Beauty in the Details

I recently came across the website of designer Michelle Dunker and I thought I would share some inspiring photos from her portfolio. To see more of her beautiful spaces, visit her website here. 

I love the mantel above the range top. The pendants lights bring in a vintage vibe while the blue and white pottery nods to a more classic style.  Notice the shallow coffer on the ceiling with the beadboard. This idea could be used on even the lowest ceilings! 

That green penny tile is fantastic.

I love how the green glass tile is carried all the way up to the ceiling. It really sets off those gorgeous venetian mirrors. 

A small glimpse into the bedroom through a lovely round gilded mirror. 

I love white paneling with dark stained wood floors. So classic!

Another great mantel over a range. This one would work wonderfully in a small kitchen as the brackets don't interfere with the counter space.  Love the fresh take on a classic style with the blue-gray subway tile.

That tile! Oh my!

More great tile, this time used in an entryway.

Another great kitchen with those same pendant lights.

A detail of the cabinetry and backsplash. I love the mix of of the tan marble with the green glass tile.

A beautiful unique soaking tub with a marble ledge. This girl has got a way with tile!

The crown molding at the top of the cabinets is really what gives this kitchen it's presence. Love the polished nickel pendants, and the dark charcoal wall. 

Sycamore Street Cottage: Before and After cont...

I'm back with the last installment of before and after photos of Sycamore Street Cottage. If you missed the other posts on this you can catch up here. It has been really fun for me to dig up all these old photos from our past renovations.  It may sound strange, but looking back at what we have accomplished really helps keep us motivated on our current house renovation (it should make us tired, because holy hannah that was a lot of work!) Looking at these photos, I realize how much we have learned about creating a well designed, well loved home that is welcoming for all. After all, that is what we are striving for. But back to why you really came here: The photos...

Before: The house had no bedrooms on the main floor. Seriously. Some genius decided that a wood paneled, shag carpeted, wood-stove heated, drop ceilinged great room would be a good idea. So sometime in the 70s said genius removed the walls between the two bedrooms on the main floor and made a shag-a-delic space fit for Powers himself.  On a side note: My next door neighbor once mentioned that said genius happened to be an architect. To which I responded: An architect of what? Surely not houses. An actual architect could have never lived in this house. Maybe he was a George Castanza type of architect? Maybe he also designed the new addition to the Guggenheim? (geez Cate, watch Seinfeld much?) Notice the window in the above picture. That window was the one that the "Rabid Ivy Monster" ate. Look closely and you'll see his green beady eyes. 

After: Yeah, I didn't have a photo of the entire bedroom, but you get the idea. New wall, new closets, new molding, new...new...new...except for the floors which were hidden under all that shagginess. This closet is actually where the old stove in the above picture lived. On the other side of the room is another closet that used to be a coat closet that opened into the living room. Simple fix, we closed it off from the living room side and opened it on the bedroom side. You have to be creative about storage in such a small cottage. 

Close-up of new molding. We are big proponents of adding molding wherever we can and we put a lot of thought into it. It really adds the architectural detail that this home was lacking. 

Before: Basement bedroom. Yes, someone actually slept here. Shocking.

After: We added a board and batten wainscot to add some detail to the downstairs family room. I am not sure why I can't for the life of me get a good photo of the colors in this house.  The walls are actually a very light neutral, and the carpet is not pink. We added tons of recessed lighting because the ceilings are fairly low and I didn't want anyone banging their heads on a hanging light fixture. We put in the same doors that we did upstairs, as well as the same baseboard. We opted for a different window and door molding because the header piece on the upstairs molding (that is the piece on the top of the door) would have been cut off so much, due to the lower ceilings in the basement, that it was pointless. We still stayed with the craftsman look, though, by using a flat piece of MDF that was cut on an angle for the header piece. 

After: Looking towards the stairwell. There is a bedroom through that door, and to the right is another bedroom, a laundry, and bathroom. We purposefully left the stairwell open because I like it that way. It looks cleaner. BUT, it is not code (just in case you are thinking of doing the same), and if we had kids we probably would have done it differently. 

After: This is looking from the bedroom into the family room. The wall color looks better in this one, but the carpet is still off. Drat. 

