Surprise! Role reversal

Yesterday was Sean's birthday. I left work at 5 so that I can get home and decorate it with happy celebratory birthday decorations before Sean got home. It was going to be a surprise.

I walk through our door and saw this. I think I must have stood there for a few seconds, thinking, something isn't computing... when I left work that morning, there was a pile of leftover renovation boxes... now there's the dining set that we picked out a while back, along with a pretty flower arrangement, place setting, and pretty napkin folding.

Huh!?!? What's going on?!?!

Apparently, Sean decided to surprise me with our new dining set.

I told Sean - wait, but it's your birthday. I'm suppose to surprise you, not the other way around. That's like birthday backwards!!!

Man, oh man, the dining room does look mighty fantastic! It's perfect for our space and the colors just mix so well with the rest of the apartment. We love it!!

Oh, also, Sean has apparently been hiding his table setting and napkin folding skills. I think come this holiday season, I may be out of my job as the table setter :)

The bedroom dream - slowly becoming reality

Moving from a 900 sq ft apartment (that's NOT counting the 900 sq ft garage) to a 550 sq ft place (with no garage) - we definitely felt the pain of the less space. Everything was smaller - our dinner plates didn't even fit in our cupboards.

To make the space feel livable, we got rid of stuff and got some new furniture... including a platform bed and two small bedside table / dressers. We ended up getting the Malm line from IKEA (it was cheap and functional) and our bedroom became very matchy. I really just despise matchy furniture.

Now that our renovation is done, it seemed like the perfect time to fix our matchy, totally non-inspiring bedroom.

On a whim, I moved the new side table we got for the living room into the bedroom and WOW - it was perfect! Just totally the right size and the right look - modern and simple with a dash of quirkiness and individuality.




I love how a simple bunch of flowers add the touch of color and life.

The good news is that I'm starting to finally get a bedroom that I love.

The bad news is that now I have to find a new white side table for the living room. And I have to somehow find room for the clothes that were stored in the bedside table / drawers. Though, I love this look so much that I'm totally willing to get rid of clothes to make it all fit. (Dang, did I really just say that!??!)

Oh, I don't think we ever showed a picture of our knob / lock for the bedroom.

We had to get really creative with our bedroom doors because our built-in dressers go right up to the door frame and a normal door wouldn't fit. We really wanted a sliding door, but it was just going to be too expensive, so we ended up with two small panels. Problem #1 solved.

The 2nd problem is how we were going to open/close and lock the door. We couldn't get any regular knobs / levers because they will prevent the doors from opening all the way. If the door didn't open all the way, you would have to be a size 0 runway model to fit through the opening. Since Sean and I are normal shaped and love eating way too much, we had to look for an alternative solution. We ended up with these ancient Chinese cabinet pulls. There's a little slider to lock the doors and they raise just inches above the door surface. Perfect!

The other totally fabulous bonus is that they help add a little oriental touch to the bedroom. Part of that quirkiness that I love!!! :)

Renovation ends... decoration begins

Our renovation is done! But no, we're not done. Now the decoration starts.

The red / brown always looked so cozy in our old apartments. But at the ghetto penthouse, it just makes our living room look dark and well, dark. So now that we have a new living room, we decided to lighten up the room.

First, curtains! Because after paint, curtains make a room (or so the blogs tell us). We had tons of green curtains leftover from our bedroom and we thought they would look swell in the living room.



Voila - instead of burgundy velvet curtains, we now have sheer green linen curtains. Step 1 complete.

Next step - rug! After browsing many many rug sites and realize how many ugly rugs there are in this world (do people actually buy these rugs!??!), we finally find a refreshing green modern, but warm rug. Now it graciously live on our living room floor.

We're not done yet, but so far, it's working! Go warm, cozy, and bright room!

Walking to work with a 74" shelf

We've been pruning through our stuff and putting items for sale on craigslist. One of the items was a 74" IKEA Lack shelf.

The buyer called me last night and was wondering if he can somehow pick it in the Midtown west area during lunch today. The shelf is pretty light and I'm only 15 minutes away, so why not.

Whew. So today, I carried a 74" shelf down the streets of Manhattan. Miraculously, I managed to wipe out NO ONE. I even managed to not ding anything... well, until I got to my desk and wacked into the file cabinet.

I got some weird looks and an arm workout. What a way to start the day.

We put the second coat of paint on...

... the first coat went on in 2006. Yes, we're just a little late.

After taking a break from anything nearing home renovation, we're back. This was a very home reno focused weekend.

First, closet

We needed some time to figure out what to do with our closet. We needed to maximize every little inch. After a weekend of sketching and researching, we realized we needed parts from 3 different manufacturers. Fun!

Here's Sean installing the railing for the closet.

Next, re-potting

Carl and Ellie are thriving. In fact, they're getting so big that we needed to re-pot them. This has never happened to us. How do you re-pot?!?! After some words of advice from parents (aka plant gurus), we got some pots, some potting soil, and gave it a go. It was surprisingly easy, and very fun! I like playing with mud!

Fingers crossed that Carl & Ellie survives.

Finally, painting

With our new living room arrangement, we wanted to move a shelf. Sounds so easy. Well, as part of moving the shelf, we needed to cover up some holes, then we needed to strip away this unused phone wire (okay, we didn't need to, but it was right there and it was bugging me). This last thing led to a lot of scraping off excess paint and sanding and need to repaint.

A simple "move the shelf" task became: move all the furniture, remove all the nails & screws, wash the walls, spackle the holes, remove the wire, scrape off paint, sand the baseboard, put down painter's tape, thrown down some drop-clothes, and finally... painting.

Here's Sean removing the wall anchors. Those babies stick!


Sean painting... look at the expression on his face, so thrilled.


We put down drop-clothes, yet I still managed to get paint all over my hands and feet!


This weekend was too exhausting... I curl up in a ball and go to sleep.

Hello Carl & Ellie

I've talked about them, but I just realized y'all have never met them.

Meet Carl & Ellie (formerly known as Hansel & Gretel). They joined us right before renovation started. I was a little concerned that they wouldn't survive the renovations. But they're little troopers.

Now they're as good as new with new buds and new leaves. You can't even tell they survived a 5 week renovation... well, except for all the plaster dust on their leaves. We're going to re-pot them and possibly give them another friend. So maybe soon, it'll be Carl, Ellie, and Dug :)

A weekend of unpacking

It's Friday night... instead of heading to the pier to watch a movie on the waterfront or any of the other various cool things to do in NY, we went home and unpacked. We had a deadline - Graham and Inge are coming Saturday night and we needed to make our home somewhat presentable.

This is what our home looked like Friday night - not quite what you would call presentable.


Lots of heaving lifting:


*ahem* unpacking:


By Saturday at around 4:




Ain't so shabby. The Ghetto Penthouse cleans up quite nicely given the right wardrobe and accessories :)

Sunday was closet day! We have this big closet space... but no closet rods or shelves. How to reclaim 16 cuft that will otherwise be lost with an off-the-shelf closet system?? Clearly this requires a tape measure, coffee, and a good sit.



Sean gets serious with ladder as he ponders all that is the closet.



After a few hours of flipping through catalogs and navigating web sites... and a few more hours of browsing Home Depot, Container Store, and Bed, Bath & Beyond - I think we may have a solution. It involves mixing and matching parts from different systems. We're not sure if they're all compatible - should be interesting experiment.

Unpacking

"Unpacking" - what a wonderful word. This time, it means that our renovations are nearly complete... complete enough where we can unpack some of our belongings and try to bring some sense of normality back into our lives.

This past weekend, we unpacked! Why tell you with words when we have pictures?!?!

First, we remove the tarp. Wow - stuff!

Sean rolls up the tarp. Or maybe he's doing a Child's Pose yoga move. Should I tell him that its not a yoga mat?

Kitchen

There was this pink film on the stove... apparently, it dissolves in water. A few swipes with a rag and voila - like new :)

The box that held our stove grates.

Door bumpers. They're the cutest thing ever.

Measuring & placing the shelf liners.

Dividers and first item in the drawers - our wok!

We found the very important coffee box (the drawing is clouds parting and the coffee pot arriving from on high - personally, I think it looks like a transformer)

Sean pays his respects to the coffee pot.

Drawers are filled!

Cupboards are filled!

Leftovers in the fridge since we can now microwave.

A bottle of wine in our new wine cubby.

Pretty vase with our spatulas and such.

Bedroom

Vacuuming and mopping to remove the 6 weeks of dust and plaster.

We attempted to move the bed without disassembling it. The doorways wouldn't have it. The bed disassembled very easily - which is a little worrisome as we used wood glue when we originally put it together, so it should have been - well, near impossible to take apart.

Well some things are still out of sorts - no working outlets in the kitchen yet. Though we may be onto something... stumbling out of bed and getting coffee within 2 ft ain't so shabby.

Bathroom

Not too much to do here yet... just hanging shower curtains. Which was a little hard to do when we could only find two curtain rings. Luckily, some scrummaging through boxes labeled bathroom (who would have thought a box labeled with bathroom would have bathroom stuff?!?!) and we uncovered the rest.

We're all moved in - again :)

Tonight I ate like a human being. On the floor.

With our renovations wrapping up, we spent the weekend unpacking our stuff back into the kitchen. Today, our stove was hooked up and the gas was on! We took the opportunity to visit our grocery store (hello grocery store, we've missed you. now kindly remind me where all your contents are located...) and buy groceries. Lily was working late so I surprised her with a home-cooked meal! Our first in 6 weeks! Just a simple pasta dish with Sean Kenney's Patented So-What-If-I'm-Irish Pasta Sauce, but it's one of Lily's favorites and she seemed happy to consume it. A little candles and some flowers, and ... we sat on the floor to eat, because we sold our dining furniture before this all began. Welll, close enough, we're slowly re-emerging in the 1st world, and it's kinda neat.

Missing: Kohler toilet

So our toilet is MIA. Home Depot has managed to lose our toilet AGAIN and has no clue what's going on.

First of all, how in the world do you lose a toilet?!?! And then to lose it again?!?! After days of trying to call them and track down our toilet - still no luck.

We've spent a lot of money at Home Depot for our renovation (mostly because their prices are lower in lots of cases than even online sites)... but I guess you get the service that you pay for. I've definitely gotten way better service from smaller companies - they do things like follow-up on questions and return calls.

*gasp* what a concept!??!

I'm definitely going to think twice before doing any more special orders from Home Depot.

Our apartment wants to be in Europe

The Ghetto Penthouse is disoriented. It thinks it's in Europe. I mean, I can't think of any other reason why its dimensions are perfect for European appliances and accessories. Hmmm... maybe the Ghetto Penthouse is snooty and pretending to be all Euro-style.

The latest saga is towel bars. Things that seem so simple is actually totally difficult. when you have an apartment with a Euro-complex. We need a 18" double towel bar in chrome. At this point, we're not even looking for a pretty one - just any towel bar that fit those criteria. Nope, no can do. They're either 24" or single or in any finish but chrome or they're $300.

Maybe we should just lift our apartment with balloons and head to Europe.

Ghetto dining

The good ol' days of ghetto living. Living ghetto style has many challenges. One of them is attempting to eat in our home. It usually involves sitting on the floor (thus, getting the butt covered in all the o-so-wonderful dust particles that's floating around our home) with plastic utensils that don't really cut food and plastic take-out container lids that threaten to topple over with each breath.

Every once in a while, we dine in style - sitting in a comfortable cozy chair and using a paint tray as a plate. Here's an action sequence of Sean eating sushi in style.

T minus 2 days

Except for installation of toilet & doors, Alberth just told us that the renovation will be complete on Thursday.

Yipee!!!! This coincides nicely with Lily having Friday off and can spend the long weekend cleaning up and trying to shape some normally back into our lives.

Lounging on a couch - here we come!

Coast to coast renovations

Hi, everyone. This little photo update serves two purposes: 1) to fill you all in on the ongoing mundane saga of our plaster, pipes, and progress pics... and 2) to show Lily, who is on "girly-vacation" in San Diego this weekend, the progress that was made to our apartment after she left.

