Updates!

We've been working on things all week.  Here's how the house looks right now, literally, as Anthony studies in the office.  He's got all his books with him now.

This same genius also hung our tv on the wall so it can swivel in all directions.  Witness:

Many of the books are unpacked and on the bookcases Anthony screwed into the wall in the living room.

Speaking of which, the living room itself is looking pretty spiffy.

Those wire shelves in front of the bar will be in the kitchen sometime next week.  Stay tuned.

Speaking of the kitchen, you can tell we actually live here now, as there's food.

And we have dining room chairs!  Eight of them, tho only four are pictured here.

We had our first guests this weekend, and they stayed here (and our first dog-guest too - we love Lizzie!):

In honor of our guests, we got the hall bathroom spiffed up.  Please remember that a couple weeks ago it had blue walls and yellow fixtures.  Here's what happens when the walls aren't blue and we add a cushy rug and one of those fancy hotel shower rods that curves out:

Anthony installed that great shower rod, perfectly.  He does all the cool stuff around here.

We still have this...

so there's definitely still a lot to do.  Watch this space!

Starting tonight, people will live here!

We moved the mattresses today, which was just about the last item on our to-do list.  Larini's didn't have a big van available, and we were too lazy to go to uhaul, so we were creative:

We did this twice, as there are two beds.  Let's just say Anthony and Andrew may not recover for a week, since they did this all day:

But now there's furniture in the guest room!  Come be the first person to stay in it.  We promise to put sheets and blankets on the bed tomorrow.  The camera, plus this vantage point, kind of compresses the space, but it's a lovely room.  We walked in this afternoon and saw the light it gets - every time I see that I'm so pleased.  Each afternoon it's sort of bathed in this fabulous bright glow for several hours, and it's also got a great view of the sunset.  That bookcase will soon have some fun books to read, there's a cozy chair... come see us!

We bought two new red rugs today, for the living and dining rooms.  They're sort of long-term temporary, while we figure out what we want to do with those rooms furniture-wise, and they're fun and cheerful too.  Here's what they look like:

Ignore the red chair in the dining room picture.  It's going downstairs.  Also ignore the white edges of the rugs; we still have to do some rug pad trimming.  And note that we're still taking weird, sort of tilted pics of the living room to remove the book boxes from the pictures.  We got some new anchors today, and we really are going to screw the bookcases into the wall.  Tomorrow.  Hopefully.

And then there's the issue of the three lamps next to Mom, on the top right of the living room picture.  We're trying to figure out how to light this space well.  You'll remember it's really tall - the ceiling runs from 8 to 12 feet - so expect some updates on the lighting plan in future posts, as we figure out what it is. 

We're going to actually sleep there tonight (hurrah!), so we went on the first official grocery run.  Now that we have bananas, raisin bran and corn flakes, I'm a happy camper.

It sort of looks like people live here

Here's what we grew at our house (it's like our own personal chia pet):

We've been hard at work populating the kitchen.  Look!

We spent some time working on the downstairs last week; some final painting and trim-painting are finally completed, and we like how it looks.  Last night we picked up the dropcloths and finally saw the new room.  We really like it, tho we hate the floor and it is going to be covered with something, anything else soon.

The brown paper is coming off the fireplace soon too, but we have just a few final painting tasks in the office first.  Keep you posted.


The boys put together some bookcases for us and we began to put them up; today we will screw them into the wall (since the Christmas tree fell down in Red Bank I've believed strongly in screwing everything into the wall!) and maybe put some books on them.  These guys are experts at Ikea bookcases; they had them up in about 8 minutes per bookcase.

Then we were dithering about what to put down over the moving parquet in the dining room, so we had to remove all the boxes of books.  I'd stacked them up along one wall in there, and somehow they'd taken over.  So we moved them into the living room, and now it looks like this:

So those are the books.  Here's what the living room looks like when we pretend it isn't half-full of books.  Sort of normal-looking, right?

We have to figure out what kind of furniture we want to have in this space; more on that in a later post.  This works for now.  Anyway, the dining room is pristine, see?

Please note that the concussion-inducing chandelier is still in place.  Wave bye-bye.  It's leaving soon.

