New Life

Rehabbing: The house is coming along. I had one setback this week with my shower. I have a custom sized shower. It's 8 feet x 3 feet with a seat at either end. I need to have a custom shower floor made that slopes towards the drain. It's pretty important that water doesn't pool or leak below so I wanted to leave it to a professional. After having 4 "professionals" out to look at it and either give me a really high bid or not bother to get back to me at all I've decided to do it myself. This was the last thing I wanted to do, but I think in the end I'll be really proud to have done it myself.

I've also had a difficult time finding someone to install my kitchen/flex room floor. It's the entire back of the house and we wanted to do a sheet Congoleum in black. It would look very industrial and not have many seams which would leave fewer places for dirt to hide. After bids in the $4,000 range I called a place nearby in the city. The guy talked me out of the sheet material because it's going over a wood floor and not something more stable like concrete. He said tiles would work better because they have more flex to them. He also gave me a bid of $1,600 which made it easy for me to make the decision. So in the end we are going with an all black Congoleum tile floor.

Throughout this project I've had a mantra. It's "simplify and black". With any decision that needs to be made I think of ways to simplify the look which I believe will give me a more modern feel or I wonder if black would be appropriate. The doorknobs are all black enamel and that inspired the black thinking. Example: Picking wall colors. Black is not appropriate. So I thought of ways to simplify. In the end we are painting the trim and walls the same color (different finishes but the same color). This cuts down on the number of color decisions that need to be made (simplyfying my life) and it unifies the rooms making the space feel larger. This is pretty common in "modern" homes and I think it'll make our historic home feel more contemporary.

I also needed to make a decision about tile for the entryway. We had all of our wood floors refinished, but there was a space next to the front door that had different flooring that had been removed. I thought of my mantra and it made the decision easy. I ordered some flat black ceramic tiles with onyx colored grout. In the end it will be very elegant and tie in with the black floor in the kitchen at the back of the house. In a future project I'll probably have an alternate mantra (sunflowers and shiny? rectangles and stone?), but having a simple plan helps keep the project cohesive.

So, the shower not being done is holding up a lot of the finish plumbing and the kitchen floor not being done is holding up cabinet installation. Both of these things should be completed this week which would be a big step towards the completion of the project! Yippee.

Movies: We haven't been to the theater since having the baby, but we did rent a movie last night that was really interesting. The dvd was Millions directed by Danny Boyle of Trainspotting and 28 Days Later fame. It was unpredictable which is one of my 2 criteria* for enjoying a movie.


*My movie enjoying criteria: 1) The movie has to be unpredictable. If I know what is going to happen before it happens then the filmmakers didn't do a very good job. 2) It must show me a world into which I would not otherwise see. That world could be the world of my next door neighbor, but it would have to be an aspect of their life that I wouldn't see if it wasn't for the film. Movies can meet either or both of these criteria and I will usually enjoy some aspect of them. It would be the rare film that doesn't meet either criteria and I would still enjoy it.