Vote for Zorro!

I entered a pic of our sweet Z-zer into Modernica's "Pets on Furniture" photo competition, and he's in this week's line up!

Yay! Handsome boy!

If you think he's as good looking on that Ironrite chair as we do, head on over to Modernica and put in a vote for him! Go Sneezer! We love you!!

Art

Brad and I have a thing for art. (Or maybe I do, and he just does an awesome job of putting up with me!) In our years together, we've amassed a decent collection. So here's a look at some of our collection, and a sneak peek at our "finished" first floor.

 Year of the Rooster and Chicago Ghost by Dan Grzeca.

Blue Bird Wedding by Middleburg Folk Art Studio. Behind it is a blanket made by my great-grandmother.

Rat Terrier Pillow by Julie Sola.

Our vintage Ironrite chair, a future refinishing project. (Not art I guess, but I liked the photo!)

A pile of art yet to find a home...

  

Our criminal 4-legged family. Back in October, I photographed our pups and Brad's brother's dogs, with a fitting backdrop... mugshot height scale. I love how guilty Rat looks in the bottom photo, and Airlie looks like she was in a bar fight (she was at the worst point in her demodex). Oh, my loveable rascals!

Our wool shag Bertoia chair is Zorro's favorite chair.

And to honor our sweet rat terriers, Hey, Ho, Let's Go! by Angela Bond hangs on the wall behind it.

(It's a bit too small for that wall, so it probably won't stay their permanantly. But for now, it's just fine!)

I actually don't know if our window painting by Emmy Star Brown has a name... Hmmm.

Greens by Emmy Star Brown! Thanks, Emmy!

One of my Christmas gifts to Brad this year was a painting based on one of our wedding photos. It was part of The Commission Project by Paul Ferney.

So there you have it! Next weekend I plan to post a better "house tour" than this... it's a bit hard to get photos in good lighting when I'm at work all day and it gets dark at 5. Such is life.

Have a good week, all!

Happy 2011

Happy New Year!

The holidays have come and gone. Our guests have come and gone. Now it's back to the renovating.

The electrician should be finishing up this week, cross your fingers. (Seriously. This is week 5. He said in his initial bid it would take him a week. He'd better freaking be done this week. I'm kind of tired of him.)

Brad and I need to sit down and figure out what our next moves will be. I want to paint. But that may not be the most pressing item. I just love how finished things *feel* with fresh paint. And beautiful counter tops would be even MORE beautiful when not surrounded by unfinished drywall, right? And I guess while we're at it we can re-hang the trim that we had to pull down in order to put in that new drywall... that might help with the "finished" look...

Anyway, no pics this post. Sors. We'll try to get some up soon.

Hooray, 2011! Here's hoping you'll bring happiness and success! (And timely electricians.)

Ahh! Yay!

Counters are in!

Exciting, huh!?

There's still quite a bit to do. The plumber is coming on Monday to hook up the dishwasher and the sink.

[The not-yet-hooked-up (dusty) dishwasher.]

[Our big, pretty sink. With the faucet inside of it, patiently waiting for the plumber.]

I climbed up on a stool to get a pic of the sink and faucet. While I was up there I spotted this:

Eeeeek! That's a crap load of dust! We've got a lot of cleaning to do...

Which is maybe an understatement...

Oops.

Walls!

Today the drywall was put up, and it looks much nicer than it did yesterday. Here are some photos of the work.

Notice the flooring that we've laid from the post the other day. I think we need to clean it.

The tile is gone! Tomorrow the island will be marble will be installed.

The big hole in the wall behind the fridge is now gone.



Pups

And just in case anyone is worried about the dogs while our house is an obvious disaster, don't be! They're all happy as clams camped out in the bedroom. Or more accurately, on the bed.

Me: "Good morning, Sunshine!"

Airlie: "omg. srsly mom. dont you know what time it is?"

Zorro-lazy-bones takes his time getting up, too.

Rat, of course, is ready to take on the world.

I'm certainly jealous...

10 Days 'til Christmas

We’ve been slow to post details recently so I figured I’d give everyone a brief update.  Does anyone remember those photos we took right after closing? Well the place doesn’t look nearly as nice currently. We’re in the middle of our holiday rush because my parents and my brother and his wife will be coming for Christmas. To say we have a little work to do before then is the understatement of the year. Here are a few quick current photos I just took with my phone. (Sorry for the quality.) Needless to say I didn't pick up before I took them.

The foyer floor is laid, but not yet polyurethaned... and is really dusty.

The living room / floor-staining room.

We put up the Christmas tree in the dining room, but it has since been surrounded by future kitchen stools, tools, supplies, and other clutter.

Jessica's busy laying the cork floor in the kitchen.

Where the sink used to be. It's been moved to the island. And the giant (unnecessary) hole in the wall thanks to the plumbers.

Jess warned you all earlier that the kitchen was bad! She wasn't kidding! Just over a week to go and this all should be back to semi-normal.

New Light

Arrived today...

