Corny

Dinner tonight. Cornbread messages.

What could be more romantic than that? ;)

My kingdom for a book

Neither of us is a minimalist, but perhaps my greatest weakness as far as collecting goes is for books. I may never actually get through my entire list of to-reads, but that won't stop me from buying them when I'm in a good bookstore. Kate's no slouch in the reading department, either, which makes for a lot of literature to house.

Before Kate moved in to the apartment in April of last year, she had Tom build two narrow bookshelves in the bedroom, and those plus a small bookcase just past the entry door sufficed to hold all her books and music, but we just knew we'd need more shelf space. 

During a visit shortly before we made the big merge, my mom (hi, Marta!) took pity on us and brought us to Gothic Cabinet Craft where we ordered a custom-sized bookshelf that would reach nearly to the ceiling without being too wide or too deep so as to block the front door when it opens.

About three weeks later, they delivered this unfinished piece:

Unfinished pine.

We had originally wanted to paint it white (white ceilings, white molding, white doors...why not a white cabinet?) but decided to do it ourselves rather than tack on another $200-300 onto the price of the unit. And we sure were glad we bought it unfinished, because we quickly changed our minds on the color. Painting it stark white would have made it feel a bit monolithic with its height, not to mention that it felt juvenile (baby's room, anyone?), so we decided to try and stain it to look like the piece of driftwood that we have mounted over the door.

Creating texture.

After one spectacularly failed attempt to make our own stain using vinegar and steel wool, we got the color right by using a grey stain from the can as a base color, then using a chestnut colored stain as a light second coat, just wiping it on and then quickly off with a rag, to get a textured, varied color.

Staining the shelves.

The first boxes we unpacked when I moved in were my 10+ book boxes, splitting the new bookshelf between my fiction (on the top) and Kate's music (on the bottom).

We love the color of the bookshelf itself and also our colorful array of books and objects.

Surprise!

July 25. I thought I was having dinner with Kate, Kate's mom, and my best friend Ella, who was in town visiting. I arrived at Melisa's house in Park Slope only to find a beautiful silver envelope taped to the front door, which was ajar. I was slightly alarmed that the front door was open, but figured they had all run to the store and left it open so I could let myself in. The silver envelope seemed a bit fancy for a little note, but whatever - Kate's attention to aesthetic detail was no surprise to me by then. I walked into the front hall and found another envelope, this one gold, taped to the inner door. "Jeez," I wondered, "How many notes did they leave me?"



It wasn't until the third envelope that I began to catch on that I wouldn't be having dinner with all three of them, after all. I looked up the stairs and saw a dozen or more colored envelopes taped up the banister. As I made my way upstairs, shaking and tearing open the envelopes as I went, I found picture after picture of us as a couple, each with a caption that told the story of how we met and fell in love.



The last envelope was taped to the ladder leading up to the roof and read, "...but this is only the beginning." My head was swimming as I began to climb the ladder. I had no idea exactly what I would find up on the roof, but I knew it would be special, and that in just a matter of minutes, I'd be engaged to one Ms. Kate Lerner, whom I adored. First, though, I had to go and get myself stuck in the hatch that opens onto the roof before emerging like a creature from the swamp, not a little bit dazed and confused.



Once I freed myself from the hatch, I listened as Kate told me how happy she was that we had found each other, how clearly she saw our future, and some other generally beautiful and sappy things that I can hardly remember because I was so emotional (Of course she was recording the whole proposal, from two angles, I might add, which allowed us to go back and remember how it actually happened). She got down on one knee and opened a blue velvet box with my beautiful opal and diamond ring, and asked me to be her wife. I could only nod and say yes.



It was only after the proposal itself that I was able to take in all that Kate had done on the roof. She had set up a beautiful table, spread with my favorite fruits, cheeses, champagne, and flowers. We were both too excited to eat much, but we sat and took in the late afternoon summer sun and looked at each other in amazement. Kate gave me a copy of Edward Lear's lyric poem "The Owl and the Pussy Cat," which is funnily quite appropriate for our relationship, and letters from her mom and brother welcoming me to the family.

