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"So it sounds like y’all have started a new design concept that the bathroom world hasn’t caught onto yet…vessel combined with Craftsman. What the heck kind of sinks DID they use back in the day?!"
Felicia asked us that in the comments to the last entry. It’s a good point and a good question. Vessel sinks aren’t really the Craftsman style. At all, in fact. The porcelain pedestal sink was the Arts and Crafts sink of choice and it was usually planted in an all white, mostly tiled bathroom. Traditional flooring was white 1-inch hex tile. The tub was usually recessed, not claw-foot. There’s a good short article on bungalow bathrooms here that should give you an idea of what a period bathroom looked like.
The traditional bathroom is very attractive, but it’s not quite what we wanted. We already knew that we were going to take Arts and Crafts design a little less literally in the upstairs of our house. The downstairs will be more traditional, the upstairs a little more relaxed. We aren’t building a Stickley replica, after all. And, frankly, Stickley didn’t always get it right. (Quick! Smelling salts for the Stickley purists!)
For our bathroom, we went with the traditional white hex tile floor and the white subway tile for the tub surround. But, we wanted to use more wood than they would have done back in 1905. We knew we would have wood on the front of the tub and on the built-in shelves and laundry chute, which are both on the right side of the room, so we needed some wood on the left side of the room to balance it out. Plus, we thought a vanity that looked like an old Arts and Crafts washstand would be neat. It’s definitely classic, but also with a modern feel to it.
The vessel sink seemed to fit well with the washstand idea. We didn’t want a tall vessel, those have always seemed awkward to us, so we sank it down so only about two inches sticks up. The sink that we have is very old-fashioned. It’s porcelain, thick, and really heavy-looking. There’s one more thing, though.
This is a little embarrassing.
All of the above blather about blending traditional with modern design? Is really just a cover to disguise this one fact:
The sink was free.
Now, we’d like to pretend that we are not the kind of people to plan one entire half of our bathroom around a free sink but…
We are. And we did. We never would have bought a vessel sink on our own. But darn if we didn’t make that free sink work!
Anyway.
Presenting, the kind-of, sort-of almost-finished-except-for-doors-and-drawer-fronts-and-oh-yeah-a-FAUCET vanity:
Why is it blurry? Who knows. Our camera is choking on all the dust and slowly dying. We put the drawer pulls on for entertainment purposes only.
Here’s a close-up:
We’ll try to get a full bathroom photo shoot up soon. After we clean it a little bit. And come up with another convincing story about why we chose a tub big enough to shelter a small village.
We’ve been tagged by both Nadja over at American Four-Square Renewal and by Felicia at Homefront Insecurity to do the "Tell Us Five Things About Yourself That Most People Don’t Know" thing. This is very kind of them, and while we really enjoy talking about ourselves (obviously), we put it off because we didn’t know what to say. Five things. That people don’t know. Hmmm. Even if we exclude our families from this equation because they know a lot about us (and the things they don’t know, we probably don’t want to tell the internet), we still are having trouble thinking of five things that people don’t know. But, honestly, we don’t have much else right now. Cherie meant to take some pictures this morning but then the cat got out and she had to chase it through the snowy, 20-degree woods. So let’s do this instead. Those of you who don’t care can skip to the bottom, where we pick up our usual complaining.
1) We are both left-handed. We are also both tall. (Cherie is more tall-ish than really tall but whatever. ) (While we’re on the topic, Michael isn’t as tall as we always thought. For years he’s told people he’s 6’6" but he had a physical lately and you know what? 6’4 3/4". Liar. Cherie’s looking into annulment.) (What were we talking about?) We are proud of being left-handed and tall, so we have built a house catered entirely to left-handed tall people. We apologize to any 5’2" righties who may own this place after us. But we don’t apologize too much because we’ve both spent a lot of time bashing our heads on low door frames and dealing with appliances on the wrong side of the counter. We’ve earned this.
2) Cherie is from Maine and is always cold. Michael is from Florida and is always hot. Michael refers to Cherie as the human ice cube. Cherie refers to Michael as the human radiator. We don’t understand it either.
3) Since Michael is from Florida, he prefers wearing shorts. He will wear shorts as early as he can get away with it in the spring and as late as he can stand it in the fall. He considers pants to be the work of the devil and, on top of that, itchy. Cherie hates wearing shorts and will do so only under duress (or while hiking when it’s really, really hot). She finds shorts to be uncomfortable and stupid-looking (on her. Not on other people). Michael owns about 20 pairs of shorts. Cherie owns 3.
4) Cherie drives a stick shift, drinks her coffee black, and loves beer. Michael drives an automatic, puts ten pounds of sugar in every beverage he touches, and prefers colorful drinks with umbrellas. Cherie does have girlier shoes and Michael likes football, so that’s something.
