Renovate Brooklyn! Day Twelve: Coveting Your Neighbor's...

...light. Our best friends Brennen and Julia live around the corner from our apartment, and they have the loveliest light fixture in their living room on North 7th Street. It is an over-sized drum shade that hangs from a pendant fixture, casting a warm flattering glow through the room.

(See left, picture courtesy of West Elm's website. You can find it online here: http://www.westelm.com/products/short-drum-pendant-w504/?pkey=cpendant-sconce-lamps-chandeliers )

Now that the walls are gone and the guest room is no longer a prison-cell-sized den of iniquity, I am on the hunt for a new light fixture to replace our little white chandelier. I have been "ooohing" and "ahhing" over Brennen & Julia's light fixture for months now, so I went on the hunt to see if I could find something similar for our house.
I have found two possible candidates- neither of which I can justify buying for the time being. Both are currently selling on Ebay, which significantly lessens the odds of my ever owning either fixture...

I think this light is truly a thing of beauty- simple and sleek but also with an eclectic element to it. The shade is 20" in diameter and 20" tall, and it hangs on an adjustable nickel rod. Hot dog! Sadly, at $149.00, plus $40.00 shipping (from Canada!) I am fated to never know this light fixture on a more personal basis.

The Sputnik light fixture shown below is the second contender-- which I love! It is a total non-sequitur from B & J's drum shade, but would also be rad in our apartment.

I am slightly concerned that our house is on the brink of becoming a museum dedicated to the design and decoration of the 1950's and 60's, so I am trying to mix it up a little bit, but man- this light makes me want to fix John a cocktail and pretend that we're living in an episode of Mad Men. It is even more completely beyond my reach at $695.00 on Ebay. But it is truly a thing of unbridled beauty.

Oh-- envy! Oh-- lust!

Renovate Brooklyn! Day Eleven: Forging Ahead!

The last few evenings have been filled with the ungratifying process of spackle, sand, spackle, sand. John has been a real trooper- staying up until almost 2:00am one night, applying another coat of spackle to the corner edging of our little wall. Thankfully, spackling is a quiet process, because I don't think that would have gone over well with the neighbors otherwise.

Look how peaceful our living room used to look...

 Just a couple of pictures here to keep everyone up to date. While John was spackling, I installed the portrait moldings in the office-end of the living room, using pieces of molding salvaged from the walls that were removed. It isn't flawless (aka. incredibly bent and paint-caked) but it is free and matches the other paint clogged murky moldings perfectly! Since I am an inpatient child, I also started painting the blue walls of the old living room to match the walls of the old guest room. We still had almost a full gallon of paint, so what the hell, right?

John has pointed out the inherent stupidity of this approach, since it is bound to get dusty and covered in schmutz, but what can I tell you? I want to see some serious change!

 

Then we took down the walls, put up a portrait molding, and started painting the old walls "Cream Silk"

              What the living room looks like this morning. It is almost hard to believe they're the same place!

We are slaving away, and hopefully will have some dramatic results to post by Monday. 

Check back in soon!

Just a teaser...

Yes. That's me. Disguised as a plaster-coated-sanding-spackling ninja of the night.

More on this subject later.

Renovate Brooklyn! Day Ten: A Little During-Dinner Design...

Tonight we're going to attack the newly hung drywall with relentless coats of spackle until all of our seams and screw holes are nothing but a distant memory. More specifically, John is going to start Round One of the attacking while I prepare dinner, hopefully it will dry while we're eating, and then we can tackle it again together, Round Two tag-team style.

So while John is toiling away in the living room, I'll fill you in on our dinner plans... I'm currently going through a hard-core cauliflower kick, so we're roasting cauliflower along with a diced sweet potato, a little red onion and a par-boiled head of broccoli. This is the first time I've made this concoction, so I will report back on its success.  Accompanying the vegetable medley is a petite pork tenderloin, which I've marinated in a mixture my mom calls "Chinese Barbecue Sauce"-  a combination of soy sauce, brown sugar, honey, and a healthy splash of red food coloring which stains everything within a 5 mile radius a luminous blood red.

