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!

And Then There Was Light

We had outdoor lighting installed in our front yard a few weeks ago. The most fun part was that the lighting companies come and do a demo before you order the final thing – so they set up test lights in your yard and you can see exactly what you are going to get.

Here was an iPhone pic that Mike took of our demo night:

And then the final thing at dusk is below. (I'd show you the before, but you wouldn't be able to see anything as we had no lights :))

We think we may have one light too many and may still move these around a bit or else diffuse them, however in general, we're very happy with our new well-lit front yard!

Virtual World

How fun is this?

A virtual tour from the landscape designer who we asked to put together a plan for our backyard. {Jason from Paragon Landscape in Charlotte}

More on what we'll ACTUALLY do later, but love to have something to muse on/take slowly/give ideas :)

Full video can be viewed here, or selected stills below.

Note the red Ferrari he also inserted in the plan, ha!

New screen porch in the background

Plan for the deck we want, and surrounding concrete pavers that we like

View back to the cars/garage

And up to another patio area in the distance. We are hoping
to have a second area in which to entertain.

Birdseye!

Another birdseye of the new patio area

From the corner of the driveway

Night view of the (virtual) firepit

View of the patio from the deck

Love my new imaginary friends~

Looking down the patio to the rest of the yard, which is left natural

Note the new virtual dog!

Looking back from the natural area to the patio and garage

And...say goodbye!

Screen Porch Finish!

We finished the screen porch on Saturday!

The last step was stapling up the screen, and then placing the trim pieces on top of the screen.
When the screen gets damaged (likely!) we just remove the top trim piece and replace that panel.

Here's the finished product, minus the door.
Door is coming from the west coast and takes 8 weeks – of course :)

I came home from Happy Hour Sunday night and Mike had the lights on, reading his iPad
and having a glass of wine... Love it – that's why we wanted this!

Here are our table and benches from West Elm, paired with the Verner Panton chairs.
Hi + low!

This is the Bubble Club Lounger we ordered from Kartell a few months ago. We saw a photo of
this sofa with cushions online at DWR, but after calling them, and calling Kartell, the cushions
seemed to be discontinued. So we took the picture to someone local, and had them made.

Ours turned out really well – we upholstered the cushions in navy Sunbrella fabric.
Easy to keep clean, and protected from fading.

Ok, so what's next out here?

Here's the rest of the plan for furniture, which will finish out the lounge space:

These are Primary Poufs from Quinze + Milan. They come in a ton of colors...
I'm considering the dark purple to go with the cool palette of lime/navy we have so far out there.
The plan is to put 2 of these in front of the sofa, as a kind of coffee-table-that-also-doubles-as-seating.

And then the cherry on top - the Bertoia chair!! I've wanted one of these forever, and it hasn't ever worked out inside. We recently found out it's also sold as an outdoor chair, too.  I showed Mike a bunch of similar (less expensive) kind of things last night and the comment was "just go for the Bertoia" - yay. Probably going to go with the white, and not sure what color seat cushion yet. Thinking just one will round out that seating area on the porch.

Also working on a rug for the screen porch. Will post pics once we're all done!

Shop: Atlanta

Mike and I had to be in Atlanta last weekend and it was a great excuse to take Friday off and get down there early to....furniture shop! One of the two of us *may* have been more excited than the other :)

Most of the showrooms I wanted to go to were around the Howell Mill Road area. We started out at Jonathan Adler with the intent of checking out a sofa I'd honed in on online.

 I'm not a huge Jonathan Adler fan - people say he's "modern" but it's more of a pop/kitch modern to me. Not really into humor with my decor. But I've been searching for a sofa for our living room/music room for a l-o-o-o-o-ng time - both on my own and with 2 decorators. Mike and I wanted something not too formal, but with a luxe touch to it. It's a hard balance to find.

Eventually we ran across the Topanga sofa from JA:

Topanga Sofa from Jonathan Adler
The name struck a California chord, of course, but it was really the silhouette that sold us

The fabric we were interested in "Brussels Charcoal" velvet,
which is shown here but on a different style sofa

 We visited the JA store to see the Brussels Charcoal velvet in person and really liked how it looked. So excited to finally buy a sofa for the LR!

(Update: Today, after purchasing, I found out that of course this ONE specific material is currently taking 14-16 weeks to deliver, which seems to be the story of our furniture life...Oh well...)
.........

After JA, we hit Switch Modern across the street, which is a favorite. We usually shop them online but have been in the store the last 2x we were in Atlanta. Didn't see anything there this time but it's definitely a good one to keep checking...

Next up, was Room & Board, also nearby:

We have been eyeing this polyethylene contemporary version of an adirondack chair from R&B for a while.
It happens to come in the perfect gray to match the exterior of our house!

And don't I wish I could have crammed 4 of these into my car. The chairs may be $399 each but the shipping
on these suckers is $229 - eesh! Alas it was only a showroom, so no luck there...

