Renovate Fox Ridge: Busy Bees!

Sorry for the delayed posting... John and I have been up at Fox Ridge since Thursday working on a top-secret project (aka. unfinished) and we've had our hands full.

When we first bought the house at Fox Ridge, John and I dreamed of installing a wood burning stove or fireplace in the living room, not just for heat, but for the wonderfully pleasant experience of having a fire burning in the hearth. Now that's country-livin'! 

We ambitiously bought a Benjamin Franklin Stove on Craig's List (literally identical to the one here, but we paid $250.00 for ours and it was less gleamingly flawless... Also, we had to drive it back from the place in Connecticut where we bought it, and in the process, nearly killed the shocks in our station wagon, it was so friggin' heavy. That would have made it way more expensive...) ANYWAY, back on topic: so we bought this Benjamin Franklin Stove, and then someone told us it was going to be a gillion dollars to install a chimney liner in our chimney, and a new chimney pipe would also be mega-expensive, and tall and ugly, and on and on they went about how nothing about this dream was going to work, and so the dream died, the stove was put up in the barn, and boo-hoo, the end.

Until! This fall, when it started getting cold again, and again, we pined for a fireplace a-cracklin' in our living room. So we went and asked someone else, who told us that basically anything modern was so efficient that it would make our little tiny house uninhabitabl-y hot and would make the living room feel like H-E-L-L itself, but that the Benjamin Moore Stove would be just the ticket. He also said that installing a new liner in the chimney was in fact, not a gillion dollars, so we could totally do that, and so the dream was jump-started once more, and now we are actually kind of close to having a fireplace in our living room. (That said, this involves the labor of numerous people other than just us, so in the interest of not being disappointed, I am trying not to get too excited until the whole thing is in and finished.)

However, I was more than happy to get way ahead of myself, and rearrange the entire room based on the location of the new wood burning stove, and then I happened to buy this incredible antique salvaged wood work bench/desk, which needed to be incorporated into the room too, and that required the purchase of a new goose-neck-style-clamp-lamp which needed to be spray painted to look just right.... so now I have A LOT of photos to take to show you... But I thought maybe I'd start with Before-And-After floor plans, so you can orient yourself in the room, as-was and as-is, and then we'll work our way through the other highlights over the next couple of days. 

If you don't remember what the living room in Fox Ridge looks like, you can also check out that Nate Berkus feature I did last Fall, where we walk all through the little house, ON TV! (Feel free to click the "Like" button while you're there... : )