Then & Now – 3/12

Hello all~

Things are moving along slow and steady on Norton Road. In good news, the crew was back to hit the punch list this week and have about 2/3 of it completed. In contrast, we are experiencing some setbacks in the paint department. As the house is settling and the weather is changing, we are seeing some cracking and bubbling of the new paint in a few spots. There is not much to do but wait it out a few months and get the painters back in to clean things up.

As well, it's hard to believe we moved in 8 weeks ago and still don't have our window shades - but yep - Smith & Noble has managed to screw up the RE-order now, as well as the original order, so we are on order #3! 2 weeks, hold breath.

In the meantime, we have been working on the powder room design and starting to think about furnishing the screen porch –– posts to come.

For now, since we are getting requests for some before and afters I thought I'd do an updated version. Here we go:

THEN – Front of house

NOW – Front of house

THEN – Gable and front door 

NOW – New hip roof and new door

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THEN – Kitchen overlooking breakfast nook

NOW – Kitchen overlooking breakfast nook

THEN – Kitchen towards sink area

 NOW – Kitchen – sink and beyond

Closer in
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THEN – Laundry room

NOW – Wine bar replaces laundry room and doorway was widened.
Laundry room entrance is past wine bar before entering den.

Inside, close in
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THEN – Den

NOW – Den

Closer in
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THEN – Living room

NOW – Living room [with new ceiling]
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THEN – Master bedroom

NOW – Master bedroom (a ways to go in here)
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THEN – Master bath as you enter

NOW – Master bath as you enter
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THEN – Master bath, right side

NOW – Master bath, right side
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THEN – Hallway towards guest room

NOW – Hallway towards guest room
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THEN – Guest bath

NOW - Guest bath

NOW – Guest bath
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THEN – Powder room

NOW – Powder room [the next project]
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THEN – Backyard

NOW – Backyard [awaiting planting season]
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THEN – Back of house and screen porch area

NOW – Back of house and screen porch area [awaiting screen and deck]

More to come...

Backwards + Forwards

We seem to be back in the backwards and forwards game again, here's a recap...

Backwards:
Remember when I said our solar shades for all the windows have arrived? Well, they did, and every single custom shade for about 20 windows - all wrong! They were manfactured in regular roll instead of reverse roll. Since we used existing older windows on our house, the lower half of the window juts out a bit and the reverse roll is the only way the shade will clear without bowing over the bottom window.

So we continue to live in a glass house until they can be remade...glad I'm not paying for that mistake!

We also found out that what we thought was "the perfect barstool" (Jesus Gasca, Onda stool at DWR) is backordered significantly further than previously estimated.

Given how much we're using the kitchen, esp. when having people over, we're going to look elsewhere for stools...

Forwards:
In good news, the wine bar countertop went in last weekend~ It's the same material as the kitchen perimeter countertops in our kitchen (below). When they installed the kitchen countertops, they wanted to seam them more than Mike, who was overseeing the installation, wanted to see the seams. As a result, we got minimal seams in the kitchen, yay, but a long delay on the countertop for the wine bar as they didn't have enough large slab material. But finally they are in and it's great to have a wine bar, which we use every night :)

kitchen

wine bar joining kitchen and den. (this will get same glass backsplash as kitchen.)

view past wine bar into den

And continuing onto den news, this room is (just about the only room!) starting to feel pulled together:

further accented by the fun gift I received this week

bowl-as-art, Frank Gehry for Tiffany

happy at home on the den bookshelf! 

The den's rug should arrive in a week or two, will post more pics then.

And on Saturday, we not-so-sadly said goodbye to the old railing leading up to the house:

before 

cutting/sanding/removal

anyone want it? sitting at 2021 norton road!

and after  ––
of course, eventually we'd like to replace the railing with something cool and stainless...

...like this...

But the brick steps are up in the air as well –– do we slate the top of them, leave them as is for now, eventually replace with stone or other, etc? –– so until plans are set, it will be bare.

for now,  the railing being gone gives a clearer shot up to the house,
showing off our new conical boxwoods near the front steps!

More landscaping to come, but getting there little by little~

Well hello again

So sorry it's been so long, as has been pointed out :)...Mike and I were OOT last weekend, but are geared up for some progress this week around here~

I don't have much to show in the form of pictures but there has been a ton, ton of planning going on. It's hard to find the stuff we like so readily here (not to mention it's usually after 8 pm when we are able to start looking!) so I am spending evenings stalking my favorite sites online and posting to pinterest.

Here's my current interiors inspiration board:
http://pinterest.com/breebasham/interiors-inspiration-new-house/

This helps me keep a visual picture of everything, and links it to the site it came from, so I can easily come back to things when I'm ready to move forward on something.

The "punch list" stuff on our house interior still is out there to be completed. Our construction crew has been busy on another job and hasn't yet been able to wrap up our job yet. In the meantime we've gotten about as far as we can get (well, inside, the yard is a whole other story) on getting things "finished" up, construction-wise, without them. We've been working on fixtures, knobs, handles, organizing devices, etc — all finishing touches.

The master and guest bathrooms got their final lighting this week with these vanity lights:

wrapped wire over mirrored glass

installed into the bigger mirror (ignore my temporary "windowshade" you're seeing in the reflection there!)

also happy to have drawer pulls finally on, and new drawer organizers :) 

The guest bathroom was a bit trickier... Finally, after ordering 3 other fixtures and returning them, I found what I thought was the perfect solution to the guest bath:

this is actually a slim picture light that nicely echoes the shapes in the faucet. 

but when mike tried to install it, we realized the plate on the back of it was smaller
than the box in the wall. meaning it couldn't go on.

my dad had a great creative idea to go to lowe's and buy a cheap fixture
with a bigger plate, just to get a new plate from it

so here's the light installed with the alternate plate 

done!

Now that this bathroom is done it's time to address the little powder room off our kitchen....
For ages I've been waiting on the vanity I ordered to get off of backorder:

And as you can probably see it has a marble top and I eventually
started feeling like we might have marble overkill in the house.

About the same time I started having second thoughts about the previous idea, I found this little piece of visual heaven ♥

floating vanity with metallic something behind it - still trying to figure that out

And we started thinking this is what the powder room needs to be inspired by.
We already have slate tile on the floor, and previously bought 2 of these lights and this faucet:

Which I still think will work quite well with the new vanity setup ... ll of this is **IF** we can find out how to get that cool metallic wall look ...

In other news we ordered a rug for the den and some furniture for the kitchen (more on that later) ... and later this week we are working on the guest bedroom decor, getting a countertop on our wine bar (finally), and prepping all the windows in the house for the new solar shades, which have arrived.

Time to see some action, and I'll post accordingly!