My mother and I spent a couple of hours clearing out all of the remaining weeds and grass in the garden. I feel so inspired! She also helped me to come up with a pretty great new design for the landscaping, and I’m going to try to break it down into stages so we can move forward with the whole thing at a manageable pace.

Oh! And I think we have a new tile guy, which is very exiting. Evan and B spent the weekend rebuilding the subfloor (and the sub-subfloor) in the bathroom, so things are moving right along…

I really love this rug. (I can’t wait until Fritz is 100% with the housebreaking so we can have rugs again.)

Even though we’ve driven by Hudson Valley Office Furniture in Newburgh dozens and dozens of times since we moved here, we never took the time to go in until last week. What an amazing place! They bill themselves as being a supplier of “nearly new” office furniture, but as it turns out, a good portion of their inventory is from the ’60s and ’70s. I started wishing I needed a Steelcase desk, because they had a million of them.

We spotted this Knoll/Saarinen tulip-style knockoff inverted on top of a pile of cabinets. The top is wood-grain laminate and the sides are peeling, but it looks easy to remove. We figured we’d bring it home and keep an eye out for a round marble remnant to replace it with. Not 5 minutes later, though, we found a piece of black marble in EXACTLY the right size (!) just hanging next to some coffee tables. Sold! (At a “just get it out of here” price, of course.)

I still have to unscrew the old top and get rid of it. It’ll look great when that’s done. The marble is heavy enough that I don’t think I’ll need to do much more than put a little Velcro underneath to get it to stay in place on the base.

I’m pretty excited about the shiny metal base, and the scratches don’t bother me at all. We’re planning to use this table outside, which I’d probably hesitate to do if it were the real thing (platinum base + black marble top = $759, or about 20x what we paid for ours).

Hooray for scavenging!

Yes, really! The roughing-in work is FINALLY done on the upstairs bathroom. Everything incoming and outgoing has been replaced, so even though this photo doesn’t look beautiful, this is serious progress. This week we’ll do some work to reinforce the joists, then next week (hopefully) the tile guy will come to put a new subfloor and our marble hexagons in place.

The clawfoot tub has also been flipped over (no easy feat, the plumbers did it for us!) so I can get started on getting the outside of it repainted before it’s time to have it put back in the bathroom. Frankly, it’s been in the “guest bedroom” (HA) for so long now that it will be weird to have it gone. And, you know, filled with water instead of plaster dust.

Every now and then IKEA comes along with a textile design that just knocks me out. Such is the case with the new blanket from the SOMMAR range, designed by Maria Vinka. I love this pattern! I bought a bag made from it, too. Cute, cute, cute.

I know, all I have to talk about right now is FRITZ, FRITZ, FRITZ. It’s all-consuming! Things are going well. Bruno has left the “if I ignore him, maybe he’ll just disappear” stage, and has entered the “I’ll play with him, but he can’t sleep next to me” stage. It’s so fun to watch them play! Bruno chases Fritz, Fritz zooms around the house like a maniac, Fritz does a war dance in front of Bruno, Bruno chases Fritz, Fritz falls asleep, Bruno falls asleep (in a separate bed, of course), etc. It’s great. Fritz is also starting to get the hang of the whole housebreaking thing, so it’s possible our living room rug could make a reappearance as early as next week.

Fritz looooooves to chew! He’s also a fan of his new bed from Otis and Claude (seen here with a LUDDE sheepskin wrapped around the cushion). I dream of the day when he and Bruno are curled up in it together!

Meanwhile…
→ the plumbers are on their fourth day of work (!), and the roughing-in still isn’t done
→ the quote came in on our garden plan from the landscaper, and it is INSANE
→ a tree guy is coming to remove the offending mulberry tree today (for a very reasonable price)
→ maybe we can build a fence ourselves after all…

My friend Janet keeps complaining about having to see that tile photo day after day, so I figure I had better put something new here!

That’s worth it, right? It’s my new Orla Kiely bag, and it holds everything and looks great. It was one of those purchases I just had to hold close my eyes, hold my breath, and say “GO!” for, but I have no regrets. Happy, pretty. (I want this one, too!)

Oh, and guess what? Our plumbing work in the bathroom is officially starting THIS FRIDAY! Finally. We also have a landscaper coming that day to assess our yard and figure out how much it would cost to demolish our back porch, put up a new fence, take down a tree, and remake Carin Goldberg’s garden. I have a feeling he’s going to see that photo and ask us why we want a prison yard behind our house!

p.s. It wasn’t freezing cold today! I wore ballet slippers (no socks!) and didn’t suffer. Is spring really coming this time?

