We got an early start yesterday and drove down to Paramus to pick up our Elfa shelving from the Container Store. We got there within 10 minutes of the store opening, which was wise — if you get there in the middle of the day on the weekend, the wait time for all things Elfa can be as much as 2 hours! As it was, we were in and out in 15 minutes.

After the obligatory IKEA side trip (I don’t think it’s possible to go to Paramus and not go there, even if you don’t need anything — of course, 5 steps into the Marketplace, you find a dozen things you suddenly need after all, which is why I have about 900 mugs in my kitchen), we did a quick Trader Joe’s run, followed by the usual gas fillup (gas is a bit cheaper in NJ than NY). As we were leaving the gas station, we saw a sign for a garage sale off of the main road. We followed the arrows through a Paramus suburb (which was nicer than I’d have thought it would be, mostly early-1900’s kit homes) and found the sale. It was the kind of garage sale I remember there being 10-15 years ago, before everyone sold all of their good old stuff on eBay.

I found an apron made of really lovely fabric that I’ll most likely salvage for another use (bag? pillows? wee curtain?), a pretty white enamelware pouring cup, a resuable Old Dutch shaker (never used, product literature from 1948 tucked inside) that I’ll use for baking soda for cleaning, a White Owl cigar box, and a great old storage trunk made out of old fruit crates with a beadboard lid. All this for $20! I love garage sales. (Another photo here.)

I couldn’t stand looking at that horrible bathroom photo anymore. Here’s some Bruno cuteness instead.

Weekend house checklist:
→ Pull up remaining floorboards in bathroom
→ Hang Elfa shelving in dining room
→ Refurbish nesting tables in living room
→ Hang coat pegs in hallway
→ Figure out what to do about living room curtains
→ Stain/poly threshold for kitchen

Yes, the renovation of the 2nd-floor bathroom is still going on, sort of. We kind of wound up taking this past week off from thinking about it, because last Friday our plumber came to assess the situation now that we’ve ripped up the floor, and the news was depressing. In essence:

1. We basically have to replace all of the plumbling, including the waste pipe. ($$$$)

That’s about it. Oh, and:

2. Because the waste pipe runs from the bathroom down through a chase in our kitchen pantry, we’re going to have to demo the entire pantry. All of the shelving was built in to surround the chase, and the chase itself appears to have been constructed out of scrap wood. There’s also a false ceiling in the pantry, which makes me nervous. Plus, we have to find a place to put all of the stuff that’s in our pantry while the renovation is going on, which could realistically stretch out past the new year.

3. Then we have to rebuild the pantry.

I’ve been feeling rather down since we got the news, but the upside is that I was able to let go of the beadboard. We’ll keep it in the attic, but I’m not going to continue killing myself trying to strip it. It’s costing a fortune, and the results are not good. So we’ll buy pine planks and put those up instead, since I don’t like the look of new beadboard. And it will look great. And maybe we’ll do white penny rounds on the floor, since we have to rip all of the boards up, anyway. We’ll also be able to reverse the direction of the tub so the plumbing is by the wall instead of cramping itself against the sink. So that’s good.

I’m trying to put aside the sadness I feel over losing the floor and walls, and focus on having a salvagable clawfoot tub, corner sink, and woodwork around the window and door. Plus, the plumbing will all be new, leak-free, and lead-free!

For you, you, you. I am so incredibly happy and proud for all you’ve accomplished this year. Best wishes for another good one, lovely.

Tonight I sat in the waiting room at Grand Central, waited for Evan, and read my new book.

Hmmm. Another contender in SofaQuest 2007? We went to the store and sat in it last night, and it is really super comfy. I worry about the quality of the leather, though (it seemed thin, but maybe it’s just really soft?), and I’m not in love with the legs. We have a dark floor, though, so it’s possible the legs would get lost visually anyway. Hmmm. I would definitely look good with the new chairs. I do love the stock color’s name, “Ambassador Camel”. Hee.

My work days are long and tiring right now. Thank goodness I have a huge window to get lost staring out of, and plants to tend to. I can’t keep indoor plants alive at home, but somehow I’m able to get them to thrive in a midtown Manhattan office building. Go figure…

We bought these lovely Danish chairs at Iron Fish across the river in Beacon over the weekend. The teak wood is really in perfect condition, with a nicer grain than any other chairs like this I’ve seen. The original cushions were intact, but the fabric was truly hideous (sort of a blue and gold brocade—that might sound okay, but trust me, it wasn’t), so my mother and I spent a few hours last night wrapping unbleached linen around them as a temporary measure until we can have new cushions properly made.

I tried on coats from Soïa & Kyo over the weekend. So perfect! The fit is amazing on all of them, there’s no way I can choose one. I want them all! These are my favorites:

This last one is the only WARM, insulated coat I have ever tried on that didn’t make me look like I’m wearing a sleeping bag. Standing/shivering on the train platform by the river in the middle of winter always makes me long for a sensible, long coat like that (rather than the cute, cheap wool coats I inevitably wind up buying instead).