After 2 more uneventful stops, the last stop of the day (and Mike was still going at this point, so impressed!) was at a vintage store called City Issue over in the Old Fourth Ward area of town. This place was SO AMAZING! They had a better mid-century spread than I've seen anywhere – well, besides Palm Springs. Too much to even go into, but suffice to say I'd make the trip back in a snap just for this place!

We immediately spotted a brass sculpture by Curtis Jere upon entering. I've written about these before, and have really wanted one over our bed for a while. This one is signed and from 1969 which is one of his earlier pieces – the shape is just what I was looking for and the size is perfect for over our bed - it covers about 2/3 the width of a queen across.

1969 Curtis Jere Sculpture that came home with us! This is sitting
on the floor atop the shag carpet sample we were testing out.

I can 't decide if we should try and refinish the brass. It has some wear to it but that's part of what I love about it - most of everything else we have is so clean and new that it's a good contrast. 

It's getting hung this weekend, I'll post pics soon!

Oh and just for fun - what I wanted and didn't get was this:

Also Curtis Jere from the 70s...

Is it a sculpture or is it a light?...love both aspects!!

What it was *not* however was a "necessity" – well, especially in my husband's mind :) Haha.

I think this piece is to-die-for though and could be a great fit in my living room. It's admittedly a little too-early-to-tell what finishing touches are needed in there, so I'm hoping we revisit it!

Happy-almost-Friday to everyone...

Screen Porch Cont'd

The screen porch is shuffling along! The next step after framing was painting. We called in some help on that one (ironically, not a bone in my body enjoys house-painting even though I fine-art painted for half my life). We have had some crappy cold weather here in the South so it's taken a couple of weeks to get the painting completed.

In-progress painting – we went with Ben Moore "Cinder"
to match our  other house trim

Today we started laying on the screen to test the color. We found a perfect match to our grey house color palette which was a really great option. More commonly used, though, is the darker screen which essentially is a transluscent back. We started laying on the grey colored screen but there was some disagreement on whether it was too light – so we went back out and got a sample of the darker one as well to try and come to a decision.

Here's a longer shot of the screen halfway up. You can pretty
easily tell the panels that have screen on them.

Here's the second color screen test going up. It is showing up pretty
transparent in this photo but in reality has more of a black tint.

We decided to go to go with the lighter grey which seemed to be a better fit with the rest of the house and has a custom look to it. We had to special-order the larger width for the remaining panels so we'll finish that up next weekend.

We also had lighting and a fan installed by the team that re-wired the house. We went with can lighting, the 4" cans, and installed six of them around the perimeter of the room.

The fan choice took quite some time to settle on - this was our second fan to go up - the first one was quite lovely in look, but didn't really push the air around like it should have. The current fan has a large span, 60", and is by Emerson.

The new can lighting and fan. The ceiling tiles were original to the house, and painted.

So, almost there! I'll post finished pics next weekend. Yay.

Screen Porch Start

Ok so I've been super-slack in posting lately. The main reason is due to me losing my camera, which has now been found and is quasi-en-route back to me (thank you Stovalls!) Not that I was the best photographer to begin with, but please bear with the iPhone pics in the meantime...

We have been busy planning what we are calling "Phase 2" of this never-ending labor of love. This essentially encompasses finishing everything that we'd like to do to the interior (mostly furnishings at this point) and more on the exterior (landscape, stone work, lighting, etc). (Phase 3 will be another year down the road, and will be the garage renovation...) The plan for Phase 2 is to start soon – once we get our final plans and budgets solidified. I'll keep you posted.

In the meantime, last week we started re-building our screen porch. We looked at a lot of ways that the wood framing could look, and finally decided to go with something clean and simple that mimicked the window layouts on other parts of our house (large square picture windows in the center of each side, with flanking smaller panels.)

The previous framing design, for those of you that haven't seen it, was anything but simple:
http://bashamhouseadventure.blogspot.com/p/pics-then-now_26.html

My dad generously offered to help us build this ourselves, so off to Lowe's we went to pick out wood. I learned the art of staring down the board to choose wood that is straightest - who would have known there was so much crooked wood out there?

We started with an empty slate, just the previous doorway has been kept intact:

On day 1, each board was measured for, cut, and placed down the exterior side and back of the porch:

On day 2, we moved to the interior, priming the parts of the boards that were facing inward and wouldn't be able to be touched by paint once they were nailed (this protects them from the elements):

The goal of the day was building up the interior trim so that it looks just as good from the inside as it does from the outside:

Here's where we stood at the end of the day today – one framed screen porch, 6 trips to Lowe's (it's hard to estimate all that wood exactly the 1st, 2nd, or 3rd time apparently!) and 1 lost wallet at Lowe's – Mike's :(  We're hoping it will still turn up...

Our painter was scheduled for this week to everything painted, but we are anticipating rain so this may be delayed a bit.

We also are looking into new door options – I disliked the quality of the off-the shelf products so after much discussion, we are going to get this door custom made like the other doors in our house - actually, exactly like our other back doors, seen here from the inside in our kitchen:

Once we are through those last steps we just have to tack up the screen, and we're there. Let's hope it goes as smoothly as it seems!