kitchen counter stools

i realize i'm all over the place, but here's the kitchen counter stool i'm leaning towards. i think they look a little bit more sturdy than what we had previously. The photos is of it in black, but I think we'll do a dark wood stain... add some seat cushions maybe?

inspiration mud room photos

here are a couple other beautiful back-entrance inspiration photos....

First floor framing

Another WOW day to come home to. The first floor is almost completely framed!!! Amazing how quickly these guys work and it looks amazing. We hoisted ourselves up the front stoop and wandered around the framed rooms fantasizing about when it's all complete. (The last photo is M. pretending to cook on his bluestar range) It's incredibly what a better sense of space one has... all the window openings add to that, i think.

Tomorrow our builder thinks they'll frame the upstairs and if the weather holds they should have it basically completely framed and with a roof next week. wow. So cool.

kitchen inspirations

This is one of my favorite inspiration photos. I think the color scheme here is so well done. The calming warm yellow combined with the dark wood of the bar stools and purple lavender. The green and beige in the next room combined with the open iron chandelier. love the white cabs, the light granite and the polished nickle faucet. all the colors and textures work so well together. It looks like they carried the white of the cabinets through all the trim, but the ceiling is a much warmer, muted tone...

Less warm and inviting, still-- I love this french country kitchen. the clean blue and white, the sense of space from the cathedral ceiling. i love the blue check and the dark hard wood table and the gorgeous chandelier. i would warm it up with hardwood on the floor and some window treatments. the marble counter tops are beautiful but might be more practical with our pick-soapstone. anyway definitely an inspiration picture.

inspirational textiles

I love these colors/textiles from pottery barn... the toile, the stripes, subtle floral pattern the moss green and storm-sky blue, the earthy brown. such an inspirational palate.... it feels formal and calm, beautiful

nursery

okay. i don't mean to get ahead of ourselves here... but both m and i are excited about having a family someday and (re)building our home it's an obvious consideration... so i think it's only natural that we take certain things into consideration. we won't be having two guest rooms forever... so already i'm assigning one of them to be the nursery and thinking of color schemes etc. i would like a calming, but gender-neutral color scheme-- based around a yellow or a green. came across this photo. it's a little frou-frou maybe... but i like the cream tones with some light blues with a splash of a gentle red. it feels cozy and beautiful.

powder laundry room

hmm. i'm overloading with inspiration photos today. but just day dreaming about our laundry/powder room. the sconces are already purchased, the vanity w/ farmhouse sink is close to a a done-deal. just thinking about how much i like the navy/green/white/beige/black color scheme and how i'd love to add the greenery of live plants across the window.....

loved these botanical lamps from pottery barn. we went and snatched up two of the table lamps and one floor lamp when they were on clearance a couple months ago. no lamp shades yet and still undecided whether they'll go in the master bedroom or living/family room....

also love the paint color along with the natural wood and splash of red foliage. hmm...

cubbies!

Inspiration picture for the little hall way off the garage. Love the slate floor and the cubbies which include hooks for coats, drawers and shelving. I like the light colors which lead to an open feel.

master bath fixtures

...from Restoration hardware....

toilets

m. knew he was in for it when i got off the train one night and announced that there were four different flushes on a toilet so we had to consider which one we wanted. as if that weren't enough there are more aesthetic considerations than you could ever dream! what i don't understand is how there's a market for SO many different kinds of toilets when you figure that each home has an average of what... two? three? and how often do they really need replacing? i think there are as many options in toilets as there are in blue jeans and i figure there's a much greater market/turn over for blue jeans. sigh. well, it's kind of fun i guess. we narrowed it down quickly to kohler and toto. i would really like to do a one-piece toilet because it doesn't have that little space between the tank and the bowl which creeps me out with how hard it is to keep clean. similarly, it would be great to do a fully-skirted toilet- which means that it wraps around completely on the bottom, hiding what m. refers to as "the intestines". so our toilet of choice seems to be the toto guinevere, the first one shown. bonus, it has the super duper turbo flush (that's not what it's really called, but you get the idea). I found a place that had this toilet in the show room and dragged m. over so he could sit on it. (i don't love the idea of sitting on toilets in showrooms, but m. doesn't seem to mind) consensus was-- it's comfortable. so we're good. problem with the guinevere? this toilet is expensive.... so if we justify it for the master bath, that'll be it. there's no way we're doing it in all the bathrooms. also it looks a little modern maybe which will work fine in the master bath with the fixtures we've chosen (coming up in my next post) but might look a little out of place elsewhere....

