Freshening up the living room

Over Christmas we decided that it was time to freshen up the living room. We didn't have enough time over the break to tear in to the big renovations of the dining room and bedroom, so we decided to only do the living room. The living room walls were already painted (instead of the layers and layers of wallpaper in the other rooms) and actually looked in decent shape, with only one crack to fix.

This is a really, really old picture from when we moved in. Complete ignore the floors, the point is that the walls were in decent shape.

We've done drywall in the kitchen and bathroom, but those walls were in terrible shape and would have been terrible to fix. To try and save some time and mess, we decided to patch the walls and paint over the plaster. In hindsight, this may or may not have been a good decision.

This is the wall that needed the least repair. Seriously.

Ceiling paint, tons of molding sanding, and adding a few electrical outlets were also on the docket for this renovation. We've had to have extension cords running everywhere, so we were looking forward to having more outlets! The window molding was worse for wear, so I decided that I should replace the inner molding which was the most beat up, probably due to weather, air conditioners, and general abuse over the years.

You can distinctly see where I tried hard to sand the old molding smooth and where the new portion starts. It isn't perfect, but the new inner molding makes it look a lot cleaner and was super easy to do. However, I learned later that the 1/2" difference in window width that using a slightly thinner piece of molding caused our brand new blinds to be slightly too small. I fixed this for the other rooms, but I'll need to shim the blinds in the living room. Caroline was sad.

The room really started to come together when we started to paint. The molding looked super white, and the yellow walls (same as in the hallway) made the room much brighter and less "baby poopy".


We don't have great pictures of the finished room because we immediately moved ALL of our stuff in to it for renovating the dining room and bedroom (that renovation actually ended a few weeks ago, but we haven't taken new living room pics). You still can get the idea. You'll be hearing about the dining and bedroom renovation soon!

Our lovely china cabinet

Over the past six months to a year, David and I have been looking off and on for a china cabinet. Even with all of our added kitchen storage from our kitchen renovation, we still really needed a china cabinet or hutch of some sort to store serving pieces, wine glasses, placemats, napkins, etc. We had the perfect spot in mind in our dining room - nestled into the corner by the extra (somewhat useless) door into the hallway. Because this wasn't the biggest space and we wanted this to be a nice piece of furniture that we'd keep for a very long time, we had a list of requirements:

• Not larger than 43 inches wide across the main section (and preferably as close to this width as possible to maximize storage space and make it a more "normal" size for when we use it in a different home 
• Solid wood with a natural finish (maple or cherry were our top choices)
• Glass doors 
• Dovetailed drawers, if it had drawers 
• The back couldn't be a mirrored surface (my personal requirement)

David's parents wanted to give us whatever china cabinet we picked out as a wedding present. Per our usual routine, the first place we searched was Craigslist. We like to start with craigslist not only because it helps us buy something nicer for a more affordable price, but because I really like the idea of repurposing / reusing existing pieces of furniture. Going to a big furniture store and buying something new just for the sake of something new feels a bit wasteful to me when all of these great pieces of furniture are out there just looking for a new home. I do have a list of things that I am less comfortable buying on craigslist - we plan to do a specific post about this sometime in the future. We had a few leads on Craigslist, but nothing we were 100% in love with. We had looked a little bit in some locally-crafted furniture stores up in VT as well as in some bigger furniture stores down in MA and at some antique/thrift shops, but nothing we really loved / felt was worth the high price tag. At least, not until we had fully exhausted our Craigslist furniture quest. 

A little over a week ago, I found one on Craigslist that looked like it had great potential. It was exactly 43 inches wide (we emailed the woman several times to get measurements for all sections on the china cabinet to make sure we knew exactly how it would fit in our space). It was made of cherry wood with a cherry finish, had glass fronts and sides, dovetailed drawers, and was listed at a very reasonable price. The one odd thing was that the back piece was made of a piece of plywood paneling with a light colored finish. We forgot to take a before picture, but with the beautiful cherry wood everywhere else, this fake-looking back piece really looked out of place. However, everything else was great and the back piece was fixable, so we packed the china cabinet into our truck (with the help of Harvie and Susan who were visiting for the weekend) and headed home. 

This is an image from Home Depot that shows basically exactly what the back paneling looked like.

Despite our careful efforts, we didn't quite make it home without incident. One of the wooden knobs vibrated off its screw and was lost somewhere on the road, and a small chip came off of the inside of one of the front legs. We saved the chip, but as luck would have it have since misplaced it. Neither thing is irreparable though. Once we got the cabinet inside, Susan and I headed to the basement to look at all the left over paint samples David and I had acquired. I really wanted to try painting the back piece an antique teal color. We used printer paper and Q-tips to test each paint color and to look at a few mixed samples, and finally settled on a 50/50 mix of Pewter Tray and Swan Sea, both Behr paints. We first tried to paint the paneling in place, but realized that wasn't going to give a nice clean finish. We then took the back piece off entirely, laid it flat on the kitchen floor, and painted it there. We did two coats of paint, though the first coat was in another light color that we had laying around because we didn't have enough of our mixed color to do two full coats. After it dried we nailed the back piece into place and stepped back to take a look. What a difference! I absolutely love, love, love this china cabinet. David is also a big fan. It has the simple look we were going for, the rich wood tones, and the newly pained blue back panel really just gives it an element of uniqueness and interest. It fits perfectly in our intended space, and I can't wait to start filling it. Without further ado, here are the final pictures! 

