Living Room

We are finally making some progress in the living room at Norton Road!

We chose an off-white carpet for the room, with a bit of texture. (I know what you're thinking... but it's actually supposed to be very easy to clean!) Circa installed it with a custom cut around the fireplace, same as the carpet in the den, which opposes this room.

It was interesting to watch them lay it in, because they do so much of it on site.
Took almost 5 hours!

Here's the finished cut...

And a view of the whole room – ignore my cat with the devil eyes :)

Our new sofa from Jonathan Adler also arrived – very happy with
how it turned out – contemporary with a touch of California! 

Going to work on some end tables to flank the sofa next (the one you see above is just temporary) ... and maybe a floor lamp. Still thinking about that beauty from the vintage store in Atlanta!

Curtis Jere

Oh and in outdoor news we found Arbor Vitae for a great price ($99 each) at a local nursery. My Dad planted 2 in between each of our 4 big camelias in the back for us – for a total of 8 new trees. They are large – maybe 8'-10' tall already, and so soon they will offer great privacy between us and the neighbors.

Finally starting to look like a real yard!~

Grass is coming along nicely too. Everything is so pretty in the South this time of year! Enjoy!

Dear Walkway, Good Riddance!

Hi everyone,

Tonight I'm posting pics of our new walkway. It's been a treat and a luxury to get to this point — I have wanted this walkway gone since I got to this house!

To take a step back, there is a large brick wall at the front of our house connecting it to the sidewalk. The wall isn't in great shape by any means, but it's not in terrible enough shape that we can't get a few more years out of it. Which is what we decided to do after getting the estimate for the new wall we wanted :)

In the meantime we are growing fig ivy over it —the best disguise we can find!

As a consolation prize for no new wall, I got to re-do the walkway, which originally was not as high on Mike's list as it was on mine. Small victory, happily taken.

The original walkway I dubbed "The Yellow Brick Road" because it was a windy brick road connecting the wall and steps to the house. It wasn't that it was bad...it just wasn't right for the remodeled version of our house. We wanted something more modern.

The original walkway

We knew we wanted some form of pavers – and here are some photos that gave us inspiration to get started:

We had to find a way to do what we wanted above, but in one of the oldest neighborhoods in the South, without the neighbors hating us. We worked with Paragon Landscape to find a perfectly smooth bluestone that could be cut into pavers – originally the thought was concrete, but given that it wears and ages, as well as that bluestone was a better fit with the house colors, we went with that.

We decided on a 5' x 1' cut of each stone and ordered 16 pavers to be laid in.

While we had a drawing for the way they would go, there was a bit of give and take
and so it was important to be on site the day of to get them spaced and placed correctly.
These are the first two we got placed, which determined the space apart from one another.

Here are the rest as they went down. You can see there is a  large tree to the right that
we had to work around – which is what determined the original flow of the stones.

Here is the final product [with the caveat that we can't cut our grass right now as it's new seed – so ideally the grass would be shorter on top of these!]

View from the street

Closer in...

View from the house, showing the shape of the pathway.

Will post again with shorter grass soon. And more landscape news coming!