Here is the (new) House

Doing it the Old Fashioned Way

This weekend instead of running around from store to store weighing the pros and cons of different materials, Eric and I took the time at home to go over our materials list for the guest house, map out our orders and put a rough timeline together for the project. Yes, I did this with Excel and Project as well as Chief Architect. Yes, you read that right - I am a total nerd. There are still some things up in the air but we are at a place now where we can start placing orders and moving forward – yay!

One sticking point we had was deciding on the form factor of some of the tiles – tiles we liked with interesting form factors (like other than square) were about three times the price of what we wanted to spend. We thought about cutting the tiles to the right shape but needed to weigh out the upfront costs against the time/energy it would take us to cut. Well Excel did quick work of that – we are going to take the time to cut as it's just a waste of money to order them in different shapes. Since we are going with mostly porcelain tiles for the ones that need cutting it shouldn't be too bad – sure it will add some overhead but it will save us a ton of money!

Then we found ourselves a bit limited with what we could do in Chief Architect in terms of customizing tile choices and form factors – only one way to fix that – graph paper and colored pencils! Eric wanted a fancy design but I was concerned with it being too busy with since the bathroom is not that big and we are using a lot of small being tiles. So he sketched it out here:

So I agreed that it's not too busy and the vanity doesn't take up too much of the space to render the mosaic useless - we are off to a good start.

Then I wanted to do the shower "water wall" (as I call it) with the multi-colored glass sticks from floor to ceiling flanked by brick pattern 12x6 cut beige tiles also vertical. Eric was concerned this would be too busy and wanted the 6x12s to align vertically. I thought that might look weird so I sketched it out – color and all!

Left side is MUCH better and he agreed after seeing on paper. Man, my colored pencils do not do that tile justice but its close enough.

So then we went to Home Depot to order our kitchen cabinets (more on that later!) and to special order the dark hex tiles for the shower pan. Unfortunately we only needed 13 tiles and they come 10 to a case so we needed to order two and will have a lot of extra. Eric wanted to use a beige and green glass tile for the border around the mosaic that I was never really 100% jazzed about. But now presented with lots of extra hex tile I think we'll just use 3" strips of the hex as a border in the floor to break up the beige and add some more fun shapes.

Then I got a little crazy, getting images of the tiles from the web and photo-shopping the crap outta them to make it all work. I present to you the bird's eye view of our soon-to-be bathroom floor

Cool! And just for good measure this is what the tile wainscot subway tile wall with chair rail will sort of look like:

The tiles are a bit lighter in real life but this is pretty close. Overall I'm impressed with restraint – normally I don't do beige. But this should be a very timeless bathroom that appeals to many people's tastes. We plan on pulling in the blue from the tile in the wall color (a lighter more muted blue) as well as with tiles and accessories. Don't want too much beige overload!

A Farewell to Furniture – Guest House Destruction Prep

The hammer is about to fall on our guest house which should make for some massive destructions photos heading your way soon – rock! But before we can tear it all up we need to make room for the new awesomeness heading our way shortly. This meant giving away some of the furniture currently occupying the grannie pad – see ya, old crappy stuff! Awesomely enough the Salvation Army out here was super easy to book (online!) with and picked it all up with no hassle – this is in contrast to the literally dozens of times I tried to get SA out to our house in Brooklyn and what an epic production that turned out to be. Life really is easier out here – glad we moved!

So what's going, first off the icky southwestern sofa that the last owners – yes you served your purpose by giving our guests a place to sit but other than I never was a fan…especially with the yellow walls and the awful carpet…later!

Rolled up front of it is the rug from our living room which I just decided had seen better days and wanted to get rid of. Here it in on our house, happier times for the rug, but not so much for us…

Now I loved this rug and so did almost everyone who saw it, it had a nice long life and saw much fun and action in Brooklyn – it was also great because it was one of those awesome examples when you buy something online and think "eh, not sure if I will like it but it's so cheap who cares!" and it actually turns out being much nicer than you ever expected. Well rug, happy travels…I hope you make someone with a jewel toned palette out there very happy.

Harkening back even further, all the way to the 2001 time frame I've given up my old bistro table and bar stools. I got these back when I was living in my alcove studio apartment on 24^th street in Manhattan – can't seem to find any photos of it but rest assured it lived there for several years then moved with me to Chelsea in my temp apartment in 2004 and then to Brooklyn later in 2004 where it resided on the 2^nd floor while I lived in the rental as we did our renovation downstairs. Much later, it lived in our sunroom and was our table when we wanted dinner out there…as seen with cats who adored that sunroom almost as much as we loathed it!

Here it is in its final resting place in the guest house – the set is neither the greatest form factor for our many…um…slightly older guests nor a style we are remotely going for anymore. We had a long, happy life together table and chairs – hoping you find a hip new home!

We also gave away a couple of old tables the old owners left for us so now the living room/kitchen space is almost all cleared out (except for tools and the flat screen which we will pack up and protect shortly) and thus ready to break apart in the near future! Bonus – here's a look at our new bathroom vanity and the crème marble countertop – yay not straight outta the 80's like the current one! Looking forward to it…

“Deer Resistant” – My new favorite thing to put in air quotes

It only took a few months of living in Sonoma County to go from "yay pretty deer!" to "argh, damn you *@?!#%$ deer!" This is because deer are insatiable, they simply eat anything that is not nailed down, more specifically any plant/flower/tree we try to get going around these parts to tame our wild and sporadic landscape. Not only do they eat them, they practically eviscerate our efforts – pulling up all the roots and eating those as well in their psychotic deer rampages. They made quick work of all of our flowers as well as our lime tree – the lemon tree they got at too but we think we can salvage. The funny thing is that we specifically planted some things labeled as "deer resistant" to absolutely no avail. I think when they say "deer resistant" they mean, "Yeah well it's not the deer's favorite thing so they will probably eat this last but rest assured they will eat it" Not very encouraging.

So we were tired of staring at our 4 mauled wine barrels in the driveway and came up with a plan to find something that the deer would not eat. In fact, I'm hoping they try now – they might get a nice surprise!

Flanking both sides we planted these dwarf palm trees which are perfect for containers and should reach a mature height around 4 feet – perfect! And supposedly not very yummy for deer, let's hope!

But the middle barrels are what I truly hope they go for – {wrings hands and cackles evilly} The contents look unassuming from far, just like some pretty colorful flowers, but up close:

Yes a variety of colorful and texture succulents – drought tolerant and cold hardy – wish I could see it if/when a deer tries to take a bite out of one of these cactuses! We're going to see how they take root and grow – we might put some more in and they are supposed to be planted pretty close together. I love them! And I love the fact that the deer won't…