The Uniform Project


One dress, 365 days.

Check out these and other style-savvy ways in which Sheena Matheiken has cleverly paired the (one) dress with vintage, hand-made or hand-me-down accessories here. The hope is to raise money for The Akanksha Foundation, a nonprofit in Mumbai devoted to bringing education to slum children. In fact, it is not only a hope but a reality - the project has already raised over $6,000 since May 2009! Kind of puts a nice socially-responsible spin on "the little black dress."

Read more about The Uniform Project and The Akanksha Foundation.

Vacation


We're back, after a week spent with dear friends in New York.

What was a typical day like, you may wonder?

In the morning, we laid about lazily by the ocean, only to be pulled away from our half-slumber by a certain little boy to chase the surf and the occasional butterfly.


We then took the train into the city,



where we walked around until our feet throbbed, had ice cream from street vendors, and climbed rocks in Central Park.



In the afternoon, we came back to the beach house, deliciously exhausted, just in time for a glorious sunset by the bay.


Truly, we couldn't have asked for a better vacation. Thanks Mark, Jen and Maia!

A good day


Sometimes a good day starts as any ordinary one. You wake up feeling tired, you feed the dog, you struggle with the kid to get him dressed, you go to work, you stop for groceries, you come back home; it's afternoon, but it feels like it should be bedtime. And as you are putting your bags on the kitchen counter, you hear a knock on the door and you go answer it to find the woman who grew up in your house on your front porch, her daughter standing beside her.

It is the eve of the woman's eightieth birthday, and she is wondering if it would be okay to come in. Of course, you say, of course, and you invite them in, and you show them around, and she says oh that’s where my grandparents used to sleep (now your son’s room), and this closet? That used to open into the dining room. And this used to be my bedroom (now your own), and this space right here is where we used to keep the Maytag on wheels - because they weren't built-in back then. And that towering oak tree in the front? That tree used to be the size of the dogwood growing next to it when I was a little girl. And this, she says, this is the house I brought my daughter home when she was born - now standing by her side, with a grown daughter of her own.

You’re told this house was always filled with laughter and happiness. This was always a happy house, she says. And she can tell you love the house as much as she did, and she is grateful, relieved. And your eyes fill with tears, happy tears, and you hug, and you think, man, I am so lucky. This is a good house, your house. This is home. This is a good day.

Work in progress


Remodeling the main floor bathroom: check.

Remodeling the kitchen: check.

Remodeling the upstairs bathroom... Well, we've only given it a budget-friendly facelift for now.


















I do have to say I am pretty pleased with the results. As an aesthetic courtesy to you and me, I will abstain from including pictures of the ugly plastic tub/shower enclosure that is blocking a window (??!!!), currently on the end wall of the bathroom. Some day, we will install a clawfoot tub and beautiful light will stream in from that poor, abused window. Until then...well.

These are some of the improvements we've made so far.... We resurfaced the vanity, which is an old, non-descript, pressed wood lovely. We covered the sides with beadboard, cut same-sized drawer fronts out of 8x1 wood planks, added glass knobs, and took out the middle door and sewed a little curtain to hide cleaning supplies and toiletries.


We also added baseboard to the bottom of the vanity and replaced the old countertop with pine wood planks (already glued together, from Lowe's), which we coated with walnut stain and poly. We dropped in a Kohler sink and invested on a new faucet (ebay), and also added vintage tin tile for a backsplash (more ebay). We were happy that the antique metal medicine cabinet, which we inherited from our previous old house, fit right in with our new old house.


















We removed another one of those added-on closets with bi-fold doors (which was partially covering the window you see here), and of course we painted the walls. Oh, and we hung a beautiful old leaded-glass window to add some character...and because I love old, chippy things - the more decrepit, the better.


Overall, I am very happy with our little bathroom. Of course, there is always room for improvement, but that will have to wait for now. In the meantime, I will be looking at tons of photographs of bathrooms for inspiration... Stay tuned, and let me know what you think!

Thanks d*s!