You can see the missing knob on the lower left door here - we will try to find something similar to replace that with. We'd also like to replace the gold knobs on the pullout tray section (for setting dishes on, etc.). They don't look too bad in this picture, but in person the gold finish is a bit dated looking. 

I wanted to see how some of our white dishes looked in it :) You can see in this picture a little bit of candle wax residue that is on the bottom shelf - it seems to clean off easily, I just haven't done it yet. 

A big thanks to Harvie and Susan for the great wedding present! I'm seriously so excited. Having this in our dining room really makes the whole house just feel more like an "adult" home. 

Setting up shop in California

Late last year I was asked if I was interested in leaving Stroud to become a member of a new (not currently existing) LMP1 racing team. LMP1 stands for Le Mans Prototype 1, which is the fastest class in the World Endurance Championship, the most famous race in which is the 24 hours of Le Mans. The 24 Hours of Le Mans is the oldest and most famous racing event in the world, attracting over 700 million viewers (more info here). For a car guy, this is a dream job, and one that sort of "fell" in to my lap. Needless to say, when the official offer came through, I said yes!

Example LMP1 car - ours won't be unveiled for about a year

I left Stroud on the 17th and spent 2 weeks renovating the house (post is a few weeks off) and getting ready to start the new job, which was a little work since we'll be designing it in California! One of these tasks was finding and setting up an apartment, which Caroline significantly helped with. It makes sense to get an apartment since I'll be commuting back and forth weekly for so long (3 years). Caroline spent a lot of time checking out apartments in Costa Mesa, the next town over from where I work (Santa Ana), and we decided that it was a little too "sketchy". Moving the search to Irvine yielded better results, and we picked an apartment to put a deposit down on in the San Mateo complex (http://www.rental-living.com/Communities/San-Mateo/). As my friend Zack said, "That was brave", but Caroline and I thought we could pretty easily weed out the bad apartments and get pretty close without having to tour a bunch. We checked out lots of online pictures, reviews, and google maps street views to rule out the bad ones, so we were pretty confident that the one we put the deposit down on was going to be pretty good.

My apartment is actually a mirror image of this layout (left/right)

After flying to Cali last Friday night, we stayed at a hotel after picking up our rental car, the "Grandpamobile".

We got up early in the morning to pick up my rx7 and check out our apartment. We don't have a picture, but the apartment we initially reserved was a bit...dark. Being on the 2nd floor and facing north-ish meant that it really didn't get any sun at all. Caroline had the presence of mind to ask if they had a 3rd floor apartment, which they luckily did! We were both much happier.

The apartment isn't huge (under 500 square feet), but empty it felt pretty decently sized for a Studio. Certainly large enough for my "home away from home"!

With the apartment settled and a few craigslist items bought nearby (dresser, lamps, chair), we took off to the black hole of stores....IKEA. Not wanting to spend a lot and not having much time to craigslist, we decided that IKEA furniture was a good idea, especially because the resale market is a pretty "known" quantity because everything comes apart and travels easily. To expedite the labyrinth that is Ikea, we even "pre shopped" at Ikea in Boston. However, it still took us several hours to get everything we needed.

We went through the store, picking out a bed, dining table, couch, coffee table, floor lamp, bedside table, mattress, and some odds and ends. When it came to start "picking" the items out of the warehouse section, Caroline was convinced that we wouldn't be able to fit everything after seeing how large it was in the store. In true IKEA fashion, it didn't even fill our rented minivan!

Not wanting to lose shopping time, we also went to Target to pick up silverware and a bunch of other stuff I can't remember at the moment. Things like dish soap, paper towels, etc. We ended up getting home around 9pm, which was actually 12am EST. We were already tired. I lugged most of the boxes up from the car while Caroline made dinner. We made an additional emergency trip to Target for some more food and then started working on the bed (which we needed to go to sleep!). The bed was easy, but the stupid slat system we bought to support the mattress took FOREVER to build. In hindsight, we could have just put the mattress on the floor. Around 1:30 AM PST, we curled up in our stinky (yeah, foam mattresses stink for a week or so as they offgas) mattress and fell asleep.

Ikea = Easy Adult Legos

Caroline had time to put together the bedside table

The next day saw us head to Costco to grab a few things we knew we liked there. We made it back just in time for me to catch the super bowl and put together all of the rest of the IKEA things, including the couch (our EKTORP, which Caroline calls ee-kay-torp). In all, it ended up looking pretty good and made the studio very cozy.

Lastly, to get an idea of some of the cars I get to see at work every day, I took these pictures of cars in the "museum" I go through every day. 

GTP World Champion, 1992

Indy racer that that the shop owner, Dan Gurney, raced back in the 60's