The living room can get a little warm in the afternoons, so we’re very happy that our electrician Erik Poor installed this fan. It would have been impossible to conceal the wiring before Chuck applied bamboo flooring to the ceiling.
And our kitchen appliances and plumbing are in! Just a few details to go here and there but everything works.
We have hot water from a brand new hot water heater in the garage.
I will never get tired of this view.
It’s really pretty from the kitchen, day or night.
I briefly visited our house yesterday morning to a bustling scene: 4 work trucks, a delivery truck, lots of people, and Chuck coordinating. It’s a good thing he’s done this for years on other home renovations and with his C W Quinn Home design business. It would be overwhelming for me.
Our appliances were delivered, but not into our home. They were on the lawn. The appliance dealer hadn’t arranged to bring them into our house. I freaked out for a second, but Chuck had planned it this way. They quickly moved into position soon after with the help of people onsite.
They’ll go in fully tomorrow. Just a few finishing plumbing touches for the dishwasher, refrigerator and stove. We’ve been living for a year in a rental house without an ice maker. It will be wonderful to have one again!
And here’s the mini fridge in the dining room. Perfect for Diet Cokes and whatever other refreshing beverages our guests would like.
And here’s the door guy working on our front door. That’s really his name. It’s on his truck and his business, he is “The Door Guy.” He must have been on the Internet early, because he snapped up the awesome URL thedoorguy.com. Doors are highly specialized installations and he spent hours cutting mortises and getting our fabulous Crestview door to fit.
We love it! We had thought about spraying it a bold color but now we’re not so sure. The birch woodgrain is really handsome and might look better with a simple clear coat. We’ll have to think about it…
The finishing touches that add personality and warmth to our house are falling into place. Here are our beautiful new Galbraith & Paul pendants from Room & Board. Liz Galbraith and Ephraim Paul are textile artists based in Philadelphia, and their designs have a bold mid-century modern flair. Each one of their lamps is custom printed to order. At $299 each, they were a splurge, but we could afford it because some dear friends on the East Coast sent us a Room & Board gift card!
The pattern is called “Tiles Frost” with a soothing mix of blues, greens and grays that works perfectly with the color scheme. And look at the shimmery glass backsplash! What a perfect backdrop. The pendant height had to be considered carefully too, because we didn’t want them to block the ocean view. Unless you’re over 6’7″ (2.1m), you’ll have an unobstructed sightline.
Chuck’s design plan accounted for how each of the rooms will interplay with each other. Since the kitchen, living room and dining room are all interconnected, the colors have to coordinate, but we didn’t want to be safe or boring by using the same color in each room. Chuck even thought through how the rooms will look from outside. Now that the kitchen is so much larger and more open, it’s visible from the street. In the original floor plan the kitchen was shoved in a corner behind cramped windows. Not any more.
Here’s a close up.
After nearly two months with mostly invisible if essential progress—plumbing, electrical, insulation, and structural work—we’re seeing an explosion of visible signs that the house is almost done. That’s a good thing because our moving deadline is this week. Our lease expires Thursday. Here’s our striking new dining room light fixture from West Elm. Our electrician, Erik Poor, owner of PoorBoy Electric, did his usual excellent job with the installation.
The fixture’s large scale makes it stand out from the street, which is why Chuck placed it in the front-facing window.
The dining room will look even more amazing when the wet bar, furniture, and wallpaper is in. We’re almost there!
The countertops were installed yesterday! We have gleaming quartz on every horizontal surface.
And I love the new undermount sink. The hole on the left is for the faucet, and the the right for the disposal button. Much more convenient than fishing for a switch on the wall.
This atmospheric blue backsplash is next. It will coordinate beautifully with the pale gray, blue and green color scheme in the connecting dining room and living room.
With most of the house still closed because the hardwood floor refinishing is in progress, we’re focusing on other parts. Like one of the critical components: the front door! The existing door works, but like much of the rest of the house it was in rough shape when we bought it. Aside from looking bland and featureless, it had been badly painted and repainted over the years, with patchy brushstrokes that would be nearly impossible to smooth out.
