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!