Red stools...hmm...the sitting kind

Heehee, I said stool.

Anyways, I saw this on Young House Love this morning and was inspired.

These are our stools.
I bought the one on the right in the As-Is of Ikea for $10 many years ago, and she has always managed to squeek by the "keep or discard" moment of moving homes. When our agent saw her, she advised us to paint the one on the left with red to match and leave them there at our bar for potential buyers. Granted, they are too short, but she was thinking of making us look "funky". Convincing J to paint his stool, eeked out in High School Shop, red, was hard and now that it's done, I can't say it looks great. We used Apple Red spray paint, when I would have preferred to paint it with a colour matching the original stool. Oh well.

Anyways, maybe I can summon up some DIYer energy and convince J to go one step further and fabric-ize his stool now??

Best Colour Blog and Dark Colour Inspiration!

I've been reading the best blog by Maria Killam called Color Me Happy. She's over at http://www.mariakillam.com/blog. I liken her to being a savant about interior colour as Paul Grilley is to Yoga. Knowing about 2 people know Paul Grilley, let's just say  he coined the term Yin Yoga and is basically the only person in the world who knows that bone structure is indicative of your potential physically, while everyone else is telling you to just work harder/wait longer and you'll touch your nose to your knees, etc. You won't. Well, I won't. Anyways, this is about a house right?

I'm going to spend the cash and hire Miss Maria for our new house so we don't hate our walls. I've painted before, and inevitably I blame Justin for EVERY mistake I make. He is no good at the stuff, and obviously I'm not, but it's a huge deal. We're going to have to paint our new *fab* cupboards in this post and I don't want to end up with purple white instead of white white, etc. (did it before, yup).

I'm loving this kitchen as inspiration

I'm also totally engrossed with using dark navy in the new house as per Leah Moss from apartment therapy's style here  http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/leah-richs-evolving-patina-house-tour-167165 and here is the room that inspires me the most.

The cool thing is we have a similar print to the one in the photo, by Charles Russel below.

                                        

I hated it forever, but after having it in our bathroom (I actually thought it would get ruined in there, but instead I ended up loving it!), I'm ready to take the step and upgrade it to a non-poop room! And now that I've learned from Maria that rooms with less windows, like our new home, actually do better with dark colours, I'm excited to go navy!! Here is our new house bathroom that is burgundy and thus proving Maria right! It's gorgeous, esp with the white wainscotting to offset it.

Ripping off a Country Kitchen Essence

Moving into an old home should come with a certain amount of moral responsiblity in my opinion. The responsibility should be to preserve some of the essence of that home's spirit when customizing it to be your own. I can't come up with a snigle reason why I feel this way, considering I was raised helping my parents move from house to house, building all new, adding on to an old house, and generally poo-pooing things of old due to their poor "R-values".
Either way, I love this kitchen, which others have posted as being the only good kitchen to have if you happen to inherit this moral responsibility with your circa 1900 house.

I love the hardwood floors in the kitchen, even though my new floors will look like this (exact depiction):

We are going to have to test for asbestos and the estimate I got from a removal expert was "worst case scenario is $9000 for a typical 150 sq ft kitchen with the maximum asbestos of 43% in your vinyl". EEK! So we might be doing the 70s vinyl style for a while.



I also love that they have changed the flooring around the cool old stove (background of above photo). And the white subway tile as the backsplash really works to keep the wood as the focal point. I have no idea where you get a white crazy hood fan, or the stove for that matter, but still, it's lovely.

I also love these sinks, but they can be so over-powering in a space, especially without the high-end faucets seen here (above) for contrast. And when we  paint our cupboards (below) white, they won't look anything like these pretty cupboards, so this is truly just inspiration at this point.



