Antiquing

This weekend we were in north-east PA to meet our newborn niece (who is super cute). There’s an antiques / flea market in the Poconos that we always drive past, so while we were up there we decided to check it out.

We found this lovely versatile silver plated covered dish with a pyrex insert from the 50′s (?) which I (successfully) negotiated with the lady for. (Negotiating on small $ items is good practice for the bigger $ items)

It happened to help my negotiating case that it was extremely tarnished looking at the time. We happened to have silver polish at home and I knew how easy it is to use. Win:

Anyway, it inspired a semi – reorganization of our upper cabinets:

I’ll let you decide if this is the before or after:

Cover It Up!

So tonight it was finally time to close in the 2nd floor air handler. Here the opening is prep’ed for the hinges.

To improve acoustics we attached a thick felt carpet pad, that also had a rubber backing, to the inside of the enclosure door. Felt is great at absorbing sound energy, and the change of densities between the felt, rubber, and wood door also help reduce sound transfer. I knew what kind of door backing we wanted and it turned out a carpet pad was the least expensive way to buy bulk felt.

The door of course will work in concert with the rest of the enclosure which is lined with batt insulation. We want this to be a pleasant bedroom so minimizing HVAC noise is critical.

Here the door is finally hung. It hinges up for service access and will have a support member similar to a car hood to hold it open.

All done, including latches at the corners, and all covered up!

Kelly also got some painting done tonight on the doors while I fussed with the above door installation.

We are slooooowly getting back into renovating and finishing the house. : )

Charette

Tonight we spent some quality time at the table working on half a dozen or so new stained glass window ideas.

Gaining inspiration from some of the stained glass books lent to us:

We each worked on a ton of designs, trying everything that came to mind- floral Victorian to Greek inspired to heady transcendentalism to a map of the world; in architect speak it was a whole lot of thumbnail concept sketches.

And, to top it off, Rob did an architectural analytique of our house:

And on that lovely note, it was time to retire the pens for the evening. Next up, considering colors!

Splash!

Today we jumped back into the shallow end of the renovation crazy pool, by doing a little organizing, and painting.

Rob took on the little bedroom window – I had painted the trim weeks ago but it had been too cold to paint the window:

Luckily the new sashes are of the tilt in/ lift out variety so it made the job a little easier. One of the sashes:

Back in after two coats. Blue tape = touch up areas.

Meanwhile I was busy filling some trim and painting the final coats on the bedroom and bathroom doors, to ready them for hardware :

Hopefully this will be the beginning of the end of the 2nd floor {bedroom/ closet/ hall/ bathroom} work!

Sleep Searching

There’s a ~52″x75″ item needed to make our guest room functional… A mattress:

We’ve never been mattress shopping before, and with all the varieties available and stereotypes for mattress salespeople in mind, we started by, you guessed it, researching. Then we decided to start our search at Macy’s Center City; if we had to escape we could run across the aisle to the kitchen department and hide. Fortunately that wasn’t necessary.

The salesman there was friendly, helpful, and by no means pushy. We tried out a few mattresses, narrowed it down, got pricing, delivery fees, and warranty info without any hassle. Whew. Can’t say I understood all the blah blah blah jargon though. Here’s one with titanium:

We also checked out the South Philly Ikea, who has a 25 yr warranty, lower delivery fees (with pickup as an option), but a more chaotic free-for-all showroom. The salespeople didn’t even glance our way until we approached them.

Having some fixed criteria was helpful in our case (max height, spring vs latex, plush vs firm, etc). Since we’re using an antique frame & a guest room budget, we knew what we wanted (12″ high max, spring, firm, no boxspring) but still had plenty of options and the whole experience went pretty smoothly.

We narrowed it down to one super comfy model at each store that were practically identical. Final decision soon to come!

Thinking About Glass…

Soon enough we will have a finished living room and since generally speaking windows are nicer than plywooded openings we need to figure out what to do with this one.

We would like to do a victorian styled stained glass window that will recall what was once there.

We may even be able to use some of the pieces of glass that we found inside the walls from the original windows in this project.

Here is the living room bow window from the alley side. The curve itself will be a fun challenge.

So tonight I spent some time looking at books and sketching ideas.

We are going to come up with a few more ideas and then pick one or two designs to further develop.

What do you think?

The Digital Age

Meet the newest addition to Madison Square, Mr. Dyson Digital Slim:

Our old upright bagless vacuum (I say old but really only ~4 yrs old) was a gift and while it was fabulous for a while it no longer worked. We were using our shop vac as a temporary solution but now that two floors of the house are “done” to a degree, it was high time to step it up and stop schlepping a shop vac to the third floor! -Enter hours and hours of research here.-

Slim is pretty sweet because it comes with a variety of cleaning appendages you can clip onto the main vacuum body, and, it’s cordless. It has a head with a rotating brush, which can be attached directly to the vacuum or the extension tube, which makes it perfect for “regular” style cleaning:

At first I thought it felt a bit heavy for one handed cleaning until I went to lift the March issue of Vanity Fair… It’s a tie:

One of the main reasons we went with this model was the ability to clean our three sets of steep wood stairs without the hassle of a cord or dragging a clunky vacuum up the steps. Seeing as I have unresolved stair issues, anything that makes stair traversing/cleaning easier gets a gold star in my book.

So far so good, although we do wish the battery lasted longer than 15 minutes! Once we start using it on a regular basis we may decide to get a second battery. It seems perfect for those quick cleanup jobs in the kitchen or hall, and does a great job on our area rugs. And window surround:

Happy Valentines Day!