moving on, then, we have the guest/someday-kids bath. while the master bath is just a shower, this bathroom has the bath tub to factor in. this is more complicated than it might seem. you have to choose between cast iron/acrylic/fiberglass and then how deep the tub should be. after extensive research and consideration ;) we decided to go with cast iron (most durable, most classic, keeps the water hotter longer) and a depth that was slightly deeper than you might do if you were only using the bath/shower combo as a shower ie deep enough that you could actually enjoy a hot bath.... but not too deep that it would be difficult to lean over to bathe kids or step over to use the shower. at the bath showroom that our builders sent us to, i had the opportunity (haha) to climb into the memoires bathtub which seemed a good balance. pretty to boot. as an aside, my husband the showroom-toilet-sitter did not feel comfortable climbing into a bathtub, so had to take my word on it. i guess we make a good pair. so having decided that we liked the memoires bathtub, it made sense to take a look at the memoires toilet. The one piece memoires toilet was $$$$$ so that was out quickly. The two piece is reasonable so that's what we're leaning towards.

Lastly the powder/laundry room downstairs. Not too choosy here-- we want something that looks fine and works well. Friends of ours have the toto promenade (the last one shown) which we've seen and tested (ha) and suits our needs just fine. If it ends up being less than the memoires two piece then we'll do that downstairs, otherwise we'll take two of the memoires and call it a day.

living room inspriations

i've become very interested in a fabric called Crypton which sounds basically indestructible-- it's highly stain-resistant, anti bacterial, not subject to pill or fade, zero off gassing etc.. Apparently it's been used in hospitals and hotels etc for some time but they are coming up with more and more residential designs as well. Also, it's "green" they even make Crypton green that's made of recycled textiles. Anyway if this stuff is as good as it sounds and if it doesn't completely break the bank, how great would it be do do a cream colored sofa?

i have hundreds of inspiration photos of various interiors on my computer right now and i thought it would be good to start posting some along with my thoughts. recently i've been thinking about the family room.... we like the large french country-inspired check patterns like these photos... even in the beige color shown. i like the idea of a neutral color palate that could change when different accents (pillows, throw blankets, paint color) is introduced.

framing has begun!

saga of the rat slab

So, we walked over this weekend to find that the garage floor had been ripped up. Uh.. that wasn't the original plan! The plan was to salvage the garage floor, but here's the scoop that M. just found out today. Problem number one was our builders needed to see how far in the sewer line ran and so they had to tear up part of the garage floor. Problem number two was, once the debris was moved away, they saw that there were a number of large cracks in the floor. What cinched the deal for re-doing the floor entirely was that we needed gravel to level the back room before they poured foundation. When he priced it out it was actually less expensive to demo the garage floor to use the gravel to level out the back and pour a new garage floor. The savings comes from not having to buy gravel to level it and not having to pay to dispose of the old garage floor. So good news all around.

Last night we came home (late, you can see it's dark) and saw the mat and grid work all in place for the pouring of the "rat slab" (!) or concrete slab in the crawl space. They call it the "rat slab" I guess because one of its functions is to keep rodents from coming up. yuck. Anyway it looked very clean and nice-- so clean and nice and level and all that it passed inspection (our second thus far) and so they are good to pour the concrete today.

hmmm wonder if we'll get home from work in time to carve our initials inconspicuously in our foundation. that would be kinda cool.....