house – Sannipanni

Living Room Make Over Part II

February 18, 2014 4 Comments

After Michael had surprised me with a newly painted room, we just had to properly furnish and decorate it. Before we even moved I had created a mood board of a golden fall inspired living room. We absolutely fell in love with the aspen painting by Parvez Taj and coincidentally it popped up on one of those deal websites on sale and I snatched it up like a dollar bill on the side walk. Pew pew!

We used a few existing pieces of furniture and bought a couple of new ones and slowly we turned the midnight blue bat cave of gloom into our wonderfully warm, cozy and bright living room:

(click for larger photo)

We were both impressed by the huge leather sofa from Pottery Barn. I had never been the biggest leather fan thanks to black, bulky bachelorpad-style sofas but this one is sooo soft and warm looking, we had to have it! Not to mention it fit perfectly in the window nook. PB collaborates with interior designers that scrutinizes your house for free and suggests lots of PB furniture to fill it. If going into Pottery Barn for furniture didn’t feel grown up then having their interior designer come to our home sure made me feel like an adult. Michelle was wonderful and had some great ideas for both of our living rooms. Mind you at that point this one was still midnight ~~blue~~ black. The cabinet and the lamp in the corner all came from Pottery Barn but she encouraged us to incorporate existing pieces as well. It was definitely a fun experience and she was so great to work with!

I got some throw pillows from World Market and was quite surprised by how reasonably priced they were compared to some online options. How cute is that owl?! Don’t remember where the striped red ones came from – I’ve had those since my first apartment in Charlotte.

Michael found a hammered metal accent table thingy at World Market and we added two slipper chairs from Target that were nicely priced. It was tough to pick a fabric that wasn’t too boring but not too crazy either to compete with the aspen picture. Target did have tons of fun ones to choose from and they’re comfy, too! The original mood board had one leather seat but we both thought a single seat would have not been enough to carry that wall plus we didn’t like the matching one to our sofa and were worried about finding the perfect mismatch.

As for the rug, we had ordered a brown and cream one online. Eh let’s just say it looked like a brown mess. Yuk. Not a fan! After staring at way too many rugs (don’t believe me, check out my pinterest board ;-)) and vetoing each other’s choices we finally ordered the red/orange ombre one and are quite pleased with how it adds warmth to the room.

Looks like someone likes the new rug… 😉

House, USA

Stuff in Our Trees – Insects and Humans Alike

October 17, 2013 No Comments

I wasn’t the only one working from home the other day – we had an arborists team here, too, to take care of our trees.

Before we ever even closed on the house but after the previous owners had moved out we drove by one day to see this:

They took care of that branch but our poor neighbor was rather scared of having the rest of the tree fall into her house. The way it was leaning was just a tad bit too much of a liability…

We’ve also had the nastiest problem with a sticky film of a sap-like goo all over our cars. Logic solution number 1: park cars in garage – uhm we don’t have a garage. Logic solution number 2: Find out what’s causing the sap. And so we did.
There’ve been huge swarms of snowflakes, wait no, it’s summer, white fuzzy bugs rather, living in our Hackberry trees. The poor trees shed their leaves and everything from cars to patio furniture and grill cover got covered with a nasty, milky, sticky film.. Thanks to gardening books from the library and Google we identified them as Wooly Hackberry Aphids.

So we bought Wooly Hackberry Aphid poison and gave it to the trees to drink. Didn’t do a heck of a lot unfortunately but it sounds like this should have been taking care of in spring anyway. But slowly the trees had gotten rid of most of their leaves so that helped with our cars at least…

Nonetheless, the arborists recommended taking one of them down as well. And BOOM did it come down! The crew did a really impressive job, climbing up and taking out branches until it was save to cut the trunk. They also cleaned up a lot of our other trees and took out a dead dogwood tree.

Thanks to all the clearing we now have a ton more light in our front and back yards. Raised beds full of tomatoes here we come! Well, next year. For now I’ll just focus on planting skeletons and headstones!

House

This Old House… Got Some Serious TLC!