And worse, it was splitting apart at the bottom next to the threshold. This battered old kick plate is covering up a door way past its prime.
Part of our dilemma was finding a period appropriate, off-the-shelf mid-century modern door that wouldn’t break the bank. Sure, we could have a custom door made, but it would never be in the budget. And we wanted a glass panel in the door too. The glass would add architectural interest, and admit more light into the entry. The problem is that while there’s a wide range of doors with glass panels, most of the styles would never work for our house. There are many highly ornamental Tuscan and French château revival doors out there, folks. They’d look lovely on someone else’s house, but not ours.
Once again, Chuck, the professional designer, came to the rescue! He’s an expert in sourcing the perfect materials because he’s been doing it for years. He stumbled across Crestview Doors, an outfit out of hipster central Austin, Texas. We instantly fell in love with their “Nokona” model, featuring a sleek offset window, at only $469!
It’s a solid core hardwood door with birch veneer that arrives unfinished. Here’s a finished example from someone else’s house.
An example from the Crestview website, not our house.
And our door just arrived! Here’s me doing my best Vanna White impression. Crestview doors are not “pre-hung” which means that they don’t come with a jamb, need to be fitted with hinges, and require mortise cutouts for the handle and lock hardware. Door installation is a specialized application that requires professional experience and tools, and we’re happy to leave that in the hands of an expert. After it’s hung with a nice new threshold we’ll also have it professionally spray painted for a clean, modern, brushless finish. Stay tuned for the reveal.
We can’t enter the house yet because the new finish is still curing, and there’s one coat left to go. But that didn’t stop me from taking pictures through the windows! Here’s the dining room and kitchen. Remember that the dining room floor in front is brand new, while the kitchen is nearly 60 years old. Both are solid oak and will last for many more decades with proper care.
Here’s another view of the kitchen. We can’t wait to walk on it!
With 10 days left to go until we have to move, a lot is happening. The floor sanders arrived on time this morning and set up their industrial-strength sanding and vacuuming equipment. The 1955 vintage hardwood floors are in good shape. They’ll look like new after a professional sanding and polishing.
It’s a good thing that our new furnace got switched on today (it had been disconnected while the gas lines were being rerouted) because the weather forecast calls for chilly, damp conditions over the next few days. A toasty house will help the floor finish cure much faster.
We’re expecting the floor finish to be applied tomorrow, and we’ll be barred from entering most of the house until at least Thursday afternoon. There will soon will be new or newly refinished hardwood floors throughout nearly all of the house. See the floor plan below.
Remember the living room? We’ve been so occupied with other rooms, but the living room is one of the house’s best features, with big ocean view windows. Chuck wanted to warm up the space. He looked at an area most people ignore: the ceiling! It already had architectural interest with beams that serve a purpose holding up the roof. That’s one of the hallmarks of modern architecture. Structural elements are not concealed, they’re part of the design. It’s one of the reasons we fell in love with the house.
Isn’t this ceiling treatment cool? It’s bamboo flooring from a big box store. Chuck is always coming up with great ideas for using ordinary materials in unconventional ways. Just cut to the desired length, put some construction adhesive on the back, and nail into place. (On the floor glue isn’t necessary, but for an overhead application…let’s just say it’s a good idea.) The bamboo planks do double duty by concealing the wiring for the new ceiling lights. Because the roof is just inches overhead there’s no room to hide any wires. The new ceiling also plays well with the original hardwood floors.
I love the way the sloped ceiling in the living room meets the new sloped ceiling in the kitchen. The play of volumes between the two rooms adds drama and interest.
You have to expect the unexpected in any renovation project. You never know what you’ll find in an older home. We discovered that the wood around one of the front windows was rotting away. The 1950s single-pane aluminum windows are a condensation magnet, and six decades of deferred maintenance didn’t help.
Since this window is a twin of the one on the other side of the house, we had to replace both to avoid a tacky patchwork effect. It was a bit of an ordeal to replace them, especially with the wood rot, as the sills had to be completed rebuilt.
Once the new stucco is on and we’ve repainted, the new windows will be more or less invisible. It’s good to get a project like this, along with its dust and mess, out of the way now.
930 Stratford 