Eventually we went downstairs, still in a daze, and started to call our family and friends. I remember my dad saying, before he hung up the phone, "I'll talk to you later in the week when you've floated back down to Earth!" It certainly took me a few days to do so, and I had a headache from smiling so much.​ I can't wait to marry Kate and start our married life together! One thing I'm sure of is that life will never be boring with her by my side.
                                                                                           
                                                                                                      -- Molly

Project Microwave!

The kitchen has always been a challenge. Not big enough to accomodate a full roster of standard appliances, and lacking in storage space, its weaknesses were further compounded by the infuriating underutilization of existing wall space.

I'd been doing without, but still pining for, a microwave since my move from Chicago. But where to even put one?

Enter stage left, carpenter and uncle extraordinare, Caleb Davison.

We had seen a shelving unit at IKEA we thought might work, but its dimensions were not the best fit for our very specific wall space.

My uncle graciously agreed to assemble and build a custom shelving unit inspired by the IKEA prototype that would house a microwave as well as some dinnerware. 

On a balmy March day, we headed to the Gowanus Lowe's to buy some high-end birch plywood.

The plywood didn't fit in my uncle's car, but luckily he had the right equipment to secure it:

During the next week, he cut the pices and assembled them.

Then, the moment of truth: installation!

All that was left was for Molly to drill a hole for the microwave cord...

And ta-da!!

(Two views of the finished installation)

A final touch we couldn't resist adding: mug-holders!

Losing our marble(s)

As much as I love Kate, completing tasks is arguably not one of her strengths. So even though when she moved into this apartment in April of 2011, she had plenty of vision about how she wanted it to turn out, she hadn't quite gotten there by the time I came onto the scene in September. Which is a good thing in this case, because it's given us the opportunity to finish some things together, and make sure they suit both of our tastes.

Case in point: the dining room table.

Over the summer, Kate bought a cast iron sewing table base at a store in Williamsburg called, of all things, Junk.

The first time I came to her apartment and saw this sitting in the bay window surrounded by chairs and with a vase on top, my first thought was, "Huh. That's a really small table." I didn't want to offend her, though, so I kept quiet for a while.

When it came to light that we were both seriously interested in home design and decor, she asked if she could run her dining room table design by me. I breathed a sigh of relief knowing that she had more plans for this rickety little base with pieces of rotting wood screwed all around it.

She had originally invisioned pairing it with a mirrored top, surrounded by a wood trim to hold it in place. But the more we talked about it (talking details is something we do best), the more complicated it seemed to get. How thick would the wood trim be? Would it be level with the mirror, or would there be a lip? There would probably be a lip, and would that make it hard to fit plates? What if someone dropped a knife and shattered the tabletop?

I'll admit that I was never a huge fan of a mirror-topped table. It felt a little glitzy and fussy for my taste, which tends to be homier. After a lot of back and forth, we came up with the idea of some kind of marble, either a white with grey veins or a soft grey that matched the chipped paint on the base.

We even considered scrapping the DIY table and buying this one at ABC Home, which we fell in love with while window shopping one day.

But after a bit of research, we discovered that our custom table (with a slightly larger top) would be less than half the price!

So one weekend, while breathing the country air in Lloyd Neck, we drove ourselves to a marble yard and chose a simpe white Cararra marble that we had cut to a 32" round. We chose a honed (matte) finish and a simple edge to add a clean, modern feel to the antique base and our otherwise fairly feminine, detailed apartment. We also wanted to incorporate a more modern feel into the table so it would harmonize with our white Paul Loebach chairs.

We bought some epoxy and a caulking gun at the hardware store, found the center of the marble top, and glued those babies together one night. We let it set for 12 hours, and the next morning, we had a more beautiful dining room table than either of us could have imagined!

Today's cat-cam.

Breakfast companions.

Today's cat-cam

Mia greets the Spring.

How many perfectionists does it take...

to find the right paint color? Answer: two, plus a whole lot of trial and error, and some white paint.

The bedroom started off as the same gender-neutral-pastel-baby-yellow as the kitchen, and while it was far from offensive, it wasn't jiving with our vision for the apartment. We were going for calm, soothing, ethereal and natural, and the yellow was screaming, "Dingy buttercups!" and "Sad Easter!"

While we knew we wanted to get rid of the yellow here, too, we also knew it could be quite a challenge. One thing Kate and I diverge on is color; I like a lot of it, and if it were up to Kate, everything would be white, beige, or cream. We were worried we wouldn't be able to compromise, and it certainly took some doing (read: studying almost 100 paint chips and buying about 10 samples - ouch to the wallets! - before finally custom mixing our own color), but we did it!