It came to my attention that if this After-Dinner Design was going to succeed, we needed to spend a little less time cooking and a little more time designing and then like a lightning strike: the marinade! Cobbled together while my eyes were still mostly closed early this morning, it had all day to sit and ponder its eventual deliciousness... Then homeward we came. Hungry and tired, and ready to... put up a wall. What better time to stick a fully saturated pork tenderloin in the oven and call it dinner?

In the photos at left, you can see our dinner pending and John in the background putting the finishing touches on Round One.

To make the Chinese Barbecue Pork Tenderloin: Serves 6-8
3 pork tenderloins        2 T. honey
1/2 c. soy sauce          4 T. red food coloring
3 T. white wine            1/2 t. cinnamon
2 T. brown sugar

 Mix all ingredients and then marinate tenderloin in sauce for a minimum of 1 hour or overnight. Preheat oven to 350 degrees, and then roast for 45 minutes. Turn and baste frequently and keep a close eye on it or the sauce will burn.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dinner behind us, we are about to move onto Round Two in the living room. The pork was delish and the roasted veggies were great- man! I love cauliflower! I have a sneaking suspicion that John is going to do most of the remaining work tonight and I'm going to take the dog for a walk. Talk about team work.

Until Tomorrow Night... Bonne soirée!

Renovate Brooklyn! Day Nine: Let the dry-walling begin.

Big movements on the home front! 

Well, eventually. First we spent Saturday doing almost nothing constructive, until the last possible minute when we managed to make it to Home Depot and do our shopping. At least this allowed for a full day of work on Sunday. Why didn't we get anything done on Saturday, you wonder? Because John and his work friend Andrew went to a shooting range in New Jersey! What, you say? I know. Me too. Apparently one of the police consultants from Blue Bloods invited them out to New Jersey to shoot guns and they simply couldn't resist. I'm as puzzled as the next guy. What can I say?

Andrew and John pretending to be cops. Oy!

So... after that escapade... We began the slow going process of dry-walling the exposed beams in the living room. This shouldn't have been so difficult, but first John had to jigger around the existing electrical boxes to get everything back in place since we had up-ended everything when we took down the wall. He did an A+ awesome job, and when we turned the power back on, EVERYTHING WORKED- THE FIRST TIME! (If you've ever danced with electrical work, you know this is no small feat...)

The living room walls- before. (Note the hole in the floor...)

John, working feverishly on the electrical stuff. Success is around the corner!

 Meanwhile, I was meticulously cutting each piece of drywall to fit around the window opening, outlet covers and switch plates, which is a time consuming but rewarding job. Every time you finish a piece, you get to see a real tangible state of change, which almost makes up for the painful calluses you get from using an exacto knife for 10 straight hours. We also filled in the hole in the floor that was left when we removed the wall. This is a small change, but man- what a difference! It was only half an inch deep and about seven feet long, but really, you'd be surprised how often you can trip on a hole 1/2" deep.

John, playing coy.

Me, wondering what I've gotten myself in to.

 Tonight, we're going to begin the spackling, taping, and corner beading. This is going to be an ugly process. Prepare to see many photographs of us looking like we've been dunked in a bucket of "flour". (Colombian drug lords gone wild!) That's how white and powdery this is going to get.

 

*Look how nicely the light passes through the little window and casts beautiful shadows onto the wall!

Props to John for the particularly savvy photos too.

Here goes!

Renovate Brooklyn! Day Eight: Snail's Pace.

Things are plugging slowly forward here in Brooklyn. We're starting to tackle the finishing details of the living room/ office area, and began that process on Thursday night by installing this cool long window into the little wall between the two spaces. (See the bottom photo for the finished product.)

I happened to have this long, narrow window already, which was found on the streets of Williamsburg months ago and when we started debating about how to treat the little wall, it became the perfect solution.

Originally, I was sure I wanted to put drywall over the existing beams to create a little 18" wall from floor to ceiling. I liked the idea of something that gave a definition of space in between the living room area and office area, plus Fernando the contractor said those beams really should stay, so that was also a compelling argument.

Before we started the time consuming process of dry-walling the wall, John and I thought we'd do a little compare and contrast.

John came up with the cool idea that we could use one of those awesome (awe-some) italian church doors to close up the beams instead of drywall. This would be considerably easier and would also add a little architectural salvage element to the space.

