Television Before and After

BEFORE:

AFTER:

Depression Modern Bar

Work hasn't entirely stopped our progress with the apartment renovation and what I am charitably calling our interior design efforts. We purchased a 1930's vintage depression modern (a.k.a. depression moderne a.ka. streamline moderne) style bar from, uh, er, Depression Modern, a great furniture shop in Soho. Then, we found the 1940's decorative mirror from a small antique shop in Williamsburg this weekend. We're now looking for a table lamp that'll illuminate the bar corner without over-crowding the top.

Gifts are certainly welcome

Commentator Chatham asks:

i am impressed with how many times you have linked to chances blog. i am not even sure he knows. Question for you, does a complete reno require a housewarming gift? inquiring minds want to know

Yes. If you're thinking about getting me something for the apartment, I want the villain chair.

Phase Three: Interior Design

If Phase One was the planning and permits and Phase Two was the actual construction, Phase Three will be interior design. We figure, you spend the time, money & energy going through a year-plus renovation, you can't put back the same well worn and mostly mismatched furniture. So, we're in the market now for new stuff. In the meantime, though, we're living with the old furniture and some temporary fixes - such as a folding card table for a dining room table. And pillows on the floor instead of a sofa. Still a lot of boxes to unpack and rooms to set up, but here's what some of it looks like so far.

Renovation Update: Details, Details, Details

It's been a few weeks since I've uploaded pics of the renovation and construction. We've moved back in and are now fighting the daily struggle to unpack everything, organize the closets, move the furniture around and generally tie up loose ends. We've had (OK, my wife, the Punditress, has had) dozens of appointments with delivery people, building people, the contractors, TimeWarner cable, Verizon, etc. So I don't have shots of the finished project just yet.

For now, here are a sampling of detail shots that we took in the final hours before move-in time. First, a rather fascinating detail of the ball-bearing catch lock for our closet doors, followed by a sample of sconce we picked for the living room and hallway, the media cabinet, and finally the fixtures in the master bath. Enjoy.

Renovation Update: Almost There!

It's been several days since my last real post ... but I'm pleased to report that we've moved in! It has been a crazy couple of days of moving boxes into the apartment while up to eight contractors and workers scrambled to put the final touches together. Unfortunately, our home laptop crashed last week, so I can't post or upload pictures from home. There's not much to see, either, as every corner of the apartment is filled with half-unpacked boxes and suitcases. It will be a long week putting our home back together.

The good stuff:

• the master bedroom is a cool, sophisticated color with a dynamite pendant light fixture;
• our master shower is awesome - a totally luxurious enclave with a strong, relaxing water flow and quiet, secluded feel to it;
• closets, closets, and more closets;
• the brand new floors look dynamite - no splinters, no buckling, just yards and yards of polished bamboo brilliance;
• I have a hallway! City residents will attest, a true hallway is a rare, rare feature in most NYC apartments. No matter how the rest of the renovation turns out, the hallways make me feel like a wealthy man.

The bad stuff (for now):

• a lot of the plumbing isn't in final form yet; they've jerry-rigged a few things until various valves and pipe fittings arrive sometime this week;
• those brand new floors are slip slip slippery;
• we've only now realized that the hallway and master bathroom have no air conditioning vents, so it is going to get pretty humid back there during the summer;
• our master tileworker mislaid the marble tile around the medicine cabinet in the secondary bathroom (this is the second time this guy bungled the job - running up expenses for materials and pushing back the whole renovation a couple of weeks); and
• in the rush to finish the job, our contractors obviously cut a few corners - they installed the bathroom door lock on the outside of the bathroom (not much good there), they seem to have glued the towel bars onto the walls instead of sinking mollies into the tile and screwing them in (our double towel rack has already fallen off), they re-wired certain lighting fixtures to make our dimmer switches useless; and
• we now have 2 extra rooms (the new bedroom and hallway) to fit the same furniture that we used to have, plus we've shed at least 3 big pieces of furniture in anticipation of the renovation (a coffee table, china cabinet and sofa). So we're not back to sitting on pillows on the floor of the living room until our new sofa and other pieces arrive (which isn't too soon, since we haven't bought everything yet ...).

So, all in all, it's great to be back home, but there's plenty of work to do. I'll try to get pictures up later this week.

Apartment Renovation Update: T-6

The painting has taken WAY longer than either the general contractor or we expected, but the results are showing. The painter-subcontractors appear to have skim coated the entire apartment (this despite skim coating being outside the scope of the project, although for what we're paying, it could've been).