It's crazy how different paint can look once it's actually on the wall (who would have known that Benjamin Moore's 'Pampas Grass' and 'Bride to Be' which read as soft, greyish tans with just a hint of pink would look like bubble-gum or little-girl nursery pink out of the can?). 

One Friday night we painted six sample colors on foam-core boards and came away not liking any of them. Of course we failed to take into account that, without any natural sunlight, we were only seeing them in the glow of the awful fluorescent lighting in the bedroom (which is high on the list of things to get rid of, thank you very much), or that we were both cranky and tired and probably nothing would have looked right to us at the time.

One of the colors we had tried that night is called 'Cedar Key,' also a Ben Moore color. And after a restorative weekend on Long Island, in the light of day and in much better moods, we realized that we actually really liked it:

But it was too dark for our tiny bedroom, especially since colors tend to look even darker on a larger scale, i.e. anything bigger than a paint chip.

Our solution? Custom! That seems to be our favorite word for this apartment with its limited space, not-quite-square corners, and our very picky (or, as we like to say, refined) taste. We mixed our sample of Cedar Key with some pure white paint, which lightened it quite a bit, and then painted our new sample on a clean board of foam core. The nice, patient paint guys at Pintchick then photographed our sample and custom mixed our paint.

The painting process itself was pretty nerve-racking. We naively didn't think we'd need a primer, so when the first coat went on, the dingy yellow was still shining through, making for quite an interesting (unpleasant) color. We were both terrified that we'd made a wrong color choice, but after another coat, we realized what had happened and really fell in love with the color.

Mia, ever the curious cat and home-improvement helper, wanted to get her paws on the color, too!

It might be slightly lighter than anything I would have chosen on my own, but then again, my tendency can be to err on the side of too much color which I grow sick of more easily, and this color feels timeless, sophisticated and calming. Plus, it was a compromise for Kate, too, who might have chosen something even lighter left to her own devices, and in the end, I love that this is something we chose together.

The Perfect New Years or... Linoleum, be gone!!!

Ah, the kitchen. If only we had the budget to do an Extreme Makeover, as opposed to What Not To Wear. Things being what they were, we focused on the high-impact, low-cost changes we could make. One design element that could easily be changed was the I-don't-know-the-sex-of-my-baby, pastel yellow wall color. For one thing, we weren't too fond of it even in isolation. But the apartment's kitchen essentially occupies a shared space with the living room, and the abrupt change from blue to yellow just made this living space feel even smaller than it already was. Not to mention, it wasn't aesthetically pleasing. We went through many a paint chip until we found the Benjamin Moore color that best matched the pale blue already in the living room, funnily enough called Marilyn's Dress. On New Year's Eve, we had our paint mixed, bought an expensive bottle of Champagne (because we're classy like that), ordered in pizza, and hunkered down in the apartment for a night of kitchen rejuvenation. 

We had thought we would paint first, but on a whim, we decided to see, once and for all, what was under the 70s era lineleum. I had a blind faith that the lovely, pumpkin-tinged hardwood would continue into the kitchen, but Molly warned me not to get my hopes up. It could be sub-flooring only, or the wood could be completely ruined. We began by peeling off the linoleum to reveal a custom-cut swath of sub-flooring. It was affixed to whatever was beneath by a massive amount of rusty screws. The last three were especially hard to remove, but once that was done, we were excited for the big reveal. We began to lift up the heavy sheet of wood and.... it wouldn't budge an inch! Yet all the screws had been removed, or had they? Scouring the floor once more, we found one last ancient screw firmly planted in the ground. The cross on its face was so old and worn that the screwdriver didn't make it turn. Over the next hour, we tried futily to make the screw turn. Or loosen it in some way. We gouged the wood away that surrounded it and filled the space with wood polish, vinegar, and Coke. We applied differently sized screwdrivers from different angles. But still, nothing! Finally, we went to see the fireworks in Prospect Park to clear our heads, and when we came back, Molly was able to break off the head with a hammer.  The screw itself stayed in the ground, but we were finally able to lift up the sub-flooring to reveal... a continuation of the beautiful wood flooring, in great shape!! I couldn't have asked for a better New Year's present!

