Year #2!

Fernando found and sent me this photo last month:

The photograph, entitled "Invisible House in Staten Island," is by filmmaker Lynn Sachs and can be found on her website here.
Yes, that is our house.
Happy 2nd Re-Birthday House! I'm glad you no longer look like a giant bush with roof.

St. George for sale.

No, I haven't given up on our house just yet. Still, I can't help hunting around to see what's for sale in the hood.

When we were house hunting here, nothing we liked seemed to be for sale in St. George. When we were apartment hunting, this carriage house beauty was available:

Fernando just didn't want to commit to a house. It was understandable - he was still in school. The people that did buy the house did a really nice job in sprucing it up on the outside. I've always wanted to see inside (we never looked at it) and just found a virtual tour online (click next.)

Another gem for sale in St. George is this beauty:

Ok so it needs a little curb appeal but let me assure you this one is amazing inside. I've seen it. It needs a lot of work but would be so worth it in the end. There's a butler's pantry, a huge kitchen, huge bedrooms, a beautiful staircase and when Fernando saw the sunroom on the back of the house he wanted to sell our house immediately. Ah, Fernando: don't you remember all of the work we did to our house?!

I don't recall seeing this one around in person but it looks to be in fine shape from the listing:

At the high end of the market (two blocks from our house on our street) you'll find one of my favorite houses in the neighborhood:

There are still some fixer uppers to be had as well for cheap prices... like poor next door:

That's really not the most flattering representation of next door. Unfortunately, she's seen better days and her current owner has forsaken her. Useless fact: she was once part of the J.C. Green estate along with our house and now stands where the stables used to be:

This one is around the corner and so cute - I love the round porch. I can imagine that it might need some work considering the super low price:

Another deal nearby:

On the edge of St. George, you can find this cozy house:

The photos show a central air conditioning unit and a great deck. At less than the price of a co-op that's a steal. I love the portico - can't you just see it with grey weathered clapboards, little window boxes and a black sperm whale above the door all New England style?

One Year.

Dear House,
Happy Re-Birthday! We bought you one year ago today and have been trying our best to get you back to your former glory. Whenever I see photos of you shrouded in your vines I'm amazed at how different you look today. I'm sorry that you haven't been painted yet or that you're not completely finished on the inside. I promise we'll paint you as soon as we can. Believe me, you look (and smell) a thousand times better today than on this day last year when we first walked through you after the closing.
Thank you for providing a happy place for us to live and for being in such close proximity to a lot of nice people. Thank you for not being haunted. Thank you for not being infested with any creepy living things either.
We love you House and hope to spend many more happy years living inside of you.
Love Always,
Heather & Fernando

snow day

So the title is a little misleading... this post is not about snow even though it is snowing outside. Just thought I'd show off the extent of our Christmas decorating this year:

Yes, that's all.

Here are a couple of photos showing the bathroom's current state:

We actually don't have swine bathing in our tub. That's grout, joint compound, plaster dust - all kinds of icky stuff that's fallen in there during the work. I haven't scrubbed it yet because it's not finished being filthy yet.

The tiles still have haze on them from grouting here - this was just after the grout was finished. We're showing you the current status of the bathroom. It's sort of like reality TV except here you actually get to see reality. The walls need more skimcoat, the baseboards and trim need patching and painting, the overhead lights are not in yet because we need to paint the ceiling first (and can't decide on a paint color.) Reality.

This is our new soap dish embedded in the wall:

It was designed by my Father and Fernando and the nice people at the place where we bought the wall tile (Monumental Marble) made it for us. It's carrara marble and was cut to mimic the shape of the tub. On top, there are two small indentations for soap. It's quite heavy and partially sits on a beam about 2" inside of the wall for stability. If we are lucky, it will never fall out. ;)

Happy snow day!

get to fixin' on NY1

St. George Properties Offer Great Views For A Great Price

Check it out - that's our house!

i'm digging for dryer

Let me introduce you to our new moat.

It's not completely finished yet... but not bad for one person and two days of digging. It's not all in madness, we're digging down so that we can waterproof our basement. It's not a really damp basement but we do get water accumulating in one area when there are big storms. That one area happens to be the exact spot where we want to put our future washer and dryer. We've already installed the hook-ups and the vintage sink that we just added a drainage pump to is right there, so we can't change the w/d location. When we had the roof and gutters fixed we thought it might fix the problem but twice since then we've had bad storms and about an inch of water in that corner.

