Identifying My Personal Style

After years of being obsessed with interiors and architecture (and far too many architecture and interior design courses to count) I’m pretty secure in my personal style. I’ve kept scrapbooks of magazine cut outs since I was about 11. Literally. And recently I started a flickr photostream to help track photos I find and love. However, just for fun the other night I decided to take a few style quizzes I saw mentioned on Young House Love. All of these quizzes operate on the same basic premise – you look at a bunch of photos of interiors showing different styles and colors and select the photos that you find most appealing. At the end of the quiz you read all about your personal style. Pretty easy, right?

According to Sproost, my style is Cottage Chic -

I love this answer. It’s so me! “You love the carefree spirit that the cottage interior inspires, but you are also serious about your appreciation for modern art and hip treasures. You love old and new alike, and love to highlight them all to expose the uniqueness of each.” All true. I also love the bit about, “Your true inspiration (whether you know it or not) is the sea… the colors found at your favorite beach: white and light beige of the sand, a variety of blues for the ocean and sky, and greens and pale grays of the sea glass…” Yes, yes and yes. Affirmative. If I have my way, when our house is all finished it will feel like waking up in a New England beach house every morning.

Ethan Allen calls my style Loft -

“Energetic. Fashion-driven. Practical. Materials borrowed from industry, architecture, and nature. Clean shapes. Punches of color. Spontaneous and fresh. Kids and pets? Bring them on.” Again, all true. This is getting fun!

The last quiz I took is the one from HomeGoods, where they deemed my look Country Casual -

According to HomeGoods, “You love unique finds, and can turn a few mismatched garden chairs or floral teacups into a charming arrangement. You appreciate a pretty mix of relaxed pieces, like painted wood or weathered furniture, lovely florals and other patterns, lots of throws and pillows, mementos and bunches of fresh flowers that give your home a unique sense of breeziness and charm.” Also true.

All in all, these quizzes are all pretty accurate. (Or at least they were for me!) I think they’d be a great tool if you aren’t really sure where to start when thinking about how to decorate your home. Knowing what colors, shapes and styles appeal to you will allow you to pick and choose elements that you can use throughout your space for a cohesive look that you’ll love. For more ways to identify your personal style, check out these tips from John and Sherry over at Young House Love.

Master Bedroom – Before

Since closing on our new home just shy of three weeks ago, we’ve been incredibly busy tackling our seemingly endless list of things to do. We put the master bedroom at the top of our priority list knowing that we’ll feel more comfortable living in a construction zone over the next several months if we have a safe haven to retreat to at the end of the day. In the last couple of weeks we’ve ripped out the existing carpet, vertical blinds, closet doors, closet shelving and hanging bars. We painted the walls Benjamin Moore Stonington Gray, had new flooring installed, painted the doors and trim bright white, patched the closet walls and painted, and rehung the doors after installing new door hardware. We have a number of small things to do to finish it up so while waiting on the official after photos, here are the official before photos…

While we waited on flooring to be installed we slept on our mattress downstairs in the family room amidst huge piles of our belongings for more than a week. It was entertaining for about a night and then it just got to be annoying. I’m a light sleeper so camping out within hearing range of the sump pump in the basement (which seemed to run nonstop as the timing coincided with the snow melting) and the other household appliances that go bump in the night left me exhausted almost immediately.

And a good look of our little camp site in the context of most all of our earthly possessions stacked all around us…

Here’s a little sneak peek of the renovation so far – a glimpse of our new paint color, newly painted doors and trim and my first ever solo installation of a door knob. (Yes, it’s true. I hung a door and installed new hardware all by my lonesome today.)

Anyone else finding their weekends consumed by home improvement projects? I can’t remember the last time we just sat around and did something normal like veg out all weekend. I have a feeling that won’t be happening for a long time to come!

Home Ownership – The First Week

So it’s official! As of last Monday we are finally homeowners. The last week has been a whirlwind of painting, scraping, packing and moving so I thought I’d get you up to speed. If I’m honest, we’re both completely exhausted, but we’re starting to see signs of improvement around here already so we know the effort will pay off.