The marble hexagon tiles for our bathroom are sitting in our hallway, waiting patiently for a floor to be installed in the bathroom so they can become a permanent part of the house. Before that can happen, though, we need our plumbing work to be done! Plumber #3’s estimate arrived yesterday, and while it’s higher than we were hoping or expecting, we have full confidence that this guy will (a) SHOW UP AND DO THE WORK, and (b) do a great job. Right? Right! The extra money is worth having to go through all of this for a 4th time, believe me.

By the way, the last time I mentioned the marble hexagons, someone asked for my source—we bought ours at Fuda Tile.

I’ve been trying to choose just the right color for the outside of the clawfoot tub, and I think the center color here (Benjamin Moore “Blushing Red”) might be the winner. It’s just the right amount of pink without being a full-on magenta.

Finding the right light fixture for the ceiling is proving to be tricky. The scale is difficult since our ceilings are high, but the room is very small. It’s going to be the sole light source in the room (except for an alley-facing window), too. Decisions! I know I don’t want anything fake-antiquey (no Restoration Hardware, etc.). I’ve been thinking about the Kartell Gé pendant, possibly in clear or blue, but I’m not sure I’m love with it.

Yesterday we brought home a pair of Bertoia side chairs to use in the back garden. They weren’t a true scavenged find as they are new, but I’m counting them as such since they were reduced in price by more than 75%. Yes!! They both have a wee bit of rust staining around some of the welds—barely noticeable, really—but since we’ll be using them outside anyway, it doesn’t matter.

Honestly, when a single wire chair retails for $421, the only way it’s coming home with me is if it’s DRASTICALLY discounted or if I find it in the garbage. I am forever grateful for the existence of the DWR Annex!

You wouldn’t know it from reading my posts, but there’s 500 SF garden at the back of this house. Sadly, we haven’t done anything with it other than clean up the trash, remove a chain link dog pen (thanks, Adam!), and level the ground a bit. Before anything is planted, it desperately needs a tall fence to hide the neighbors’ yards. There’s also a rather annoying mulberry tree that we want to have removed, as the copious amounts of squishy berries it drops all over the place during summer render the yard virtually unusable.

It’s an ugly little patch of land right now, but you’ll see—these chairs are just the beginning! It’ll be looking like Carin Goldberg’s garden in no time.

When we bought our house, we took off all of the doors inside to make it easier to refinish them and strip the paint off of the hardware. Two years later, we are still without 90% of our doors.

Yesterday I started in on the refurbishing process of the door pictured above, which belongs on the closet in the bedroom. Yes, the bottom two panels are missing, and were replaced with window screening. A couple of our other doors (one other closet, as well as the bedroom door leading to the hallway) have this same “feature”. I will, of course, be getting rid of the screening and repairing the doors with new panels of wood.

Can anyone explain this to me? WHY would someone put screening on an interior door? For ventilation? What on Earth would they be keeping in a closet that would need to breathe?!

As a side note, today is St. Patrick’s Day, which translates to a morning train full of drunken college students with shamrocks painted on their faces, and, because I work in midtown, the constant sound of the stupid parade going past my office building. I hate parades. I also loathe public drunkenness. And, you know, green bagels.

PHEW. Is it really March 9th already?! I don’t know what happened to the last two months, but I am totally exhausted. The past couple of weeks have been pretty ridiculously cruddy (family members in the hospital, jury duty, Evan away on a business trip, train outages, computer nightmares, work nightmares, conspicuously absent plumbers, etc.), and this weekend was just barely an improvement…and now it’s time to go back to work tomorrow. I need time off! I’m so tired and so behind on everything, which is the worst feeling.

In happy, non-whiny news, I have a new computer!!! YAYYYYY!!! We bought a 20″ iMac on Saturday, and then spent the next 24 hours struggling with wireless configurations. Ultimately, we’ve opted to return the problem-ridden Time Capsule we bought, and go back to our trusty AirPort Extreme. (Never, ever buy the first generation of anything Apple makes the first week it’s on the market. Never!)

It was well beyond time to replace the old Graphite iMac, which had been with me since 1999 (!!), and it’s extra super nice to have a second computer to accompany our MacBook, which is primarily sofa-bound. I do most of my heavy duty design stuff at work on a fancy Mac Pro machine, but an iMac suits my needs very well at home. I’m excited. The monitor feels so big!

I’m really, really tired, and it’s going to be another long week. Sleep-sleep-sleep-sleep-time.

p.s. Here’s Bruno on his birthday!

I’m going on day 5 of not having any internet access at home, and it’s not getting any more fun. We’re going to pick up the new modem tomorrow, and hopefully that will do the trick. I’m sort of afraid to check my inbox at this point…it’s going to be a busy Sunday of catching up.

