Seven Ten Clark

Herrrrrrrringbone

Karrey — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 19:47:53 +0000

Let’s start with wood floors, since I really think that this is the second-most pressing issue in the house, after the basement walls. And to be clear, this is NOT just about the, erm, aesthetically displeasing carpeting that spreads around the main floor of the house like a fuzzy disease. Since we’ve started living in this house, we’ve been sick. It’s not the mold, since we have that under control through careful tinkering with the house’s humidity levels. It’s not the cats, since we’ve had them all along without (mostly) ill effects. I’m pretty sure it’s the carpeting.

The current carpeting has been in place in the house since somewhere around 1988, and in the intervening 22 years, it’s been exposed to who-knows-what, including dangerously toxic mold/mildew levels, pet dander, dead skin cells, and whatever has been spilled on it over the years. The result is that I’ve had to start taking my allergy medicine year-round, and most of the time while he is home, Kevin can’t breathe without a very heavy, wheezing crackle. It’s scary, and it needs to be resolved. And if it’s something other than the cruddy carpeting? Well, we’ll move on to the next possible solution with glorious new flooring.

Here is where the herringbone comes in: I’m obsessed with hardwood floors in this pattern. Lookie here, and you will be, too:

Where do we start?

Karrey — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 16:34:28 +0000

The problem with having such a long list of things that need to be done (or purchased) is that it’s difficult to know where to start. Well, we KNOW where to start: the basement walls. They’re cracked and bowing, and they need to be addressed first. We’re going to be installing wall anchors to pull the walls straight from the outside, and that’ll probably be done first thing after the ground thaws out and dries out this spring. It’ll be a pretty big, expensive project, although hopefully it’ll be taken care of within a few days’ time.

The problem, then, is figuring out what to tackle first after the walls are completed. Here are a few prospects:

Tearing up every square millimeter of carpeting in the house and installing hardwood flooring ourselves
Tearing out and rebuilding the basement bathroom
Tearing out and replacing the stairs leading down to the basement, and walling-off the stairs and putting a door at the bottom of them so that it’s a separate space that isn’t open to the upstairs
New couch
The Kitchen of Doom

I’m going to follow this up with a series of posts filled with ideas that I have for these projects.
Where would you start?

Living Room Shelving

Karrey — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 20:28:12 +0000

Over the weekend, Kevin and I finally came to the soul-crushing conclusion that we need to get rid of the Expedit bookcase in our living room. It was soul-crushing for me, anyway. After moving it twice, I think Kevin was sort over the whole thing. Basically, our living room is simply too small and dark to have this black, hulking piece of furniture taking up so much room. Plus, we’re both trying to pare down our belongings, to move out of the realm of packrats who are owned by their belongings, and each and every one of those cubbyholes calls out to me in my sleep to be filled with new and interesting bits of nostalgia and kitsch. I can’t do it anymore! Behold, bad cell phone pictures:

Our lounge really isn’t a bad size, considering the fact that we live in a pillbox rancher from the 1950s. This bookcase, as you can see, makes the room look quite a bit smaller and more crowded. Also, it really limits the layout of the room, because it’s impossible to put it on any other wall. And sure, we’ve got cool stuff, and we like to showcase the REALLY cool stuff, but it doesn’t need to be out on display at all times. We want to streamline.

Over the weekend, I came across the shelter blog The Brick House (via Anna from Door Sixteen) for the first time, and I became smitten with her DIY shelving wall unit project. I’m talking deep smit. I love the very minimalist lines, with lots of wall white-space visible. Kevin’s into the idea, although he thinks it might be a little too “industrial” for his taste. Any ideas on keeping the same general concept, but making it a little foofier?

P.S.: You can probably see from the pictures above what I’m talking about when I say that any design we do, until the gross carpeting is replaced with hardwood floors, is basically turd-polishing. Maybe I should put down an area rug to cover as much of it as I can.

P.P.S.: If I spent half as much time doing stuff to my house as I do perusing shelter blogs, it would be way further along than it currently is. Maybe I should add that to my list of resolutions. Less convolutions, more solutions.

Kitchen Computer

Karrey — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 19:47:44 +0000

Would it be completely period-incorrect to pander to my nerdy/foodie yearnings by setting up a touchscreen computer in the kitchen? I know it’s pretty high-tech, but we could find creative ways to hide it, and plus LOOKIT HOW COOL IT IS!