This collection of mostly white photos on Flickr is truly inspirational.

Thanks to Holly for putting this together!

My wishlist is always longer than it really needs to be, but these are the top items I’d really like to have right now:

1. A new sofa. We’ve been dragging around an IKEA sectional for 5 moves now, and it’s shot. The shape of it is also all wrong for the long, narrow living room in our house. I want the new sofa to be upholstered (or slipcovered) in linen, well-built, leggy, and comfortable. (contender 1, contender 2)

2. A new digital camera. Mine is just too heavy to take with me all the time, and lately it hasn’t been focusing very well. I hate researching these kinds of things, though.

3. Good boots. Something than can take me through fall, winter, and spring, and that will go with everything. (contender 1, contender 2)

I’d also really like to get a good night’s sleep, but I won’t officially put that on my wish list. I’d rather be run-down, haggard and dead tired on a fab new sofa than be refreshed and lying (uncomfortably) on our current one. Boo.

p.s. Also, Swedish pigs at happysilly. Perfect! (via Smosch)

All at once, the purple aster in the front garden is in bloom! Fall is definitely coming. The days are already getting shorter, and I need a coat when I leave the house in the morning.

My new favorite site to start the day is Simply Breakfast.

When painting walls, my gut usually tells me that everything in my living space should be white. I love white, it’s my favorite color (along with black, gray, green, yellow, red, pink, blue, etc.), and it makes me feel peaceful and happy. We spent days testing paint colors on the walls trying to pick out the perfect whites for our house (we settled on Benjamin Moore’s matte Moonlight White for the walls, and satin Simply White for the trim), and a year later I still gaze in awe at how right these whites are for this house.

And yet, we somehow decided to paint the entire front hallway (and the stairwell! and the upstairs hallway, too! and the ceiling!) two shades of purple. I don’t remember the exact color names, but “Lilac Nightmare” may have been one of them. HUGE MISTAKE. Yeah, no kidding. We lived with it in agony for a full year, thinking we’d learn to love it. That never happened, so we devoted three full days last week to painting over it all…with our perfect whites. Ahhhh.

I made a little progress with the beadboard last night. I’m going to focus my energies exclusively on getting the mastic off a little at a time, and leave the paint for later (removing it all at once is just getting way too messy). At the rate it’s going, it looks like it will take 4-6 applications of Peel-Away 7 to get it all off. I can really only work on about 1/6 of the bathroom wall at a time, so that comes out to…uh…a lot of weeks of working on the beadboard.

I really don’t want to put up new beadboard, because it will look NEW BEADBOARD. I’m not into “fake old” things. I either like things that are fresh and modern in style, or that are truly old and honest in their design. Things like pressed sheets of embossed beadboard style paneling nearly give me hives, as do faux-Victorian faucets (which tend to look more like American Colonial, honestly). I don’t want my bathroom to look newly renovated. I don’t want it to look like a Home Depot showroom (or a Duravit showroom, for that matter).

Here is what I do want. I especially adore the Starck Axor faucet combined with the clawfoot and wood floor! Much more pleasing than something fake-old, yeah?

All photos from LivingEtc

p.s. Hi Anh-Minh!

The Citristrip is not working. The Peel-Away 7 is not working.

The paint is gone, but after three applications of the above products, the brown mastic (it’s 1/4″ thick, and rock hard) just is not budging. I honestly do not know what else to try.

Maybe it’s time to consider replacing the beadboard. Sigh…

So, um, I really hope this is one of those photos I’m going to look back on in a few years and have a good laugh at how revolting my beautiful bathroom used to be back in 2007:

Yeah. Today we pulled off the rest of the masonite paneling from the walls, revealing (of course) more of that rock-hard mastic that was smeared all over the beautiful old beadboard wainscotting during a previous owner’s awful attempt at renovation.

After much struggling with rusted screws, we also managed to pull up the plywood subfloor. The original floorboards were rotted pretty badly around the drains and had to go. At this point, it looks like we’ll either be trying to do a patch to match the remaining, intact boards (which are 7/8″ thick and apparently not something you can just pick up at Lumber Liquidators), or we’ll just have to replace ALL of the flooring with new pine boards. Either way, the finished floor will mostly likely be painted wood.

Tomorrow’s plan is to try experimenting with both Peel-Away 7 and Citristrip to see if that beadboard can be salvaged. Fingers crossed.

Bruno has had a very stressful week, defending us from the likes of plumbers, junk haulers, and oil tank replacers. A tee shirt helped to calm him down a little (seriously, it really helps), but the little guy just wants all of these strange guys to leave so he can lie on the sofa and chew his stuffed lamb/camel (Lamel) in peace. Love.

Yesterday our plumber came to disconnect the clawfoot tub and corner sink and move them to the back room so we can get started on renovating the bathroom. The beadboard needs to be stripped, the walls need to be replastered, the floor has to come up, and most likely all of the plumbing under the floor will need to be replaced. Ohhh.

So now the bathroom looks like this:

Fortunately, we have a second bathroom downstairs to use while we work (and work and work) on that mess!