August 20, 2013 1 Comment

It’s been a month on the day that we’ve lived in our 1967 house now and it is starting to feel like a home. Until yesterday it’s felt more like a war zone with boxes and boxes and more boxes and us having to keep areas clear for handyman access. Insert mental image of me jumping from between two boxes to another set of boxes while juggling a huge pile of STUFF. Uffda!

Even though the house is “completely renovated” as per its listing there ~~was~~ is a long list of things to update or fix. At closing I must have accidentally traded in my wonderful boyfriend for a HouseMonster that has been working relentlessly on making the house safe and durable.

The inspector had identified several things that needed to be addressed and thankfully the sellers cut us some slack by contributing to the closing costs to cover some of the repair costs. One of the first things to go was the leaking water heater and our new one is so awesome we had to real it in a little bit because the water was too scorching hot. Score!!

Several people have come to work on the crawl space that had a moisture content in the wood that was outside of what they normally like to see. Side note, it has been an unusually wet and cool summer! So we got a moisture barrier, some neat drains, sealed vents and now finally after at least a three week delay a dehumidifier that kicks in if it gets too humid under our living room.

Another item on the list was to get our chimney swept. We have an awesome real wood fireplace and that is just part of the regular maintenance routines. Well, the chimney sweep took some photos and apparently the clay tiles were in need of some TLC. Zee HouseMonster could tell you all the details but I turn into a bad listener when construction projects turn too technical (I imagine that’s what it’s like when we tell men the nuances of four different dresses – they’re NOT all dresses – to us girls anyway). Long story short, we now have a newly lined chimney that should withstand World War III and will serve as a great landmark if the house ever burns down. That beast is (hopefully) indestructible.

We are definitely ready for atypical North Carolina winters now with our fierce water heater and the stately chimney. And nicely enough, the previous owners left us a big stack of wood (that hopefully isn’t infested with spiders) so we can have some cozy fires later this year. (Note to self, search for “how to start a fireplace fire” on youtube.)

Speaking of fire, there was quite the big fire hazard going on with the house. Back in the 60s and early 70s copper was scarce in the United States and so aluminum was used for electric wiring in houses just like ours. Which in itself is not problematic, except that there are usually copper wires that connect to them by the outlets. OK, our realtors still didn’t see what the problem was but all our HGTV watching had educated us that copper and aluminum react to heat and oxygen differently and therefore over time there is a chance of shortcircuits and fires. Granted we only live a handful of houses down the road from the fire station but the thought of sleeping in a place that could quite potentially catch on fire any day was quite unsettling especially for this German and her MidWesterner. Risk no es bouno for us.

So my darling the HouseMonster found a few ways to deal with this aluminum wire problem, one being the Copalum and the other being the Alumicon method. In comparing the two, the best indicator was that the one electrician certified to do Copalum in our city took 3 weeks to get a quote to us and then had the guts to be twice as expensive as our fantastically Angie’s list rated Alumicon electrician. Hmmmmmm…. Tough choice!

In my ideal, magic world we’d let the electricians into the house, let them work, they finish and the house is back to normal. In the real world this turned into the Honey removing every outlet and switch plate in our 13.5 room house. I lived with the fear of sleepily reaching for an uncovered switch and being zapped back to reality or beyond by 120V. Not to mention keeping the four legged pal from escaping our watchful eyes and sniffing around one of the low uncovered outlets. Yikes!! War zone!

See those purple things in there? Basically they keep the aluminum wire that comes from the wall and the copper wire from the outlet apart so all is safe and purple. They were all over the place and the electricians installed three of them in every outlet, light fixture, and switch. Talk about a tedious job!

But thankfully, eventually they were done! They also fixed this cable mess in our breaker box and now all furniture is pushed back to where it is supposed to be and we’ve had time to tackle quite a few boxes. Our bathroom got a new skylight today that actually lets us see the sky and not some milky roof covering! Yay! We’re getting there and it feels GREAT! I know the HouseMonster still has plenty of projects on the list including restoring the deck and shed but at least the war zone in the house is gone. Phew! What a great feeling and I am so thankful for my superman who’s been coordinating work crews and worked super hard along side them to make a safe and sound love house for us. I feel so thankful!