This is all the handiwork of Keith. Keith was once a grave digger. More excitingly he used to work on a tugboat. I have an irrational love of tugboats. When you love tugboats, St. George, Staten Island is the place to be... I get to see them every day. ;)

Keith's been having problems with finding a place to store all of the fill. It's already piled up the length of our fence and now we have an enormous mountain in our yard. I swear - the yard really was clean - right before we started our very own Big Dig.

this charming house

I've had some requests for more photos... so here are some older ones that I never had a chance to post. I've been using Fernando's camera and he's been downloading them onto his computer so I usually have to wait for him to send them to me. I think I'll try just downloading them onto mine in the future - as soon as I get rid of the spyware that's been plaguing me for the last week!
Here are some nice details and things we inherited with the house...

Art Deco wooden doorknobs - I love these and they are on most of the doors. The former owner claims to have a box of them that he says he'll bring by... we're still waiting.


The living and dining room fireplaces have matching log holders. If you look closely you can see that they're dragons! Or sea serpents? Or Nessie?! I've never seen anything like them before and wonder if whoever put them there found it humorous because the house is in St. George?


There are two of these glass hang bars in two of the closets upstairs. They don't photograph very well.


The first owner of our house was a writer for a NY newspaper. We haven't been able to determine which one yet. He's seems to have been a little eccentric and one of the installations we found around the house were the attic stair risers plastered with uplifting headlines!


There's even one up on the ceiling at the top.


Our doorbell hangs above the arch in the kitchen and sounds exactly like the old school bells you'd hear between classes. It's a keeper.


I have no idea if this Art Deco mirror was originally used in our house. We found it in the attic before we had our estate sale. I love the Flash Gordon-esque lightening bolt etched on the front and think it might be nice in the miniature bathroom downstairs.


Here's a view of the lattice on our front porch and the glass vestibule. There are oval cutouts up top to let in more light.


This is our very own Busybody. Well, it's some kind of homemade version of it anyway... looks like someone attached an old car side view mirror to the bottom! It has a view of the vestibule from the living room.


You know the old owner was eccentric when you find the "Postal creed" stuck to the top of the mailbox... neatly hammered out with the help of a label maker. This is actually an old Richmond Farms milk box.

everything a big bad wolf could want.

I hate to admit it but I'm already getting excited about decorating. In truth, I've been excited about decorating this house since the second I first walked inside. Our last place was a very streamlined apartment in a 1950's era building - with a long hallway and large rooms. It was bright but we didn't have windows on every wall. There was a lot of room for large artwork and low, long furniture.

This house is very different than what we've been used to. For one, the windows are lower to the ground and more abundant. There are also many doors. This doesn't leave a lot of wall space for large paintings and long furniture that's more than two feet off of the ground! A few weeks ago I had to make the hard decision to sell one of my favorite pieces of furniture, a vintage, long George Nelson "Thin Edge" teak credenza. The only place we could use it is in the attic... and it's so heavy, I wouldn't want to ask anyone to carry it up there! We sold it yesterday and as hard as I thought it would be to let it go, I now actually feel good. I know that it will eventually be sold (it went to a dealer) to someone else who will have the space to truly enjoy it.

So anyway, here comes my first decor commitment to this house: I purchased wallpaper for the foyer.

I chose Cole and Son's "Woods" wallpaper in what I can only call greige. On the Cole and Son website the color is identified as "69/12149." When I first viewed it in the "New Contemporary II" book in the wallpaper store, I immediately thought "how beige." I also thought ick about all of the other colors that "Woods" comes in (especially the white, too bright.) No problem, I didn't really want to use "Woods" anymore, right? I've been coveting that wallpaper for a few years but have now seen it in every design magazine and mentioned on a million blogs. Why would I want to be like everyone else anyway? I much prefer Cole and Son's "Cow Parsley" in black or "66/7046" anyway, right? Well, actually no. Once I saw the aforementioned wallpapers in the foyer and under the right lighting 69/12149 just jumped out at me! I'll give some props to 69/12151 too - very pretty, but Fernando shot it down (too lavender.) And "Cow Parsley" in 66/7046? Well she seemed a little too busy for our small foyer.

So now here I am with my very own "Woods" wallpaper. And I ordered it in the color that I thought would be the ugliest. But you see, it does this strange thing when you hold it up to the walls in my foyer in daylight - it turns a lovely silvery grey. Magic.

humpty dumpty

We hired a plasterer last week. It's all making me very nervous. He came highly recommended and I have been assured that he is a "plaster master." But I'm still nervous. You see, our crown molding is not wood - it's plaster.
The main room I've been fretting about is the dining room. There was A LOT of water damage on the ceiling from the bathroom upstairs. It is still leaking (still trying to finalize a plumber) but not heavily. One of the plasterer's workers removed the ceiling and was able to save the plaster medallion but... there was molding damage! I've been told that it is normal - the water damaged the molding and he managed to save most of the pieces... still, can it be put back together again?