5) We love the ocean more than just about anything else. Whether it’s the smooth, warm, green Florida ocean or the rough, gray, freezing Maine ocean, we love it. We love the smell of the ocean, we love the sound of the ocean, and we love to eat things that come from the ocean. Cherie once went to California on a business trip and kept getting lost and going east when she should’ve gone west because she was so confused about the ocean being on the wrong side. That is how connected we are with the ocean. (We like deserts and mountains, too, but they are no ocean.)
More than you ever wanted to know, we’re sure.
And on to the complaining:
We can’t find a bathroom faucet. The vanity is installed and we are ready to go forward with finishing off the bathroom sink. A bathroom sink! No kidding. We are very excited about the prospect of someday brushing our teeth somewhere other than the tub. All that’s standing in our way is this bloody bathroom faucet, or our lack thereof.
We had no idea that this was going to be so hard. There are thousands of bathroom faucets out there, but there apparently are none that a) are several inches high to clear the vessel sink, b) extend out far enough to reach over that wide sink rim, c) are classic enough to go with the Craftsman-style vanity we built, d) aren’t hideously ugly, and e) aren’t hideously expensive. Are we asking too much, do you think? We didn’t know it was going to be this difficult. Maybe we should have designed our house around the bathroom faucet to avoid this problem.
That’s it. We’re tearing it down and starting over. Unfortunately, even if we do that, we will still need to find a bathroom faucet.
It’s been cold, folks. That’s all we have to say.
HA! As if we would ever say that little. Especially when there is complaining to be done.
Yes, it has been very, very cold. Yesterday Cherie checked the weather just to see how long the cold would last (answer: April) and she learned that the high for yesterday was -1. Let’s repeat that. The high was -1. At noon, in the sun, at peak daylight, the temperature was -1. Ahem.
It is January in Maine, after all, so we should not be surprised by this sort of thing. But it has been such a mild winter that this caught us all unawares. Just this past Saturday Cherie was tending a burn pile wearing only a sweatshirt. Well, she was wearing pants, too, but the point is that she was not wearing a jacket of any kind. Because it was warm. So to go from mid-40s on Saturday to -1 on Wednesday… that was a shock to the system. It’s easier to handle the cold when you have time to work up to it. Time to, you know, have all of your skin surgically replaced with fleece, perhaps with a wind-resistant nylon layer too.
We know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, "But if it didn’t get cold until Wednesday, and the weekend was warm, what did they do all weekend?" We continued our march toward civilization. We hung the doors on the opening to the attic so that there is no longer a gaping hole in the master bedroom. We put another coat of varnish on the bathroom vanity, which has started to seem like the endless task. There was the aforementioned burn pile, which helped clean up a lot of the stray trees, branches, wood, and cardboard that’s been gathering around us. And we put the kitchen corner cabinet in place and built two more carcasses around it. Then we had a hour-long discussion about where the silverware drawer should go.
These are the kinds of things you have to talk about when you build a kitchen from scratch. Silverware drawers. Spice racks. Whether it’s more important to have conveniently located measuring cups or easily accessible sugar. You haven’t lived until you’ve mimed your way through unloading the dishwasher and putting dishes away, debating the whole time whether you prefer to to swivel right or left after pulling out the plates.
Who says we don’t know how to party on the weekends?
We are terrifically behind on photos and updates. We know. We’ll get to work on that backlog. As long as we don’t have to step outside to do it.
It was a weekend of small projects, small projects intended to further our progress towards living the civilized life that most homeowners in the US enjoy. For example, we put up the ceiling fan and light in the guestroom. Was this completely necessary at this very moment? No, but by doing so we are now able to hang out in our temporary living room without being blinded by the plug-in shop light that had been our previous light source. See? Civilized.
There’s also this:
Doesn’t look like much, does it? That’s the dryer hose, which is now properly vented outside the house. Before this weekend, every time we did laundry we had to open the laundry room window, shove the hose outside, close the window as much as possible, then enjoy the nice draft throughout the house until laundry was done. No more! Civilized! (That other part of the Y-pipe is waiting for the installation of the downstairs bathroom vent.)
In this quest to tame our wild house, we thought it was time to focus on the kitchen cabinets again. The kitchen cabinets are all based around one tricky corner cabinet. Once we build that, then the rest should be pretty simple. We had the special-order revolving Lazy Susan shelf system. We had the wood. We spent Sunday afternoon putting it all together.
But it didn’t work. The shelves are designed to stop spinning at the L so that you don’t have to fiddle them back into the right position before closing the door. But the top shelf wouldn’t stop where it was supposed to. It kept going and would stop five inches over every time, right in the middle of the "door". We tinkered with the shelves. We messed with the pieces connecting them to the cabinet carcass. We tightened screws, we loosened screws. We moved screws around. Nothing.