Now that we're six days away (T-6) from moving back in, I am astounded at the number of aesthetic details that we've had to address. Switch plates - pure white or berber white? Closet door latches - ball bearing or mirror? Bathroom moulding - accent line on the inside or the outside? Mounting your plasma on the living room wall - HDMI, component cable or S-video?

All I can say is, I'll be thrilled once we settle back in next weekend.

Where once there was a wall, now there is freedom. Just like Berlin, 1989.

Renovation Update: Walls and Doors

There's exactly two weeks left for the renovation and I'm beginning to feel the tension. We have to leave our temporary / rental apartment May 31st, so if the apartment isn't ready for us to move back in, we'll be screwed.

The good news is, I stopped by the apartment over the weekend to check on progress and was pleasantly surprised. Most of the doors in the new half of the apartment (master bath, master bedroom and bedroom hallway) have been installed. Here's a shot from the new hallway looking into the bathroom with the outer door open and the inner sliding pocket door fully closed.



Here's the same shot with the outer door partially closed. As you can see, we're still waiting for the frosted glass insert for the outer bathroom door.

Here's a shot of the narrow double doors for one of the four closets in the new bedroom hallway.

And here is a close-up of the sliding pocket door that will separate the outer (sink, vanity & linen closet) room of the bathroom from the inner (shower and comode) room.

Meanwhile, plastering and prep work of the drywall is continuing.

This week, we'll hopefully have shots of the bamboo floors to share (right now, the finished floors are covered with cardboard and tape for protection while the rough work continues) and some more finished rooms. Plus, moulding/framing of the new doors, new door hardware (IOW, handles), ceiling-mount light fixtures, and wall-mounting the plasma TV.

Renovation Update: Floors and Master Bedroom

We've picked a soft metallic blue-grey (Benjamin Moore AF-695) for the master bedroom walls, offest by AF-10 white for the moulding. The contractors have been patching and smoothing over the walls for over a week (looks to me like the functional equivalent of skim coating).

Pretty soon it will be time to order the new (queen size) bed. I had promised that, once we started the renovation and moved out of the old apartment, we would never sleep on my bachelor-era concave backbreaker 2000 TM. I bought that mattress ages ago from my sister's then-boyfriend's family (they owned a mattress factory in North Philly). To give you an idea of how old this mattress is, my sister's married now (to someone else) and has 2 kids. One of them wants to learn how to drive already. The ex-boyfriend is a shuffle board instructor on a cruise ship. North Philly, on the other hand, is still North Philly. And somehow I'm the only one left with any evidence of their relationship.

The prep work on the floors continues ... the black sheets are a micro-fiber plastic material that works to insulate, soften, and sound-proof the bamboo floors.

Next up: bamboo floors and closet and shower doors! Stay tuned!

Renovation Update: Master Bath

The contractors have hand-cut the edging around the bulkhead on the shower. With that detail out of the way, we're almost done with the shower in the master bath.


They're also close to finishing the detail work around the recessed shelf above the shower bench.

Our bathroom hardware vendors measured the space for shower doors last week; although they had told us they doors would be here already, they now estimate installation will be finished by the end of this week.

Renovation Update: Major Changes

I stopped by the construction after a long weekend away and was thrilled to see the progress we've made. First, the master bath: they've added a dark grey grout around the quartzite tiles in the outer water closet and have installed the custom-bathroom vanity. They've designed the vanity to match the new doors we're installing in the closets and bedrooms throughout the apartment (hopefully early next week).

After a bit of back and forth with the tiler, and my wife's six trips to different tile and marble retailers throughout New York City (she actually hand picked a dozen tiles from over twenty different lots of marble), the bathroom floor looks great. Since we had had a few misfires with the tiler, my wife and I actually laid out the marble exactly as we wanted them last Thursday night and numbered each tile on strips of blue tape:

Meanwhile, aside from flooring, an overhead light fixture and some painting, the master bedroom is substantially complete:

The main (old) apartment looks rather bare with the furniture moved out and the old floor ripped up. They've delivered our bamboo flooring to be installed this week.

A view from inside the living room out towards the entry hallway and door.

Finally, they've started work on the pre-existing bathroom by ripping out the shower doors, full length glass mirrors (cracked since the day we moved in) and old medicine cabinet (never fully opened, another broken relic that we had been living with for years).

The biggest difference that we've noticed is the greater sense of space and flow. From a bare 600 square foot single bedroom, we now have sufficient space where one person can stand in one end of the apartment and have no idea what's going on in the opposite end of the apartment. As a guy, I am really looking forward to the greater amount of elbow room (although as a father, perhaps I shouldn't be too excited that I won't be able to tell what's going on down the hall...).