Our neighborhood, c. 1921

This is Randolph St., NW, a bit south of us. This picture was taken two years before our house was probably built. I've been searching for a 1923 picture of our street, but have not succeeded in finding one yet. I was curious to know what the exterior of our house looked like when it was built, before people started adding tacky '70s doors with diamond-shaped windows and metal handrails with swirly, heart-shaped flourishes.

A better fit

We have two of these sconces in our dining room. They need to be polished badly, but they're pretty, especially the fluted shades. However, they do not fit in with the other things in our dining room at all. I stumbled upon a replacement today that just might be perfect.


The white shade would echo the white Ikea pendant over the table very nicely. But I'm not sure I can pay $106 each for two of these sconces. Do I like them that much?

More cool gifts

The MOMA store has such great stuff.

Wooden Block Alarm Clock, $65.00

Bell Alarm Clock, $65.00

Modern dollhouse, $19.99 (Oh my gosh, this is awesome!)

Tube Top Table Lamp, $120.00

Elephant Bookend, $32.00

Radiators: To cover or not to cover?

Our radiators look pretty funky. Whatever paint was used to paint them is now peeling off in chunks or bubbling up so that it looks like the radiators have a serious disease. Having them removed and sandblasted is expensive, and scraping all the paint off ourselves will take forever. So it looks like radiator covers are in order. But they're all so...uninspiring. Right now, these are my options:

From BeautifulRadiators.com

From Shutter Shack

But what I really want is something more modern and less obvious. Something like this:

Or maybe I should just suck it up and scrap the paint off so I can have a pink radiator.

Preview

Living room color (Winter Wheat, Benjamin Moore)

Dining room color (Blacktop, Benjamin Moore)

Going with black in the dining room was scary, but I'm excited about it. There will still be white trim and a lot of sunlight, so it won't be like we're the Addams Family. I think it will look elegant, like this...

Photo from sfgirlbybay

Photo from Living Etc., via Door Sixteen

Not weird and goth, like this...

One room (mostly) down

We've lived in our house for almost seven months now without painting one wall. The walls were in such bad shape, with cracks and water damage, that we couldn't paint them until we repaired them. But finally, this weekend, we painted our first room.

The guest bedroom is now Benjamin Moore's Pigeon Gray. The color is a little more lavender-gray than I expected, but it's still quite nice.

As you can see from this picture, the baseboards still need some work. All that cord out in the hallway was cable TV cord that ran along the baseboard and had been painted over. Pulling it off made a big mess, of course.

In less than a week, my mother will be here with a U-haul full of my stuff, including a bed and a few bookcases. Then, the guest bedroom will actually have furniture. It's amazing how much progress we're making all of a sudden.

A housewarming gift?

When asked what I would want as a housewarming gift, I didn't have an answer. Seems like that's a question I should have an answer to, right?

Pasta-roller attachment, $149.95 at Williams-Sonoma


Set of 4 Cafe au Lait bowls, $72.00 at Williams-Sonoma

4-piece canister set, $19.99 at Target


Utensil jar, $28.oo at Anthropologie

Soon to be reality

Since Barrett did such a great job with the guest bedroom, we're going to work with them to make a plan for remodeling the bathroom. We want to do some of the work (tiling, painting) ourselves...we think. My ideas for the bathroom are coming together, and they are bit different than what I first envisioned. My original idea was having marble hexagon tiles on the floors, and keeping the palette for the room mostly white with a few black touches. The marble tiles are really more than our budget can handle, so I'm really liking these black penny round tiles with black grout (via Door Sixteen).


Add beadboard, in a soothing shade of blue (but with thinner boards than in this picture):


The walls, Benjamin Moore's Simply White. The sink, pedestal with a traditional faucet:


And a claw-foot tub if it will fit. Oh, how I hope it will fit.

Done.

Barrett Construction has completed their work on the guest bedroom.


Beautiful ceiling. Beautiful wall. We are very pleased.


Now we need some shades or curtains for the windows and a new light fixture. And, of course, paint. I'm thinking Benjamin Moore Pigeon Gray:


Something extra:


We bought a set of outdoor furniture at Ikea. We put the bench on the front porch. The table and two chairs are in the backyard (pictures to come). You can see underneath the bench there is a nasty outdoor carpet. One of our next projects will be to pull up that gross stuff.

Finally, a bedroom fit for a human being

We are nearing the end of our first non-DIY project since the floor refinishing. The second upstairs bedroom had a crumbling wall and a weird tile ceiling.


But all of that is gone now.


Ain't it beautiful? All they have to do is sand and prime, and we'll be able to paint this bad boy and put some furniture in there. Just in time for our late-June visitors.

Productivity

In the midst of all our home improvement this weekend, we managed to make pizza on the grill for the first time. This resulted in perhaps the best pizza I've ever eaten. For the toppings, we grilled asparagus from the farmer's market, picked basil from the garden, and added some goat cheese. Delicious.

Besides making delectable pizza, we bought some paint at Benjamin Moore and started prepping the entryway for painting. That meant repairing more cracks...


...and scrapping more peeling paint.


One last development in this eventful weekend: We got an air conditioner for the living room. After sweating through some really hot, humid days, we gave in. 12,000 BTUs of awesome coolness are now ours.

Paint it...

Black-ish, for the dining room:


Simply white, for the entryway:


This, for the living room (I think it will look great with our mustard yellow sofa):