Brick by brick

I’m building a house where I can think
And have some balance and dignity
I’m building a house where no one can hurt me
I’m huilding a house where the weak are strong
I’m building a house with a real song
I’m using faith that is immortal
I’m building it with simplicity
and the way that we feel, you and me
I’m buidling it with what I believe in

It was so much fun driving by the house watching the roof and second floor disappear a little more each day. Out builders are doing an awesome job getting stuff done. G and I have also had a lot of fun picking out the tile and vanities and other fixtures for the bathrooms. After some initial sticker shock, and two weekends straight of shopping we figured out what we were doing.

I have to say Pinterest is truly the best invention of 2012. It is amazing to me how much information can be aggregated with a few keystrokes. Type in master bath and bam! you have pages and pages of ideas.

Houzz is another fantastic resource. Before our first meeting with the tile lady, I printed probably 20 pages of inspiration rooms to review with the hubs.

• Sidebar: one of the things I absolutely love about my husband is how he and I make decisions. We are not hem and haw’ers. We might discuss/argue for a little about various points but once we come to a decision there is no second guessing, only moving forward. That’s how planning our wedding was, and that’s how tile shopping was.

We went through all the pictures, pulled out the ones we liked, which happened to be the same, and pretty much fell in love with the first thing we were shown. Not because it was the first thing, but because it was exactly what we were both picturing. It actually freaked all three of us out a little (me, g, and the sales lady). Being that both sets of our parents have trained us to triple bid everything, we took the knowledge that we gleaned from this first excursion and continued to two other tile stores.

MISTAKE

The second store, which I had called ahead and made an appointment, was such a bad experience. I honestly couldn’t get out of the fast enough. The owner/sales person couldn’t be bothered to even show us his merchandise. He barely paid attention when we were talking about what we were looking for, instead he really must wanted to listen to euro-trash techno music and update his Facebook page. I honestly could have turned around and left right then, but hubby felt the need to try to engage the guy in any sort of salesman like behavior, ie asking the price of things and oh I don’t know it’s availability.

Then we headed to the big box tile store, Standard Tile. It was fine, but nothing blew us away and we didn’t see anything both price and look wise that compared to the first store.

Unfortunately our fantastic sales lady, Maria, was headed on vacation so we had to wait until last week to actually order anything. But order we did.

Our master bath is going to be so serene, the tile looks like sand! And we are going to have this really cool/modern 12 x 24 tiles in the shower area, 12×12 on the floor, and detail 2×2 throughout.

Here were some of our inspiration images:

Contemporary Bathroom design by San Francisco Architect Mike Connell

Contemporary Bathroom design by Toronto Interior Designer Shirley Meisels

Contemporary Bathroom design by Toronto Interior Designer Meghan Carter Design Inc

This is what Maria showed us:

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The kids bathroom is going to be timeless. All white tile, hex on the floor with white grout, and white subway tile in the bath/shower area. We will also be adding in a bit of glass tile detail above the tub.

Our inspiration:

Traditional Bathroom design by Boise Interior Designer Judith Balis

Super classy. We’ll also have wainscoting in their bathroom. We also just picked out the colors, but that is another post. 😉

hex flooring with white grout

 

So that’s the tile… the following weekend we figured out the whole vanity situation. THAT
was fun, and that is a story for another time.

 

Summer Rental – Part 3 another twofer!

What’s that you say???? What happened to the house tour?!

Well nothing, I just added a couple more touches to D’s room so I was waiting until I photographed them before blogging it. This is the last stop on our tour, I told ya the house is small! Now you get to see the powder pink bathroom as well as the big one’s bedroom.

If you’ll remember, D got the biggest room for two reasons, we wanted to really separate him from E, and the only other room had a door out to the main street as well as the bathroom… So G and I wanted it! We’d NEVER HAD A MASTER BATH!!!! We technically have had our own bathroom, when we were in Hoboken and before the big one was born…. but that was different.

Anyhoo….

Here was the room when we looked at the place:

And then we put most of the kids furniture in here since we took the little one’s closet for our things, they continue to share the closet as well as a dresser. the little one’s changing table as well stayed in here because there was no room in her room for it.

Then because I couldn’t wait until we moved back into our other house I HAD to get D some of the best SuperHero Art I’ve seen. I found it on Society 6 by TheLinC

flash, superman, and the capt above the bed

from D’s point of view

WonderWoman, Batman and the Hulk

Clearly I didn’t clean before taking these picture. Lesson learned!

Next stop, the kids bathroom. And it’s…. PINK! PeptoBismo Pink at that!

I’ll say this, the kids LOVE brushing their teeth.

I love these built in shelves. they’re not very deep but obviously placed between the studs on the wall. very helpful.

So that’s all of it I believe. Hopefully I’ll be able to contain myself and not do too much more and we’ll be back in the other house in no time.