Countertops

Our countertops arrived yesterday! I was very excited about this, but I forgot that it meant we would also have our sink and faucet installed! It's actually starting to look like a real kitchen again. :) The countertop is a quartz stone, and has some light-gray flecks throughout. (Might be hard to see in this picture.) It has a nice sheen and is really elegant looking. Lily was 100% spot on with getting a stainless steel faucet. I was like "shouldn't it be chrome??" and we debated it for eons. of days. But she was right, the stainless matches everything else and it looks great against the countertop.



Cabinets

We wanted to re-use our old built-in cabinets, but one of them was too small for the new wall space. So our contractor is building a new cabinet to match. We also designed ourselves an awkward L-shaped little linen closet, and he came up with a smart idea for how to arrange the shelving, and began putting that together yesterday also.



Floors

Do you know how hard it is to find parquet wood floors? No one makes them anymore. Most of my online research lead me to believe we would have to get all the little wood pieces cut by hand and inlaid by hand. Back when this type of floor was all the rage, they had premade interlocking chunks that you could just lay in place, like tiles, but no one makes them anymore. I searched everywhere online and our contractor searched all over the city... he finally found the exact same kind that we have, at a lumber yard in East Harlem. Whew!



Yes...

And yes, the apartment still looks like this. Tomorrow will be the end of week 4. Our contractor expects to have a few more days of work next week, but believe it or not it's all coming together!

Valve emergency!

Our emergency this week was a plumbing miscommunication from week 1. It turns out that our contractor installed a shower valve that doesn't fit our shower handle, so we had to rush-order a new valve yesterday.

Our poor contractor had to tear the wall back open to take out the wrong valve, so we don't have ANY running water in the WHOLE apartment until the new one is installed.

The new one should be coming via Overnight UPS today... so here's hoping UPS shows up before our contractor has to leave for the night! (I survived last night without a toilet, but I don't think I can do a plumbing-free weekend!!)

Back in the first world

I came home tonight and do my usual tour. I walk into the bathroom and see:



Yes! Not only do we have electricity - we have a mirror and a sink and faucets! We're back to the first world.

*sigh* Now I really don't have an excuse on why I leave the house with Einstein hair or eye boogers... now I have to go back to just admitting that it's really just my inability to leave the house in a presentable state in the mornings.

BTW - the photo above is a re-enactment. We had to capture the moment somehow!

Now, we can finally take a bath! Sean and I decide to try it out. He declared that this is now the 2nd most comfortable seat in the house. (The first is the club chair, which is usually buried under our blue tarp and takes loads of effort to dig out each night)





Our kitchen appliances are plugged in. We have a working fridge and a working microwave. Tonight, Sean figured out how to use the timer on the microwave... and as I'm writing this post, he just exclaimed "We have an oven light! And a surface light! And a night light mode!"

I'm never leaving this room

Oh my, we're going into our fourth week of renovations and it's all coming together. Today, I came home and we have ELECTRICITY!!! We can turn on lights in the bathroom and bedroom. Oh my gosh, too exciting.

I walk through the door and do my normal tip-toeing through the house (kind of like a kid on an Easter egg hunt who can't wait to turn the corner and see what she'll find)... the kitchen looked the same... I walked into the bathroom and the sconces are hung! On a whim, I flip the light switch and ELECTRICITY!!! I blink and then I realize that the walls and ceiling have been painted. It's beautiful. It's gorgeous. It's fabulous. It's the most perfect room and I never want to leave it. I told Sean that if we ever move, I'm going to cry because I wouldn't want to leave the bathroom.



Bear in mind, we still have a huge gaping hole where the medicine cabinet is suppose to go, a bucket for a sink, and our old never-quite-flush right ugly toilet. I can't imagine when it's finished... everyone - you've been warned - if you never see me again for the next 5 years, it's because I'm in the bathroom.

BTW - do you know that I spent 2 hours this morning at work before I realized that I still had eye boogers!?!? *sigh* things that happen when there's no light and no mirror. Well, at least that problem is 1/2 solved, now I just need the mirror.

Oh, second btw - we also have a running refrigerator. Now we can take leftovers home... hmmm... we just don't have any way of re-heating them. Oh well, now we can have all the ice cream we want and it'll stay cold! So nice to have a working frost-free (and very pretty!) refrigerator!



Oh, did I mention that our bedroom was painted on Friday!?! When we moved in, we wanted a zen bedroom with tranquil springy green walls. What we got was hospital green walls - the total opposite of tranquil - instead you think IVs and needles and all the ickyness. Now, now we have tranquil.

Grout - it really makes a difference

We've been slowly seeing our vision for our home coming true. It's quite exciting to realize that our random choices weren't too shabby!

We're especially pleased with our bathroom - our random tile selection and the last minute change to do a half-tile instead of a full tile all worked out brilliantly. Today, we came home and our bathroom has been grouted. *whazam* amazing what a difference grout can make. It's gone from looking good to looking absolutely spectacular!

BTW - do you know how many shades of grout there is - unbelievable! We ended up buying our grout when we got our tiles with the assistance of one of the store owners. She'll say "I recommend A or B" and I would say "A!" and she would say "Good choice!"... I can't imagine not having her assistance and staring at the 10 shades of beige and trying to make a decision.... hmmm... it'll probably be like when we had to pick out our bathroom wall colors. :) Lots of staring.

Speaking of bathrooms... we came home last night from dinner and Gaspar stops us in the lobby and said that Joe, the super, needed to speak to us. Sean and I looked at each other and thought "Uh oh, what happened?!?!"

It turns out that our temporary toilet that was held in place by painter's tape was leaking to our downstairs neighbor's ceiling. Ooops. Joe said that it was a minor problem and we should continue to use the toilet until this morning. You know, I realized that you can really hold a pee for a loooong period of time when you're afraid of what will happen if you flush. Just now, we justed called our contractor - apparently, all's well and we can continue to use our toilet for as long as we need it. Whew...

I think our home is hungry... or needs fiber

This is the THIRD time in 2 weeks where a roll of toilet paper has vanished!

*poof* gone!

Is this our home's way of telling us that it's hungry?!?! Doesn't paper have a lot of fiber? Maybe our home is low on fiber.

Photo update

Paint! Floor! Pretty cabinets!
Goodbye granny wallpaper!
Goodbye glossy ceiling!
Goodbye linoleum!


New, bigger bedroom ready for paint.


Bathroom tiles lookin' nice :)


New A/C unit. Installed during our renovations by sheer coincidence. :)


Lily pulled the desk chair in and debated the bathroom wall color.


Sean says: I am too young to be having the "which shade of beige" conversation.

Tile emergency!

Monday night... we found out that we're 2 tiles short in the bathroom. How can that be?!?! We purposely over-purchased the amount of tiles we need because you always hear horror stories about bad cuts, tiles breaking, etc. Man, this means we must be really bad at math.

Hmmmm... thinking about it... we thought we over purchased the amount of kitchen floor tiles we needed and it turned out to be just enough.

Yep - we suck at math.

Alberth told us that it's best if he can get the tiles by Tuesday... what to do!? what to do!!?

Luckily, my Tuesday morning was very light in terms of meetings... I trekked out to Brooklyn and trekked back with 3 (one for just in case) tiles. The round-trip journey took about 2.5 hours. Purchasing the tiles at the store took about 5 minutes (this includes a bathroom break).

The store is waaaayyyy out there. But I love the store - it's a family-run business where mothers and daughters and sons all work there - the people are just the nicest! And, they have lovely tiles - extra perk!

In fact, when I walked in, they remembered me and automatically gave me a discount. We're kind of going over on the budget, so I'll take any discount I can get!

I miss the pool float

Our toilet's back, so we can sleep back at our apartment. It's sad leaving Sean's studio. I've gotten used to sleeping there and living out my "loft" dream. We packed up our bags, sheets, and inflatable couchbed and headed back to Manhattan.

Night time comes, we get ready for bed and realize that we left the pump at Sean's studio... in Queens.

*sigh* what to do, what to do? Do we
1. Go to Sean's studio to pick up the pump?
2. Blow up the inflatable couchbed manually?
3. Find some other option

It was close to midnight, so option 1 automatically got discarded. Sean decided to give option 2 a try.


I think he went at it for about 10 minutes and the inflatable couchbed remained, well, it pretty much remained deflated.

That left option 3. What to do? What to do? We have taken many a naps on the couch and it's way comfortable! Unfortunately, the couch is in a vertical position, so sleeping on it was a no-no.

We decided to pull out the cushions and make a little bed. We've spent many a nights when we first moved in on an inflatable single person pool float, so this should be a 5 star hotel compared to the float.


Well, it wasn't a 5 star hotel. We spent the night precariously balanced on the cushions. For some reason, it was harder to balance on the cushions than the pool float. I never thought I would say this, but I miss the pool float!

Here's a picture of the pool float from when we first moved into the apartment and didn't have furniture yet.

Starting to look less messy

I realized we hadn't taken many photos of our place last week! Each day we come home and there's something new to look at... a few new tiles, a new kitchen cabinet, etc... And for the last 5 nights we've been sleeping at my studio, so we haven't even been home other than to drop off some paint cans or pick up clean clothes.

But here's a few quick (and not so great) photos that I snapped with my cell phone to give you guys a little progress update.


Tiles in the bathroom
We were going to full-tile the bathroom, but we have too many weird soffits. Our contractor recommended stopping at the border, 4 feet up. That meant we had to scramble and choose a paint color. After staring at 37 shades of white, "Edgecomb Gray" it is. Paint should go on in a few days.





New bedroom wall
The old bedroom "wall" (I use the term loosely) was 2 feet closer to you in this photo. Basically, the stepladder would have been in the next room. So we've made the living room a little smaller, and now our bedroom will be 10x10 feet.




Kitchen cabinets
They're purdy. :) We now have all the cabinets in place and level, and some custom "mini-bits" built into the weird little nooks that our kitchen loves to have. The walls have since been cleaned up and are ready for paint.




Sleeping at work
When we got home Friday to find our toilet in the living room, we turned around and carted the air mattress to my studio.

Today's word.... "saddle"

Our day:

blurry-eyed, waking up

"what time is it"
"noon"

yikes!
scramble out of bed
go down the hall to the studio bathroom
realize no toothpaste *shrug*
put in contacts
splash some water on face

meander a few blocks to Cafe Henri
stop by a tile store
look for threshold, no luck
wonder why the streets are so empty
eat yummy ratatouille crepe
drink yummy cafe au lait

subway ride to manhattan

"bye honey"
"bye sweetie pie"
"meet at the fountain"

sean goes to shower at lily's office
lily goes to library to pick up train books for next week
meet at the fountain

"guess what time it is"
"2:00?"
"11:30"

*mental note: husband can't tell time*
explains why streets so empty at 9 in the morning

subway ride to brooklyn

buy asparagus paint (because guacamole is too gray)
*mental note: look into job as a paint namer*
look for threshold, no luck
look for door lock, cut finger on lock

subway ride back to manhattan

go to apartment
stare at many shades of white to decide on bathroom paint
look for the one paint chip that has disappeared
must have the missing paint chip before making decision

walk down to paint store #1, no missing paint chip
find many other potential substitutes
walk down to paint store #2, pick up missing paint chip
walk back to apartment
rain, rain, rain
walk into drug store to pick up an umbrella
rain, rain, rain
back at apartment
add sail cloth, china white, and edgecomb gray paint chips to collection
*mental note: really must look into job as a paint namer*

decide on edgecomb gray
call mom on appropriate finish for bathroom
walk down to paint store #1
buy paint

walk to home depot
look for threshold
employee #1 directed to aisle 16, no luck
look for threshold
directed to paint section, no luck
employee #2 said "saddle" and directed to tile section
wait for employee #3 to finish servicing another customer
look through many piles of carpet
ask employee #3 for "saddle"
must custom order
all colors ugly, no luck

*shoulders hung in shame, must tell contractor that failed homework*

walk walk walk
feet tired
rest at borders
drink coffee
flip through beach vacation magazines

walk back to apartment
rain, rain, rain

walk to restaurant
eat yummy food

walk to duane reade
look for dessert, no luck

subway to long island

walk to small convenience store
buy brownie & sneakers bar
walk to studio

blog about day

Ummm, the toilet is in the living room

Yesterday was a good day... We went to Home Depot after work and ordered our doors. We had a yummy meal at L'annan and Crumbs cupcakes for dessert. And then we had a leisurely stroll back to our apartment.