I wonder if I could convince Kevin to help me set this up if I promise we can do one for him in the garage, too. Hmm?

New Lighting

Karrey — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 17:52:49 +0000

While our region of Iowa is being covered with a blanket of drifting snow, we’re spending a lot of time indoors. Why not make it a little prettier, a little brighter? Okay!

On one of many (many) recent trips to our favorite little Iowa City junk shop, Artifacts, we came across a Lightolier sputnik-style pendant lamp. I passed by it at first, since it’s hard sometimes to just SEE everything that’s in the store, there’s so much to go through. As I was heading towards the front to leave, I spotted it and new it had to be mine. Kevin even liked it, and sometimes it’s hard to convince him to like anything. We got it for a very fair price and ran right home to trade out the old fashioned (and not in a good way) light fixture in the part of our living room that would normally serve as the dining area.

I only have two issues with this light:

Four of the globes were missing, so we’ll need to figure out where we can buy more, and then decide if we want the new globes to be smokey and transparent or the translucent white
The stickers on the light don’t offer much information, and I’m having a hell of a time researching the piece. Does anyone know anything about Lightolier sputnik lamps?

I think I’m in love!

Belated Holiday Wishes

Karrey — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 20:53:58 +0000

We here on Clark Street hope that you had the happiest of holidays this season! We’re gearing up to start taking baby steps towards some pretty big goals, although we made the tough decision to put off gutting and renovating the kitchen over the winter. There are simply bigger fish to fry, and the kitchen we have is perfectly usable until we’re able to complete those other tasks. In the meantime, we’re going to have a lot of fun re-imagining the space and coming up with our dream (vintage) kitchen, rather than coming up short and having to settle for good enough. Be sure to check back for renderings and floor plans!

Gearing up for T-Day

Karrey — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 17:18:35 +0000

I’ve never been much of a fan of Thanksgiving. I’m vegetarian now, which means the holiday is even less special to me, but even when I ate meat it was never a favorite holiday. Not even in my Top 5. Maybe not even in my Top 10. The biggies for me in the latter part of the year have always been Halloween, Christmas/Yule, and to a lesser extent New Year’s Eve/Day. Thanksgiving has always been kind of…meh. Oh yay, let’s slave away in a hot kitchen, watch football on tv all day, graze on food for hours, and then clean everything up. Not so much. Now that I don’t eat meat, including turkey or anything with turkey/chicken stock in it, the holiday is even less relevant for me. What’s a girl to do when the rest of the country is obsessed? Looking at vintage or vintage-y photos related to the holiday don’t hurt.

Gotta go with a creepy finish

Major winter project: Kitchen!

Karrey — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 21:42:39 +0000

After discussing it a bit, I think Kevin and I have decided that we’re going to try to tackle as much of the kitchen redesign/renovation over the winter as we can.

I know what you’re thinking.

“Wait wait wait, the kitchen? It’s usable! What about finishing the bathroom? What about working on the lounge area in the basement? What about what about what about?!”

We’re both pretty sick of the kitchen, and if we’re going to be trapped inside over the winter, the season during which we do our most labor-intensive and creative work at the stove, we’d might as well be in a room that we like to look at and use, am I right? I think I am.

Anyway, before I get to a few inspirational photos that I’ve collected lately, I want to ask you readers a couple of questions:

What is your favorite thing about your kitchen?
What do you wish you had in your kitchen?

On with the pictures:

From Retro Renovation

Pam's Kitchen from Retro Renovation

From Design*Sponge

From Design*Sponge, I love the FermLiving wallpaper and black countertops

From Decor8

Alice's kitchen from bread&honey, I love the green cabinet interiors

From Apartment Therapy, I love the shelves around the window

From Apartment Therapy, I think I want a tile backsplash

From Apartment Therapy

From Apartment Therapy, we're definitely doing black and white checkered floor tiles

Paint Pains, Part Deux

Karrey — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 19:56:02 +0000

On with the story!

I should mention that we had actually tried a sample of the Menards paint in the color we chose. In fact, we had a lovely stripe of it next to the front door for months before we finally got around to prepping the house for painting, and while we agreed that it was a little on the bright side, we still felt it was close enough to what we had envisioned and wanted to use it for the whole house. I’m sure our neighbors loved us, having a white house with light blue trim and a big green stripe down the front.