They’ve started the demolition!

It’s clobbering time

The other day I came home at lunch to see the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. What do you think it was????

WOOOOOOOD

Lots and lots of wood

More wood

 

And as I peeked around the side of the house, what did I spy????

no more siding

 

So very excited!!!! The concrete asbestos had been on the house since it was built. I know that it is technically safe but with two little kids it always made me nervous. Especially since the inspector said it was find until it broke, and with both kids very into throwing things not so safe.

This was last week, and then TODAY when I came home for lunch. THIS is what I found….

Holy Roof… Literally!!!!

 

They tarped it up really good tonight, I’ll take some more pictures as the week continues and if you happen to be driving down my street please stop and snap a picture and send it to me.

A little YUM

I love to cook. I’m just throwing that out there. I have lots of cookbooks and I love to troll the internet for new recipes. My brother-in-law actually always makes fun of me and asks what website I found a certain dish at and never quite believes me if I happen to have created it myself or used a family recipe.

Anyhoo. I think I have mentioned before how I like to cook dinner weeknights for hubby and myself. The caveat is that it needs to be made in under 20minutes and be pretty simple as far as prep work. Why you ask, well our end of day is a bit hectic. I pick up the kids around 5:45/6pm and G gets home around 7. The first few minutes are spent with me wrangling them into the house and keeping them from destroying EVERYTHING in their path. I try to throw some snacks and milk at them and pop them in front of the television for whatever is on Nick Jr or Sprout. (Hey, I never claimed to be a font of parenting and I never said this was a parenting blog.) Every now and then we put on some music and have an impromptu dance party like this….

Booty Shake

While they are distracted, I unpack their bags, unload/load the dishwasher, THEN get dinner started. Realistically it is around 6:30 giving me 20-30 minutes from start to finish.

What’s a girl to do? Well she cuts corners that what she does.

Trader Joe’s has amazing prepared foods, as well as pre seasoned meats and cut veggies. I have a honking jar of minced garlic in the fridge and usually have some chopped onions as well. These are things that take up critical time, and as long as I can find quality product, the more organic and natural the better, I buy it.

There are tons of great websites (brother-in-law is rolling his eyes, I can feel it) where you can find 20-minute meals. I have a cookbook from at least 10 years ago that is called just that, 20-minute meals that is amazing, it has complete meal plans including shopping lists and what you should have in your pantry.

Here is what we had for dinner tonight.

Chicken Masala over Brown Basami Rice.

Sounds exotic doesn’t it. I will let you in on my secret for this one….

it’s all about the sauce

This dish came together on the fly… I decided we were having Indian but knew it would require some doctoring. The simmer sauce is great but not as robust as you would get at a restaurant.

First up I chopped some onions and peppers and got them sautéing

Peppers and onions the basis of every great meal.

You want to make sure that they are super soft but just short of caramelizing. Then the simmer sauce is dumped in and the chicken added.

Chickoooooon

I was so busy taking pictures that I sorta forgot to get the chicken cubed… then i got so into the cooking that I forgot to take any more pictures… but I have leftovers so I will take some picts of those and add them… I’m owning up to it now. Bad blogger, bad.

Yummy füd

and a close up

mmmmmm gooood

Let’s review:

1. Saute peppers and onions. 2. slice chicken. 3. add simmer sauce 4. yum

 

Random side step…. see the cutting board I have above. I have a whole set that is color coded with icons. When I got them I thought they would be awesome. Nice and thin and different ones for each food group. But honestly, they don’t store flat, they start to curl up. and if you’re cutting anything that has juice or liquid of any kind in it there is no well for it so it gets all over the counter. NOT FUN.

I think I am ready to invest in a good butcher block cutting board. Any recommendations?

Monday, Monday

Monday, monday (ba-da ba-da-da-da)
So good to me (ba-daba-da-da-da)
Monday mornin, it was all I hoped it would be
Oh monday mornin, monday mornin couldnt guarantee
That monday evenin you would still be here with me

So here’s hoping that the rain subsides and they are actually able to start on Monday as planned. We have the permit up in our window, and we have the entire house tarped and taped.

It is actually quite humorous, our house sorta looks like that scene at the end of ET when the scientists come and set up the clean room.

Scariest part of ET!!! I was terrified for weeks thinking he was in my closet.

G and I finished it up this weekend. It was a bit harder than I thought it would be but we finished and used up ALL the tarps!

The ghetto corner of the kitchen that couldn’t quite get the tarp to cover.

Kitchen fridge and oven all covered and taped up.

spare bedroom and hall linen closet

The dining room drapes… get it… drapes!

covering up the rest of the stuff in the basement

I spy something…. awesome

Permits, permits, permits!!!!!!!

Who has two thumbs and is super excited to finally be able to move forward with our renovation…. THIS GIRL!