We've always looked forward to going home at the end of the day; it meant the work day is over - yea! Ever since this renovation started, now we are like giddy little kids on Christmas day whenever we open the door to the apartment - what changes will greet us today!?!

Last night, Sean opens the door and says "Ummmm... the toilet is in the living room." It was! And our sink bucket was removed. We had no plumbing, but our bathroom floor tiles looked quite lovely. (The toilet and sink had to be removed to let the tiles sit overnight)

We turned around, packed up our inflatable couchbed, sheets, toiletries, and a change of outfit and headed to Sean's studio for the night. It was really nice. I've always wanted to live in a loft - the studio is huge with high, high ceilings. Waking up this morn, I thought "So, this is what it'll be like if we lived in a loft" :)

Today's random thoughts... could IKEA not be my knight in shining armor?

Last October, IKEA was having a Kitchen sale - 10% off all kitchen items. Since we knew that eventually we'll actually get the go-ahead for our renovation, we decided to just go ahead and buy everything. Since October, we've had a pile of cardboard boxes sitting in the middle of our living room.

Our thought was always - well, we'll just return anything we don't open and use. So now that we're at the point where we know what we want to return, I'm finding out that IKEA has the worst return policy and customer service. The stories are just scary. It's making me think twice before buying anything from them in the future.

Kitchen tiles are in!

Straight? Diamond? Straight? Diamond? Straight? Diamond? Straight?

Sean and I spent about an hour one night laying out the kitchen tiles and trying to figure out if we wanted a straight or diamond pattern. First we just laid out the tiles... and couldn't decide. Then we laid out more tiles and put up boxes on the side to simulate what it'll look like with cabinets... and still couldn't decide. Then we stood in the middle and pretended to be cooking and seeing what the tiles look like when we're using the kitchen... and still couldn't decide.

We kept on flipping back and forth, back and forth. We like the clean lines of straight, but hated the red carpet look. We liked how diamond made the room seem larger and broke up the straight lines of the room, but hated how your eyes just bounce around and can't figure out where to land.




After sleeping on it, we decided to go with straight. It looks fab!! I'm really happy with our decision :)

By noon I was done.

A story of Sean carrying a sink 30 miles then recieving kitchen appliances, all by noon.

buzz buzz 6am.

slurp, coffee, sink in the minivan.
sit sit sit, thanks for the ride dad.

train station, sink up the elevator
train's already here!
credit card swipe!
bee boo doors closing!
flying leap!
whew.

stand stand stand. bee boo.
stand stand stand. bee boo.
stand stand stand. bee boo. welcome to new york city.

elevator sink
escalator sink
street sink honk.
curb curb curb.
sink is home.

delivery call appliances coming!
Stand around stand around stand around phone.
hi here's your stuff, urgh lift shove.

upstairs downstairs
super doorman porter
walk lift wait
tip $20, tip $20, bye.

bike bike bike.

office now snooze.

We have appliances! (just need a kitchen to put them in)

Part number guy's crew delivered the kitchen appliances this morning.

So first they carried the new oven down into the basement. They were all sweaty already.

So I said: "Hey, guys, I know you just carried this big thing down the stairs... but .... it's the wrong oven." (It was the same model but the freestanding range, not the slide-in.) We feared the worst, but the paperwork was in order, so they must have just pulled the wrong one out of the truck.

Wrong oven - oops

After some truck searching and paper flipping, they determined that they'd just delivered our stove to someone 3 blocks away. They had ours and we had theirs. So one delivery guy just started walking down the street with the unpacked oven on a hand truck, and a half hour later emerged around the corner with ours. Amazing. :)

Our appliances! They looks so small next to the truck

Guys moving our appliances across the street

Lugging away our old appliances
"bye bye stove that took 30 minutes to boil water"

Bye bye fridge that needed defrosting and didn't really keep food cold

Feeling rested

We're getting old. After spending two weeks on our inflatable couchbed ™, we had to escape to Sean's parent's place for two nights in a real bed. After two nights of real sleep and waking up to birds chirping, we're physically (and mentally) ready for another week of waking up on the floor because the air in the mattress escaped during the night.

Productive weekend! On Friday, we stopped by IKEA after work and picked up a larger kitchen cabinet. I'm amazed at the number of people going to IKEA on a rainy, cold Friday night.

Sunday was running around trying to find a one hole sink since the counter-top people are coming on Tuesday and we need to have a sink ready. Do you know how hard it is to find a one-hole sink?!? Apparently, stores only carry 4 hole sinks in stock and you have to special order the one-hole sinks. We manage to find a reasonably-priced sink that has 4 holes, but it's one of the prettier 4-hole version sinks. The sink can also be under mounted, so we're going to ask the counter-top people how much extra it cost to do an under mount, if it's not too much, then we'll go with an under mount installation.

We also made a decision on the doors. We had to make some compromises, but the compromises meant that we save $1K - it was worth it :) And maybe we can use the money saved towards the sink installation.

We have a medicine cabinet!

For the longest time, we wanted to go for a simple look in our bathroom - this meant a frameless mirror medicine cabinet. We picked out 3 options that looked nice and are reasonably priced and just needed the final word from our contractor on what size we can fit in the room.

About 2 weeks ago, I had an "d'oh!" moment. A frameless medicine cabinet will make our room really cold and go totally against the spa / zen look I was going for. I realized I needed a warm wood-framed medicine cabinet that's not ugly.

I went searching for this warm, not ugly medicine cabinet. You know, it's really really hard. There are oh, so many ugly medicine cabinets out there. The ones that seem not so bad - they're like $800. There's no reason some pieces of wood, glass, and metal should ever cost that much.

I finally found one that's perfect enough at Restoration Hardware. Even better - it was on sale! We bought it, but then it just never showed up. I finally called them this week and they said that it's been discontinued and they're out of stock and maybe when I purchased it, the web site inventory hasn't been updated yet. They tell me that they'll investigate and call me in 24-48 hours.

I eagerly anticipate this phone call, with the dreaded feeling that they're going to tell me it's out of stock and I'm out of luck.

Today! Oh, so glorious today, I got an shipping confirmation email from Restoration Hardware - my cabinet has not only been shipped, it's due to arrive today! Yea!!! I've been happy all day.


Here's Sean unwrapping the cabinet. The thing was in a huge box and very heavy! It was expertly wrapped, so we didn't completely unwrap it. From the back, it looks beautiful :)

I *heart* Part Number Guy

So there's this part number guy - apparently, he gives amazing mind-blowing discounts on electronics & appliances. Typical conversations go like this:

*ring* *ring*
part number guy: part number?
you: hello? Hi, my name is...
part number guy: [interrupts] part number?
you: [flustered] hmmm...
part number guy: [getting impatient] part number?
...

Today, I called part number guy. There are two phone numbers - apparently, one is the nice guy, one is the mean guy. Which one do I call?!?!

I randomly pick a number and my conversation was surprisingly pleasant. Though when I tried to say things like "It's a GE refrigerator", he would interrupt me with "part number?" But not all together too unpleasant - in fact, he finished the stove part number for me.

He called me back in 30 minutes with prices. OMG - they're fantastic! Duder, for those prices, I'll put up with the lack of conversation.

Day 3

Today is Day 3 of renovation.

Demolition is... well, it's done! This is a task that some of the contractors estimated 6 weeks worth of work. Alberth got it done in 2.5 - days, not even weeks! We love our contractor :)

We discovered that there are tiles underneath our kitchen and bathroom tiles. I mean, are people really that lazy?!? They can't even rip out old tiles before laying new ones!?!? Here's Sean standing on a corner of the old-old kitchen tiles.



We also discovered the old wall paper in our kitchen. Looks like the previous owner decided to stick with the blue theme. I'm so ready to NOT have a blue/white kitchen.



A few things I've learned:
1. Set aside a mirror. For a house that was full of mirrors, now we have none. This makes daily tasks like making sure I don't leave the house looking like Einstein a little bit more difficult.

2. Set aside a hand towel. Now I wash my hands and just wipe it on my shirt - classy!

3. Make sure flip flops are easily accessible! Even though Alberth is super clean, the floors are still covered with a layer of dust and slipping in/out of actual shoes is a pain!

4. Flashlight! With lights shut off, sometimes, it's the only way to see.

Tomorrow's D-day!

Months and months ago, this was our fortune cookie prediction. We thought it was absolutely appropriate for our renovation dreams. We magnetized it to our door as a reminder that if we don't do anything, our renovation dream will remain just a dream.

Tomorrow - we start renovation! First thing, demolition! Our contractor said that it'll take about a week, so by this time next week, we won't be living at home. Just not quite sure where we'll be living. But fear not, we have our 2 pieces of luggage, so we're mobile and ready to couch hop!

Let's Get It Started, in here...

Let's Get It Started, in here...

And the tape keep runnin' runnin', and runnin' runnin', and runnin' runnin', and runnin' runnin', and runnin' runnin', and runnin' runnin', and runnin' runnin', and runnin' runnin', and...


18 rolls of packing tape, 2 rolls of bubble wrap, 30 boxes, 2 bags full of *ahem* bags, and iTunes blasting... we kicked it off with a little dance to "Let's Get It Started" by the Black-Eyed Peas and then off we go...



Most people celebrate Memorial Day weekend with going to the beach, BBQing, strolling through the park...

... Sean and I celebrated it by packing, packing, packing and with occasional trips to Home Depot in searching of tubs, doors, and faucets... West Elm in this effortless search of shelves for our bathroom... and PC Richards in search for a good, but cost-conscious dishwasher and microwave.


Two days later - we're basically done. Just need to move our bed and tarp up the living room tomorrow and voila, we're ready for demolition.

Everything is shoved into one corner of our living room. You know, now that it's done. It feels really good. This is our pile o' stuff now. This is what it looked like when we moved in. Go us for down-sizing!

Our tiles arrived!

Our tiles arrived Friday! As they queued up in a pile on the street (50% shown here) a passerby stopped, bent her nose down to one of the tiles, then simply continued walking. We're not sure if she grossly disapproved, or was simply there for quality checks.

Unfortunately the tile company's delivery policy is "to the curb only". And our buildings' policy is "deliveries go through the basement." So Lily and I lugged all 1,000 pounds of stone down the steps from the street and then handtrucked them through our basement and up to our apartment, where they now sit in our dining area in a cute pile shaped like a dining table.

Our super Super saved the day by loaning us his handcart, because I was too numbskullery to think ahead and bring mine home from work. Even still it took about 2 hours.

This was much better than our original plan, which was to take it home on the subway.

T-minus 13 days to demolition

We haven't been updating the ol' blog here in a while because we were delayed by our building's wonderful management company for 6 months, while some structural engineer, who refused to visit us, deliberated slowly from a trailer-based office in Queens about whether our closet door was scary, illegal, or a skyscraper. I won't torture you with the saga, but that statement is actually true. :(

So as a result we've had our IKEA kitchen sitting in our living room since November and the tile people couldn't even find our order when we went back to schedule a delivery. ("Hm, maybe we filed it away with the 2008 taxes?")



BUT NOW! We finally have approval, and we have an actual start date from our contractor! Demolition begins... (drum roll) ... Tuesday 26-May! So we've been packing up everything in the rooms that will be smashed, taking down paintings and fragile things, and basically getting everything ready.

Soon! So soon! They'll be making all kinds of a ruckus and who knows where we'll sleep when we don't have a shower or toilet, but hey, that's what makes life interesting.

Lamp shade!

We haven't posted in a while and well, it's because we really haven't done anything in a while.

One Saturday, we decided to stroll around NYC and I made Sean stop into Anthropolgie. I love that store - their clothes are fantastic and the decor, oh my gosh, the decor is phenomenal! I'd love to have whoever that decorates the store come and decorate our home.

We've always hated our previous shade, so this shade was perfect (and on sale!)

Hello Eva

So, I didn't spend $400... I spent only $350.

A few years ago, I kept on getting neck cricks. I said to myself "I'm 30 with a nice job. I'm gonna spend more than $6 on a pillow." I've been sleeping like a baby since then.

Just a few days shy of turning 32, I decided that it's time to get myself a nice vacuum. No more marching into Walmart at 2 AM and picking out the cheapest vacuum. I'm gonna do some research and get one that's quiet and works.