Before: Through that door lies a bathroom. Or so I've been told. It was too scary to step foot through that door. 

After: Bathroom. White subway tile to the ceiling made the ceilings appear taller. There is a linen closet to the right of the bathtub. 

This is the tile we put on the floor of the bathroom and also the laundry. I love it. It has an Ann Sacks look with a Home Depot price. They might still carry it, I haven't checked. 

So there you have it, Sycamore Street Cottage. I miss that little home, with all its quirks. But when I start getting sentimental about selling it, Mr. always reminds me that if we did it once, we can do it again, and the next home renovation will be the better for it. And you know what? I think he is right. 

Sycamore Street Cottage: Before and After cont...

As promised I am back with some interior photos of Sycamore Street Cottage. If you missed the exterior photos or would like to be bored by the back story check it out here. These photos were all taken as the moving van was being loaded so the rooms are empty. If empty rooms give you the willies, you may want to avert your eyes and sing a happy song until the pain subsides. For the rest of you, the before photos are horrible (I never actually planned on sharing them with anyone, they were merely a reference to motivate us - as in "look how far we've come") and the afters aren't much better (I would take better ones, but the new owners might think that a tad strange). The colors are reading all wrong and the lighting is screwy, but it will at least give you an idea of how we spent three years of our lives!

Before

After: New molding all around: crown, base, casing around doors, windows. There were hardwoods under that lovely blue carpet that no one, including us, thought were salvageable. They were! We patched them and stained them a mixture of dark walnut and mahogany. 

Before: This is the best pic I could find of the stairwell wall. To the right of this photo is a solid wall that backs the stairs to the basement.

After: We removed the wall and put in a newel post and railing. This really opened up the living room and made it feel larger, as well as add needed light for the basement. We added the arch to hide a structural beam which matches the arch to the dining room and the arch from the dining room to the kitchen. 

This newel post we found at a salvage yard. It was pulled out of a 90 year old victorian mansion in The Avenues (an historic district in Salt Lake City).  I can't find the before photo of it, but it was a mess. We stripped off all the layers of old paint, cut it down to the right size and gave it a new life.  The egg and dart molding is magnificent! Why they tore this out, I'll never know, but the old adage holds true: One woman's trash is another woman's newel post.

Before: This photo shows the old kitchen and the sunroom behind it.

After: We took down the wall between the old kitchen and sunroom, added another structural beam, and expanded the kitchen to make one larger open space. We reworked the window placement and added new windows. Matching hardwoods extend to the new kitchen.

Before: Looking from sunroom into old kitchen

After: We added a peninsula for bar seating. The wall behind the peninsula was built specifically to house my grandmother's hutch. Mr. even installed a spot light to highlight it!

Another view. To the right of this photo is a door with a window leading out to the back porch. I chose this door to let in more of this glorious light. Because this kitchen has windows on three sides, it gets bathed in northern light all day. 

We chose a counter-depth, french-door, bottom freezer refrigerator so that when open it wouldn't inhibit traffic flow. A side panel and top cabinet make it look built-in and much more expensive than it actually was. Next time I would bring the cabinet closer down to the fridge to avoid that black hole space. Live and learn. 

I actually bought that light for our first home and couldn't part with it so I took it with me to house no. 2. It looked so at home in this house that it finally found it's permanent residence. Glass-front cabinets on either side of the sink add depth to the space and bounce the light around even more. One of our next projects was to add a white subway tile backsplash but we moved before that was done. I think it would have really finished off the space. 

Before: This was looking from the old kitchen into an office/bedroom.  On the other side of that closet is the living room. 

After: We took down two walls and the closet and we gained a dining room. The arch on the other side of the room led into the old kitchen and the arch closest to the camera was were the closet used to be. We removed all the walls and added arches to open up the flow of the small house. By using the same paint color(which in person is not at all this yellow) and the same flooring throughout the first floor, the small space appears larger and has a sense of continuity. 

Before: Bathroom. Scary. 

Before: Another view of same bathroom. Scary. 

After: We ended up moving the sink wall about 20 inches into the old kitchen to gain more space in the small bathroom. No idea whatsoever why I painted this room red. But there it is. We all make design mistakes.