Day 1 – Monday

Our appointment for our closing was at 4:00. By 5:30 we were leaving the lawyer’s office. We stopped off to grab takeout for dinner and then headed over to the house. By 7:30 we had all of the flooring in the three bedrooms, the hallway and the stairs ripped up and piled up in a heap in the garage. I’m here to tell you, this was the nastiest carpet you’ve ever seen. (Don’t worry. I have plenty of photos I’ll share later.)

Day 2 – Tuesday

I took the next day off from work so I could get a jump start on getting the house cleaned up. Only, when I got to the house in the morning I realized that the keys I had gotten at closing were the wrong keys. So much for that idea. Instead I spent the morning researching flooring with my buddy Carolynn. (We also stopped for coffee. This was crucial.) At lunchtime I drove up, met Mike at school to grab keys from him, and then headed back to the house to clean. We then spent the entire night pulling staples and tack strips up from the old carpet. I pulled a muscle in my neck and discovered muscles in my forearms I never even knew existed.

Day 3 – Wednesday

Painting commenced. The master bedroom got the first coat of paint, the dramatic results of which were not lost on me. I took about 87,592 photos. (Again, I promise more photos than you can handle in the very near future.) We then decided all of the existing closet doors needed to be ripped out immediately and decided to demo six bifold mirrored closet doors. They met their end in the ever-growing pile of debris in the garage.

Day 4 – Thursday

Thursday brought a lot more painting. The master bedroom got a second coat of Benjamin Moore Stonington Gray and the living room got the first coat of Edgecomb Gray. It then dawned on us that the living room shares a wall with the entry hall and the stairway/upstairs hall so we realized those would need to be Edgecomb Gray, too. So then the entry hall got painted.

Day 5 – Friday

After work I picked up pizza, declared myself completely sick of takeout dinner and met Mike at the new house where he was already slaving away putting the second coat of paint on the living room. We finished that up and then ripped out the old carpet in the dining room, which will soon become our office. We pulled out all the tack strips and staples, spackled a bunch of crazy dents and dings on the wall and then sanded down the spackle until our shoulders burned. Then we ran out of steam and dragged ourselves back to our rental to pass out.

Day 6 – Saturday

Saturday was moving day. I woke up early, made another run to the paint store to grab more paint and by 11:00 we were loading up trucks and cars. It took six people roughly 6 hours to get us from House A into House B, where all of our stuff is now piled into the family room (literally stacked almost to the ceiling) while we wait for new flooring upstairs. We then went back to our rental to crash on the pull out sofa and to continue packing some of our smaller items to move the next day.

Day 7 – Sunday

More packing. More moving. More cleaning. More painting. Lather, rinse and repeat. I finished moving out the last of our personal belongings from our rental while Mike continued painting at the new house. We spent our first night in our new house, camped out on the floor of our family room.

Day 8 – Monday

Yesterday was all about cable/internet installation, scoring more super affordable Craigslist furniture (this time a new bureau that will hold our flat screen television in the living room) and painting the ceiling in the living room. We painted until about 9:30 and crawled completely exhausted into bed about an hour later. Turns out, ceiling paint that goes on pale pink and dries bright white completely amuses me. And it made a huge difference on our previously smoke-stained living room ceiling. Score!

Day 9 – Tuesday

After work today I headed over to our old house for a final walk-through and to clean up after us a bit more. Mike met me there with takeout for dinner (yet again) and we cleaned until about 8:30. By the time we handed off our keys to a neighborhood friend for our landlords and got home it was nearly 9:00. Tomorrow we’ll wake up (from our current “bedroom” on the floor of the family room) and start all over again.

Did I mention that we’re tired? Completely and utterly exhausted.

