In the beginning

Okay - I'm just going to quickly start from the beginning.

My darling husband and I are the type who say:

"Lets think about looking for a house next year" Then start looking that month

-or -

"Lets look for a long time, we don't want to settle on something to soon" Then look at five places and choose the 2nd one we saw.

The thing about our place is the location. It is on the third floor of a three family house, just outside of the historic district (as if everything weren't historic) and a 10 minute walk from downtown and hubby's work. I told him "If this is even semi-livable I want it."

Fateful words.

It WAS semi-livable when we bought it.

Here's a picture of the outside...





















So we bought the condo on August 25th, 2004 (which was one day after our soon be be cat was born...awwww...). We didn't do much on it for a few months. Hum...I don't remember why, perhaps it was because it was SOOO darn hot!! (For those of you from the west, the humidity is a killer!) We had a friend come visit us the end of September, we hadn't done anything on our house by that point (expect put paint swatches on the wall and stare at them). After she left I tore up the carpet in the Living room.
















We were pretty disappointed to see that sometime in the past 80 years someone had plunge cut into the floor, probably to do wiring on the second floor. That, combined with the huge gash in the floor where a wall used to be made it pretty impossible to reuse the existing floor. The linoneum that was under the carpet came up really easy in that room, ironicaly. In later rooms (the bedroom in particular) where the floor was in good condition the lino is stuck tight.

View from the Bedroom

This is the Bedroom looking toward the Study/Kitchen. The door open to the left is the Bathroom, the closed door to the right is the Closet.

Here is our kitchen. I think the fact that I've cooked ANYTHING in the past year and a half is pretty commendable. Oh and yes...those ARE pull strings on the lights. Like I said, we saw potential.
This is the Study. We like to give important names to fairly mediocre spaces. I'm only showing this cause there is a pretty drastic change in the after pictures. But for now you'll have to wonder.

B.R. (Before Remodel)

I never emailed pictures of our new condo to friends and family. I was embarrassed. As architects we should have found an exciting and compelling place to rest our feet at the end of a long day. Instead we found the most mundane, dull, drab place on the market and called it our own. We could see the potential, and I guess I must apologize to you all for assuming that you wouldn't be able to see it and would instead feel sorry for us. I should have known that was inevitable.

So finally, here are the before pictures. Looking at them now they seem so clean and organized ... sigh. Then first picture is looking from the door way of the study into the living room. It was the faux (styrofoam) beams the really sold us on the place.

Day 443 of our captivity...

Wouldn't it be cool if you could follow us through the whole process of our remodel, day by day? Well you can't. I didn't think of this until last month so this is unfortunately a remodel retrospective. Well - fortunately for us because we are nearly finished. I'd say 2-3 months....Wait a minute. We were saying that a year ago. So I guess that although I wish I would have thought of this at the beginning of the project there is no reason to think I won't get good use of it.

This will be pretty much a posting of before and afters with a few comments about what we are doing now sprinkled in. The "what we're doing now" parts will probably give you an idea of why this has taken so long. Oddly enough we have other things to do beside remodel!

Okay - hold on a minute while I learn how to post images...

Uh oh...It didn't work...okay...I have lost interest for the moment. I'll edit this later and then we'll REALLY get this started.