Bad News/Good News

Uh...hello? Remember me? I'm the person who used to write a blog about building our dream house.

The bad news is that I haven't written for months even though we have continued to work on the house and have accomplished quite a bit.

The good news is that the reason I haven't written is because I've been busy having a life! You know, life beyond house construction? Yes, it really does exist! And that's also good news for any of you who may still be in the middle of your own project. Life does get back to normal.

How to Re-plumb a Vintage Sink

Vintage 1953 ad courtesy of retro renovation, my sink except in white!

They said it couldn’t be done.

All I wanted to do was find new faucets for a vintage sink. Who would have thought it would be so challenging?

Let me take you back, dear reader, to one day last fall. Ever since we realized that the lovely Kohler Memoirs pedestal sink we ordered would overpower the downstairs powder room, I had been struggling to find a replacement. Not only that, but I was also struggling with the design of the room overall. I had a few ideas, but nothing seemed to really click. So without a design concept to guide me, I really had no clue what I was looking for in a sink.

One day I happened to be wandering around the RE Store, and I spotted this amazing blue vintage bathroom sink.

A Room (or Desk) of My Own

I'm paraphrasing Virginia Woolf in this post, referring to her extended essay entitled "A Room of One's Own" first published in October 1929. The essay derived from a series of lectures she delivered at Cambridge University and was ostensibly written from the point of view of a fictional narrator exploring women as writers of, and characters in, fiction. It presents the argument that women need a space of their own--literally and figuratively--to write in order to be able to produce within the structure of society where women did not have a clear right to a role other than as wife and mother.

Embedded within the idea of a room of one's own is the implicit notion that a woman must also have the financial means to pay for that room (and secure it for life), and that women's relative poverty (contrasted with men in similar stations in life), legal rights (or lack of), and societal roles often prevented them from having that room where they could write, or otherwise create, freely.

Woolf herself was deprived of a formal education because her father, like many others of that era, did not believe in wasting education on girls. Only the boys were sent to school. Any learning that did occur was usually of the kind thought to be useful in attracting and holding a mate, but nothing along the lines of an actual career or profession.

So what does this have to do with our house?

First Party!

A little Christmas spirit(s)!

A few nights ago we officially christened the house with a dinner party, and put our new kitchen to the test in the process. 

When you design a kitchen, you try to plan for all the activities it will need to accommodate day to day as well as the occasional big event.

Can several cooks work in the kitchen at the same time without tripping over each other? Is the range up to the task of cooking multiple items at once? Is there room enough in the fridge to chill all the beverages and store the prepared items until serving time?

Miss K made the placecards
and did the flower arrangements

And the dining area; is there room to add all the leaves to the table plus a couple of card tables? Can you fit, in this case, 17 chairs around the tables without resorting to climbing over one another to get in and out?