At our left, he is holding one of the church doors up for our viewing pleasure. He is almost completely purple from the strain of holding it up, but sadly that was not captured in the photograph. But take my word for it-- very purple.

We realized almost as soon as he held up the door that not only did we not want the door there because it darkened the space so much, but it made me rethink the idea of having a solid wall there at all.


The wall blocked off the light from the living room area and obscured the sofa which had the odd effect of making the two spaces seem completely separate again. The absolute opposite of what we wanted to accomplish. Back to the drawing board...

We had actually already considered this window for the wall, but I was concerned that our apartment was starting to feel like a doily or a sieve with some many windows cut into the walls. But once we had seen the effect of the solid wall, I rethought this stance and we took another look at the window. Can you believe how perfectly it fits into that opening? Destiny I tell you! 

Unbelievably, this process took an entire evening, so this week was a bit of a wash. We have decided to stay in the city this weekend to work on the apartment, so that hopefully we can get a little more completed before the work week begins.

       Back in the saddle...

  
*A side note: As an additional incentive, I just received notice that The Mother Figure (yes, my mom) will be descending upon Williamsburg for President's Day weekend, so we've really got to pick up the pace or she will be sleeping in the guest room with a big green loveseat, two dining room chairs, an extra side chair, all of my office bookcases, and no real door of her own. No pressure.

Ps. The chairs!

A little side note, I did buy the vintage slipper chairs I saw yesterday on Craig's List. Here they are below, now at home in our living room. Not bad for $50.00 for the pair, right? And much better than the big green love-seat.

 

Progress abounds! 

Renovate Brooklyn! Day Seven: The Closet Show-Down.

I was trying to figure out how to load up that quintessential show down tune, from "The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly", but as we know, technology isn't my strong suit.

If you can't remember how it goes, you can click here :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hYV-JSjpyU&feature=related

Picture this: Clint Eastwood, scruffy beard, rolling bales of tumbleweed, facing off with his adversary. Each with gun on hip, ready to draw. This was John and me last night, as we faced off on the subject of the living room closet doors. Who knew closet doors could be such a hot topic?
 

We knew we had to do something about the closet doors in the living room, shown above in a surprisingly flattering light. They were grungy old sliding wood doors that didn't actually slide all that well, and were a surprisingly large presence in the room. My mom insisted that they made the whole apartment feel claustrophobic, and though I was pretty sure it was the entire city she found claustrophobic which probably had more to do with the nine million people living in such close proximity, she was convinced that the closet doors were the culprit. She wanted them out! (But the storage! The Sacred New York City storage! Was that to be forsaken?)

John wanted to tear them down and then move them into the other half of the room, and I was on the fence. I wasn't convinced there was a good enough reason to move them into the other room, but I wasn't ready to give up all of that storage without a fight. I mean look at all that space! Above the closet, inside the closets: a more organized person's dream come true. However for us, the loft area had become a place to throw stuff, which is neither organized or pretty. It had to go. 

We also had these incredible salvaged church doors to factor into the equation. I had acquired these doors, (shown above, pretending to be our closet doors) through a series of long stories, and now I had to figure out what to do with them. They weigh a ton-- I mean A TON- and originally came from a church in Rome that was being renovated. I thought they would be perfect for our new closet doors, but once we lined them all up in the living room, they just seemed so huge and present. The opposite of what you want for closet doors, just ask my mom.

So we compromised. Sort of. We decided to paint the existing doors to see if white would make them more discrete. If that doesn't do it, I have agreed to a mediated session to discuss the closet doors in greater depth.

What I looked like when John said he didn't think I should paint the closet doors.  He claims to have been joking. I was clearly perplexed.

It's already 11:00pm at this point. I'm having a gas.

Finished product! An improvement? Only my mom will be able to tell us for sure.

Renovate Brooklyn! Day Six: J'adore Craig's List!

This past weekend was a much needed respite from the Brooklyn renovation. We took a minute to shake the dust from our hair, chistle the lead paint from our eyes, and relax a little bit. John is an Olympic-relaxer. He has received numerous compliments and awards for his ability to relax like a pro. I am actually a terrible "relaxer" so I spent the weekend "relaxing" by trolling the local antique stores and thrift shops up in Port Jervis, and scouring Craig's List for unknown gems. I am hoping to discover a turkish Oushak rug that someone had foolishly posted on Craig's List for $50.00 instead of $5,000.00, but have decided not to hold my breath on that front.