Meet Eva - our new vacuum. It's the first time I've ever had a canister vac. She follows me around like a little puppy ;) I was actually a little sad when I was done.

BTW - if I bought the Dyson, I was going to name it Wall-E.

$400 for a vaccum - do I dare?

I have a love/hate relationship with our current vacuum:

• Love: I absolutely hate sweeping and messing around with dust pans and brooms, so I'm glad the vacuum allows me to just glide it around the floor and effortlessly pick up all the dust and dirt.


• Hate: It is loud! Very, very loud! Sean says that he can hear it clearly all the way down our building's hallway with our door closed. Every time I vacuum, I'm in fear that our downstairs or next-door-neighbor will come bursting through the door with a sledgehammer and smash our vacuum.

Regardless of whether I'm going deaf from the vacuum, it seemed rather silly to spend money to buy a new vacuum when our current one works perfectly fine. This past weekend, our vacuum experience a boo boo. It appears that the hose doesn't really work anymore. I mean, I guess we could try to fix it or we can go buy a new one! :)

I've been doing a little bit of research and I found our next vacuum - the Dyson Slim. It's small (perfect for a Manhattan apartment); it has nearly perfect reviews from every site (people are commenting that they are starting to love vacuuming because of the Slim). The only hiccup is that it is $400. Yikes! The last time I purchased a vacuum, I walked into Walmart and spent $89. Can this Dyson Slim be four times as good?!?!

A tile that's "so Lily"

We got tiles today. Lots and lots of tiles.

We've gone to 4 tile shops around Manhattan and Brooklyn in search of our perfect bathroom tiles. We wanted rectangular shaped beige tiles. Sounds pretty generic right?!? It's so impossible to find them. Of course, it may be because we're picky - we wanted a certain shade of beige; the edges have to be crisp; it couldn't be too swirly, but couldn't be too solid; it couldn't be too big or too small. (this is beginning to sound like our refrigerator hunt). We finally found our perfect bathroom tile at Mondial Tile in Brooklyn.

Today, on a rainy Thursday evening, we went back to buy.

The challenge today is finding the perfect accent strip to accompany our tiles. We were in luck! We found the perfect accent strip for our bathroom. It totally adds our personality to the room without negatively affecting the resale value (hopefully). Sean describes the tile as "that's so Lily". I'm totally stoked!

FYI - if you're ever tile shopping in the NY area - Mondial Tile is a family operated business and they are the nicest people. I feel like they're family. They aren't afraid to tell you when they think something looks awful and they get really excited when you pick something that they think will also look fantastic.

Seeking a refrigerator that's "just right"

Sean and I have been feeling a bit like Goldilocks. We've been on the hunt for a refrigerator...

... those refrigerators are too deep
... those refrigerators are too wide
... those refrigerators are too tall

With the plethora of fridges out there, it seems rather impossible to find one that's "just right".

ohmygoshweboughtakitchen

We've made a giant step in our renovation progress today... we bought a KITCHEN!

We're still waiting for all the paperwork to go through with our building's managment, but IKEA was having a 10% off Kitchens sale that ended this weekend, so we zipped on out and flashed our plastic. Several digits later, we own a very flat but soon to be beautiful kitchen!

And we're making a MAJOR improvement over our current kitchen, which is uglier than the cardboard boxes in which our new kitchen is arriving.

So here are some pictures from our big expensive exciting day.

AND A MOVIE. 'Cause we're such technodorks.








(Of course we had to get some swedish meatballs...)

Tonight is our answer...

... we stay. We stay in the United States, we stay in New York, we stay in our first home.

Sean and I said that if McCain won this election, we move. We move to another country. We move to another planet. We move anywhere that is not the United States of America and endure four years of McCain and Palin representing the country we live in.

We're ecstatic that we don't have to move. I suppose that means it's time to renovate :)

P.S. A few of us went to Ben & Jerrys for the free ice cream and got our picture into the digital print of New York Times. It's cool that I can use a portion of my 15 minutes of fame being associated in the media with this fantastic and historical election.

Wait and see?

With the unstableness of the economy - should we wait before committing large amount of cash towards our renovation efforts? This amount of money can carry us a long ways.

Another layer of complexity in this already overly-complicated decision making process. *lily screaming*

Misplaced decimal?!?!

We're starting to get some quotes back from contractors. The image says it all.

When I read the numbers for the first estimate, I read it like five times because I was thinking... surely there's a misplaced decimal somewhere.

Our home is talking to us

Not so subtly, our home has been trying to tell us a message...

First our refrigerator stopped working. And of course, it has a sense of humor, it breaks down at midnight, the night before we have to wake up early and spend an entire day outside. Being that we have an ancient refrigerator that needs to be defrosted, the melted frost starts flooding our kitchen floor. To avoid any possibility of the water dripping into our downstairs neighbor and causing any sort of damage, we had to clean it up. 3 hours later, we manage to defrost the freezer; the ice filled our entire sink - which conveniently helped keep all the frozen food somewhat cool. Miraculously, after the 3 hour break, we held our breath and turned on the fridge and voila, it worked. We know that we're on borrowed time and we need a new fridge ASAP.


Then, 2 out of 3 shelves in our medicine cabinet shattered. The shelves are on these very unstable brackets and they fall about once a month. This time, they fell and broke.

So, yes, house, we hear you. It's time to renovate. We know. We're working on it.

Why is it so hard to say goodbye...

... to an old cardboard box!?!? I just unpacked the last box that solely held my stuff - it was my last box. I've had this box since 1999. Nine years!!

Today, I bid it farewell. I'm surprising sad about it... not the contents in the box, but saying good bye to the box itself. This box has been with me since the beginning of my post-college days and now we part. It goes to the recycling bin to be morphed into something else. For a box that has been shuffled through four states, it's still very sturdy. I guess that's why some people make furniture out of the FedEx boxes. They hold up very well!

The items that were in the box, so many random things. Random decorations that we hung in our dorm room during my FRESHMAN days! Items that I somehow deemed too valuable to throw away... I'm not sure why a free poster from a free movie preview of a movie that I only mildly liked is something that I needed to move from Austin to NY to Denver to Dallas to Austin to NY.

I've always known that I tend to be a pack-rat. I don't know if it's the sentimental values or it's just pure laziness. Living in Colorado and Texas, my apartment was always large enough that I can just have random boxes pile up somewhere. The lack of square footage in our current home has forced me to evaluate my pack-rat tendencies. Some of it is easy; some of it is really hard. I've had to really think about why I want to keep things since everything I keep, I've had to find a home for it. I think I'm getting the hang of it. I keep postcards; I throw away stubs from our vacations - I mean, honestly, I'm not going to make that scrapbook of that last vacation. I have the pictures and that just needs to be enough.

It's on.

After months of browsing, we did it! We've just made our first purchase towards our home renovation. We now have a bathroom faucet and a bathroom accessories kit coming our way. My heart was actually pounding when I was completing the online purchase process.

Man, there are some ugly faucets out there; there are also some expensive faucets out there. I mean, I realize that quality and material contributes to the cost, but $800 for a faucet?!?! A faucet?!?! It's a faucet!

After a lot of browsing and debating (for two people that have similar taste, we can have some drastically opposite opinions on faucets that we love/hate), we found a faucet we both really liked at overstock.com and most importantly, it was in our price range. A few of our friends have used overstock and have raved about it, so our fingers are crossed.

So, it's on. This is our first official step towards home renovation... Sean joked that if we chicken out of the renovation, we can always just install the faucet :)

Bye bye furniture!

You know... after living in NY for two years, one of the things that truly makes me giddy with happiness is whenever something is removed from the apartment. I'm not picky - it can be a bag of trash, a pile of magazines, a pair of shoes, basically anything.

Today, 3 pieces of furniture left our home: a coffee table, a desk, and a hutch. These three items have been leaning against our bookcase for months now, but now they're gone! Bye, bye!

We posted the items for sell last night on Craig's List and today, less than 24 hours later, they're sold and the new owners have come and picked them up. Yea!

The money was just enough for us to order dinner :)

Taking back the streets

Sometimes I groan and moan about living in New York... the unbelievable amount of money we pay in rent and mortgages and taxes and grocery... the lack of space (I wish everyday that we have just one more closet)... the wafts of spoiled garbage during the summer... and well, the list just continues and continues.

Every time I get to a point where I want to move away, something really great happens that makes me appreciate being a resident of the Big Apple.

Today, it is the Summer Streets event. For three Saturdays in August, the city opened up 7 miles of streets to pedestrians, cyclists, skaters, skateboarders, basically anything that's not a car. Today is the first Saturday. Let me just say, it is all kinds of wonderful and just an absolutely amazing experience.

It's sort of surreal to walk around the street without having to worry about cars. The roads are quiet. No one was in a hurry, everyone ambled along... the number of smiles I encountered, the friendly mood shared by everyone... is this what our lives could be like if we removed cars from the equation?!?!

In addition to closing off the streets to pedestrians, there was a myriad of events - helmet giveaways, live music, and a little fitness. My favorite part of the walk is stumbling upon a Crunch class. Imagine a crowd of pedestrians that's willing to pause for a few minutes and shake their booty. It was a diverse group of people - young, old, male, female, all races... and everyone was having a blast... even the crowd was smiling on the sidelines and shaking their tush a bit too :)

This is the first year NY is doing this event... I really hope this not only become annual tradition, but maybe this will also impact city planning in NY. For those of you living in other cities... this is so awesome!!! I hope other cities follow suit and everyone can experience this!

Better than any superfluous adjective can describe

Wow. Wow. Wow.

There is no word adequate enough to describe the opening ceremony. I think this is the first time that I've ever gotten choked up watching any Olympic-related events. As goofy as I think some of the TV commentators were, I think one of them eloquently summarized the ceremony: it was better than any superfluous adjective can describe (something along those lines, since my short term memory is basically non-existent).

We haven't turned on our TV since our Pakistan vacation. I rushed home around 7:25 and had 5 minutes to turn on the TV and try and find a somewhat acceptable rabbit-ear reception. It's been so long that it took me a few minutes to figure out how to switch from DVD to TV mode and then I couldn't figure out how to turn on the sound. I mean, we have 4 remotes, which one does what?!?! I miss the days where there was one power button, one volume button and one little knob to switch among the 4 channels. There's something to be said about a very simple UI.

Okay, getting off track... so I finally found the channel, figured out how to turn on the sound, and finagled with the rabbit ears enough that we had a tolerable reception.

I kind of figured that the ceremony was going to be a pretty special show. I mean, this is really the first time China has had then ENTIRE world's attention since it started popping on everyone's radar and become rumored as the next dominant country. The Chinese gov't won't tolerate anything less than absolute perfection. They certainly didn't disappoint. Everything was executed with such brilliance. Oh my gosh, I felt so proud. These are my homies! Did you see the precision during the drum act!?!? Or the perfect circle in the tai chi piece. The former marching band geek in me can't help but admire such incredible synchronicity.

While I was beaming with pride that my homies are putting on a show that is going to make its mark in history as one of the most brilliant and beautiful ceremonies ever, I was also angry and sad.

I was angry that the government has enough power to fundamentally change people's lives just so they can put on a good face to the world... this is everything from forcing citizens to attend behavior classes to forcing non-Beijing residents to leave the city to reduce the population. I really do despise the spitting and cutting in lines, but I also accept it as part of the culture - it is all part of what makes each society unique and different. It just seems so wrong to force all these people to change their behavior so that it's more acceptable to the Western culture. What gives?!?!? I also read a story that this old couple that spent all their savings to travel to Beijing so that the wife can get specialized treatment for her illness. All the doctors they visited said that they were too busy prepping for the Olympics to help the wife. This kind of attitude and mentality... this superficial mask that is donned by China to itself appear bigger, better to the rest of the world - it makes me so mad!!!

This is also related to what makes me so sad. I think China has this magnificent, absolute intriguing history and culture. Granted, I'm a little biased, but they have thousands of years of history that is unique and so ridiculously awesome and special. This embracing of the Western culture and discarding the Chinese past - it's really sad. I'm hoping that soon, the good people of China will realize that they don't need to be become completely Westernized to be regarded with respect and they'll learn to embrace both the old and new and create an all new synergy of the past and the future.

