Sneak preview

fun times with paint. This is what I've been thinking for the parlour: half royal blue, half white with a chair rail dividing the two. One wall sconce between the two windows with maybe a bookshelf below. The double doors currently closing off the parlour will be removed.

Cart before horse?

Premature (adjective) 
1. occurring, coming, or done too soon.

2. mature or ripe before the proper time.

Currently our parlor looks like this:

BIG problem... solved-ish!

My favorite, favorite, favorite piece of furniture is our restoration hardware leather couch that we paid an arm-and-a-leg for. In Durham, Ayumi and I hung out on it a lot. When Ayumi was out of town, I slept on it. I like it more than I like the cats. Okay, so me gusta couch.

Auction Delivery!

W.A. Smith Auction delivery guys came by today with our purchases...for free! Dan and I thought we'd have to get a U-Haul, bring it to the auction place, load up our heavy things, bring them to the house, unload, then bring back the U-Haul for a not insignificant price - so now, of course, we love W.A. Smith Auctioneers :)

New dining table with 6 Fugly chairs (will be posted on Craig's List ASAP). Mango immediately tracked dusty paw prints all over it.

Electrical

 We got the go-ahead from the permit people to start wiring on Friday, so we started drilling some holes in the 2x4s that afternoon and continued the next day. The difficulty for this project lies in the arrangement of the 2x4s: normally, the 2x4s are set in so that the skinny side is facing in and electric code dictates running wires through the walls is best practice. Unfortunately, the two interior walls in the parlour have 2x4s laying flat, with the wider side facing in - I can't drill holes in the 2" side, so I had to find a way around that...by going into the basement.

Connected below at a junction box then to main power

Floor plan for 2nd floor

We've been talking to a contractor - Gary - who pushed us to come up with layouts for the two bathrooms on the 2nd floor.

I love this free program at floorplanner.com; it even lets you choose flooring and colors and whatnot!

Dan's addition to the post
Currently this bedroom looks like this:

demo = weekend project?

For our first *big* project, we've decided to tackle the parlour in the front of the house. We bought ourselves a crowbar and bagster and chatted with 3 electricians about rewiring and the city renovation folks for permits and such. We're now thinking of doing the electrical ourselves and decided to start with demo ASAP (Sunday). All the people we've talked to kept saying the demo would take a weekend...but we smugly told ourselves weekend for ordinary folk = 1 day for us.

 So we stuffed our couches outside the parlour doors into the hallway - the thing about old houses is that the doors are so darn small, you can't get modern couches through them.

hoping we get this room done soon so we can use our front door again.

Auction Day

Last Saturday (June 16) we went to our first (technically, our second) auction. We were prepared to bid big bucks for this beautiful Ralph Lauren chair and ottoman, even though, really, we have no business buying furniture at this point in our house reno (yet to begin).

start small

 We thought for our first project we would start small and work up gradually. Expert spray painters that we are (a tricky skill we learned back in Durham) there was no pressure. We bought a frame at a consignment store and had a print in mind I'd bought a few years ago.

Dan busted out his German hat for the occasion