Finish Line Glimpses

Exciting finishes are popping up around the new house. Two nights ago I had a kitchen brainstorm and today we have a fresh, fun accent wall that I think will look really good with the kitchen cabinets. When we picked the colors for the first floor, we knew we would add color to the back wall of the kitchen. Since the refrigerator will soon be installed in the back corner, it's great to have this done. A HUGE thank you to my amazing Aunt Jeanne for encouraging my enthusiasm for such a bold color and painting the wall!

The mudroom floor is temporarily orange. This is just the structure for the wires that will heat the floor under the slate colored, chevron patterned tile that will be laid this week.

Refrigerator will go in the left corner and the spice rack may hang between the window and the light switches

Nate must like the color since he bought himself a new helmet in the same hue

And aqua stripes in the table cloth. It's everywhere!

I also saw the powder room tile for the first time today and LOVE it. Can't wait to see it installed.

A little pop in the attic too! The other dormers will be bright - maybe one yellow and one coral?

And The Winner Is...

Carrara marble! We didn't see anything we loved last weekend (except expensive Super White quartzite), but then the kind woman from Stone Design in Milwaukee emailed me this photo. She thought it was still on a boat, making it's way from Italy to Indiana, with a hugely variable arrival date. Nate and I decided that living with plywood countertops for a little while wouldn't be so bad, but then SURPRISE! an hour later she emailed to say that it actually was on land, not sea, in Indiana.

This is actually a mirror to the slab we'll use. This one is also polished, whereas we'll have ours honed for a matte look. There is a small crack at the bottom, but that will be cut out, still leaving a rectangle large enough for our bathroom vanity, where it will complement the 3 inch marble hexagon tile on the floor. Excited!

Hexagon tiles for the floor of the master bathroom

Here is an example of honed carrara marble:

Satin Floors

The main floor needs a second coat of finish on Monday, but otherwise, the floors are done! We're really happy with how they turned out. Although Louisa came home today after seeing them and said Yeah, they look good. Just the same as these floors, tapping her toe on the floors in our rental house (which are fine, but nothing to blog about :). Oh, how the brand-new finish of a satin floor gets lost on a 5-year-old!

Hard (but fun) Decision #2

Since posting Exterior Color Agony on Tuesday, I realized that the word "agony" is very dramatic. Agony is not something I experience often (ever?), and I definitely don't want to seem like I'm complaining about this renovation at all. It's something we entered into very willingly and still have no regrets, 70% of the time (smily face emoticon here).

The other difficult, yet still fun, decision is the countertop decision. When I first posted about our kitchen daydreaming last October, some of you suggested a white/grey countertop in quartz or marble. I had not considered carrara marble, but since then I haven't been able to stop thinking about it! I've read posts like this and wondered if I could live with such a soft stone. I've visited three countertop/stone shops and all three salespeople gave me the same speech, something along the lines of we really try to discourage people from choosing marble for a kitchen. Despite their warnings, I brought home a 12x12 sample of honed carrara marble and told Nate I wanted to sleep on it. It's SO soft and lovely. I was pretty set on it, telling myself that the character of etching and staining would make it feel loved and lived in.

So we got a quote for honed carrara marble and the estimator at Madison Block and Stone said ideally we would drive to Waukesha or Milwaukee to pick out a slab. I drove to Waukesha on May 21st, the first gorgeous summer-like day in a while. Unfortunately the marble they had was too short and it wasn't love at first sight. The weather that day is important to mention because I didn't want to drive further from home to look at the other wholesaler, so I still haven't seen what they have in person. Here is the Venintino marble slab that is too short:

Just kind of dull, right?

That same day in Waukesha, I saw a granite called viscount white. I've never had a thing for granite, but when I went to these warehouses and saw the huge slabs and listened to how they're "harvested" it really helped me gain an appreciation for natural stone, so I entertained the thought of granite as another natural stone option. I was surprised by how much I liked this viscount white granite.

p.s. it's not actually pink, that is a reflection of the store sign

The benefit of choosing granite over marble is that granite is much harder, so it will stain, scratch and etch less. But marble seems much more timeless than granite. They are priced similarly, within $120 of each other.

You might be wondering, why not quartz? Because Quartz, which is manmade and much less porous, is more pricey, especially for the white/light ones. We do hope to find some beautiful quartz remnants to use in the bathrooms and laundry room, because when you use a remnant, you pay the same whether it's super cheap granite or expensive quartz. This is fun and not fun. Fun because you could get lucky and find an unclaimed remnant the day it arrived in the remnant yard as a scrap from someone's larger project, and not fun because it makes me feel like I should stop by the remnant yard daily to score a sweet remnant.

To help you picture things, here is Nate's latest drawing of the kitchen, from two different angles:

The wood really will be wood, so you can see the the approximate size of the countertop we need. I don't love the super dark part of the viscount white granite slab, but we could easily avoid that by the way we cut the "L" shape and the square cut from the whole slab.

More kitchen news! The cabinet colors have been decided. Thanks to a blog post at The Inspired Room, I knew what color they used (below) and went with it. The lower cabinets and refrigerator surround will be this charcoal grey and the upper cabinets will be a cool white, called ice cube.