Hmm... this started as a post about our crappy TV signal, but it ended up being a long Lily rant. Sorry! Hope everyone enjoys the Olympics!

Fortified with expert advice and insight…

Sean and I have been attacking this home renovation project quite blindly... we've been using the knowledge we gathered from watching HGTV for four months as our guiding light. So as we're making decisions and plans and setting our budget, we actually had no idea if we were on the right track or if we've completely veered to the no-man’s-land of home renovation.

Luckily, Sean’s godfather is a retired contractor. We had a long chat with him Monday night. To say this man is so good and knowledgeable is an understatement. He asked a basic question regarding the age of our building and then started stating what we probably had in our home – the kind of tub, the size and type of medicine cabinet, etc – and he nailed each one. He gave us advice on just everything – how / where to spend our money, recommendations on approaches to the renovation, advice on when we should engage the contractor, approximately how long our renovation should take, etc.

Now we feel loads better knowing that we’re approximately on the right track and armed with a concrete set of next steps.

Thanks Dieter!

Baby's first boo boo

We never use our built-in A/C unit, because it doesn't work very well and we have a little portable A/C that does the job using 10 times less power (literally). But about 2 weeks ago it was really, really hot and we decided to turn it on for the night.

The next afternoon, the superintendent called us to let us know our A/C was drooling into the neighbors' below. We shut it off; the A/C people happened to visit the building the next day, so they looked at it.

"Can't be fixed," they said. "New ones cost $2500 to $4000." For one air conditioner? I could buy 30 air conditioners for that much! Maybe I should put 6 or 7 in each window. "Oh, and here's a $70 bill for our services." Thanks.

That was 2 weeks ago. Today, the super called again. "So, we need to talk about having the water damage fixed downstairs..."

Looks like we'll be out another $400 or $500 so that someone can repaint part of their room. I said, "Wow, uh, That's a lot of money. Can't I just come down with a paint brush? " No. Workers must be insured, blah blah, sigh grumble wallet.

This place suffers from a severe lack of normalishness! What the heck!

Night of pizza, cupcakes, and home decor web surfing

We were suppose to spend the summer figure out all the renovation details and hire a contractor, begin the actual home renovation process around September, and have a grand launch party around Christmas time.

We've been slacking.

Tonight, we holed ourselves up in our apartment with pizza, cupcakes, and our two computers, Happy Meal and McDaddy, and attempted to make some more progress on renovation decisions.

Sean cooks; I take bubble baths. A few weeks ago, we decided to tag team on this renovation effort. Sean focuses on the kitchen; I focus on the bathroom; we review recommendations with each other and voila, decisions. This approach is actually working.

For the bathroom, we've narrowed down choices for a lot of the items. For some reason, it always comes down to two choices and we're at stalemate - Sean prefers one; I prefer the other: sinks, faucets (see below), medicine cabinets, tiles, the list just continues...

Lily's faucet vs. Sean's faucet

I like to think that we both have okay taste and a reasonably good sense in decorations; I guess in the end, whatever we decide, it'd be a vast improvement over our current bathroom... and I get to take my bath :)

Farewell, my tool box

Chinese Laundry. Yes, it is a shoe company (very cute, comfortable shoes!), one of the shoe boxes has also been my "tool box" for as long as I've lived in an apartment... since 1996. It was the perfect size for my little tools, nails, and tape measure. I even had a stud finder.

Today we decided to organize one of our closets. We started with our tool closet. All the items in my Chinese Laundry box fit into one of the existing boxes we've already had... all the tools went in the real tool box; all the nails went into the real nail box.

It makes sense and decluttered the closet with one less box, but saying farewell to my Chinese Laundry box was a sad moment. It was one of the last items leftover from my single days. I put it in the recycling bin... so hopefully it'll be reincarnated as something equally as fashionable and useful.

Everyone should jump on the modular band wagon

Our current bathroom is quite hideous – for those of you who have seen it, you know what I’m talking about:

- peach walls
- hole behind the light switch
- medicine cabinets with the shelves that are always falling down
- leaking, but unfixable toilet
- moldy-looking ceiling that's actually not mold
- icky and VERY HEAVY shower doors

The list just goes on and on. Sean and I decided that we’re going to gut the entire bathroom as part of our fall home renovation project.

We love the look of a pedestal sink, so we went sink shopping!

It sounds so fun and so easy, doesn't it. Hah! "home renovation" and "easy" are two terms that do not match.

We manage to find a sink that we love... except (you know there was going to be an "except") the basin and the pedestal are from two different models.


I emailed Kohler to see if the parts were interchangeable (one can only hope) and they responded today and said No "...all of our basins and pedestals are designed to fit together a certain way and are matched as such..." Isn't a modular approach more cost-effective for them?!?!

Well, at least they returned my email.

Duh... just Flickr it!

We're planning a fall home renovation project. This is THE big project with gutting the kitchen, gutting the bathroom, and if there's still money leftover, paving a hallway through our living room and converting our apartment into a true one bedroom.

We've made countless trips to the local bookstore to browse through books and magazines. I've been surfing various web sites to get information on hiring a contractor 101, everything you need to know before you begin a home renovation project, and the best part - browsing for ideas. The latter has been difficult - have you seen the "before / after" projects in the magazines - I mean, are they for real?!?! Do people actually have those kitchens & bathrooms in their homes?!!??

I saw a posting today about home renovation projects on Flickr. Curious, I hopped over to the site for a look. OH MY GOSH!! There's a wealth of inspirational ideas. What's even better - these rooms actually look real.

Now I know... when I need home renovation / decoration ideas, I'll just Flickr it!

Meet Mo

Hello. This is Mo. Mo has been with us for a week now. When we come home every night, Mo is always there - our little touch of nature.

Mo didn't come with instructions. I'm a little worried because Mo's starting to get yellow/brown spots. Why the spots!?! Is it because it needs to have indirect sunlight? Does it need more water? Less water? Food?

When we lived in Austin, we had a fern named Herb. Herb was a bit sickly, but he always managed to make it to another day. When we went on our honeymoon, my mom took care of Herb. In 3 short months, Herb blossomed. He grew taller, he sprouted many more shiny, green leaves. We didn't recognize Herb. Lucky for Herb, we decided to leave him with my mom. I say hi to Herb whenever I visit the folks. Herb is very happy right now.

At this rate, Mo may need to join Herb.

And then there were none

Our apartment had 4 nasty ceiling fixtures. Three were the $5 builder-grades, one looks like it was the original fixture from when the building was constructed in 1958.

One by one, we've slowly upgraded the builder-grades into a style that is a little less generic and a little bit more us:

1. Kitchen triplet (took 2 tries, but we finally found a light that we liked, was cheap, and actually fit into the space)
2. Bedroom zen (also $5, but much more our style)
3. Dining room bistro (it took us a year to find a light that we liked, and another 6 months to install it)

Now, after 2 years, we finally bid adieu to the last nastiness. Say hello to our hallway shine. (And yes, we still need to paint the ceiling and walls.)



(Look familiar?!? Yes, it the same fixture as our kitchen. We like it that much)

Plunger... plunger...

Today, we had our first home fixing emergency. Well, first new one because I guess technically not having electricity was our real first crisis.

Anyways... we finish dinner and I turned on the sink faucet to start washing dishes. The water level rises higher and higher. "What??? Is our drain clogged?!?! How is that possible when hours ago, it was flowing freely??!?" They have been doing some maintenance work on our water pipes, so we thought maybe the valves were shut. Nope. Valves are working just fine. I pour Drano down the sink. Doesn't do anything!!

Oh man, what to do?!?! Sean, my super hubby comes into the kitchen with the plunger and voila - he fixes the problem.

Plunger for the kitchen sink - who would have thought?!?!? Learn something new every day :) So another day, another home crisis resolved. Yea!

Naked bulb - BE GONE!

We originally bought a lamp last year for our dining room, and have been so busy (read: lazy) that we finally hung it up 13 months later.



What a difference lighting makes! Behold the same room, with a naked bulb (above) vs. a beautiful pendant lamp (below).



Sean hated -- HATED -- the naked bulb SO MUCH that he turned it off everytime he saw it on. Often seconds after Lily just turned it on. (Lily: "Hey! I need light to see in the closet!" Sean: "Grumble, turn off that light! I'll get it." Fumble, dark, bonk, fumble.)



The usual cheapskates we are, this lovely lamp was only $50 at CB2. It was supposed to be a plug-in lamp, but we snipped the plug off and bought a little round medallion in a cheap Chinatown electrical shop for another $3. A little electrical tape later, we have a wonderfully lit room.

Geeks: in stereo!

Only the truest of geeks have matching his-and-hers iMacs and cell phones.



Sick cutesy voices:

Lily: "Hello cutie pie! I am on the phone with you right now!"

Sean: "And we're on video chat too!"

Lily: "Oh isn't this the cutest?"

Sean: "Not as cute as you!"

Lily: "No you!"

Then we cuted each other to death.

Closet poo explained

Friday morning, Sean rides the elevator down to go to work. This happens every day.

On the 8th floor, the elevator door opens and in walks a contractor. All morning long, we heard bangs and crashes and FELT (yes, felt!) the floor shake. Apparently, unit #8G is being renovated.

The contractor and Sean starts talking... and the contractor explains that they are replacing the floors and its a pain because there's tar beneath the floor. A light bulb goes off in Sean's head.

There you go... closet poo is tar. Brings to mind the story of Brer Rabbit and Tar Baby. Anyone read that story as a kid?

Sean is sitting in a fancy chair

We're slaves to fashion. Furniture fashion. And it's such a shame that pretty furniture costs a pretty penny.

We were extremely pleased when we discovered a high style chair at CB2 that did not have a corresponding high price. (On clearance, 50% off!) With the sale price it cost only a bit more than your standard home-office chair, but looks so much not blugly. Because we all hate blugly chairs. (You know who you are, Office Max.)

We took the opportunity to replace our desk with a piece of IKEA furniture that we'd bought last fall... it was meant for the bedroom but simply didn't fit, and sat against the wall in its requisite cardboard flat-pack for eons. Eons of weeks.

The IKEA thing is meant to straddle over a queen bed and act as an occasional table, so as a desk it's much longer and thinner than a normal desk. But we think it gives the workspace a graceful feel, especially coupled with the clean-lines of the low fancy chair.




Before: residue from Sean's bachelor days



Pile of cardboard boxes notwithstanding, we now have a custom modernistish workspace that cost less than $200.

Cheapskate bloggers, 1 ... snooty designers, 0.

Have yourself a very Ghetto Christmas!

The holiday spirit is high here at the Ghetto Penthouse as tradition trumps modern city life. Our iMac is belting out the Barking Dogs Jingle Bells as we plug in our miniature plastic tree.

Merry Holidaze all!

Around the world in less than 80 days

Hmmm... yea, so I just realized that you can't read the text. So in case you're curious and can't do anything else until you know exactly what the text says, below is a copy of it. Oh, also all the pictures you see above are also viewable in the link below (only bigger versions). Now everyone can rest happy :)

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Howdy! Howdy!

Finally - some vacation pictures. True, we never put up pictures of our honeymoon (we're still filtering through those), but you can fast forward and see pictures from our first non-honeymoon vacation "Around Vienna, Prague, and Berlin in less than 80 days" :)

Click here to see our pictures >>

We decided to be kind and filter our 999+ pictures into a much more manageable set of ~100.

Enjoy!

Love,
Sean & Lily

Wanted: Smaller room with less light

Literally 91% of our bedroom walls are covered in mirrors. We've hated them since before we even moved in. (Sean & Lily at the open house: "Nice room. Those mirrors have to go.")

Yes, yes, mirrors make a space feel bigger and add natural light. But honestly, it's an 8x10 room... do you need 80 square feet of mirrors? It doesn't exactly fool your eye into thinking the room is bigger.

So how to remove them? You have to smash them. Not for us. Most contractors won't even take the job, and those that do... charge a lot.

We thought about painting them to look like walls, (Our neighbor did this) but we never got around to it because we hate our current wall color. We'd also thought about covering it with something like a lattice, or reeds, or bamboo or something.

Last weekend we went into the new CB2 in SoHo. Out of nowhere, a set of lovely linen curtains jumped off the shelf and said "I match your bedroom and can cover your mirror! I am 8 feet long and can run floor-to-ceiling! You will love me, and I am on sale!" Not to disappoint the aggressive product, we bought 8 panels and 2 curtain rods on the spot.



