I’m feeling pretty pleased with the progress Evan and I were able to make in the garden this weekend. In a total of about 8 hours over the course of two days, we managed to construct two 8-foot mega-planters. That includes the time spent buying the wood and transporting it home! Total cost? About $100 total . . . for both planters. Fifty bucks a pop!

I took a few progress shots along the way just in case someone else wants to make a mega-planter or two. The whole project was super-easy. Seriously. Anyone with a drill and a jigsaw can do this.

After cutting all of our wood to size (we used 1×6 planks that were already 8 feet long, so we really just had to cut the side pieces down to 18″, and cut up a few 2×2s to create the support posts), we got to painting. I like to use Cabot Solid-Color Acrylic Stain for outdoor projects. It has the look of a flat, solid paint, but won’t chip or peel like paint does. The stain is very forgiving and easy to apply, usually only requires one coat, and dries completely in less than an hour. It really does hide the grain (but not the texture!) completely, though, so you might want to use something translucent if you prefer a more “woody” look. Since we already have so much wood going on outside between the deck, the porch, and the fence, I really wanted something subdued. Black has a nice way of receding in gardens, too.

(By the way, one gallon of this stain goes REALLY far. We bought one can two years ago, and even after using it for a gazillion projects, the level has only dropped about two inches. I fully expect this can of stain to outlive us all.)

The assembly process was easy. Screw the posts to the end panels (we screwed through the back so the screws won’t be visible on the finished planter), screw the end panels to the front and back planks, screw on the center posts for extra support (this may not be necessary with smaller planters). We used exterior decking screws that won’t rust. For a finishing touch, we stapled mesh screening onto the bottom of the planter. With all the groundhog* action that’s been going on in our garden lately, I consider any small defense a good one.

*At last count, there are four groundhogs: Haggis, Patches, Scarface, and my arch-nemesis, Fatback.

The planters are in place! We spent a good amount of time leveling them and making sure they were sitting nicely together. We’re planning to throw in a couple of bolts to keep them in line with each other over time, too.

THE DIRT PILE IS GONE! It felt so good to shovel all of that excess dirt that’s been migrating all over the yard for the past couple of years into the planter, let me tell you. We’re going to fill the planters the rest of the way with nice, rich planting soil, of course, but it’s okay to put crummy dirt in the bottom. Ahhhh. Bye-bye, dirt pile! I won’t miss you.

I took a second-floor shot of the whole garden so you can see how much area the mega-planters take up. I’m not sure yet what we’re going to plant in there (possibly something tall and evergreen and bushy, mixed in with some brightly-colored flowering perennials), but it’s so exciting to have another piece of the garden plan DONE.

Speaking of not getting things done immediately . . .

This is the current state of our garden. If you take a look through the past couple of years of garden progress posts, you’ll see that this has been taking us FOR.EV.ER. and ever. The fact that this is our 5th summer in the house and we have yet to actually enjoy the backyard is just depressing. We had really hoped to get it DONE this year, but the temperatures in New York have just been stiflingly hot and humid—it’s very difficult to get much done before exhaustion kicks in.

I think we’re kind of getting somewhere, though? Yeah, half of the garden is still just dirt (and it’s bad dirt, too), but the pavers are in, and we planted a border of dwarf mondo grass around the deck. The Japanese maple has gotten HUGE (look how tiny it was two years ago!) and the pachysandra has really filled in. I’m especially excited that we’ve started to bring gravel in (one bag at a time, carried through the basement) to cover the ugly asphalt.

This is the end goal, at least for now (Photoshopped, of course—thanks to Carin Goldberg’s garden!). Eventually we’d like to plant ground cover between the pavers, but for the time being, I’ll be fine just staving off weeds with a layer of mulch. Vegetables and herbs will be grown on raised planters on the porch—a concession to “our” omnipresent groundhog (we’ve named him Haggis).

I just really want to be able to sit out there and look at something other than a giant pile of dirt.

It’s been a while (three weeks, to be exact) since I posted an update on the status of the vestibule re-tiling project, and I don’t really have any excuses. Or rather, I have a lot of excuses, but I don’t have any good ones.

See that 6-inch gap between where the tile ends and the floor begins? That gap has turned me into a serious procrastinator. Sure, the tile is down. It’s even grouted! But the gap is there. So I can’t take pictures.

The tile is actually the same height as the subfloor (the water-stained boards running vertically), so I couldn’t go any further. Instead, I had to make the world’s largest threshold (42″x6″) out of an oak board. I stained it black, coated it with polyurethane, and slid it into place . . . but it looked funny. Or at least I thought it did. But a week later, it looked alright? And then a week after that, it started looking pretty good.

And then I started focusing on the wood floor. Is it really that scuffed and scratched?! I guess it is, but I never really noticed until the new tile and threshold went in. We can’t get the floor refinished, though, not right now. It’s too expensive and too messy and too disruptive. (Yes, we should have done it four years ago before we moved in. I know.) Can I really take photos of the tile with the neighboring floor look like that?