Not only do we have the cabinet colors picked out, we also purchased our stove and refrigerator last night! I'm really happy that after looking at many different brands for weeks we were able to make a crunch-time decision (because of a sale ending at midnight last night) that we both woke up excited about:

Kitchen Aid Range

Maytag Refrigerator

On Friday night and Saturday we'll celebrate a huge hotel renovation my dad just completed in Brookfield, so we'll drive  to Milwaukee after that to check out the other wholesaler's marble slab in person. Here is the picture I've seen. It's polished, but can be honed, which is what we would choose if we went with marble.

These are such fun decisions! Really, there is no agony at all. It's all fun and I already know I'm going to miss the research and decision making once it's over...like I did each time I decided on a dress for a high school dance and my wedding dress.

Exterior Color Agony

There have been two tough decisions so far in our house renovation: the exterior color and the countertop material. The siding color decision has been made (in that we've ordered samples, not that I can't change my mind...) and the other decision (marble versus granite) has not been made and will receive individual attention in it's own blog post, coming soon.

As for the exterior decision, I knew I wanted darker grey and of course figured out right away that "darker grey" is not a final decision. There are so many choices still - brown-grey, green-grey, blue-grey. Flipping through the color deck, Jeanne helped me narrow things down to these:

Felted Wool, Westchester Grey, Peppercorn, Gauntlet Grey, Cityscape

Actually, the truth is that #3, Peppercorn, was not in the original top 4. We started with four choices and two were quickly eliminated for being too light. So from there I had it narrowed down to Westchester Grey and Gauntlet Grey. Then I read this post and in addition to feeling relieved that I was not the only one struggling with my decision, it helped me decide that Westchester Grey was the one...or so I thought. For some reason I still doubted that decision and after flipping through the paint deck late one night, decided to add Peppercorn to the mix. It looks so black compared to the others, but by that point I had experienced enough wow - it's amazing how different that looks when you paint it out moments, that I decided to give it a shot.

So I texted some friends/family this photo to solicit opinions:

It was a fun way to connect with people and while there were a few outliers, the majority picked either Westchester Grey (#2) or Peppercorn (#3). By the way, I think this has been one of the toughest decisions for me because Nate did not have a strong opinion - - he didn't really see a difference between the various grays.

Not easy to see the difference, but left is Peppercorn and right is Westchester Grey

Peppercorn, Pearly White, Westchester Grey

I asked Nate's opinion once I had it narrowed down to these two. His answer? He had a slight preference for Westchester Grey, but didn't dislike peppercorn. My neighbor said "Go bold! Choose peppercorn."  I also had a few friends who encouraged me to go darker. That was my gut feeling too, so that's that! Peppercorn siding (material choice: LP Smartside) with pearly white trim.

I'm really excited about it. We'll have to wait until fall for the siding, but that's fine with me. We've had a Tyvek covered house since Christmas, so what's another couple of months?

Floors (Like New)

The floor contractor made my day last week Thursday by calling and asking if they could start one week earlier than planned. After a quick call to Nate to make sure that was okay with his timeline, I said "yes!"

They dropped off their trailer and tools on Monday afternoon, then got started, sanding away 110 years of scratches, stain and such, Tuesday morning. By Wednesday evening, the attic and the second floor was looking so nice! We're crossing our fingers that the main floor will look equally pretty. Our plan for now is not to stain the floors, but we'll see how the main floor looks before we make that decision.

Progress feels great! July 4th is our deadline, since we need to move out of our rental, and it's looming!

Speed Painting!

I'm amazed at how quickly the walls were painted at the house! Tonight we went for a bike ride, then came home to eat dinner. While Nate was grilling, Peter and I walked over to the house to check out the progress. Only last night did James start painting the ceilings, so I figured things would still be mostly white. I was wrong! The only walls that have not been painted are the main staircase, the attic, the mudroom and the laundry room. I'm eager to go back over in the daylight, because at first glance, the living room (Cupola Yellow) was not quite right - too brown/yellow? When I mentioned my fear to Nate, he brushed it off, reminding me that I'm slow to warm up to most colors...and things. Really? Is that true?

This line-up makes it look like we'll have more yellow than we actually will. Colonial Yellow is the back door color, which is mostly glass. And the yellow at the top is an idea for the inside the attic dormers.

So I'll put a couple of photos here because it would be rude not to, but promise me that you'll keep an open mind until I get better photos with better lighting tomorrow!

The bike ride

Exterior color test strips. Which is your favorite? Mine is the lower right - Gauntlet Grey

This is Cupola Yellow by Sherwin Williams. I think better lighting, refinished floors and trim will help me like it more

Portico by Sherwin Williams

This was a risky move - Sea Serpent. (Below: my guest room inspiration)

Calming and neutral Stone Lion for our bedroom

Below, Louisa and Cora see their room (in Teaberry) for the first time. The smiles mean they approve, right? And the last picture, the sweet, sweet attic. It has not been painted yet, but I think it will still be something really light, perhaps Modern Grey.