Down with Trees Part Deux

Not having possession to LBH (Little Big House) yet, I am only going off what I have from photos of the house. And most of these photos came to me from the Home Inspection, a four hour drawn-out affair. Four. Hours. It wasn't that long due to defficiencies in our place. It was that long because we hired an eccentric, awesome home inpection. Merv does some of the preliminary inpection duties, but while you are bored and waiting, he gets the couple to do a quiz which they always fail. The quiz is to label each emergency valve. But this isn't an idle activity. Merv will come up with a scenario, such as the following:
"Okay Jackie. Your neighbours got you to look after their home while they're away for three weeks. Why the wife Justin? Because they will always get the wife to do it. Why? Because the husbands never bring in the papers or water their plants. Got it?"
Justin and Jackie nod.
"Okay. So Jackie, you're in their basement, which we will pretend is exactly the same as this one. You walk in and suddenly you smell gas. Lots of gas. LOTS of gas. Come on Jackie, what are you going to do!?"
"I run! I run out and hide in my own house?"
"Come on Jackie, the house is about to explode, what do you do!?"
"I curse the day I swore off cell phones, run down the road screaming 'Call 9-1-1'!"
"Errr! Wrong! Find the gas shut off! Find it! Find it!"
And so on. He does this for each thing, like telling me there is scalding hot water pouring out everywhere, that he is melting, etc. And then we label the valves and he leaves the labels on for us down the road.
That probably shouldn't take 4 hours, but Merv happens to love antiques and old homes, so he also regaled long stories about renovations, old homeowners, and even invited us out to an estate sale. He was, in a word, thorough. Do I remember all the crap we need to fix? No. But I took sketchy notes.
Back to the photos. So, I don't have good photos of our new home. But I did find a more recent photo of the front, which I'm guessing was taken 10 years after the one I last posted. Here they are.

Above is the one I posted originally. And below is a more accurate depiction of the forest that is our new front yard.

So if you had any previous doubts about "Down with the trees", I hope they are no more.

Down with Trees!

Little Big House (LBH) has 3 huge spruce trees in front of her.

I think this photo is more than a few years old since my neighbour's lovely infill isn't there (to the left). I think the trees are even bigger now.

She faces North, so these trees are definitely blocking her view. From my extensive research on LBH, I know that she was probably built by Russian immigrants who came to Canada to escape religious persecution, and worked as labourers. I think there was either a strong lack of women involved in the home, or maybe they made it knowing it would be a boarding house, but either way, she isn't a "pretty thang" is she? The front dormer upstairs has the original diffuse glass, hand-made. It's stunning to look out through those panes. I would love to have those trees minimized for a few reasons.
1. Light, first and foremost. There are two main floor windows being blocked.
2. Space. I want as much garden as I can possibly build.
3. Curb appeal. Now, I am not a big fan of tree removal for aesthetic reasons, but sometimes you need to be honest with yourself. They don't add anything. That said, I would love to at least leave the stumps, to create some niches ecologically in the yard for bugs and birds.

Otherwise, the house is covered in vinyl. It would be a treat to uncover original wood siding and keep that up, but I know it's not a realistic goal right now.
The chain link remains only in the front, with the sides gone. So a phantom chain link fence. Yep, another thing to go!

Creating Priorities in a New House

We just bought a house between a sausage cafe (both in what they serve and who goes there) and a zoo (this one is literally a zoo, no figurative speech). It's a decent street, and one of the oldest houses in town at circa 1900.
I feel bad for our little big house. She is hidden behind 3 big spruce trees in the front. She has a mere one window in the back, which is the south side. Without insulation, I feel this poor little house has been waiting for me for a long time, cold all winter and hidden all summer. Meanwhile, I have discovered that the new neighbour, living in his fortress of an infill, is my coworker. But doesn't like the little big house. I think this motivates me further to make this bland house a dream home. I do well under pressure.

Here she is.
This is the backyard (duh). Said neighbour, aka The Grinch, has told me how much he detests the apple tree (an apple tree!!!) to the right here. I have seen where he has so lovingly chopped off the branches daring to touch his fortress.
We get possession July 3rd, and I'm stoked. I will be 31 and one month that day. I take this as a good sign. Without a damn reason why.