I See a Red Door and I Want It Painted Black

Our painter paints during the day and is a masseuse in the evenings... you just never know, eh? He's a nice guy and notices every detail, but it's a massive job, given that we let 2 teenagers loose with paintbrushes almost 2 years ago. It was a good thing at the time - they both enjoyed it quite a bit. John is starting the 2 bedrooms now before a trip to Palo Alto, and then will do the kitchen when he returns 2 weeks after that, when the cabinets are in. Here are the before pics of the bedrooms.

Field Kitchen Part II

This is Alan's ingenious dish washing station. The spray button on the handle makes it all work, and brings the field kitchen together nicely.... I was going to set up a camp kitchen on the driveway and just pretend we're at Strawberry, but this works fine.

We even had company for dinner last night when Ethan came home, and dinner for 3 was no problem.

The Field Kitchen

Our first night home was a #16 at Super Rica, the second night, Thai take-out. Sunday night we got the house and temporary kitchen together (thanks to the wonderful muscular assistance of hard-working Ethan and Lucas) and cooked our first real meal.

It was actually fun, like our early days when we did everything together in our small one room apartment. With our new induction burner (highly recommended) and an electric frying pan we made salmon, brown rice and spinach w/mushrooms and onions. We will not starve!

Dishwashing in the bathroom even has the benefit of being able to use the toilet while washing dishes.... This could get old soon, but Alan has planned an ingenious set up that might work out fine.

In the meantime, we're looking forward to going to dinner at David and Linda's on Friday...

Demolished

The drywall is gone, the floor pulled up, and new, mysterious wonders have been revealed of course. Our carefully charted calendar is already 2 days behind schedule. It all happened while we were on our beach vacation, and while I was a little nervous about not being there, it was also very relaxing and wonderful to stop thinking about it for large periods of time. I am so lucky to have 2 wonderful families to vacation with! (Beach photos are here)

The naked kitchen looks pretty disgusting, after being enclosed for so many years, and I hate to think about what will go back to lurking there once it's all nicely sealed up again.

Several things were revealed, which in the time-honored tradition of this house, makes people who work on it scratch their head and say, "Huh."

• There was no subfloor beneath one cabinet - they had just plopped the cabinet down to cover the hole.
• There was drywall slapped on over stucco in one place (where the original outside wall had been).
• And the beams... something about, "What was holding up the roof?"

You can sort of see beams held together with nails

The plumber and electrician are set to come early this coming week, and the painter will also start on the bedrooms. We've picked out a lavender color for Marina's room with a raspberry trim, and Ethan's will be the same green as the kitchen, perhaps with a different trim.

One morning on our vacation we ventured out to buy light fixtures from Lights Beautiful in Ventura. Brian had been very helpful on our 2 previous visits to the store, so I was glad to give him our business, and he gave us the 20% contractors' discount.

And just before we left for our vacation (delayed one day because of all the moving and packing) we took advantage of a Sears 15% off day and purchased our dishwasher, range and microwave. Yay! More things to cross off the list, and fewer decisions to revisit obsessively.

Our Contractor is Watching Out for Us

Met with Cam last night to calendar the whole project and figure out what we need to do. Answer: a lot. But if it takes 8 weeks from this Monday, then we'll be done when we get back from Marina's graduation in Prescott beginning of May. And if it takes more like 12 weeks (Murphy's Law) then it will be done when we return from Strawberry beginning of June. Either way, it's all good. Cam is doing a great job of making us feel very safe and secure, and it feels like we're in good hands. And, his daughter homeschools her 2 kids.

Now we are breaking our backs getting everything done, and Alan is getting all the specs together for everything we're ordering, and then tomorrow we go to the beach house to be with the Moses clan for the week. Can't wait to be sitting on the beach instead of packing boxes and lifting furniture.

The Finalists: Raisin, Sage and Silk

We couldn't find a 3rd color for the trim, so we're going to use the Saybrook Sage on the kitchen walls with Greenmount Silk as the trim, and then the opposite in the family room. Then we're going to paint the arches in Raisin Torte, which we have in the living room. It will match the arch in the doorway between the living room and kitchen. Complicated, I know, but maybe I'll get a photo up of what I mean. Or you'll just have to see it when you come to the house.

It totally looks black here, but it's really a nice deep red/burgundy sort of color. I think it will look good. If not, it's only a little bit that we'll need to paint over.

Alan met with the electrician today, first putting together a really spiffy map of where the lights will go. It reminds me of how the kids used to draw maps of their ideal houses on graph paper when they were little. Alan just kept on doing it.