                 

Above: Gorgeous Oushak Rug                 Above: Pretty Average IKEA Rug

I did, however, find a perfectly acceptable IKEA Jute Rug on Craig's List for $40.00, usually $100.00 in the store, which I thought was a perfect price, and would look just smashing in our new living room area. (This is probably the only time I will ever openly advocate for IKEA, so mark it down in the record book.) The rug that I initially laid down, shown in the previous posting, is actually perplexingly, irrevocably dirty, you just can't tell from a distance. In person, it definitely isn't a thing of beauty so I thought a replacement was in order.

Today I'm also going hunting for a pair of vintage arm chairs to replace the big green loveseat in the living room. It is a funny thing: we did so much last week and I was thrilled with how everything was coming together until I took our "after" photos. Suddenly I realized how off the furniture really looked. I mean, it was a huge improvement, but now it is a much better room with all of the wrong furniture. So the first thing I'm trying to find is a pair of chairs that are in better scale to the room. I found the chairs shown below on Craig's List and am going to visit the pair on the left today in between meetings on the UES. The other pair are located in Jersey, so that visit will have to wait for another day, but I am liking both. I will report back.

Tonight, we get back to work!
 

           

Renovate Brooklyn! Day Five: A little bit of cheating never hurt anyone...right?

So the entire premise of this blog is that all of the work happens from 8:00pm-midnight and all of the work is completed by us, the charming, hardworking couple. But yesterday, our blog had an affair, a dalliance, a little tryst with our wonderful friend and contractor extraordinaire, Fernando Honoré. Fernando is a contractor that I have worked with consistently for the past 4 years on all sorts of projects with my company, and when I told him what mischief we were up to, he kindly offered to lend a hand. As they say, always accept help when you're in over your head, so I keenly agreed. It didn't seem fair to ask Fernando to work within the confines of our 8:00pm-12:00am schedule, so I took a half-day and met Fernando in my living room yesterday morning (yes! I said morning!) Together, we ceremoniously took down the remaining wood studs that separated the old living room from the old guest room, though truth be told, Fernando did all of the work, and I ran around taking photos and picking up pieces of discarded wood and nails so the dog wouldn't step on them.

(F.Y.I. If you'd like to contact Fernando for your home renovation project, he comes highly recommended. He can be reached at: tpshon@aol.com )

Down went the first beam...

And then another beam went down and then another until there were none. Well almost none. Fernando kept two on the left side and two on the right side to err on the side of caution, and give extra support to the floor above ours. Rest assured, Fernando is also a licensed, insured contractor who knows his stuff. If he says it's safe, it is safe. This has created one larger, completely phenomenal space that is truly enormous by cramped-brooklyn-railroad-standards. If someone is keeping track of our to-do list, I think we can confidently tick this off!   

 We are over the moon!!! 

You'll be comforted to know that the work did not stop there, at the reasonable hour of noon. Oh no. I bid Fernando a very grateful good-bye, and once he was gone, I too went back to work. And then like little yuppie robots, John and I filed back into our apartment around 7:30, and began our renovation escapades once more. There was much to be addressed since Fernando's departure, all of the pieces of wood and molding that had been pulled down needed to be disposed of, the defunct gas-light pipe need to be removed, and the dangerous looking tangle of electrical housing needed to be assessed as well. But the best part- we had to figure out how to arrange the room now that the wall was gone! The icing on the doing-lots-of-work-late-at-night cake!  