Well, in case you never made it to Design Sponge (ha!), here are the pictures that Grace posted... (For more pictures of our kitchen and more details on the work we did, click here.)
























Here are a couple of before pictures, taken while the home inspector was doing his thing (before we bought the house)...















And here is one (adorable, if I may say so myself) during picture: my beautiful boys, hard at work, installing the new dishwasher. What can I say? I am one incredibly lucky person.

Kitchen peek

I am very excited to say that, if everything goes according to plan, our kitchen will be featured on tomorrow's Before and After, on Design*Sponge at 10am. (Huge thank you, Grace!)

There will be before pictures that I have not shared, and a couple of new shots requested by Grace, so make sure to tune in and check it out if you get a chance!

The house

This is what the house looked like when we bought it. It did have a cool gargoyle on the front porch, but sadly, it did not convey. Even more devastating was the fact that someone had removed (??!!) most of the craftsman details, down to the decorative brackets under the eaves. That was one of the first things we tried to correct soon after we moved in (see picture below).

As far as painting, though...that was a different story. For whatever reason we thought we'd attempt to paint the exterior ourselves. Admirable goal, really, but what with all the projects inside (see here or here for a couple of examples), and the kid, and our jobs, and....well. Not particularly realistic. As a result, our house looked pretty much like this for two long years, and I'm sure the neighbors were just thrilled:














In the end, we decided to invest on hiring a professional. In fact, we ended up having to hire two sets of painters, since the first guys were completely inept AND ran off with half the money, but...I digress.

Anyway, once we found a real professional, I became paralyzed by the idea of having to commit to a color scheme. I couldn't just paint it over if I changed my mind (like I have done with most rooms inside the house - heh), so I was gripped with indecision. I worried about the fact that I was leaning toward using (*gasp*) five different colors. Although I am not a big fan of the monochromatic look the house had when we moved in, I had to admit that it was safe. And I like safe. I'm not much of a risk-taker when it comes to design and color in my own space. I am happy to report however, that I love the way the house turned out.















We even have a new little gargoyle resident to replace the one that moved out with the previous owners.










Pretty sweet.


(ps: the little gargoyle came courtesy of my dear friends, Tom and Kelly, who run a store in Asheville, NC, called Oddfellows Antique Wharehouse. It is filled with beautiful antiques and found objects mostly from England. Next time you're in the Western North Carolina mountains, you should stop by and take a look!)

Dissonance


Just thought I'd share this photograph I found on Flickr. If anybody knows whom I should credit, please let me know. My brain initially wants to think it's looking at a a subway staircase, and yet there are windows. Stained-glass windows. And those aren't tiles on the wall, but bricks painted white. And the clawfoot tubs, filled with water? And the plants? And the old floor boards, with the worn paint? I love how surreal it is. I am completely haunted...in a good way.

Giving thanks

Erin, from Reading My Tea Leaves, is a wonderful writer and photographer, and I was pleasantly surprised when I found an email from her in my inbox this morning letting me know she was posting this little picture I sent her, from the neighborhood where I live:


Blogging is proving to be more difficult than I had expected - there is so much out there already..! I want to post so many things, and then I get lost in all of the beautiful images and words others are posting. So, editing is certainly more overwhelming than I thought it would be.

I also find that I am having a little bit of a hard time navigating the two worlds that blogging encompasses. Interestingly (and somewhat uncomfortably for me), blogging is a private endeavor that really does not take its first breath until it steps into the public domain; it's a sort of communal journal writing that depends on others to continue to develop. I don't think I anticipated how strange a space that would be for me.

In that spirit, then, I wanted to take a moment to thank Erin for helping me take one of the many steps toward achieving this elusive balance between the privacy from which I type these words and the web of people that might read them... In essence, thank you, Erin, for inviting me into your community.