I'm writing to avoid more packing and organizing.

Demolition Monday!

OMG... we suddenly found out/realized that demolition will start Monday the 17th, but we're leaving town for a week this Friday -- so suddenly we have to get everything out of the kitchen and bedrooms, and pack to get ready. I'm suddenly feeling quite overwhelmed. On top of that, Alan's back won't let him do any lifting - he did too much last weekend - so I'm carrying the load for now. Yikes.

At least we've been having fun with paint colors. It looks like Saybrook Sage (Benjamin Moore) is going to be the kitchen color, and we're thinking Greenmount Silk for the family room and kitchen ceiling. They both look yummy with the counter and cabinet. Just trying to find a nice sandy colored trim. We're going for the coastal California look I guess.

What I Want in a Kitchen

As I page through Ellen's design books (I think she has them all!) I am lured toward a kitchen with all kinds of wild colors that make you sit up and take notice. But mostly I don't want people to walk in and say, "Ooh, look at your kitchen!" I want it to be useful, convenient, and make cooking and cleaning a graceful, elegant dance toward a delicious meal. A place where Alan & I can work together without crashing into each other. A room that will house kids (and grandkids!) and friends and relatives and feel warm and inviting. But mostly I want to cook without having to hold things up to the light to see them, to have enough space to prep without having to stop to reorganize or do dishes, and to be able to find what I need when I need it. Actually, what I really want is a cook, and since Alan has become quite the chef, I want a kitchen HE likes to work in!
The paint swatches on the wall are drying. maybe we'll have a decision soon.

Cabinet, Countertop & Floor Samples

Here's some photographs we took of samples we had. Again, color looks different than other webshots due to lighting & camera.


Cabinet - maple in toffee color


Caesarstone Verde


Plyboo vertical bamboo, carbonized (but we'll be getting another brand (Greenwood) so it may look a little different.

Des Colores

For lack of anything better to mull over, we've gone over to paint colors. I wish I could figure out a way to post swatches for you to vote on. Steven says a color designer might be worth the money. He may be right, because I have to say, the longer I look at these colors the more confusing it gets - though this is true of almost all of our other decisions as well.

If you go to the Benjamin Moore website you can type in these color names and see what we're looking at. Cast your vote for the best candidate now (but don't badmouth the ones you don't like - it's bad politics).

• Saybrook Sage
• Camouflage (another word I learned how to spell today)
• Silver Sage
• Moon Shadow
• Cheyanne Green

Yet another way to share in our vision - ah it's so fun to blog! Here are some photos that people posted on Garden Web of their painted rooms, all of which we admired. It may be hard to tell about a color, given that the light, the camera, and your screen are all variables in how it looks.


Cheyanne Green 1502


Dry Sage


Moon Shadow 1516


Saybrook Sage HC 114



Silver Sage 506


Flowering Herbs

We're thinking a lighter shade in the kitchen and a little darker in the family room.
But we're waiting for our sample of countertop - Caesarstone Verde - so we can see how they look together. The counter looks a little like this (but the web version doesn't really show the green highlights that you see in person):

Changing Demographic

What does it say about me when I no longer run into people I know at the zoo (when I was there last Sunday, there were hundreds of toddlers and their parents there), but I do run into old friends when I go to kitchen design stores?

This Little Light of Mine

A trip to Lights Beautiful in Ventura yesterday ah - shed light - on this area of mystery. Way too many choices - cans and fixtures, CFL, halogen, LED, xenon, incandescent, undercabinet, warmth, color, T-5, transformers, Title 24, intensity blah blah blah. I will admit right here that none of this makes any sense to me whatsoever. I'm still at the evolutionary stage where electricity is nothing short of magical, and as long as I can turn on a switch and see better than I could before, I'm pretty happy. Fortunately I have Alan to interpret all the letters and numbers, and he seems to actually get it, or at least puts up a good front.

We were hoping to use the new LED cans that recently came out, but because of our slightly sloped ceiling on the sink side of our kitchen (another architectural wonder of our very strange house), we won't be able to without them sticking out on one side (they don't yet make the LED cans that will do that). So it looks like we'll have several - 6? 8? fluorescent cans along the kitchen ceiling which will fool people into thinking our 2 sides of the kitchen actually go together (tying the room together nicely).

Then we'll probably replace the old fixtures in the family room with these perhaps, or something like them:Then under the cabinets we'll probably go with fluorescent lights that look a bit like this:


I guess I have learned something. I learned how to spell fluorescent.