We’ve been making a little progress on the bathroom while we wait for our plumber to show up (don’t get me started on that subject, ugh), which is very encouraging. Evan pried off all of the original beadboard, which was unsalvageable, unfortunately, and we started nailing up the new pine planks in its place. Everything will be painted white, of course—we’re not going for a ski lodge theme in the bathroom!

I also did a little repair work to a rotted corner of the window sash in the bathroom, which was very satisfying. This poor window (which actually isn’t as bad as some of the other ones) still needs a lot more work, but it felt great to carve out all of the rotted wood and patch up the whole corner. I can’t wait to see it totally repaired and repainted. This is the first window that I’ve done any work on, and it’s very encouraging even to see this minor improvement. (Only 14 more windows to go!)

Our tile has arrived, too! I don’t have a photo yet, but we’re using white/gray marble hexagons with gray grout. Like the rest of the house, the walls and trim will be white. If I don’t lose my nerve, the outside of the clawfoot tub will be painted a rich, pinky red.

This might sound kind of goofy (I’m pretty sure once you’ve used the word “goofy” to describe something, you’re really only describing yourself), but I actually deliberated over whether to shoot around my television set when I was taking photos for the AT tour.

Over the years that I’ve been reading interior decor/home magazines, I’ve noticed that television sets are conspicuously missing from the ones I am drawn to the most. There’s something a bit gauche about showing a TV, apparently, perhaps because the appearance of one is an automatic indicator that the owner of the house does not, in fact, spend all of their free time either reading the The New Yorker, listening to NPR, or teaching their kids about classical music. I suppose there’s a part of me that wishes I didn’t watch TV, and that I spent more of my time at home, say, reading. Or scraping paint off of the radiators.

Anything but watching Rock of Love and Celebrity Rehab (see, I’m not taking the easy road here and just name-checking Project Runway, even though I watch that, too—go, Christian!). I don’t know, maybe I’m still recovering from a non-TV-intensive childhood (We played outside with little animals out of pine cones and sticks!). Or maybe I just like crappy reality TV. Either way, watching television in the evenings is a reality for me, and I’m not going to pretend that I only own a small set that stays hidden in a closet somewhere unless we’re watching a rented movie (foreign, of course—with subtitles).

Honestly, it’s only a matter of time before Bret Michaels is a guest on Fresh Air with Terry Gross, right? High and low culture usually wind up crossing paths eventually, anyway.

So the TV stays, and I’m not going to hide it. Our Sharp LCD gets to sit right there in the living room (yes, directly opposite the sofa, imagine that!), next to the fireplace, and I’m not going to put it behind a door or a curtain. I’d still know it’s there, and I have a feeling it would be even worse having to come to terms with how often I’d be opening that door or pulling back the curtain. At least we only have one TV, and we rarely watch it on the weekends.

And I don’t watch Tyra, because she is crazy.

A tour of my house is on Apartment Therapy today, along with an interview and a long list of resources. You can see all of the new photos here, most of them new.

I’ve added a special I Love Newburgh category to the links.

p.s. I love love love Marilyn Neuhart’s dolls.

Yesterday I made pecan sandies using this recipe. They were delicious and totally devoured by us and by our flower-bringing lunch guests. My only caution when making this recipe is to be careful if you’re grinding your pecans in the food processor—keep a close watch on them, as a moment too long and you’ve got pecan butter instead of pecan meal! (Of course, now we also have a little something special and unexpected to spread on toast, but it was fortunate that I had more pecans on-hand.)

I also made grilled vegetable sandwiches with gouda cheese and garlic mayonnaise, and a butternut squash soup with spinach and rice. Yum. The best part is that there are leftovers of everything (except the cookies!) for lunch today.

The new resident has taken up occupancy in the hallway. Doesn’t it look perfect next to Elisabeth’s amazing poster?

I’m looking forward to the long holiday weekend! Saturday will be very full: picking up the floor tiles for the bathroom (!!!), lunch with old friends, dinner with new friends. By Monday evening, I am determined to have curtains sewn for the living room. The fabric has been sitting around for months, but I’ve been procrastinating because I don’t feel like ironing. Isn’t that silly? I just hate ironing, especially huge pieces of fabric.

The dressing room as always been a little bit neglected. It feels empty, it needs life. I have a bit of buyer’s remorse over the glass doors on the wardrobes, but I think doing something dramatic and happy on the opposite wall will help. Wallpaper, perhaps?

A lot of warm puppy time, and a little peace and quiet when the cold set in.

Hooray for color!

p.s. I know, I know, my house is overrun with chairs.