But doesn't the kitchen look nice?!

Final moving activities taking place today, so more pics to come.  And one note: we got our first real mail yesterday, a lovely card from darling Katie, who claims to actually read this blog (if you see this, THANK YOU!).  What fun to get our own nice mail at our own house!

Days 9 and 10

So, the house started to look like people live there (people who have boxes instead of furniture, but not people who only have tools and dropcloths, so that's an improvement).

The best part right now is definitely the kitchen.  Here's how it looked tonight (bonus points if you can identify the cone atop the cabinets.  Clue: it's not a dunce cap.  Answer below.):

Note the drainboard is out, and a whole bunch of other stuff.  Tonight (Day 10) we went to the house after work (We are going back to work now, instead of spending all day, every day at the house.  Not sure if this is an improvement or not, but c'est la vie.).  We spent a couple hours opening boxes of kitchen things, washing them, and finding places for them.  On Day 9, I was pretty freaked out that nothing would fit and we'd completely overflow the cabinets with all of our kitchen stuff.  How could two people (not 10, not 30) own so much stuff?!  But today we got much more of it organized and it's mostly fitting.  We washed glasses.  I can't believe how many kinds of glasses: champagne flutes, white wine glasses, red wine glasses, pilsner glasses, gorgeous glass beer mug things that I can't describe but which are from Simon Pearce and are actually beautiful.  Here's what we can't find: the pint glasses, which are our regular drinking glasses.  Andrew's friend Matt says that tells us what we ought to be drinking, but since I like milk and Anthony's all about the water, we hope they turn up.  Milk looks funny in a pilsner glass.

The new thing in the kitchen is all the hardware.  In the last set of pictures, you had to pry the cabinets open with your fingernails.  Not so now.  Check out the sleek new handles and our pretty little knobs:

 Perhaps you can't tell from the pictures, but we're actually making headway on the piles of boxes.

The ones on the right in this picture are all books.  The ones on the left are other things.  But the piles are lower and there's room to walk now, so that's an improvement.

The living room is still overrun with boxes and furniture, sadly.

We haven't uncovered the bottom level yet.  There are a couple of places where we want to work on the trim some more, and the office needs some touch-ups.  But it looks very different!  The vast majority of the tools are gone, the camp chairs are folded up, and you can actually see what a big room the soon-to-be-gym is.

In the next few days we'll keep unpacking, put up the four bookcases that are going in the living/dining rooms, and put the books on them.  Then we should finally have enough floor space to arrange the furniture.

Also coming up: a very organized utility room, courtesy of Anthony.

Answer: The cone on top of the cabinets is the form on which one makes a croquembouche, the traditional French wedding cake, made of many tiny cream puffs encircled in spun sugar, that we chose for our own wedding, and that Anthony makes me for birthdays because he is perfect.

Day 8

More snow this morning; isn't the yard pretty?!

Also, lots of wildlife in the yard today.  Thumper was here:

His tracks were all around the house.  Maybe our new friend the hawk, who was sitting in a tree in the backyard, was looking for Thumper, perhaps for dinner.

This morning Tony grouted the new tile backsplash.  It looks amazing.

It took two men to install our smoke detector.

The pile in the dining room began to take over the living room.

We have a lot of boxes!
Our bedroom closet doors (as well as all the doors all over the house, and the guest room closet doors) were re-installed by two very intrepid drill-wielding guys:

And now our bedroom is divine!

The guest room is all done too, and it's so much prettier than we've ever seen it.  And it even has a little tiny bit of furniture now!

Anthony got to work on the kitchen.  He steam cleaned all the cabinets and put some of the new hardware on the doors.  We really like the hardware; I got more of it today and we'll finish tomorrow.  What do you think?

We like the handles especially.  Here's what the kitchen looked like mid-way:

And then the boys put the rest of the doors on - check this out!  Isn't is amazing?  I love the kitchen now, which is a big change.

We still have some cosmetic changes to make (scalloped trim, that means you) but it is a whole new place, and it's gorgeous.

Now that Fran is back, we are all having champagne, so we have to go.