I finally let all my friends, family and Facebook friends in on this little, (until now) secret blog thing I’ve been doing. Other than my hubby (who reads everything pre-publish so he can fix my punctuation), my parents, and like five of my closest friends, no one knew that I’d been working on this. (Oh, and Brendan Reed, the nicest, sweetest and loveliest person that I have never even met, who helped me put this site together and still answers at least one lame technical question a week.) Anyhow, other than with those few people, I wasn’t ready to share. But wow, was the response a huge hug from the internet. It gave me a nice little boost of confidence. So, to you all, thank you from the bottom of my heart.
Now back to work.
I went to look at the tile progress at the butcher shop this week. The wall looks pretty great. I’m really happy with the black line – it makes an otherwise common looking wall less so.
I am bummed with the kitchen floor tile. The installer said that installing the 2″x2″ square tile in the diamond formation I wanted would be too labour intensive. All that means, as everyone and their mother knows, is that he wants to charge more to do it. A lot more. I pouted and huffed and pouted some more and then I conceded. He is old school and the cheapest installer we could find and he won this round. Sometimes you need to back down. Most of the time you need to stick to your guns – this was not that time. I know it will bug me a little every time I look at that floor, but some battles are not worth it. That is the renovation process though: you are always elbowing people a little to get your vision of a space produced. Sometimes you are pushing your client to take a leap with you, sometimes a contractor to properly fulfill your design, others a supplier to get stuff to you on time. And sometimes, a tiler pushes back. In the end it will look good, no one cares but me, and I am obsessing.
Sefi and Marc, my Lawrence partners, found a large 10’x 4′ stainless steel table with a maple butcher top at some random place in the country for 500$. They got it for the kitchen and Sefi mentioned there was a second matching table and I immediately told her to get it for the middle of the space. I always wanted a massive table in the space and I was at the point where I thought for sure we’d have to have it made, and then this one appeared. No pictures of it as of yet. It will hold merchandise as well as be a spot where customers can eat their sandwiches.
I wanted a really big lamp to go over the HUGE table and so I went back to lighting heaven, aka Lambert & Fils. This is the lamp I had in mind for that part of the room:
But now that it is going over top a stainless table (albeit with a wood top) it felt way too cold and lab like. So Sam from the shop agreed to paint it a sage-y green for me. We’ll keep the shiny interior and keep the green metal top but we’ll paint the aluminum. This will bring in some more of the metal green I want in there as the accent colour. I also chose a light for the outside entrance way. This means the main decorative lighting is pretty much done. We may need to add some extra lighting to the lunch counter area down the road, but for now I think we’ll be ok. Lighting: check!
Next we need to figure out the floor which looks like this now:
I don’t know if I want to stain it or give it a varnish. Epoxy or white wash or both? I need to get someone in that knows floors and then do some tests. Really, I want it to look like this piece of plywood that was just lying on the floor:
The colour is right-very close to the Benjamin Moore Puritan Gray I chose for Lawrence. And I like that I can see the wood grain through the paint. Sometimes you get the answer in unexpected places…
On Thursday, I went over to my dad’s studio to prep my big daycare presentation. My father is not only a super awesome dad (Hi Dad!) but also a very talented and inspiring artist (Peter Krausz is his name). He has also taught art forever. He took one look at what I was planning for the kids and brought me back to the basic issue that these were three year-olds. Clearly. He suggested using pictures of actual couches, tables, chairs as opposed to the design template squares and rectangles that I was going to use, which totally would have seemed too abstract for toddlers. Once I started looking online, I found sketches of all the furniture items I wanted to use and then dad (again!) suggested the kids could colour them after gluing them down.
So I spent a few hours finding, printing and cutting up 10 of each item. Then I went to Home Depot and picked up a bunch of colour chips for the kids to choose as the wall colours of their “mood board”. These were some of the results:
Pretty great, I think. I did however, underestimate how crazy long it would take for those little fingers to glue all those pieces down. Sooooo long. We never even got to the colouring part.
Another awesome byproduct from visiting my dad’s studio (other than my mother feeding me) is getting to look at his art work. I fell in love with this piece that was just leaning against a wall. I knew the work vaguely but had never really looked at it. It is from 2011 and it is 4’x 7′. It is a view of the train tracks just outside my parent’s loft and just down the street from our own house. There is just something about it – the light, the tracks, the snow, the abandoned industrial building. Now I want it for our home.
And I want it to go here:
It seems made to go over this couch. Maybe we can “borrow” it and if someone wants to buy it, we’ll give it back. Maybe.
xa
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