Before.

During demo.

Exposed rafters and pocket doors.

Look up - the missing molding!

No money. Just creepy cobwebs.

What to do with that brick?

The brick hearth in the kitchen came out two tone - red paint and a strange mustard yellow color. At first we thought okay let's just clean it off. Then after careful consideration we decided that not only would that be time consuming, we weren't sure that the traditional exposed brick look was the look we're trying to achieve in our kitchen. Yes, the rustic red of exposed brick is beautiful but as I was picturing it in my head I just couldn't see it with the modern fittings we've already picked out. Plus, if the exposed chimneys in the attic are a good example, I don't want mortar crumbling over my stove while I'm cooking! Yes, I know you can seal brick. ;)

Here she is in an early shot with some of the old framing still in place:

One look I've always admired is the brick wall treatment at BDDW. Digging around online I discovered that the owner achieved the look by layering joint compound over the brick surface. Since we had nothing to lose (we'd still have to clean the brick anyway) we decided to scratch up the paint with some sandpaper and start layering.

We discovered that joint compound will take some time to dry (especially on a humid day) and it is best to not try to help it along. After using a fan on the surface we had cracks on a test patch. Lesson learned and fixed with more compound.

Here you can see the progress (thanks to my Dad) so far:

I'm really liking the look already and hoping it will hold up over time. I'm not really worried since it's interior brick and not exposed to moisture from the elements. I think we'll paint it a similar white for a bright, clean look.

she's mighty mighty

Why are contractors so unreliable? I don't just mean general contractors but plumbers, electricians, etc. I can't tell you how many people have cancelled on us, just not shown up or just not followed up with estimates after coming out!(???) How do they stay in business? And why bother coming at all if you're not going to send an estimate? Waste of time.

phew.

Anyway, we are now vine free. The only success we've had in hiring anyone came in the form of roofers. They showed up (I know AMAZING!) and have so far cleared off all of the remaining vines that we could not reach. Even the chimneys are visible!
They're not starting any of the actual roofing stuff until Friday. Nevertheless, the house already looks better and we've been getting many compliments on the progress. As a matter of fact, I hear we're the "talk of the neighborhood." Now we only have to live up to everyone else's expectations. ;)

mama, don't let your babies grow up to be...

Dirty. Or 'N Sync fans.

A little installation that used to hang above a BED. A bed where someone was actually sleeping.

wallpaper free!

It's all gone. We could have had it worse but it was still hard getting it all down. There was wallpaper in the foyer, kitchen?, upstairs hallway and two bedrooms. The foyer, kitchen and hallway were easy - everything just pulled down without a fight. But the bedrooms seemed to be really fond of their covering. Here's one of the bedrooms that Fernando and Chris had previously attacked:


And here's the other bedroom with it's wallpaper on:



It's hard to tell from the last photo that the original background color of the wallpaper was a pale BLUE. There were spots that had been covered by frames throughout the years that were still a little blue. So why does it all look so yellow? NICOTINE.

It was a two day affair and far from fun but my mother and I got through it. I even had a huge blister on my finger from all of the scraping but thanks to my sister's Reiki, you'd never know now.

The walls in the second room are now ready to be prepped for painting. The room with the blue flowered wallpaper has the worst plaster damage in the house. We may not get to it for a while - luckily, we have 3 other bedrooms to use in the meantime.

everything looks perfect from far away...

If you can't tell by now my posts aren't exactly being posted in order. Well, they are but I've been writing at the end of the day and adding photos later... so the posts haven't been getting published right away. I'm keeping the dates the same though - so we have a record of our progress by date.

We have a roofer coming next week (hopefully) to start the roof, gutters, point the chimneys and take down the remaining vines. Yesterday, we had a landscaper tame the hedges in the front and on the side - this I haven't had a chance to see yet but I'm very excited to hear that we can walk freely down the side of the house now! And he indentified all of the poison ivy and removed it. He was actually immune to the ivy and was able to touch it. I'm beginning to think I may be immune to it as well - I picked up a lot of those vines and I didn't have the slightest reaction.

Some highlights from phase two of the vine removal last week here:

Fernando did the chopping, I did the clean-up and Chris was the muscle again.

And here's another shot from last week taken by the roofer:

I hear there's some view from up there... makes me wish I wasn't so scared of heights!