We installed them wall-to-wall and floor-to-ceiling (only one day before Sean's siblings came over for the thanksgiving day parade!) They look great!!



Ghetto Penthouse... a little less tacky, one day at a time.

I love it when a (floor) plan comes together

Before



After


We've lived here for 18 months and never really set up the living room. Well, there was furniture, and it was sort of arranged, but we never actually took the time to see if it was a good use of the space. Actually, we knew it was a terrible use of space. A quarter of the room was "dead space", and became filled with junk we wanted to get rid of. And the main sitting area didn't have any natural light, and was crammed in the middle of the thoroughfare. Which meant that walking from A to B (anywhere) required you slalom between the coffee table and ottoman. (Resulting in many a bruised shin.)

So last week, Sean took it upon himself to rearrange the room. Viola! More space. The new layout has the added benefit of allowing us to peer up at the sky while lounging on the couch.



Yes, it's very very messy. We still have a lot of boxes and furniture to get rid of, but at least they're offensively standing in the middle of the room instead of hiding behind the sofa being forgotten about.

Floor plans by the incomparable Google Sketchup

The hills are alive.... with the sound of music

Vienna! Prague! Berlin! [insert another city name]!

I just booked our tickets for our first real vacation since our honeymoon (yes, its been a looooooong 2.5 years). We're flying to Vienna! After searching for cheap flights the last few weeks, I finally decided to cash in my United FF miles. The process was rather painless. The customer service rep was rather pleasant and she said that there were flights to Vienna for the dates we wanted, so I booked them :)

I can't wait to go to the library tomorrow to checkout some Lonely Planet guides. For now, I'll settle for dancing around the room singing songs from Sound of Music and driving Sean insane :)

I just did a search for Vienna pictures on Google - man, the city is beeeeaaautiful! Can't wait :)

baking soda + vinegar = lotta fizz & unclogged sink

I've been on this "green" kick. I know... I know... its so mainstream. I'm really quite disgusted that I decided to hop on the "green and organic" bandwagon. Bah.

They say reading and knowledge is good for you, but all its done is making me wonder what kinds of long-term, unreversible damage I'm doing to Sean and I when I'm using 409 or Drano. I mean, you would think that when one is cleaning, one should feel good, blah, blah. But now when I clean, I get a guilt conscious too. What gives?!?! It just make the whole cleaning thing suck even more (which I didn't think was possible).

Our bathroom sink has been seriously clogging up. It's making simple tasks like washing my face difficult. Now I have to wash the left side, stop, let the water drain. Wash the right side, stop, let the water drain. And then do an overall wash. (I think I've been running around with facial cleansers permanently adhered to my face b/c of this whole 3 step process). Usually, this is an easy fix, I run to the 24 hour Duane Reade, pick up a bottle of Drano and voila! Instant declogging. But now I have this "Go green! Say no to evil non-green products" nagging in my head that prevents me from making that easy trip. So we live with the clogged drain.

Yesterday, I finally decided to try the ol' baking soda/vinegar trick that I read about on Friday. I poured in 1/2 cup of baking soda, then 1/2 cup of vinegar, watch it all fizz (which was pretty cool). Let it all sit for 20 minutes and then flushed with hot water. You know what.... it actually worked. Now I have this sink that allows me to wash all of my face at the same time. Yea!

Maybe this au natural cleaning thing won't be so bad. It's like of like conducting a science experiment. Though word of warning, don't combine baking soda and vinegar before you pour. I tried it (I mean, it just seemed to make sense to combine the two so that it'll drain easier), and I really don't recommend it.

The blackhole known as Etsy

Recently, I've stumbled upon the brilliance that is Etsy. The web site is a blackhole. I start browsing (of course, when I browse, I must look at all 146 pages of pillows) and somehow *poof*, 3 hours have passed. So if you are now hopping onto the www.etsy.com site - you've been warned.

Sean and I have been looking for a light for our bedroom. It's a long and challenging process. We apparently have very different taste when it comes to lighting. Sean likes simple, clean (translation = no personality), I like the more quirky, funky (translation = weird). We've been butting heads on this for a while.

We finally saw a light that we both liked from Room & Board, but (there's always a but), it was $225. I mean, I just can't see myself ever paying that much for a light. It's a light! It needs to turn on/off. The kicker is that I didn't even like the shade - just the base. So $225 for just the base. Umm... no.

Yesterday, I saw a post on Apartment Therapy (another site that sucks up many minutes of my day) for some beautiful china with a cherry blossom pattern. I'm a sucker for cherry blossom. I think its the Asian in me :) I clicked on the link and it brought me to a store at Etsy. There... I saw a light that was nearly perfect. So close, except the decor on the light was wrong. I wanted red cherry blossoms, the light had green/orange leaves and flowers. But, since the seller sells china with cherry blossoms, I figure I'll ask if she can make a light with red cherry blossoms. I emailed the request - she said "yes!" and it was $40! She painted it today, firing it tomorrow, and I should receive it next week. Ooooo... I love the Internet :) Isn't the light beautiful? So perfect for our Zen bedroom :)

The seller's name is Olga and her store is at Olga Designs. She has beautiful items at really reasonable costs. Plus, she's very responsive and super nice.

Food & geeks

While Lily was busy eating her way through Las Vegas with her girlies, Sean was busy buying the latest addition to the Ghetto Penthouse... a new computer. Talk about your typical male/female interests :)

Our former desktop was "Big Mac", our laptop is "Happy Meal" and our airport (wireless router) is "The Drive Through". We're having problems coming up with a name for our new computer. If you have any suggestions, let us know!

The new computer is ultra sweet. The keyboard is the coolest thing. It also has a built-in camera. Lily looooooooooves the Photobooth software and just have to share two of the many goofy pictures with y'all :)

Explosion out our window

There was an enormous steampipe explosion in midtown Manhattan yesterday evening, and it was right out our window.

Yesterday I was on the phone with Jake when I started hearing a deep, low rumbling noise coming from somwhere... the kind of sound that makes it hard to hear other things.

I casully placed my hand on our big picture window, and the whole window was vibrating! Still chatting with Jake, I took a step closer to the window to see if there was a big truck idling on the street below, and I saw one of the scariest things anyone can see... cars peeling out and dozens of people running frantically through the street, looking over their shoulders as they bolted away from something.

I turned to the left and saw, three blocks away, an enormous explosion-like plume erupting from my street 3 blocks north of our building. "I ! Um! Jake! ... I'm going to have to call you back!"



What is it? Should I leave? I'm a few blocks away, it seems safe. What if this rupture grows or spreads closer or something? I was freaking out. The area affected is almost directly between The Chrysler Building and Grand Central Terminal -- two landmarks, and likely targets for terrorism. My inial fear was that there was a bomb set off in the subway station... but I quickly realized that a) the station doesnt run that far south, and b) no bomb would continue to vent like this.

Within less than a minute, police, rescue, and fire were everywhere. Kudos to these guys for being on the ball! I frantically called Lily (aah, why wont she pick up??) and finally got her on IM. Whew, she was safe. I was so worried! We IMmed the whole time this was happening (my cell phone couldn't connect) and kept each other company.

I grabbed my camera and took the video above. Photos don't convey the power and speed at which this 30-story column of smoke & debris was erupting from the street. The first porton of the video is from literally moments after it began. It looked very much like a volcanic eruption. (It made me think of the movie "Volcano" where an active volcano begins erupting under LA or something silly like that.) My initial guess was that it was a ruptured steam pipe, which turned out to be the case.

Everything's fine now, and we're both safe. The road is closed at the corner below us, so thankfully we can come & go without crossing police tape. There are about 5 news vans in front of our place.

Candles weren't designed for Julys

It's stupidly hot today. We have some nice pillar candles decorating our picture window. Today, they became one with the glass.




So now we have D-shaped candles. Good thing they were only $4 at IKEA, and not $24 at Pottery Barn! We need better A/C.

5 dollar zen

We replaced the ugly $5 Home Depot light with a beautiful $5 IKEA light.




Why do people decorate with Home Depot stuff? They sell lumber.

Real furniture

Today is a very momentous day in our lives -- we just bought our first piece of real furniture!! Real furniture is made of wood and does not require self-assembly. :)

Ever since we painted our dining room red, we've envisioned a glorious antique Chinese buffet storing our fine china, gracing guests as they enter our home. It's remained only a vision for several reasons:


1. The buffet had to be a certain color. We can't have our guests' first impressions be a ghastly color clash.


2. It had to be a maximum 47" wide. Our walls are crooked enough that a 48" piece of furniture acts as a 1-inch doorstop. And most buffets are at least that wide.




3. It had to be within our budget. (Read: really cheap.) We just bought a place; there isn't much cash just lying around waiting to be spent.


This has made our search last over a year. Last month, I (Lily) was walking through a street fair and stumbled across a booth selling antique asian furniture. Standing there was a magnificent buffet... It was beautiful; the color was a perfect match; AND it was less than 48" ! And even better, the fair was at 3rd and 28th... not too long a haul. (Transportating items is always an obstacle in the city). Unfortunately, Sean was away on a business trip, and I couldn't purchase our first real piece of furniture without him. Saddend, I walked away. Alas! Another foiled attempt.

Today, we woke up and glanced out the window - another street fair, right below us! As we headed down the elevator Sean said, "Wouldn't it be funny if that antiques booth is like right out side our building?" (okay, he didn't use the word "like" - that was the Lily edit).

We walked out the door, I glanced to the left and you guessed it - there was the booth, just outside our building's door. We walked the 2 seconds to the booth and there it was. The buffet. We looked at it. It was beautiful, it was perfect. What was even more important - we successfully negotiated a price that we wanted to pay. It was ours!

The guys at the booth were even kind enough to help us carry it into our apartment. Sometimes, things just are meant to be.

Come visit and check out our new addition to the ghetto penthouse... becoming less ghetto, one piece of furniture at a time :)



Please ignore our minty fresh hallway.

The Minimal Effect

If you look around everywhere, cool & trendy is all about the minimalist effect. What better way to show off a room?!?!

So, I'm not too much into minimalism, it's too cold and impersonal. However, there are definitely lessons learned. It's with this minimal principal in mind when Sean and I loaded up 14 medium size boxes & a few pieces of furniture and called them our "outbox" pile. So a week shy of a year, we finally found someone to come and pick up our outbox pile! This is a huge monumental milestone - we celebrated gaining 50 sqft of our apartment back and losing 14 boxes of stuff by using our towels.

I'm sure by now you're asking yourself "Towels?!?! Huh?!?! What?!?!" As motivation for us to donate the outboxes, I told Sean that we can only use our fluffy, brand-new towels we got as a wedding present after the outbox is gone from our home.

Let me tell you, those towels are niiiiiiiiice :)

To help celebrate our minimalism milestone, Sean decided to put forth a bit of his own personal effort:

Bedbegone

As nice (or not) as our old bed was, it was just too big for our tiny 8x10 bedroom. Witness, like magic before your eyes, that which is the bedroom transformation. Poof! Amazing.

< Before.


Lily's Zen vision is finally coming to fruition. (Below) It will likely be ready in time for us to move out.


After >


Bedroom makeover, $405.00
The trendy low platform beds we were looking for averaged $600 to $1200. It seemed like a lot, but we figured that it would be a good piece of furniture for the ages. Then we realized that we could just purchase the Ikea MALM bed for $159 (and MALM Nightstands, $49 each) and if it falls apart when we move, buy another one, and so on. And still save money. Hm. We danced the room up with some funky art we'd bought from a local artist for $35. Curtains and rod also from Ikea, $20. Duvet cover from Bed Bath & Beyond, $80.

TV girl, we miss you!

Strange as it may sound, Lily and I have named many of the people that live across the street from us, since we can see into perhaps two dozen apartments from our place. Our favorite two neighbors, Shirtless Man and TV Girl lived directly across from us, one above the other. They were both home very often and never had guests over, so we assumed they were single and thought perhaps we should hook them up. We think Shirtless Man is gay, actually.

