Showing posts with label siding. Show all posts
Showing posts with label siding. Show all posts
Monday, May 9, 2011
The Big Reveal (part I)
OK, I have dilly dallied long enough on showing off some kitchen pictures. Before you scroll down, please keep in mind a few things:
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- I need to figure out how to better operate my camera.
- I need a new white shiny stove
- I need to figure out what to do about my backsplash
I'm a bit nervous about this, even if the pictures were good, but here we go:
Here's a view from behind the breakfast bar. You can see most of the work area, and all the appliances. I picked a really dark cabinet (Kaffe stain from Kraftmaid which I fell completely in love with), which dictated a lot of the other finish choices. You can also see I am keeping up with the red and white accessories theme.
The view from in between the breakfast bar and the coffee bar. You can see the whole bank of windows in this room, which I agonized over and measured and basically spent like 2 weeks trying to figure out what I wanted there. I definitely wanted the 3 over 1 grills, since that's traditional to the style of house, and the original windows were that style. I wanted it to feel like the kitchen belonged to the house, so the dark woods and windows should help with that.
You can also see the glass cabinets above the windows. I have all white things in those, because you can actually see them without lighting the insides of the cabinets. Perhaps I'll do that someday, but I really wanted glass fronts and I wanted them somewhere they would look pretty but not get too smudged up or filled with things that would look messy. Fortunately, the new kitchen is plenty big enough to have some extra cabinets for pretty stuff. Also, all of the cabinets are 42"high and reach all the way to the ceiling. Jeff says this is imposing.
The breakfast bar. Behind the far chair is a door and sidelight that will eventually open onto a deck. Contractor-father-in-law is there today with some big pieces of wood, so hopefully that will turn into something soon. I need taller stools for here, since these are cabinet not bar height, but they came with the house and matched the cabinets and blended ok with the existing furniture. So I'm over it for now.
Here's a little view of the corner where all of my baking stuff lives. Have I told you guys how I organized everything? If not, I'll try to do that another time. You can revel in my complete battiness and obsessive compulsive nature.
And of course, you've already seen the office wall which is behind the breakfast bar. To the right, the door to the deck. To the left, opening into the dining room. I also obsessed about these windows, incidentally. I mentioned in a comment that I had the electrician put the outlets higher than the desks, too, so we could more easily plug things in. Woot!
This is what it looked like outside over the winter. Hooray for spring. It's much warmer and greener now.
The layout sketch I made to get husbandly approval before we started construction. (You can see that we nixed the prep sink because it was so close to the regular sink, and also went with bar height and not table hight for the breakfast bar. The fridge is bumped over a bit, too.)
I'm super super happy with everything so far, modulo the new stove and backsplash. Everything is plenty functional, however, and very pretty to me, so I consider it a complete success.
*whew* That was long!
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Construction: Stuff is Happening
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| This looks much brighter than real life. |
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| This is closer to the right color. |
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| View from the sidewalk |
Construction always seems like you have nothing, then a ton of stuff really fast, then nothing, then a ton of stuff really fast. Repeat for as many months as your project takes.
I think part of that is that digging a big hole is not super exciting (unless you happen to be a 3 year old boy, in which case it is the best thing EVER), and neither is plumbing or electrical rough in. Framing, however, and drywall. Those things look like real progress. They're big! You can see them!
In any case, plumbing and electrical rough in and inspections have been happening lately at our place, so it has not seemed like there was a ton of progress, even though logically I realize that's all important stuff.
While the specialists work on that stuff, however, our contractors and my husband have been putting up siding. Lovely beautiful siding! Siding is progress!!!
I agonized over siding colors for a month. Classic white? Sage green? That beige color that seems really popular right now? Eventually, somehow, we ended up at red. The rationale is that it in brick red the addition would not be a big distracting cube of some random color from the street. In the last picture you can see the view from the sidewalk. It does not look *exactly* like the brick, but that's OK. I think it's less visually distracting because the colors are similar. I also don't think they are so close together that it looks like we were trying to match and slightly failed. (See also: wearing black pants and a black jacket from two different pant suits)
We've picked a bunch of things based on keeping the addition consistent with the rest of the house, so the red siding kind of made sense. In some cases, we were able to pick some elements that are both consistent with the house now, and consistent with what the house was like when it was built. (This is hard, because the house was built in 1924.) Unfortunately, money and time are always problems, so we get plain double-four siding instead of the faux cedar shake that I would have liked. (Though I saw that on our local eat & park restaurant, and it looked kinda bad, so I think I am happy with the double-four. Also, if I knew more about what double four meant besides "each board thingy has 2 - four inch horizontal, er, bits, I would tell you, but I totally don't.)
We got windows that look like three over one paned, because that's what the original windows in the house were. There are a few left in the house, and lots of our neighbors have them. (The previous owners replaced some with those grid-like mullions, which are fine, but don't really have the same feeling as the three over one.) We also got a solid wood front door with nice, straight angles. It's hard to know, but I suspect the original door would have been something similar.
We're not trying to recreate the house as it was in 1924, but rather to pick elements that seem right in the house, while not giving up modern conveniences. (For example, the three over one windows are modern flat easy to clean double hung windows that look paned and not all wood single paned. )
I am really digging the mock-clerestory windows on the side of the house pictured, by the way. I think they are secretly transoms for over a door, but I really wanted three high windows there (to bring in light but avoid having a view of the neighbors back yard), and those are what fit. Thank you father-in-law-contractor for thinking of that!
Yay Progress!
Now it's tie to watch frosty with the little one.
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