Should I retouch the wood in Photoshop? Speaking of Photoshop, should I just clone in a few more rows of tile and a less-gargantuan threshold? Hey, why even finish the tiling in the first place if I can just do it digitally?!

This, my friends, is my thought process when it comes to posting photos, and is the reason why I show so few progress shots. That said, are progress photos something you want to see? Is it helpful in some way to see pictures like this? Or is it just more fun to see the before and after (really after)?

…and looking the other way.

Our hallways are long and skinny. Our whole house is kind of skinny, actually—20 feet wide—typical for late-1800s row houses. We’ve managed to make this work in the downstairs entry hallway (that’s it in the first photo here) by balancing the staircase with an extra-long credenza that doesn’t interfere with passage to the dining room, but upstairs is a different story.

Here’s a floor plan to give you an idea of the space I’m working with (upstairs is on the right, and the new closet what’s behind the “attic door”—that’s the open door in the above photo). It’s really not wide enough for a shelf of any real dimension, much less furniture. There are doors all over the place. Someday we’d like to have a few light tubes installed, but for now it’s kinda dark, since there are no windows.

Clipper Street Residence, envelopeA+D

This is kind of the aspirational gold standard for me. Our house doesn’t have as many fancy details, but it is from the same time period and roughly the same Victorian style. I could see adding a chair rail (and maybe a picture rail, too) in our hallway, and hanging Julia Rothman’s beautiful “Pieces” wallpaper from Hygge & West (I am ashamed to say that I have been hoarding two rolls of it for about a year now—I’ve gotta use it at some point!).

From Livingetc

I keep coming back to this hallway, too. It’s pretty much the same size as ours, but it’s looks SO much more open. Part of that is because of the white floor (sigh) and the super-strength lighting (which I don’t think is natural, so it’s probably as dark as ours in reality), but also because we have the aforementioned closet down at the end where they have that little railing. Sometimes I think walls full of frames can look a little contrived, but this is really nicely done. I feel a little bit of vertigo coming on at the thought of having to rig up the necessary scaffolding in order to hang stuff that high up over the stairs. Yeesh.

When we’re not busy capturing stray animals, we’ve been staying occupied with our vestibule tiling project.

Evan did all of the demolition work, thankfully. I am terrible at demo—I’m not very strong, and I get overheated easily. (Okay, and I hate wearing goggles and face masks.) Once he had a system down (namely chiseling out the grout first, rather than just banging away on the tiles with a sledgehammer like they do on TV), the actual tile removal went more quickly than we thought it would.

The thinset underneath the tile was a different story, though. Evan spent hours upon hours over the course of two days scraping and chiseling and sweating in order to get it all off. Putting cement board over the thinset and tiling on top wasn’t an option, because we can’t put any additional height on the floor. The step/threshold at the front door is a huge hunk of slate, and it would be very sad to have it not line up right with the edge of the tile.

95% complete. You can see the grid lines pressed into the concrete from the original 1880s floor tile (long gone, sadly). This photo doesn’t show it well, but the concrete actually shows the relief of the logo embossed on the backs of the original tiles—American Encaustic Tiling Company. Neat, huh?

Next up . . . THE TILE!

Aside from installing a ceiling light fixture and cramming it full of stuff, the closet-to-be is now officially a CLOSET. What was once a filthy, unused, and unfinished space behind a door used solely for attic access is now a much-needed 18-square-foot storage space, and it’s pretty cute, too!

Once the plaster walls had been repaired, the electric work was done, and the ceiling was in place (THANK YOU, CLOSET FAIRY!!), I got to work on cleaning up the considerable mess that was the floor. As I mentioned, the existing floor was old linoleum, which I’d planned to leave in place and cover with FLOR tiles. However, I was pleased and surprised to discover that not only was the linoleum laid in a single sheet, but it was not attached to the floor in any way! No creepy glue, no scary asbestos paper. I was able to simply lift it and remove it in one piece. Excellent!

Underneath the lino was a plank subfloor (just like in my office). This subfloor runs through the entire house, of course, but with the exception of this closet and the office, it’s covered with finished, face-nailed strip flooring everywhere else. (If you’re curious about the finished floors, here’s a post about them!) The subfloor in the closet, of course, was never finished in any way, and was splintery, stained, and soft.

In other words, the floor was ripe for painting! Out came the sandpaper, the primer, and the floor paint, and I got to work.

Because we’re going to be storing some heavy stuff in here, we need to have a covering on the floor. I had ordered the aforementioned FLOR tiles before discovering that the lino could be easily removed, but when it arrived, I realized I’m not really a huge fan of the stuff. It’s a little too perfect for my taste. Happily, I remembered this rug, purchased last year on eBay for $3. I’d never found the right spot for it before, but it fits perfectly into the closet!

I apologize for the quality of the photos. It’s very tricky to get a decent shot in there . . .

I love the vestibule at our front door, but I do not love the tile on the floor. It’s cheap, it’s dirty, the color is awful, and it’s just way too big for the space. I have a strong dislike for large tiles in small spaces. We’ve been putting off this little job for years now, but I think we’re finally ready to do the demo work and start prepping the floor for new tile!