Finally we had to face the truth. Our Lazy Susan was extremely lazy indeed. And broken. It’s a Broken Susan. We think that there is a manufacturing defect in one of the screws that holds the shelf hardware in place. It doesn’t seem to be setting into the hardware all the way. We’ve contacted the company and have been promised a replacement part, but our march into civilization has been halted. By this:
So close.
Huh.
The things you learn.
For a month now, we’ve labored under the delusion that we began this blog on January 5th, 2006. That was the date we closed on the property, so we were convinced that we put up our first blog post that day.
Wrong. Our first post was January 1st. How very New Yearish of us. We were very on top of things back in January 2006. We must not have been building a house then.
Too bad, then, that we blew right by the blog anniversary date. This is not entirely out of character, as we both are blatant birthday-forgetters and only manage to remember our wedding anniversary because we purposely chose a date that doubles as trucker slang (10-4, good buddy. Over and out).
All things considered, it seems a bit late to be doing a thanks-for-reading retrospective but, heck, why not? It’s the anniversary of the land purchase and that counts for something.
Over the last year, we’ve put up 108 posts detailing our pain and triumph, and an astonishing number of you are reading them.
We’ve been found by hundreds of people searching Google for "shampoo niche" and "building a cat house" and "how to cut Hardibacker" (hint: swear at it a lot) plus quite a few folks searching for some woman named "Cherie Michaels." We don’t know who she is, but if she’s walking around with a name like that she better be a nice person. It’s doubtful we were helpful to any of these searchers, but we hope we at least made them chuckle. Or roll their eyes. Or re-think the building process entirely.
We’ve found wonderful people over at Houseblogs.net where there is proof that there are crazier people than us in the world. Also smarter people, but we don’t talk about that as much. It’s mostly a home renovation site, but they let us stick around for some reason. Probably so that they can feel superior.
We’ve tortured, at current count, seven houseguests by forcing them to work on our house–some multiple times. But they keep visiting. We’ve suckered a number of friends into coming over and helping. Some of them are still talking to us. Even those that suffer humiliation at the hands of the blog. (Sorry, Todd.)
We’ve lost count of how many trees we’ve sacrificed to this little project, or how many pounds of nails we’ve used, or how many bruises, scrapes, and other minor injuries we’ve accumulated. We never had any hope of remembering how many arguments we’ve had about design choices and the budget and is that really the best project to be working on right now? We just ice down the bruises and bandage the scrapes and admit that one of us was wrong and keep going. Has it been worth it? Oh, yes. Yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes with maybe one no thrown in for the bad days.
We’ve got some great plans for the next year. For one thing, we are starting to get out of the boring part of the building process and into the fun stuff (read: out of drywall and into wood). We’re working on freshening up the look of things around here because we think that a year is long enough to put up with a "temporary" design and we are really sick of that picture of ourselves. We’ve got some special features planned–like more "how we did that" photo albums and a live action webcam so you can see us working. (Ha! Just kidding. No one wants to see how often we slap each other’s butts while working. Trust us. No webcam.) Stay tuned. We’ll get around to it all eventually.
In the meantime, thanks for coming along for the ride. Happy house anniversary to us. Don’t feel badly because you didn’t get us a gift. No, really, it wasn’t necessary. Just leave a comment and we’ll forgive you.
We seem to have lost all control over the blogging situation here at Chez M & C. We could blame the holidays, the crazy weather (snow! no…warm! no…freezing rain! no…sunshine! no…high winds!), or the sugar coma resulting from eating our body weights in sugar cookies and chocolate (and the body weights keep increasing from the cookies and chocolate so then we have to eat more…it’s an endless, ugly cycle). Or it could just be laziness. Take your pick from any of the above options.
We have done quite a bit of work, but it’s going to take us a little while to sort it out into entries. Be patient.
But we wanted to share how 2006 gave us one final kick on its way out the door:
That’s another drip from the dormer of doom, discovered on December 31st. We continue to have condensation problems up there when the temperature fluctuates wildly (see comment about the weather, above). We are working on a strategy and will have more details later, but for right now we are leaving the insulation out in those bays so that any water will evaporate as it forms instead of collecting in pools and running down our walls.
We are officially over 2006. Stupid year. I mean, yeah, sure, so we bought land, built our first house, gained a whole passel of nieces and nephews, had some fun travels, and tortured tons of houseguests in 2006. We are done with that year.
So far 2007 is vastly superior:
That’s the mahogany top for the vanity, pieced together, sanded, with a hole for the sink and drying from its first coat of sealant.
Look at the grain! The color! It’s a masterpiece:
(Yes, that is a dryer in the living room. What’s your point?)
Being the geeks that we are, we had to put everything together for a trial run before we took the top back off to stain it:
Fabulous.
2007 is going to be our year! We can feel it! Just as soon as we get the tablesaw and dryer out of the living room, that is. Then there is no stopping us.
Who wants to come visit?