Not sure if we should put it in the kitchen or the dining room yet... I'm afraid it may be a little too small for the dining room.

Right now our kitchen is a freaking DISASTER! The old floor is out, the counters are out, the walls are out! It's a big, ugly shell of a room... with pretty cabinets. The electrician will finish up in a day or two. Then we'll be clear to hang new drywall, lay the flooring, get the countertops installed, and get the plumber back out to hook up the new sink and dishwasher. UGH. I'm exhausted already!

Holy Sh*t!

Thursday night Jessica walked into the house and the first words out of her mouth were "Holy Sh*t!" This is because I began removing the drywall in the kitchen. While there was kind of a cool look to the 50s plastic tile in the kitchen, it doesn't work at all with what we are doing aesthetically. We wish we could have only removed the tile, but the old glue for the tile has left removing the drywall as our only option. Furthermore, we need to remove the linoleum tiles in the kitchen to lay the new cork floor. As a result, our kitchen (and due to the dust, the rest of the house) is more disastrous than it was before.

Valedictorian

Airlie graduated from her puppy class! (On Halloween. Thus, tutu. I'm a little slow on the blog updating...) She was one of, if not the best student in the class. Very attentive, a quick learner, and extremely eager to please! She's pretty much a rock star.

We're in Agility training now, and we'll hopefully start beginner obedience in January!

In non-dog news, Brad and I are working our butts off on the house! The flooring is all laid in the living and dining rooms and we're getting ready to start some demo in the kitchen. We have a lot of yellow plastic tile and gross flooring to remove in the next week or so. Then we'll be adding an island (with a dishwasher! Woo Hoo!), continuing the cork flooring, painting the cabinets, replacing the hardware, and installing new electrical. Our hope is to have the first floor (minus the bathroom) done by Christmas. It's gonna be tough... wish us luck!

Oh, Rain. What am I going to do with you?

Our plan has always been to install rain barrels to catch all of our roof runoff. Of course, we didn't plan on moving ahead with the rain barrel systems until we had replaced the roof and gutters. No use trying to catch water at the end of a downspout when most of the gutter is rusted through...

But, of course, this happened. Now we're preparing for a new roof, and we're suddenly in need of barrels.

I wanted these:

But I just got the quote and they're CRAZY expensive for some big hollow chunks of plastic! So we're on the hunt for new barrels. The problem is, we need a grouping in the back of the house to catch the water from the back porch roof and the south side of the main roof, and we need a grouping in the front of the house to catch water from the front porch and the north side of the main roof. We can line up the barrels along the side of the house in back, but the space between our house and our neighbor's is only 2'-5". (Yay, city living!)

It gets more complicated up front...

The north side of our house is right on the lot line. So, no room to put barrels on the side of the house up front. We're left with a space about 13" wide to the north of our front porch, or the area under our front porch steps. This is where the big money barrels I REALLY wanted would have worked wonderfully. They are only 7 1/2" deep! We could have stacked a few next to the porch and a few more under the steps and called it a day.

So, here are some others we're looking at:

This is pretty. Maybe a couple of these would be okay visible in the front yard, with some larger, uglier ones under the stairs... Like this:

This is a beast. It may not fit under the stairs...

But these are kind of cool:

They're big bags-o-rain! Rain bags. They hold just over 100 gallons and lay flat, perfect for under a porch. Not sure how multiples work, though...

Then we could just line a bunch of these up along the side of the house in back.

They aren't 7 1/2" deep. :(

But they are 14". Which is still good.

Anyone out there have any rain barrel experience? Suggestions? Comments on the wonderfulness of rain?

Not a dog post.

So Brad has commented that I'm posting a lot about our dogs... Hehe... oops. I forgot this was supposed to be our home renovation blog. :)

So here's some super awesome stuff about our ongoing renovation!!

Right now, I'm working on finishing our drawings. We initially planned on doing a lot of the work over time, but now we're considering bidding the whole project out to knock it out in one fell swoop. We'll see just how much doing it all at once will cost us before we make that final decision... For all who are curious just what our plans are:

Plans in AutoCAD.

Interior Elevations in AutoCAD.

Ha. Okay. So you can't quite tell just what's going on from the screenshots. Basically, right now we have one 'finished' bedroom in the attic and the rest is raw space. We plan to add a bathroom and master bedroom, as well as fully updating the rest of the house. This may be better... Click the images to see 'em larger.

So, what do you think?

Helpers.

So we still haven't taken a good "finished" pic of the living room floor... BUT, I have good pics of my helper dogs ON the new floor!

Fat Rat.

Airlie Bear.

The Bear is getting BIG!

Sneezer and Fatty. My guard dogs.

Zorro, aka Sneezer, aka Sneeze Beez, aka Beezer, aka Zeez, aka Z, aka Smiles.

We've been dog-sitting for Brad's brother while he's on his honeymoon! This is Bella. 

And this is Cowboy. Cowboy likes to try to eat the cork floor. He's not such a good helper...

Sorry, Cows. I outed you.