This is what we picked out. I’m not sure if there’s a name for this pattern—it’s almost a basket-weave, but not quite. It looks like marble, but it’s actually some sort of cultured material. I like that it looks old-ish, but not fakey old-ish. And it’s graphic. I like graphic. It’s also pretty inexpensive (Home Depot! In stock!), so we should be able to come in at around $200 for this entire project.

We’re planning to use a very dark gray or black grout. The display at HD used a cream-colored grout, which made the tile look sort of faux-Tuscan (which is decidedly not my thing). I’m excited. This is going to look great. The vestibule is the first thing you see walking into the house, so it should look great, right?

ETA: Here’s a close-up!

When we bought our fixer-upper of a house just over four years ago, we entered the renovation process with a mind for perfection. I’m the type of person who either does something perfectly or doesn’t do it at all (resulting, unfortunately, in a great number of things that I never try for fear of “not doing it right”), and Evan, while not quite as obsessive, does like to see things done right and done well, without corners cut.

I can remember thinking that we should strip the old paint (all 3-10 layers of it, depending on the room) off of the moldings before repainting them. I remember looking up historic masons who would do chemical analysis of our mortar before re-pointing our bricks. I remember wondering exactly where we would find horsehair to use when doing proper plaster restoration on our heavily water-damaged kitchen walls.

And then I realized that I did actually want to live in our house (and even enjoy it!) at some point and not just admire it from afar like a museum piece. Ultimately, houses are for living in. Of course I appreciate quality craftsmanship and try to use good materials that won’t need to be replaced or repaired for a good, long time, but sometimes you just have to call “good enough” . . . good enough.

Case in point, the photo above, taken yesterday in my home office. It took us three years (much of it in a state of abandonment/junk storage status) to complete this room, and you’d think in that amount of time that we’d have gotten everything “perfect”. Nope. As if it’s not bad enough that there’s a giant chunk missing from the bottom of the window casing (it had rotted away from water exposure—I cut away the rot and did a quick patching job with Bondo before painting), there’s an entire length of baseboard molding missing behind the chair. Did you notice? Probably. Oh well. It’s good enough!

In order to replace this section of molding, we’d have to bring a sample of the intact pieces to an historic millworker to match. Then, I suppose, we’d have to glob on about 8 coats of paint (peeling it in areas between coats) so that it wouldn’t look “too new” when fitted into place. Ugh, and THEN we’d have to get out the miter saw and match the interior angle of the existing molding . . . math would be involved . . . ugh.

Forget it. I’m calling this “good enough” and pretending it gives the room character. You barely notice it when you’re standing up, anyway.

Isn’t the term “master bedroom” kind of funny? It’s not a name I ever heard growing up (along with “patio”, “family room”, and “window treatment”—we had a porch, a living room, and curtains), but I’ve adopted it recently to distinguish between the guest bedroom and the bedroom that Evan and I sleep in. What else can it be called? The big bedroom? I guess I’ll just stick with master bedroom, even if that does conjure images of elaborate, four-poster canopy beds, gilded chaises, and off-room bidets.

What was I talking about? Oh yes, the master bedroom. Where Evan and I (okay, and Bruno and Fritz—and yes, they’re allowed under the covers) sleep. It’s a mess. It’s not quite as bad as it was last year, but beyond the above photo, there’s not really anything in there worth showing right now. We keep putting off really doing something with it, probably because it’s part of the house that visitors don’t usually see or spend time in. Isn’t that sad?

I need inspiration…

Yes, I’m aware that this is not a bedroom. It’s Victoria’s new dining room, and I love it. We actually considered painting our bedroom very dark gray or black when we first bought the house, but since we weren’t sure exactly what we were doing with all of the various rooms in the house, we opted to paint everything white until we knew what was what.

Photo by Frédéric Vasseur. I love this bedding and the low-hanging pendant lamps. Also, yellow!

Photo by Per Magnus Persson. I know I’ve posted this photo before, but I don’t care. It’s perfect.

Photo from LivingEtc. Yeah, yeah, I know, it’s Jenna Lyons AGAIN. But come on, it’s SO fabulous. This also makes me wonder if maybe I should paint the moldings the same color as the walls. Hmmm.

Photos from The Brick House. I really need to find a great blanket like that. Also, this reminds me that I STILL haven’t painted that old dresser I bought at a flea market three (gulp!) years ago.

Time to get cracking.

We finished the guest bedroom more than six months ago, but we still haven’t had any guests. Boo-hoo! Until someone deems us worthy of visiting, I’ve decided to make a point of hanging out in the guest bedroom from time to time. It’s nice in here!

The salmon-pink plastic Philco radio on top of the credenza still works. I bought it years and years ago at a stoop sale in Brooklyn for $5. I love the sound of old transistor radios, especially to listen to baseball games (even though I have no real interest in baseball). Insta-nostalgia.

I wish I could remember where I got the little clock on top of the mantel. Probably at another Brooklyn stoop sale! I’ve had it forever. (The poster, of course, is from Elisabeth Dunker of Fine Little Day.)

Now doesn’t that look like a nice place to take a nap?