…with money to spare!

Considering how many cool, unique, and fairly priced antiques we wandered past this weekend, I am truly amazed that we left Massachusetts with money left for tolls. We had a great weekend and definitely enjoyed our trip.

We rolled into town Friday afternoon, pitched our tent at the Village Green, and did some surveying from the truck before making our way to Applebees for our Housebloggers meet-up with Gary (of This Old Crack House), Derek (of Brockton Bungalow), and their families.

Finally meeting these people face-to-face and having a table full of house lovers to talk technique and obsession with was a surreal experience. As Derek said, we know WAY too much about each other’s lives considering we’d only just met. We stayed far too long for our waitress, who could not be bothered to offer up dessert or coffee even though it was obvious we’d be staying a while. The night finally broke up when Elizabeth, who had been an absolute angel all night, decided to prove her father was not a liar. Neighboring tables were shocked by how quickly she went from a dimple-faced doll to a typical screaming, writhing 3-year-old. I would have pitched a fit too, if I were her. There’s only so much shellac talk one should engage in, and we were well over limit.

Saturday was spent at the antique show, where we sweat and sweat and sweat some more. We spent a few hours getting comfortable with the dealers and familiar with prices, and a few more hours picking things up and putting them back down. We did make one large purchase – something we fell in love with and just had to haul back. I’ll share details tomorrow since I haven’t had time to take good photos yet!

A few favorite finds:

The coolest coat rack, and it would fit in a very small space. Too bad it was almost $3k.

This statue reminds me of my mother’s snippy Pekingese, Lilly. Only cuter, with less underbite.

Ribbons, buttons, and embellishments of all kinds arranged in the most beautiful way. A designer’s dream – this is what I want my craft room to look like someday. Without a doubt the prettiest booth we saw all weekend.

Can you guess what this is? It’s a sample version of the famed purple tub that our buddy Tom owns! If you look in the lower-left hand corner you can see the tag attached to it, which will give you an idea of the scale. If it hadn’t been $300, we definitely would have brought it home for them.

Stay tuned, I’ll snap some photos of our big purchase and post them soon.

When we gutted the hallway, we found some gorgeous wallpaper samples. It was badly damaged and falling to pieces, but I did manage to get some good photos of it before we decimated things.

Here, you can see how it was applied – it may have gone all the way up the wall at some time point, since the pattern was not centered vertically. In this photo, you can see where the bottom border area starts:

Here’s a close-up of the border – a very cute floral pattern that repeats the greens and tans found above, but also mixes in some pastels:

Below the border the design is bark-like jaggedy lines in a light burnt-umber color. The darker areas toward the left are just stains.

Here is a great close-up of the main pattern; you can see the bark-like design repeats behind the main element. According to this site, it’s a “Victorian Baroque” design and quite a bit earlier than our house supposedly dates to…..

If you’re like me, you’re always looking for color inspiration. I thought this design was a perfect sample to pull an authentic color scheme from, so I whipped out my trusty Photoshop eyedropper and grabbed the dominating colors to share with the world. So here it is, my friends – a truly authentic color palette!

For more on Victorian Wallpapers, and ours in particular, check out these older posts:

Cupola Exploration (more original wallpaper samples)
Reproduction Wallpaper (Resources)

Tomorrow morning, we leave for Brimfield with a very small wad of cash and a truck. Any bets on what we’ll come back with, or how over-budget we’ll accidentally go? Given the size of the show, I have a feeling we may be too overwhelmed to even make a purchase….
?

We haven’t made too much progress on our hallway since gutting it, but I’m finally getting around to sharing the pics. We were hoping to find a wad of cash in the wall, but so far no luck. Instead, we found lots of sketchy looking wiring (including electrical outlets that weren’t attached to anything solid, ots of frayed fabric wire coverings), a crumbling plaster ceiling, and the back side of the old chimney.

Here’s the hallway pre-demolition. And if you go back about a year you can see the true hallway “befores”, complete with pepto-pink walls and a urine-soaked rainbow rug. We took a few baby steps to stop the gagging.

This is the hallway now. We still have a tiny bit of gutting left to do, as is evidenced by the shocking pink at the end of the hallway. This portion still has some ceiling left too. Why stop at 90%? Because we were both so tired, sweaty and cranky that crowbars were going to fly if we didn’t call it quits. Seriously. The number of times I broke out in tears during our hallway demolition: 3, and we’re not done yet.