It occurred to me that readers might be curious about what we have for dinner before we get underway each evening. Nary a McDonald's Big-Mac crosses these lips, you should know. Last night we had a delicious dinner of Lentille du Puys Salade (yes, lentil salad) and a lovely spread of cheeses purchased from the over-priced and inconsistently friendly/angry Bedford Cheese Shop in Williamsburg. The recipe we use for the lentils is from David Lebovitz and it is a truly miraculous thing. So easy, so tasty, so not McDonalds.

http://www.davidlebovitz.com/2006/11/cheap-caviar-1/

So, dinner behind us, we got cracking. I shimmied up the ladder and using a hack-saw, cut down the very defunct gas line. Then I whacked a couple of huge nails into the ceiling beam and lead the electrical housing above it so it came down near the wall, rather than hanging perilously in the center of the room, just begging for the dog to become entangled in the whole high-voltage nightmare. Meanwhile, John was (finally) saddled with the vacuum and then given the task of lugging the grotty wood down to the curb (last night was trash night so we hoped a couple of hunks of wood wouldn't be there long enough to set off the Dept. of Sanitation on some psychotic ticketing frenzy.) For the salvage enthusiasts out there, you'll be pleased to know that we have kept the big wooden studs and are hatching a plan to re-use them somewhere else in this project, so you don't have to drive over here to retrieve them from our trash, which didn't get picked up because apparently the city is still on emergency snow-removal. (Am I the only person who finds the snow piles far less unpleasant than the heaping, festering piles of refuse?)

Electrical housing and dead gas line dangle threateningly from the ceiling...

Then we started playing around with the furniture. This is really one of my favorite past times. Other people like tennis, canasta, internet-based fantasy worlds, golf, or needlepoint. Not me, I like dragging all of my furniture around until I can't remember where it started anymore. In an effort not to tick off our neighbor's downstairs, I used the dog's bed as a dolly and scooted my office cabinets all around the apartment. I was sure this was an act of pure genius, until John caught me in the act and assured me that it was not. 

Genius or idiot???

The end results may be temporary, but look fantastic so far. We haven't decided if the living room area should go closest to the kitchen and the office area be over near the bedrooms or vice-versa, but until the closets in the old living room come down, we've laid it out as shown below. It is such an enormous improvement from how the apartment functioned before. Next, to tackle those closets but that's for next week. Right now, we're off to the country for a little R & R. 

Looking at the living room area, facing the bedrooms.

Below- you can also see the office area, looking toward the kitchen.

  Have a great weekend! 

 Love, 

John & Christina

Renovate Brooklyn! Day Four: The Parents Come for a Visit!

It was meant to be an early night, in the construction sense of the word, since John's parents, Michael and Sally, were coming to Brooklyn for dinner (...to celebrate John's 29th birthday for those who haven't yet wished him a Happy Birthday...) The plan was to make a little more headway and then clean like billio so we didn't have to provide them with face-masks because of all of the dirt and dust. Plus the house was a horrifying mess with the contents of every room spread every which-way, and you simply can't let the in-laws see you living like that, can you? 

 

 

Yes, that is a dresser on top of a bed, under a large pile of god-knows-what. 

And yes, that is Joseph, from a light-up Nativity Scene. Good to have in the

case of emergency.

Can you imagine coming home to this every evening? It's great.

But before we started cleaning, there was one more drastic change that I wanted to make-- cutting a window into the wall between our bedroom and the new living room/office, which would allow more natural light to pass from the street windows into the living room. There was already a funny little nook in the bedroom that looked as though someone had closed up an existing door with a sheet of dry-wall, so this wasn't going to be a difficult process. In fact, it was so simple that the door bell rang, and by the time I got back, John had already cut out the hole for the window. Whoa! That's fast.

 

Preparing to cut the new window...

Still very dusty...

 Now granted, this is a little rigged because I waited until this morning to take my "After" photo to get the full affect of the morning sun bursting through the windows, but even though I cheated a little, you have to admit- it looks pretty awesome. We still have to frame it out with a panel of drywall below the glass and then add moldings so it looks more like a window and less like the door it is, but all in all, we were quite pleased with ourselves for whipping through this quick but significant accomplishment. And then the cleaning began... and went on and on...

Looking back at these photos, I am realizing that maybe I was the only one cleaning, and John just did a thorough job of documenting the process. Thanks John. 

 

I even look a little suspicious already...

 

 

And like that, everything was tidied up just in the nick of time, and Michael and Sally came over and were wowed, and then we left, and had the most delicious dinner at one of our favorite local spots, Marlow & Sons, and the kooky waitresses came and they were so enthusiastic and all the food was "coming with something obscure" and life was good! 

Until tomorrow!