The bedroom

Our second floor is basically an attic expansion, and except for a bathroom and a tiny room on the front side of the house, it is all wide open. Although originally we'd put our bed in that little front room, we decided to move our "bedroom" to the open loft area, on the back of the house. We ripped out old carpet and were pleasantly surprised to find wood floors, which we painted white. I've always wanted white floors, and since these had already been painted (a shoddy brown) and were in pretty bad shape, Bill agreed to let me go with it.














With a kid and a dog, I am sure I will be repainting in the near future, but for now, I am loving it.


The dresser I got at the Habitat for Humanity store - it was in the "free" pile. It needed work, but I think it's perfect for the price.


















The mirror is vintage, the clock is from L.L.Bean, and the frame with my sweet boy's picture is from Fragment Freaks, a great ebay store well worth checking out.


We fit a small secretary in the corner where the open staircase is; we keep the laptop and all of the wi-fi and DSL wiring in there, so I made a little curtain with Amy Butler fabric to hide it all. Can you tell I am a little bit OCD? I get a desk with a door, but then I still have to hide the mess when the desk is open! *sigh..!*


We love waking up in our new bedroom; there's something about the quality of the light, and the feeling of being on treetops that's pretty magical.

The bathroom

Our bathroom did not always look the way it does today...

When we first moved in, our main bathroom had a couple of good things going for it: white walls and a relatively new Toto toilet. Beyond that, it had some...issues.

First, there was the problem of the pink tub from the 50's, which had most likely replaced a clawfoot *sob* tub, and as a result there was a rotted wood windowsill in the shower area.

Second, there was a space problem, caused in great part by a ridiculously large hog of a vanity and an awkwardly added-on closet with broken bi-fold doors.

Third, there were brass accents everywhere: the vanity lights, the faucets, the towel holders, the knobs...

Finally, there was also the issue of the tile, with its lovely salmon hue, along with matching grout to boot - on the floor and on the walls.

So, one leaky tub faucet later (which, according to the plumber was going to take almost a thousand dollars to repair), we decided to do a serious remodel and start over. Nothing but the toilet and tub would remain.



Bill did most of the demo work. Okay, okay: he did ALL of the demo work. Thanks, Bill! I jumped in after that.












We put up vintage 12x12 tin tiles to cover the popcorn ceiling, we added crown molding all around and we replaced the rotted window with a vinyl one (not a fan, but we were keeping the tub in place).

We installed white subway tile in a classic brick pattern, adding a single row of thinner blue tile as detail. For the floor, we chose smaller tile, which we also laid like brick to echo the pattern on the wall. We then called a guy in to re-glaze the tub, in white.




We added shelves with baskets for storage on the wall opposite the new pedestal sink. We also covered the remaining walls with beadboard.










The whole thing took several long weekends, a lot of trial and error (since we did all the work ourselves, including the plumbing), and many, many rolls of teflon tape. But we love the end result, so I guess it was all worth it.

The kitchen















This is what our kitchen looks like these days. It took about four months worth of weekends and a whole week in December during the holidays to get it to look like this. We ripped out hideous countertops and replaced them with Ikea butcher block ones; we took out the lower cabinets and put in place unfinished, off-the-rack oak ones from Lowe's (which we painted); we put in a new farmhouse sink (ebay), faucet (ditto), and appliances (Craigslist, friend's cast-off, Lowe's). For the upper cabinets, we either took out doors and added period details with moldings, brackets and trim, covered some of the remaining glass doors with pretty fabric, or painted the fronts with chalkboard paint.














Ah, yes - we added beadboard...

...and some old tin tile behind the sink as backsplash.


















We continued the beadboard around the fridge wall and into the breakfast nook we created by adding a built-in bench, a vintage chandelier I painted with some leftover blue-gray paint, an old beveled mirror and the Docksta table from Ikea.

The view from the dining room. We got the farm table for a song at a local antique/junk store (the kind of place just over the train tracks, ran by a guy who is only open on Saturdays and who only takes cash). The table was buried underneath piles of stuff, stacked almost to the ceiling. It needed to be refinished, but other than that it was sturdy and, well, just what I'd been looking for. Needless to say, it is perfect in every way.