And the Saga Continues…

Ok, so I am going to come right out and admit that buying a house is no walk in the park. In fact, if I’m honest, it’s a complete pain in the ass. From the initial price negotiations to the dreaded home inspection that didn’t pan out as we had hoped, things haven’t exactly been smooth sailing. Following our inspection, we got hung up for over 10 days haggling back and forth to try and reach a consensus on a credit to be issued at closing. (I’m not sure how it works outside of New York so for those out of state and those who haven’t been through the process, getting a credit at closing essentially means you get part of the price you’re paying for the house back in a check along with the keys to your new house to put toward any repairs you might need to complete.) It was estimated that the house needed approximately $2000 – 3000 in repairs so we asked for what we thought was a very fair $2000 credit. The sellers wouldn’t budge and required multiple copies of our inspection, brought in their own inspector to try and refute the results and on and on and on.

Several times we discussed walking away. I went back to the drawing board and started researching other properties and finally it looked as though we’d probably be spending the weekend house hunting again. We were completely bummed. But the reality of the situation was – we’d already gone higher on price than we had hoped and we had already committed to a house that required us to buy all brand new appliances upon moving in and we felt very strongly that even if we could afford another $2000 – 3000 in repairs we didn’t want to do so. It was that simple. Why should we pay for an issue the current homeowner ignored? It was a classic case of “not my problem” and we decided to put our collective foot down. Pay up the $2000 or we’re moving on and seeing other properties. They called our bluff. We walked. And not an hour later I got a phone call back that all of a sudden they were ready to play nice. Less than twenty four hours later we had a signed contingency release in hand stating that they were committed to issuing a $2000 credit at closing. Woohoo! And onward we go.

Ok, so let’s get onto the good stuff for a moment, shall we? A couple of weekends ago we went out appliance window-shopping so we could scope out ideas, finalize a budget and chat with our friendly neighborhood Lowes and Home Depot guys about delivery times and charges, etc. While we’re still debating a dishwasher, we have our stove and fridge fairly well picked out.

This range is Frigidaire Gallery from Lowe’s. (I’d link to the exact model, but their site appears to be down at the moment.) It’s definitely not a real high-end unit (ohhh how I would love me some Viking in my house), but it has a few extra features I like. It’s stainless steel, it’s gas, it has a self-cleaning oven and it has five burners with a power burner for boiling big pots of water quickly and a simmer burner for delicate sauces. Love that!

The refrigerator is also by Frigidaire and despite my love for bottom-freezer French door models, we decided that the traditional side-by-side style will suit us just fine. We have a very similar Frigidaire fridge in our current rental and it more than gets the job done for us. I have a lifetime to be snooty about appliances, I’m not going to start now. Even though I really wish I could fork up the dough for a gorgeous Sub-Zero, it’s just not going to happen.

This week is all about the mortgage application now that we are finally wrapped up with negotiations. We don’t foresee any issues on that front, but I’m not holding my breath until the coast is completely clear. There have been too many bumps in the road so far from me to rest easy just yet! After that we’ll be onto the appraisal phase and assuming we make it that far, we should be homeowners in the next month to six weeks. I am scared, excited, nervous and absolutely ready to get this home-owning show on the road. Stay tuned!

Touching Up

I have so much to fill you in on regarding this house buying process. But can I just say – it is incredibly stressful! Far more so than I had expected even though I was fully prepared for this process to be anything but a cake walk. With that said, I’m planning to write about the craziness of the last couple of weeks in the next day or so, but in the meantime I just wanted to share my undying love and affection for Glidden. See, because we’re slowly realizing we can probably start doing things like packing and getting organized for the upcoming move. And we needed some touch up paint for one of the bedrooms, but I really wasn’t all that interested in spending $10+ on a quart of paint when I am still debating paint colors for the new abode and we really only needed a dab or two. Well low and behold, Home Depot carries these sweet little Glidden paint testers that cost about $3. They come in tiny little bottles with a screw top that has a mini paint brush attached to the underside. Yup. Pure genius. So for $3 we touched up the areas in need and have plenty of dabs leftover in case we scuff anything as we move our furniture out next month. Like I said – genius! And for the record, yes, simple things really do amuse this simple mind.