Here you can see the ceiling that needs to go. No worries – we’ll be carefully removing and saving the tin, since I’m in love with it. Do I care that it’s rusted and rotted through in many places? No, I do not. It will be saved.

This is the adjacent bedroom ceiling. We took down 2 of those lovely acoustic-tile drop ceilings while we were feeling frisky. This ceiling has seen many leaks, and is the reason we’re redoing the roof. Once the acoustic tiles came down, much of the plaster decided it too wanted out. Even a few lathe pieces jumped ship. And now, if you slam a door really hard upstairs, you can watch plaster rain from the ceiling. Neato!

This Friday we’re headed out to “New England’s largest antique show” in Brimfield, Massachusetts. It’s a MASSIVE outdoor show (5000+ dealers) that takes over the small city 3 times a year. This is our first trip out there, and should prove to be interesting. We’ll be bringing the camera, and you can expect a post-mortem detailing our trip!

We won’t be looking for anything in particular, but we will have the truck with us should anything wonderful and surprisingly affordable pop into view. I’m sure we’ll come home with something fun, despite our limited funds. If you are shopping for something specific at Brimfield, it’s best to go earlier in the week like Gary. Who, by the way, we will be meeting in person on Friday. This is our first real-life encounter with a fellow houseblogger, and Gary’s blog is one of my favorites. I have no doubts that this will be a fun weekend!
We’re camping, so hopefully the ridiculous rain that pounded us is over for a while. I’m bringing play clothes just in case. If it rains, and we’re traipsing through fields all day with 30,000 other people, I’ll be the first to take a running head-first mud slide.

I found all sorts of “Survival Tips” for the show, which seems a bit scary and intimidating. Are antique dealers going to feed me to the wolves if I don’t bring enough cash? Are we going to get lost among the booths and wander without food or water for days and days? Will we poke one anothers eyes out while arguing the purchasability of some pretty little item we uncover? Or will we just end up hot, tired, and overwhelmed?
If you too are headed to Brimfield, here are a few of my favorite links:
Brimfield Survival Tips 

Behind The Scenes at Brimfield, The Largest Outdoor Antiques and Collectibles Market in the United States

First-Timers Overview

Top Tips for Seeing the Show

Grace Bonney, editor of the inspiring design*sponge blog, has impeccable taste. On her blog, she highlights unique and beautiful house products.

The picks are mostly modern, so they’d fit perfectly in a NYC loft apartment, but not so perfectly in our middle-o-nowhere fixer-upper. Every now and then, though, I see something I think we could get away with. Once we win the lottery and do not have to choose between frilly things and 2x4s, of course.

Here are a few of my favorite products, in all their girly Victorian-mod glory:
diane von furstenberg designer rugs

alexander henry fabrics

jocelyn warner wallpaper

Get your mind out of the gutter, would you?

While I have no cool photos to post (left the camera at a party this past weekend, but it will be back home soon!), rest assured we spent most of our holiday weekend tackling home improvement projects. In fact, we managed to gut the rest of the stairwell and the upstairs hallway – all 20 or so feet of it, including most of the ceiling. Mess? What mess?

We started out Saturday thinking we’d pull out the dropdown ceilings found in various places upstairs. To throw them out, since we had the dumpster and all. That turned into some cracked plaster removal, which turned into “Let’s go ahead and gut the hallway so we can rewire the upstairs.” It’s amazing how quickly things escalate when we’re feeling energetic.
Removing the walls/ceiling was an involved process….

• Remove the drop-ceiling tiles and framing in 2 bedrooms and one long hallway.
• Remove all bits of loose or crumbling plaster.
• Pull the lathe and remaining plaster off the hallway walls and ceilings with a crowbar.
• Go back in and pull all eight zillion nails that held the lathe on.
• Shovel mounds of demo-mess (plaster, nails, wood, dust) into a garbage can.
• Drag the garbage can (which now weighs about three hundred pounds) down the stairs, out the door, and over to the dumpster.
• Hoist the garbage can up into the air, dump everything in it.
• Repeat the shoveling, dragging, and hoisting about 40 times until all of the debris has been cleared.
• Sweep, and vacuum, and sweep some more. Then vacuum again, because that plaster dust is stubborn stuff. Mop about 5 times. Give up and decide it’s “clean enough”.