The bargain of the year or, Honey, we've got dining chairs!

According to Country Living, this is a bargain:

Well if $250 a chair is a bargain, it's not one that I can afford. Still, I liked the modern-with-a-nod-to-tradition aesthetic of the Loebach chairs, and crossed my fingers that someday there might be some sort of sale. 

Months passed without a sale, and I had long given up hope, when I found myself in the Lincoln Park West Elm on a mild January day.  Out of old habit, I made my way over to the chairs. Imagine the rush when I saw the
following:

Add to that, a one-day-only 20% sale they were having, and my $250 designer dining room chairs became $39 dining room chairs. Now, that, my friends, is a bargain!

Above: the bedding we wanted was also on sale. That makes me a happy shopper!

Below: Back in Brooklyn, Mia makes friends with the new furniture.

Our Royal Rose

Hey all, Molly here! Kate wrote a very lovely, very mushy blog post about our meeting, and I don't think I could have said it any better. We fell, literally and figuratively, on our first date, and we're going full steam ahead.

What she didn't mention is that only three weeks after we met, she left for Chicago for three months. On my birthday. She broke this news on our second date, and though she probably didn't believe me at the time, I told her I'd come visit her. I don't think she expected me to stick around for the three months she was away, but I knew better. And after a couple of visits to Chi-town and Kate's three week vacation in December where she came back to the east coast to meet my family, we knew we wanted to live together. A little fast? Definitely. Crazy? Perhaps. We both kept trying to reign ourselves in, saying things like, "Well, let's just see how it goes when you're back in New York..." and "I guess we should try to be more practical about this..." and "But how many cats can we really fit?" That didn't last long, though, and after a while, we knew what we wanted and we knew we could make it work.

But being the foodie that I am, I made it clear early on that we'd need to make some significant changes in the kitchen. A stove from the '70s whose oven didn't work? A refrigerator that held one carton of milk and four strawberries, and... that's it? The dingy yellow color? I don't think so. This would be the most challenging kitchen re-organization I'd ever tackled.

Neither of us had the money for the full-on renovation we wanted, so we had to get creative. First up was finding a working stove. We were limited to a 20" model, though, and weren't loving any of the options we found for new purchase. One Hotpoint model looked like a cartoon stove, with its bloated front and flimsy construction. The Avanti models were the most aesthetically pleasing, but even they were slightly more expensive than what we wanted to spend, and we weren't 100% assured of their quality. A friend of mine owned one in the past and described it as "finicky," plus the floor model at PC Richards with a cracked handle and crooked door did not inspire confidence (if that damage occured while sitting on display, I don't want to know what would happen with signigicant usage).

Ever the fans of All Things Old, we looked into vintage and antique stoves. But 20" models were rare in those designs, and even when we found a place that sold refurbished apartment-size vintage stoves, they were going for $1,800+, almost an entire month's salary for me, so that was out of the question.

But then a stroke of luck: one bitter cold January morning, while Kate was still asleep in her sterile Chicago sublet, I was browsing the website for Build It Green NYC. I've always kept a peripheral eye on this website, because they have such interesting things. For those that aren't familar, BIG is a not-for-profit that specializes in selling salvaged materials from building sites. So if you need an old claw-foot tub, a fire-place mantel, old doors, or, say, a 19" Royal Rose white enamel stove in great working order, BIG is the place to look. When I saw this beauty on their website, I threw on some semblance of an outfit, fed the cat, and walked the 10 or so blocks to their Gowanus location, calling Kate every thirty seconds or so on the way to try and wake her up.

After some hemming and hawing and a ton of picture messages (the stove was in nowhere near perfect condition, but ultimately we decided we liked the worn look of it), I bought our beautiful Rose for $300 and paid some movers a little more to deliver it to Kate's apartment, hook it up, and haul away the old one.

She gave us a few surprises, our little Rose, both good and bad. First we were surprised to discover that her 19" width was actually ideal for our space, as the old 20" stove hung over the edge of the archway by one inch. Also, wrapped up in all the excitement of finding Rose, we failed to realize that she had no electric pilot light, and needs to be lit with a match or lighter. Our girl's special, but we love her anyway.

Today's cat-cam.

My man.