Two Elephants

1- A television in the bedroom! I'm against it but this is one battle I can't win. Thoughts for or against?

2- The closets- sans doors. They've been like this for a very long time but I'm happy to say the doors are a WIP, being made by my handyman/carpenter!

I've never shown this side of the room before because it's not finished. The drawers will also soon be replaced by built-in drawers to match said closet doors. Doing it yourself teaches patience:)

This is the nice other side of the room...

Musical Furniture

Design 101 pretty much states that the sofa goes on the longest wall in the room, no? Well I'm bored with not only the furniture placement in our living room, but with the furniture itself. We bought the sofa& matching chair (faux pas I know) back when we first bought our house. It's here to stay for awhile or at least until we renovate our basement but until then we decided to move it around to see if another layout would work.

Current Layout

Option 1- sofa in front of window on short wall 

Option 2- Sofa facing long wall. Art to potentially move

& replaced with tv but blocks flow from front door entrance & stairs 

Back to the original layout- sofa on longest wall works the best

Does the sofa always work best on the longest wall?

Knife Art

Now that the backsplash is finally done, I was able to install a magnetic knife rack to hold all my knives, including some new Globals that I got for Christmas.  I think it kind of looks like art on the wall. Not only does it look clean & streamlined but it also saves on valuable counter space!

Colour Injection

Our living room is feeling kind of drab & boring. I think an easy way to solve this problem is to add some new brightly coloured pillows. Here are some fabric options I'm considering...

Source

Details

The little details always seem to take the longest to finish and they're also the ones that probably no one else will ever notice!
We pondered for months was how to transition from original wood floors to the new 1" higher elevation tile floor. We got creative by using a piece of bevelled baseboard that was long enough (10 ft) to run the length we needed and then ripped it down to the proper width. The wood species are both red oak but the threshold still needs to be finished with a coat of urethane and the floors need to be refinished.

Before- Lots of toes being stubbed here

 After- floors still need to be sanded to match

A Year in the Making

I've been on leave from blogging for the past 6 months. In that time, I've been focused on just living life & enjoying each moment because as I've learned life is just too short!

Not much of that time has been spent on home improvement projects but we did finally decide on and install our kitchen back splash tile. Here are a few options we were considering. We had a difficult time choosing just one with all the amazing options out there, which is probably why it took almost a year to finish. We decided on a glass mosaic that still has a contemporary feel to complement the rest of our kitchen. This is what the end result looks like.

I also discovered this new product on the market that looks like it would make tiling easy for novices like ourselves. Wish we had discovered it prior to installing ours with tradition thinset. If anyone has used it, I'd love to get your opinion.

Best Wishes for a happy & healthy 2011!

Kitchen Evolution

It's shocking what a little (or a lot) of paint can do to transform a space. Here's the before & after of our cottage kitchen. Not only did we paint the walls & cabinets but we also replaced the laminate floor with a reclaimed wood floor. We took down the old wall board and replaced them with bead board walls painted cloud white. The cabinets were also freshened up with a few coats of paint, a light cape cod gray. We've slowly been doing all of this over the past 6 years on weekends during the summers. The transformation is pretty amazing.

Before

After 

A fresh coat of light gray

Soldier blue accents

Cloud white on the bead board

I love the school house light & the tin ceiling

Distractions

With summer just around the corner, and summer-like weather already in Toronto, not much has been getting crossed off the never-ending to-do list and here's why.

We've been spending all of our free time up north at our Georgian Bay retreat, where lots of DIY projects are underway along with ample reading and relaxing. I just finished 'My Life in France' by Julia Child. It's a perfect summer read that I'd recommend to anyone. If you're looking for good summer reading material, I highly recommend checking out this great new witty blog Literary Lip Service. Happy reading and lazy summer days ahead!

EcoEnergy Retrofit Results

Almost 18 months ago we started down the path of making our home more energy efficient. Building science is the resident engineer's specialty so it’s been his mandate to improve the efficiency of our home in any way possible. I can’t even tell you how many cans of ‘great stuff’ foam we’ve gone through. We should have bought shares in it 18 months ago when we started sealing all the air leaks. It’s our style to take our time to do it right, so we used the entire 18 months allowed to complete all improvements as part of the government sponsored plan. Unfortunately the plan is no longer being offered for new audits. Perhaps more people were taking advantage of it then what was initially anticipated- and why wouldn’t you? Some of our improvements:

o   Replaced 2 old windows with Energy Star rated windows

o   Insulated 40% of our exterior wall space with spray foam

o   Insulated our basement header space with spray foam

o   Insulated our attic to R50 with blown-in cellulose

It may not seem like a lot but these 4 main improvements were good bang for the buck, resulting in almost $4000 in rebates. Now we just have to wait 12 weeks to receive the cheque in the mail....

Lofty Dreams

Sometimes I day dream about trading in my little house in the city for a historical loft in a hip downtown neighbourhood close to places like St.Lawrence Market & The Distillery District. We've been dreaming of architectural details like 14 foot ceilings, post & beam, and exposed brick walls. I'd love to be able to walk or take public transit everywhere I needed to go. I'd love to not worry about maintaining a yard or shoveling snow. Sometimes I think loft living might be simpler. This building would be just perfect.