It took two days of sweat and frustration. The good news is that we’ve exposed nearly all of the remaining knob and tube lines; this ought to make rewiring much, much easier than we had originally anticipated. Teague got busy the other night and wired up a brand new three-way light for the stairwell, which is AWESOME. Previously, the only light available for the hallway/stairs was a little night-light plugged into an electrical outlet. And since our stairs are a deathtrap full of odd angles and sharp curves, good lighting is key.
It’s a small thing, but I feel very fancy having a three-way light switch in our house; given that most rooms didn’t even have light switches when we moved in, it feels like a huge upgrade!Wondering how three-way switches work? Check out this page:

http://home.howstuffworks.com/three-way2.htm

In all my years of house voyeurism, I have never seen a bathroom with features like this:

Notice that this is a one-piece – some serious flushing cabability!

See the matching light fixtures, shelf bracket, towel rod, etc? I was amazed it was all a perfect match AND still intact, given that the house has changed hands a few times. Lucky!

Even the ceiling fixture matches! How cute is that?

The pièce de ré·sis·tance, a giant purple tub.

These photos are from the home of a fellow fixer-upper couple we met this week. I thank them for sharing their house, both with us and the blogosphere. They also have an all-pink bathroom downstairs – pink wall tile, pink tub and toilet, pink mosaic floor tile, and super cool hollywood-style mirror. I can’t believe that both bathrooms are still intact with the original fixtures – it was pretty amazing to see.
These one-piece toilets were apparently “Cadillac” of toilets in their day, and appear to be from the late 20’s – early 30’s. This page has more info on the style: http://casetoilets.bestmfgco.com/

I think this bathroom proves that if you’re going to do something stylized, you might as well do it all the way…. right down to the towel-bar holder!

It’s STILL raining in Upstate New York. And I don’t mean spring showers or cute little sprinkles. I mean torrential rain, buckets and buckets of rain. The kind that wakes you up from a dead sleep, and has you staring out the window in amazement. The kind that makes you very glad you have a roof over your head and a sub pump working it’s magic to keep your basement from flooding.

We’re being hit hard, but east and south areas are being hit even harder. 123 miles of the NYS thruway have been shut down (making my commute a LONG and traffic-riddled one) for the second day in a row. Two truckers died yesterday when they drove into a sinkhole on Rt. 81. It’s total madness, and very tragic.
We’re lucky that our area hasn’t seen any significant damage or flooding; we’re also lucky we didn’t start our roof project on Saturday. We’re definitely counting our blessings.

In other news, we met a very cool fixer-upper couple last night who were kind enough to give us a tour of their adorable historic home. And their bathrooms? One is pink, and one is purple. As in purple toilet, purple tub, purple sink, purple ceramic light fixtures. All original, all very cool and stylized. I’ll share photos tomorrow, so stay tuned!

Some things are just meant to be. Due to a number of events, including an upcoming trip to Brimfield and a big new construction project on Teague’s plate, we held off on tearing open the roof this weekend. It was not an easy decision; we were really torn. We both wanted to make progress, but not at the expense of our sanity and physical well-being.

Today, I am SOOOO glad we decided to wait. It has been one big non-stop downpour. And this? This is the 7-day forecast:

Yeah…….. so, I’m glad a blue tarp is not the only thing keeping gallons of water out of our house. We decided that since we’re in no rush with the roof (just needs to be done before it gets too cold this fall) we’ll wait until we can both take some time away from our day jobs and commit to the project fully.

But since we had the dumpster and an unsheduled weekend, we had to find something to keep us occupied. That something ended up being the stairwell, a big ‘ole mess of crumbling plaster and pink paint that looks like something out of a horror movie.
It started out like this:

Notice the crumbling plaster on the left. We get a good breeze coming through that hole in the winter, since this wall is not insulated! And when you bound down the steps, pieces of the wall often fall off. It’s a charming feature, but one we’ve grown tired of. So we took our crowbars and got to work! Our fancy multi-use ladder came in VERY handy on the stairs, by the way. Here I am, all safety-geared up and enjoying the good bicep workout:

Here is how we left it after a day of demolition:

The ceiling is in good shape except for a crappy wallpaper job, so we left it in place. The maroon thing on the top-right is a curtain that keeps the cold air out in the winter (no longer needed, hooray!). The pink half wall on the right will be left up until we buy/find/steal a railing that will keep people from hurtling down the stairs to their death.

It’s not a new roof, but progress is progress! And progress that does not involve major stress,worry and back pain is pretty nice.