2014 February | my inspirational home

Great Cleaning Tip

Posted on February 24, 2014 by Sophie

So at the risk of sounding like Suzy Homemaker, I have a great new tip for cleaning! We have a bunch of cloudy glass and crystal vases and nothing that I’ve tried has gotten rid of the cloudiness. I finally found it!

Yup, believe it or not, denture cleaner did the trick. (No, I don’t wear dentures, but I have the tablets handy to clean my anti teeth-grinding night guard!)

I just put half of a tablet into two of the worst offenders (both smaller vases), added warm water, and rinsed it out after about 10 minutes. My only regret is that I didn’t get “before” pictures!

Decor Advice Please!

Posted on February 21, 2014 by Sophie

We have a large dead space on the stair landing. (I’ll post pictures when I get them.) It’s the front of the house, under a big window, so there’s lots of light, but it’s currently just an empty ledge a bit higher than eye level. I need ideas of what to put on it!

(Yeah, I know, I’m getting ahead of myself. But I like to look for things when I have spare time, so I may as well start browsing now!)

I don’t want planters because I am a plant assassin. I have killed every house plant we’ve ever had. So plants are out…

I found this vase at Home Goods:

The colors pick up on the carpet that we chose. (I’ll post a picture of that too!) But it’s just one vase, and it’s a pretty long ledge. What can I put in it (maybe tall branches or bamboo?) and next to it?

Thanks!

Our New Linen Closet

Posted on February 18, 2014 by Sophie

With the nasty weather we’ve been having, a lot of the reno is being held up. We need to hook up the house to the gas line (until now it was on oil heat) but we can’t until the ground thaws… not sure when that’s going to be. So we can’t work on the heating and cooling, which is slowing down a lot of our progress.

In the meantime, Juan is working on the smaller things that need to be done. We now have a linen closet where there was once dead space at the end of the upstairs hallway!

We’re also putting in bookshelves where the work table is now.

What do you think?

Termites… Round 2

Posted on February 10, 2014 by Sophie

Like I mentioned, we found termite damage on the other side of the house (living/dining room) now too! We’ve had to take down the Sheetrock and are going to replace the beams. Oh, and we discovered that the insulation in the back is moldy, and there is no insulation – AT ALL – in the front of the room. Isn’t that lovely?

Front window (sorry for blurriness). Note the absence of insulation!

We are dropping the center beam a bit (so the ceiling will make more of an “A” shape than an inverted V) for electrical purposes. At least something’s getting done here!

And we’re also trying to decide on a light fixture. More on that when we narrow down the choices a bit!

Living/Dining Room Floor!

Posted on February 7, 2014 by Sophie

Well, at least something is decided. We found distressed wood-look porcelain tile that we loved for the living/dining room (we also found a gorgeous area rug at the carpet store, so no worries about the room being too cold) and were going to order it from our tile guy. Then we went to Home Depot that same day to look at lighting at lo and behold! The same tile for $0.80 less per square foot! Considering the fact that we have to cover about 350 square feet, we saved almost $300. Not bad!

MS International Redwood Mahogany 6x24 Inch Porcelain Tile

MS International Redwood Mahogany 6×24 Inch Porcelain Tile

We really did well at Home Depot! Just a word of warning (according to our tile guy): if you’re buying in bulk from Home Depot, make sure that all boxes are from the same dye lot. Otherwise you may get halfway through your kitchen/hallway/dining room/whatever and realize your tiles are two (or more) different colors!

Isaac loaded them up on a friend’s truck and lugged them over to the house – 35 cases!

We weren’t taking any chances with these – wanted to make sure we got them before they sold out.

Now we found termite damage on that side of the house too, and we’re being delayed by that. It’s so frustrating. But – on the bright side – at least we have the flooring ready!

…aaaand Back to the Drawing Board

Posted on February 5, 2014 by Sophie

Well, the granite was too good to be true! We need 60 square feet so for most granites we’ll need two slabs, though there’ll be a lot of waste that way. Turns out that the Black Forest slabs that we liked are unusually large, 64 and 68 square feet – so one is not enough, but two would be waaaay too much (and will cost us an unnecessary fortune).

So now we’re back to square one. Frustrating!!!

We’ll probably end up with either the Super White quartzite:

(and we’ll have to drag back out to the marble yard to pick out the slabs)

or we may go with engineered quartz. Our stone guy (shout out to Ben at SSG!) says that there are some that we may like, despite the fact that most quartz is speckled or very plain, which we don’t like. I’ll go there tomorrow (and will update afterwards!) but am browsing the web in the meantime. I found these two that are really interesting:

Carbone Caesarstone, via marble.com

Black Knight Caesarstone, via marble.com

But with our luck (and good taste!) these may very well turn out to be out of our price range.

I will keep you posted!

Decisions, Decisions…

Posted on February 3, 2014 by Sophie

It’s unreal how many different types of granite there are! We’ve been having a really hard time deciding. Plus there are plenty that are just beautiful to look at (even though they’re way out of our price range…) – I love just roaming the marble yards to check out the incredible slabs. Check these out!