular. We are pinching ourselves, as yet again we have nothing but good things to say about the fellows who did it. And this time round we were really taking a bit of a gamble as neither of us knew anything about them. I'd noticed their van parked in the Hood and taken down...
Monday, 26 April 2010
Kitchen Dreams
Before: the kitchen that taste forgotFor the past two and a half years, we have been living with a kitchen that is so laughably ugly that really anything, even a hole in the ground, would be a step up. Okay, in all fairness, we did apply a lick of paint and installed some el cheap-o vinyl black and white tiles on the floors, just to make...
Tuesday, 20 April 2010
The floors
The buried treasure, our now crisp, clean floor boardsThe stair risers will be painted whiteThe stain swatches, we prefer the one to the leftOh happy day! The floors are being sanded. I am constantly amazed at how with old houses, the beauty is in the subtraction. Under the dusty grey wall to wall carpet, under the thin post-war hardwood,...
László, part 2
Like most parents we gage the passage of time by our kids' ages. And seeing as The Little Princess, quite conveniently, was born just two weeks and one day after we moved into the Tall House, she serves as a cute, curly haired, living marker of our time spent there. So I can easily say that we have been living in our beloved ruin for 2 years, 4 months and 5 days. Which, rather embarrassingly, means that we have gone for 2 years,...
Thursday, 11 February 2010
László
Manu was so inspired by Laszlo's handywork that he applied the primer that very weekendLászló, the plasterer, is such a character that it almost seemed predestined that he work at the Tall House. With an accent as thick as goulash and a vocabulary that hints at an eastern bloc upbringing, "in what commune is this Small Street?", László's...