The green that we originally chose gave off a bit of the color blue, but when we found the color closest to it at Home Depot, it was clearly more yellow. That should have been another clue. When Kevin finished up the front of the house, it GLOWED. Our poor neighbors must have thought we were crazy. A few of them walked by while it was this color and said things to the effect of, “Well…I guess it might be okay?” and then scurried away. Kevin and I were embarrassed, to be honest. It certainly hadn’t turned out the way we’d hoped.

I did a little bit of internet reading, and had the idea that we might be able to do some paint doctoring, like by pouring a darker color into it. Kevin decided to try asking Sherwin Williams if they might be able to do something about our situation, since we definitely didn’t want to go all the way up to Home Depot in Cedar Rapids for nothing. He was told they might, so we loaded up all 11 remaining gallons into the trunk of his car and drove over, hoping for a miracle.

We had a paint chip that we thought we’d like, and Sherwin Williams actually has a whole line of brochures that include paint chips from different architectural eras, and we found a color in the “Suburban Modern” brochure (i.e. 1950s) that was pretty close to the paint chip, and the gracious lady working the counter told us she would see what she could do. She warned us that the color we had chosen to shift our paint to was still pretty bright, and we let her know that we wanted bright, just not, uh, neon. The next day, Kevin picked up the doctored paint and set about covering up the first coat. This was the result:

Perfect! It was exactly, EXACTLY what we’d had in mind. When he was repainting, the new color next to the first green looked almost diarrhea-brown, but now that it’s completely covered it up, we love it. The trim and mailbox will be white, along with the cinderblock foundation. We’ll also be replacing the front storm door (discussion on that will be saved for another post) and storm windows with white ones eventually. Better photos to come!

Paint pains, Part 1

Karrey — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 19:46:09 +0000

So, we had a bit of an issue with paint during the last week, causing us both a lot of frustration and probably raising the ire of our neighbors, those poor folks who probably never dreamed they’d have to deal with kooks like us when they chose their lovely little houses in our historic neighborhood. We’re sorry, neighbors, we didn’t do it on purpose.

I should probably begin at the beginning. As you’ve probably noticed when you’ve looked at pictures of the outside of the house, we had a bit of a problem with peeling paint.

Okay, maybe it a little more serious than “a bit of a problem”. Paint all over the house was peeling like crazy, all the way down to the bare wood. It had previously been painted less than 5 years before, and I guess it started peeling less than 6 months afterwards. I don’t know if the paint issues stemmed from poor workmanship, or if it was possibly because, during the years that he had lived there alone, Kevin’s dad had used inside climate control as little as possible, and extreme temperatures coupled with very, VERY poor insulation created issues with the siding and making the paint peel. Maybe it was both of these factors combined, I don’t know. Anyway, it was obviously something that needed to be dealt with, and soon. The homeowner’s insurance company had even started sending us letters telling us the paint needed to be fixed ASAP. (Of course, they started sending these letters to us in JANUARY, which is the perfect time of year for painting the outside of a house, right?)

Anyway, we planned to take care of it as soon as the weather got nice, and thanks to a generous joint birthday gift from my parents, we had the funds to buy some kickass paint. We decided on green, since it wasn’t a very common color on our street, and we both had a vague idea of what shade we wanted. When he was growing up, Kevin’s grandparents’ house was pretty close to what we wanted, bright but not too vivid, a good 50s color. Since then, it has been sided with vinyl in a neutral shade, so we spent a lot of time cruising around town, looking for the perfect flavor of green, and finally found a house that we thought looked like it was the right color. Then came the fumbling.

Instead of knocking on the door and asking the owners directly if they knew the paint color/brand, or at least getting a comparative color, instead we went to Menards, picked up all of the green paint chips, and then parked ourselves across the street and tried to eyeball it. Not too smart. We settled on their shade called “A Little Bit of Lime”. After translating that to a Home Depot/Behr color, it was “Key Lime”. Lime. That should have been a clue that it wasn’t quite right.

Not so bad, right? It looks pretty mellow as a paint chip. Too bad we picked it out in the store, mere minutes before we had 12 gallons of it mixed. If only we’d been able to visualize the shade on the exterior of a house…

AUGH! Yeah, not good. A little too…neon. So, what were we greeted with when Kevin was finished painting the front of the house?

To be continued…