Two months ago, the muscular, V-shaped Shirtless Man moved out, to Lily's shagrin... the Browns moved into his place, and are quite boring by comparison. At least we still had TV Girl. Poor TV Girl, she just sits at home every day after work with the TV on, long into the evening. We could actually see what she was watching. Never anything good, just lots of surfing. We really bonded with TV girl, we felt bad for her. She seemed like a nice person, if not a little shy. I think we could have all been friends. Strangely, we really felt like we knew her.

But last week as I was getting ready for work, I discovered -- TV girl's apartment was bare!! Not even a goodbye! No big packing day... just... empty. Like she had to get away from us in a hurry. Perhaps everyone moves out because of the freakish couple across the street spying on them from the Ghetto Penthouse...

Ghetto suburb

As a Christmas gift for Lily's parents, we did a little deco work at their place (since our place is in such limbo). Last year we re-did a bathroom, so this year we re-did the living room.

Sean's mom and Lily sewed curtains from some bolts of fabric, Sean and Lily's mom painted the room, and Sean & Lily rearranged the furniture and redecorated the room with trinkets from elsewhere in the house.

Clothes line bungee

Doing laundry, Lily likes to air-dry a lot of clothes, but we don't have a place to hang anything. So for the past 9 months, we've criscrossed twine around our bedroom and the hall to our bathroom.

We really wanted to get one of those cool retracting clotheslines that you see in European hotels... A string comes out of the main device and hooks on an opposite wall. We finally got one yesterday. I was wary at the low cost ($10), but it was the only option at the mega home store, and I suppose they're not very complex doohickys anyway.

Well, after drillling four holes in our plaster and hanging this baby up, we pulled out the string, tightened it til it plucked like a Cello, and then hung our fresh laundry. And, of course, the string stretched all out and the clothes lumped together in the middle.



It's not my week for home stuff. :(

Assisting those in need, when they feel like it

Well, I'll start off with a photo: our apartment still has charitable donations piled all over that we can't get rid of. 10 boxes and three pieces of furniture (including a bed). You'd think the charities would be happy to get so much wonderful free stuff from giving people. We've got clothes, kitchen stuff, blankets, towels, even suits and toys for families trying to get a fresh start.



No, they couldn't care less. Salvation Army was the only one willing to come by and pick the stuff up. They gave us a window of time for the pickup (8am to 4pm, great) so I had to sit around the house waiting for them all day... and of course they never showed up. A call to their main office at 4pm: "Oh, they came by this morning but couldn't find a place to park so they left." What?? Why? I'd have paid a $50 parking ticket to get a $3000 tax deduction. I asked them what I could do. Their answer: "Want to try again Thursday?" There will still be a bus lane in front of my house on Thursday. "Hey, we gotta keep the trucks moving, there are millions of people." Millions of people what? Living here? What's that supposed to mean?

I told them I'd might just throw everything out, and they said "OK."

Happy anniversary to us!

It was two years ago that Sean began our vow exchange with "I'll try not to cheat" and we celebrated our "I do"s. Happy anniversary to us!








Two years later, thanks to Apple technology, Lily has morphed into Syndrom from Incredibles and Sean is wondering what he got himself into :)

Naked bulb - be gone!

So it has been a while since our last post. The last time we blogged, we were in a mad scramble to get the ghetto penthouse in people-viewing shape for our Halloween party. For the most part, we got everything done on the list except for removing the outboxes. As I sit here now, 3 months after October, the 14 outboxes are still in the corner. Our new goal it to remove them before our 1 year mark :)

Our tiny little place has 3 naked bulbs. Originally there were 4, but we added a kitchen light. Go us - 25% of the way there :) We knew exactly what kind of light we wanted for the dining room (naked bulb #2) and the bedroom (naked bulb #3) - the hard party was (1) finding it and (2) finding one that's in our price range. So the hunt has been going on since about when we first moved in.

Well, today... drum roll please... we're pleased to announce that we just purchased a lamp for naked bulb #2!!!! Our first real renovation task since the Halloween party. We'll post pictures as soon as we receive it and install it in our dining room - I'll bet y'all are counting down the minutes until that posting. I know we are! :)

Wife swap

It's been a few months since we posted. We gave ourselves an deadline of Halloween to get the place in somewhat decent - able to present to the public shape. Halloween came and gone and our pile of outbox is still here.

We're not sure what to do with the 14 boxes in the outbox pile. The problem is that charities in NYC area won't pick up unless you have furniture. So how do we get 14 medium size boxes all the way down to SoHo area. Make 5 trips with our two feet and a hand truck?!?! Get in a taxi and pay?!?! It just seems wrong to pay money to get rid of stuff. So we don't know and in the corner it sits. If you guys have any suggestions, please let us know.

So the other day, Sean gets an email from one of the producers at "Wife Swap" - asking if he's interested in being considered as a participant. Huh?!?! What!?!? Apparently, the producers thought the LEGO angle might be a cool one to showcase in the show. I was like "No way!" Have you guys seen that show!?!? We have only seen the trailers they show during commercial breaks and it looks scary. So doubly, triply "no way!". Then Sean tells me that they pay $20,000 for people to be on the show. Oh! Wait... that amount of money pays for a bathroom and kitchen renovation. Hmm... I think I can do it for a week. But it turns out we don't meet the demographics... you need kids. Oh well!

Measure once, cut twice ?

The carpenter's credo is "Measure twice, cut once."

I have just learned why it's not "Measure twice, then two weeks later when your in your dad's garage, grab the circular saw, cut once , then take the wood back home on the train and find out you'd forgotten those bothersome little fractions that come after the numbers you remembered."

While I pouted over my newly painted shelves that are 1/4 inch shorter than their cabinet, Lily wedged some matchbooks into the little gaps.

Stable? Enough so. And ghetto enough to match the rest of our home!

Now nobody breathe...

Outbox runneth over

As we've been unpacking and setting up our new home, we've been setting aside things that we don't have space for. This pile has been dubbed "The Outbox", and soon grew to over a dozen (big) boxes.

Most of these items will be donated to charity, but we'd like to give all of you first dibs. There's a good selection of kitchen stuff, as well as home decor, video games, and stuff. If there's anything here you would like, please reply to this post to "claim" it.

Yes, we know that some of these things were gifts from some of you in days gone by. We cherish every gift we receive! But we have many duplicates now that we've married, and others are things we wish we could keep but simply cannot fit into our home. It's been very hard parting with a lot of these things. Thanks for understanding.

Listed art a brief description of the item and it's general condition. (Excellent, Good, Fair, or Poor)

[ List removed, thanks for taking our stuff! ]

Ghranny Penthouse

It occurred to me today that we never showed everyone what our place looked like when we got it.

We have nine pictures and some commentary on Flickr.

Perhaps this will help you better appreciate how far our place has come, even though it still looks like a bomb shelter. I'll take horrendus-work-in-progress over swirly-grandma-decor any day.

CURTAINS!

As a manly male type person, I find it very embarrassing to be so excited about curtains. But then again, I do the cooking and my wife goes out to the office everyday. Maybe I should pick up sewing while I'm at it?

So I'm excited about curtains. Curtain rods are great because you can pretended you are Jet Li. (You should all go see Fearless, by the way.) Anyway, we have curtains now. It's really nice to think that the neighbors can't see into our bed every morning, but even more nice to see Lily's awesome zen-vision beginning to take shape in our bedroom. Soon the bachelor-blue bedding and other uglies too will be gone.

Due to my amazing fading powers of math, I had to cut the curtain rod an inch shorter so that it would fit on our incredibly tiny wall.

Darling it's better, under the siiiink.

Little Mermaid lyrics aside, we're suckers for IKEA's smart little storage solutions. Along with some nifty cutlery-drawer-organizers (which fit to the millimeter by sheer luck) we finally tamed the gobbed mess beneath our sink thanks to a sliding metal rack and a sliding set of bins.

I gotta say, what a difference it makes! Lily was so happy that she sat there and played with the trash bins for hours.

Lamp: reloaded

As much as we love Greek Mythology, the Medusa Lamp just wasn't cutting it in our kitchen. We tried shortening the cord, but it would require a real hack job so we just returned it. We got a new light that's nearly as nice, and half the price! And more importantly, it fits in our kitchen without strangling anyone.



We are, of course, just happy that we were able to finally throw out the cheapo fixture (third photo, above) and all of it's five-dollar-ugliness.

Let there be lamp

The folks that sold us our ghetto penthouse took the light fixtures with them, installing $5 ugliness on their way out. As such, we've been staring at naked bulbs and Home Depot grot for the past 3 months.

We finally found a light we like for the kitchen. (Shown here.) It's really cute, really nice, (and ahem, really affordable).

Although designed to be a pendant lamp, it retracts upwards to "desired height". Perfect! We bought it & brought it home.


Sean climbed up the ladder Sunday night, assembled it, and installed it. (his first do-it-yourself cieling fixture!).

As it came together, our kitchen finally starting to look homey. When we were finally done, tired but excited, we retracted it upwards to desired height.


But it seems the excess cords do not stow safely in the overhead compartment. The six-foot stretch of cords, retracted to 1 foot, is a noodled mess. We own.. Medusa Lamp.



Now we're not sure what to do with Medusa Lamp. We could:

1. try to retract the cords somehow. We tried last night and they don't seem to want to budge.


2. try to splice the cords and remove the excess... although this might leave visible splicing.


3. take the darn thing back apart, go an hour-each-way back to the store and return it... putting us back at square one.


4. Try for a "medusa" / greek goddess theme. Aphrodite Spatula-ta, Helen of Trivet, Pandora's Fridge...

Cash in the attic

I consider myself pretty web savvy and tend to try out new web things as they emerge. But for some reason (save one traumatizing eBay experience) I've avoided contact with eBay and Craigslist.

But Sean and I just have too much stuff. Unless we want our home to permanently resemble a storage unit or dumpster hall, we need to get rid of stuff.

We have 14 "outboxes", containing everything we want to sell, donate, or (last resort) throw away. We tried to give stuff to Shannon and Jonathan, but they don't want anything! Bah... you'd think college kids would jump at free stuff.

Since we can't give stuff to our siblings, we decided to try to sell stuff to strangers. So yesterday I ventured out for my first Craigslist expereince ... listing furniture and electronics for sale!

24 hours later - we've sold 4 out of 4 items. Not so shabby! $30 richer, we're looking around to see what else we can sell :)

It's hard to unpack from Detroit

Sorry for the slow posting these past few weeks. Lily is now working in Detroit on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays! :( Our unpacking has slowed to a snail's pace. We're trying! We want to get the place all nice & ready and have everyone over for a nice dinner party... we just don't know when that will be.

A house is a pile of stuff with a lid on it

As we approach week four of unpacking (gadzooks!) , we've managed to set up a living area, dining area, and a desk area all in the main room. We still have a waaaays to go, but at least we can pretend to be normal people now.

We've hauled away over 350 gallons of trash. Most of that was packing materials, but there was a fair amount of "Why do we have 8 half-used bottles of Elmer's glue?"


We've also created The Outbox, (which has grown to 12 boxes) of things to sell/donate/give, or failing that, pitch. Everything from coffee mugs to an entire Playstation2 ensemble. We'll inventory it soon, so if anyone needs anything... :)

It's so painful to think we moved all that stuff only to get rid of it. But alas... we didn't have time to weed through it before our Honeymoon. So it went from our old place, into the truck, into storage, into the truck, to my parents basement in NJ, back into the truck, then here.

Water you waiting for

Overnight guest, ready to shower:
"Sean, you're hot water takes a LONG time to heat up. I've been running it for like 5 minutes..."

Sean, not looking up from his computer:
"Oh, the [H] and [C] knobs are reversed."

Guest:
"Of course they are." (Wanders back into the bathroom.)

- - -

We don't have water today (what the heck?) but I'm happy to say I finally spent the quite literally 30 seconds it takes to switch the knobs to their correct spigots.

"Hello, unit 9E ? Unit 8E is wet."

I love when mantinence says your A/C is leaking. Into your neighbors unit. Through the brick façade of the building.

Scarey sounding, but the building mantinence guys took out our A/C (pictured.. weird that you can see right out!) and were able to fix it in a few minutes. (For free!) Good thing too; we found out that a replacement unit costs $4000! (Titanium plated, no doubt.)

We won't get started on how bad our A/C is to begin with. Chugging $325 last month in electricity, you'd think it would cool the place.