Floor tile: Wavy edge travertine. That is not the technical term, just what i call it. It has a softer, more cottage-like appearance than the straight edge travertine. 

You may recognize this jetted-tub from our current house's bathroom renovation. We liked it so much that we have now used the very same one three times. It is super deep and looks huge but has the same length and width of a standard tub so it can be retrofitted to work in any almost any tub space. 

We put the ORB faucets in long before they were a common sight at all the big box stores. We had to special order them from a plumbing specialty store and I paid out the nose for them. I tend to do this a lot. I pay more for the new 'it' material because it isn't popular enough yet to hit the mainstream and I have to track it down at some obscure factory where they don't feel bad about stealing my inheritance. Would I do it again? No. Take a tour through any historic home and you will see chrome fixtures in the bath (along with white subway tile and white marble). The chrome still looks classic, never dated. I still like the look of ORB, but I think it is a better bet to spend my money on classic materials that I won't tire of. 

Check back tomorrow for the last installment of interior photos from Sycamore Street Cottage. 

Repurpose: Use What Ya Got

Gone are the terms cheapskate, tight-wad, frugal-fanny. These days it’s frugalista this, budget savvy that. It’s chic I tell you and I am riding that bandwagon. Though I prefer the term resource economist, the principle is the same. Use what you already have and turn it into something you want. Repurpose. Restyle. Reuse. 

Not only do you save money (!!!) but it also keeps perfectly usable items out the landfill. This may not seem like a big deal to some but seriously take a little trip out to your local landfill, I dare you. I have been about 12 times (yep, when you DIY you tend to frequent some less than reputable establishments). 

This is my usual arc of emotion on a dump trip. 

First: awe and amazement. “Look at all that stuff! Where does it come from? Can you believe they threw that out?”

Then: horror and disgust. “Look at all that stuff! Where is it all going to go? This is valuable land!”

On this (our third) whole house renovation project we are making a conscious effort to cut down on our waste. We understand that this method of renovating and decorating isn’t for everyone. Repurposing an item usually means that you have to: 

• be creative about how to use a certain material
• be flexible in your design plans
• be okay with things that aren’t perfect. Some see beauty in imperfection, others don’t. It depends on your personality and priorities.

Here are some ways in which we repurposed items from around the house for our bathroom redo: 

These glass knobs made me weak in the knees when I first spied them on all the doors in our cottage. However, when I first got stuck in the bedroom because the blasted knob refused to turn I realized they weren’t going to function in their current job (so sad). So I quickly came up with plan b...

We used four knobs in the bathroom to hang some decorative tiles.

These two were sprayed to match all the new door hardware then screwed into the new ball-catch french doors leading into the new master closet (more on that later!). The knobs are stationary - meaning they don’t turn - but they are still functional hardware. Those back plates also came off some of the old doors and were painted the same bronze color. They don’t actually match (one has a collar, the other doesn’t) but after getting the same  treatment, they look like they have always been together. 

This mirror was also given a new life:

Here it is above the fireplace when we first bought the house (and yes, the WHOLE house was teal - except for the kitchen, bathroom and office which were pink). We knew immediately that it would not stay in the living room but it was big and free and I needed one for the bathroom. So we used a glass/tile cutter to cut it down to the right size. This resulted in some very jagged edges but those were covered with new molding. 

Because we matched the mirror frame to the molding around the window and door, it blends right in and sort of looks like another window (you can see the only window through the reflection). The drawback:  it is built in so there will be no changing of minds or other equally fickle behavior (which I have been known to exhibit). It is also not perfect- there are a few black spots here and there due to its age-but I think that just adds to the character.  

P.S. Just in case you have a few old knobs laying around, here is how we hung ours (this trick took the two of us and two guys at Ace to figure out so I thought I would spare you those wasted hours): 

You just need a few items: two plastic hollow wall anchors, one double sided bolt, knob

Place one of the plastic anchors inside the hole of the knob making sure that the top sits flush (otherwise when you screw it into the wall, it will show). You may have to snip the end in order for it to fit. The other plastic anchor gets hammered into the wall (sorry no pic) where you want the knob to hang. Screw the bolt into the knob first, and then screw that into the anchor on the wall. Easy!