Tea time

The ardourous task of unpacking continues. Unpacking in Manhattan is a lot harder than unpacking anywhere else... we empty a box, but then there's nowhere to put the stuff, so we're at a standstill.

We were trying to decide what the next step should be, and our eyes landed on six boxes of fine china. That's a whole stack along the wall! So we decided to have an "easy" night and unwrap it all.

Unpacking the fine china was the most fun we've had unpacking. First, there was all the bubble wrap -- ooo, it was such a struggle between opening a box or spending 5 minutes popping bubbles. Some boxes had both types, the big bubbles and small bubbles, so we could go back and forth.

We haven't seen our china since months before the wedding, when we first picked it out. It's a great feeling when you see something you haven't seen in 2 years and you still really love it. We love it! And in some cases, it was the first time we'd seen the item! (Sure, we'd seen the plates and cups, the usual setting they display in the stores...) But when we unwrapped the butter dish and the casserole dish - they were sooo cute!



And then we unwraped the gravy boat -- Sean and I were both like "Oh my gosh! A gravy boat - we've never owned a gravy boat before!!!" With each thing we unwrapped, we had to spend at least a few minutes studying them (and playing with them!)

Now I'm totally ready to have a dinner party - only if we can unearth the dining table and chairs :)

We can sit on the couch

After a month of having an air mattress for our bed, couch, and dining chair... having an actual couch is the most luxurious thing in the world.

(A week and a half ago, we were so desperate to sit in an actual seat that we went to a Starbucks just so we can sit in their cushy chairs.)

Sean VS the cake

Sunday, Sunday! SUNDAY!

One day only, the battle between SEAN the HOMEMAKER and Duncan Hines DEADLY choco cake! Who will devour whom?! The Homemaker hasn't been in the ring for a year, and Cake is rising to the challenge!


DING


Oh, it looks like it's all over for Cake! For a while, Cake was really cooking out there, but his crumby performance has him whipped and looking beaten.


... Urge to bake .... fading .... Sorry, it's been 15 months since Sean has baked, and he was in serious withdrawal. We've finally unpacked our kitchen!!!

Toilet runneth over

What ghetto penthouse would be complete without a busted toilet?

Some flimsy yet integral bracket jigger (the technical term - Sean looked it up) cracked just before our moving day. Strapped for time, Sean drew inspiration from his father. ( Dad can jury-rig anything. Stories abound of a Mustang with cemented paper plates and a campsite grill. And Sean has witnessed first hand Dad's ability to erect trellises with keychains and fix the minivan with binder clips and twine. )


To flush, simply pull up on the twisted electrical wire, wait for the tank to empty, then smoosh the attached little bar back into the plunger.

Unpacking from the land of giants

There's nothing like seeing Texas-sized stuff in a Manhattan apartment. Our electric can opener could tear open a trash can. And what's with our 15 inch dinner plates from Pottery Barn? We have to store them in the hall closet!

All our possessions have been hidden in boxes for over a year; it's amazing how huge everything looks to us now that we're back in a small home.

(Speaking of our Pottery Barn gifts... why didn't any of our friends tell us we registered for three sets of bowls? Salad, dessert, soup... what were we thinking? Temporary insanity: pre-wedding stress. Or too much fun with the scan gun. What's your excuse?)

Moving day

We moved in yesterday! We've been here for a month (air mattress, one pan, plastic spoons, 3 towels...) but yesterday we finally moved all our stuff. We rented a truck, loaded it on Monday, and drove into the city for unloading Tuesday.

Sean enjoyed taking the full-sized truck through the Lincoln Tunnel (inches to the wall!) and through the streets of AM-rush-hour Midtown Manhattan. We got the perfect spot just around the corner from our building, and met with our friends Pradip and Steve.

Moving, however, was greulling.



We're required to enter through the basement (the building's rules, sigh) which required carrying everything down a flight of stairs on the street, and then zig-zagging through the basement to the elevator. We are also required to finish before 4:30pm. Working non-stop in the July heat, we hand-carried and handtrucked boxes and furniture across the (usually gridlocked) street, down the block, down the stairs, through the basement, into the elevator, then down the hall and into our place. We all sweat through our clothes, and finished JUST in the knick of time. (At about 4:45, actually.) Pradip and Steve, you guys are saints!


We have SO MUCH STUFF, having just moved from a 1600 square foot Texas apartment to a 600 square foot Manhattan apartment. Our place looks like a storage locker.

Lipstick on a pig

After 4 gruelling days of priming and painting, we're finally done. (Well, except the kitchen and bath, that's later.) We had to repaint everything. Previously, all the walls, trim, doors, and the ceiling were a lifeless tan/beige/blah color. Not only did everything all run together, the color darkened the whole place. Worse yet, it was all all glossy.


But now, our home is crisp and lively.

We opted for Benjamin Moore paint over Behr after several rave reviews... We've heard it's got thicker, longer lasting color, and is consistantly consistent.

We used:

Decorator's White (almost pure white, slightly warm) covers our cieling, doors, all our built in cabinets, and trim.

Deep rose (very, very dark red) accents the dining room. It supposedly stimulates appetites and conversation. :) It took FOUR coats, even with a primer. That's a deep red.

Palm coast pale (a very pale, sunny yellow) in the living room. Brightens up the place without gushing you with color. :)

Neon celery (a fresh green) for the bedroom. (To be complemented with dark woods and white linens). So very zendy.

Man, power!

So, did we mention? We bought a place with ...some... electricity. Incorrect wiring, a broken fuse box, fire hazards, you name it -- it was bad. For the past month we had two working lights, and extension cords on the only outlet that worked properly.

My brother is an electrician ... last week he visited with his big bag o tools. After several Home Depot trips and two days of drilling, chopping, pulling, and other noisy fun (and two bags of rubble out the door), every switch, outlet and light now works! He pulled out all the messy code violations, upgraded the box, the lines, outlets, and switches, and even added an outlet in the bathroom. (Can you believe there weren't any?)

And now we can see in the dark!! ... My gosh, our place is becoming normal!!

Restore-a-floor

Lily spent about 5 hours scrubbing the floor with steel wool and Restor-a-finish. What an difference $7 and some elbow grease can make!

Door pulls

Uh, oh. The paint fumes are getting to Sean . . .

Optimus Primed

No more glossy beige walls, glossy beige cieling, glossy beige trim, glossy, hospital pink bedroom ...

The entire apartment has been primed and is ready for paint! Get ready for.... COLOR! (Gasp)


Deciding on colors can be tough, but Lily brings everything to a new level.

Having fun with peeling paint

I read I should wash the walls before painting them. It's our home - got to do everything the proper way! A bucket of soapy water and a rag, and we're good to go.

But with every swipe of the rag, big chunks of paint started coming off the walls! I couldn't get it to stop... I finally just stopped washing and OH MY GOSH, the paint just peels off. I've never seen paint do this. Walls, doors, trim... the peeling paint knows no boundaries.

Looks like the original paint was glossy and when the previous owners painted over it, they didn't sand or prime... so their paint just didn't stick. And... does this mean they never washed their walls? EVER?

I'm not too sad since it's this icky peachy pink color. I feel like I've been living in cotton candy land after the cotton candy went bad. The bad news is that we're forced to manually peel the walls in order to repaint it.

10 minute kitchen renovation

Today, "renovation" is a big word that means "$20 for new knobs".

Our kitchen is white white white. Cabinets, floor, walls, appliances, knobs... even the sink and faucet! Everything is old, the layout is weird. But we don't have an enormous pile of cash to update our granny-era kitchen.

The cheapo ugly-ugly white plastic kitchen knobs made me ill. So we sprung $1.49 for slick chrome ones. (Sadly, the white ones are still for sale today... for $1.29. Which is worse: being too cheap to pay twenty cents for chrome, or preferring white plastic??) We also replaced the buzzing flourescents with some nice halogens. The previous owners bought them in 1997 and left them in a closet. Hm.

Net result... a kitchen we can live with for a little while. Amainzg what a change little things make. (Next for the kitchen : the granny wallpaper comes down!)

Lily cleans everything with 409 ...

... even the Chrysler Building. (By the way, we love our view.) :)

Ghetto Penthouse

This weekend, while attempting to turn on the under-cabinet-light that is nailed upright on the living room wall and trailing 9 feet of cords, I tripped on the air mattress and kicked over the candle that sits on the part of the floor we call the "dining table". My friend Pradip witnessed the whole thing and was cracking up, "What is this, Ghetto Penthouse?"

Here are some photos from our recent home improvements...


Strapping-tape doorknobs. Now gone.


Who on earth wires a phone through the dishwasher??


Peeling paint and washing the walls


Paint prep for the nasty built-in


I never liked the kitchen door anyway


Relaxing on the inflatable couchbed

closet poo

So today, I’m cleaning the last of the closets. The floors are completely nasty, as if no one’s cleaned them since they were installed 50 years ago. One was especially bad with some sticky thick brown goo that just wouldn't scrape away. I soon realized that the brown goo covered about 80% of the closet floor, and the thought of trying to scrape away all that goo completed grossed me out. I joked to Sean that we should just strip away the tiles instead of cleaning them. We wanted to do that down the road ("phase 5" of my 9-phase plan) but he replied, "Okay!" Before either of us could change our mind, we'd peeled away the first tile. So much for the list and phases!

Halfway through the peeling, Sean said "eewwww... I got closet poo on my hands." Some other brown goo, maybe the glue they used for the tiles, was still sticky after 50 years and had the surprising consistency of poo. With every poo tile we threw away, we felt more and more relieved. Of course, for the rest of night, we made reference to poo like every 5 minutes: "Sean, you got closet poo on the bathroom faucets!" "Sean, you got closet poo on your pants!"

The battle of the paint brands

Typical evening
Lily: What do you want to do tonight?
Sean: (shrug) I don't know. What do you want to do?
Lily: Oooo... let's walk over to Home Depot! *very giddy*
Sean: Okay!!! *equally as giddy*

We discovered HGTV about a year ago and totally latched onto it (something about being homeless, living vicariously through the tube). Now we finally have our own place to apply all the lessons learned, so is it any wonder that a trip to a home improvement store provokes so much giddiness?!?!?

After many trips (and piles and piles of color chips), heated debates, and zillions of choices, we finally chose our colors, by Behr. Soon after, I saw several people on apartment therapy saying that Behr paints are really poor. Say it ain’t so! Not after all that effort! I browsed the Internet for hours and realized that everyone has their own opinion.

So what to do now?? Does the brand of paint really make that much of a difference?? Should we ditch all the effort and start over? Or continue pressing forward with Behr and keep our fingers crossed??

Ka boom... ka boom from the roof

It's July 4th! This glorious long 4-day holiday weekend was extra special because we welcomed our first overnight guests – Shij and Sabby! We bribed them with all the yummy food that NYC has to offer so that maybe they’ll forgive us for not having electricity in most of the unit, or furniture, or the fact that they had to sleep on pool floats as beds.

A few years ago, Sean and I went to join the throngs of people on FDR to watch Macy's Fireworks – the fireworks was pretty, but the concrete road was painful to sit on and we were packed in like sardines. This year, we decided to skip all that for the comfort of our home and made an awesome discovery - we can catch most of the fireworks from our rooftop! We just find reasons to love our new place more and more – despite the lack of electricity and all :)

The end of the homeless era

For most of our married life, Sean and I have been homeless. Right after we got married, we spent a week packing up our belongings and moved the majority of them into a storage locker in Austin. The rest was scattered between Chicago and New Jersey.

Now, about one and half years later, we find ourselves settling back in NYC and moving into our first home as Mr & Mrs. Our stuff is now scattered across New York, Illinois, and New Jersey instead of Texas, Illinois, and New Jersey. (Hey - at least the stuff is all getting physically closer to each other and to us!)

We're working on consolidating all our belongings not only into one state, but into one city, and under one roof. It's taking a little longer than anticipated because we discovered that about 80% of our new home doesn't have electricity.

As our friend Fozzie Bear asked, "when you go from being homeless to having a home with no electricity - are you moving up or down in this world?!?!?"

Because I (Lily) am somewhat amused by this whole situation, we'll be chronicling our attempts to restore electricity and other home renovation projects in this blog.