Moving!

Well, the blog is moving. Check out the new site here: www.moderncharleston.com

DIY: Bottle Lamps

I found this link on Apartment Therapy today and think it would be an awesome (even easy) project to tackle. I think I'm going to have to add it to my project to-do list. Here's the link to the directions from Hallmark Magazine.

That Darn Cat

With many thanks to Darcy, this is what I came home to today.

I'm not even sure how she made that long triangular-shaped gash, and I'm not sure I want to think on it too terribly hard.

Ironically, these are (still) the temporary shades, and I just ordered three reverse roll window shades to cover each of the front windows. So if she was going to ruin something, at least it was something that we are in the process of replacing.

Needless to say, it will be back to the claw caps for Darcy.

Spring Is Here!

Okay, it's official-- spring is here! The daffodils are out, and, of course, I couldn't resist picking a few for our dining room.

All of the blooms and buds are definitely putting a smile to my face, and I'm even more thrilled that all of this good weather will mean we get even more time to work on the house. Joan came for a long weekend visit this past weekend, so we enjoyed lots of time outdoors, enjoying the gorgeous weather and tackling yard work.

Joan helped us identify the many bushes and plants in our yard.

Since this is our first spring in the house, we weren't exactly sure what all might bloom. We have three main types of bushes: azaleas, boxwoods, and hollies.

Azaleas in the backyard:

Most of them seem to be planted in a bit of a hodgepodge manner, and the bushes in the front yard overwhelm the house and don't take advantage of the big window in the living room that overlooks the yard. One of our goals is to transform this:

into a flower bed that complements the window rather than hiding it. It looks like this weekend will be filled with bush removal (though we're hoping to replant the boxwoods along the fence as well as some of the azaleas).

Joan also got us started on our spring planting, so we have a nice punch of color at the windows at the back of the house.

The strawberry pot is filled with herbs and colorful flowers.

We pulled out a lot of weeds out of the flowerbed and plan on relocating the azaleas to another location in the yard (not sure exactly where yet). I think we're wanting to keep this area more of a flower bed / herb garden.
Even the stump was brightened with flowers (including a dwarf gardenia) and greenery.

A palm fern takes the place of a planter that used to hold weeds.

We also did some major pruning on this tree that separates our house from our neighbors, and even learned from our neighbor that this is a cherry wood tree. The bark, now revealed after the extensive pruning, is a deep reddish-brown and very smooth.

In fact, this is a cherry wood tree in our neighbor's yard.

We have four along the driveway, and they all look so much better now they're pruned.

And we're still on a mission to trap (well, kill) the mole that is taking over our front yard.

(I'll keep you posted as to whether we're successful.)

Now about Those Floors

One of our many adventures this past weekend included a trip to Lumber Liquidators. I particularly like how they advertise that they're not about having a snazzy storefront or expensive advertising; they would rather have lower prices. And their Charleston location definitely upholds that claim. They're located in on King Street Extension between the railroad tracks and the interstate, and their parking lot isn't even paved. In fact, when we arrived Sunday, we thought they might have been closed.

Needless to stay, their flooring prices definitely seem considerably cheaper than other places we've seen.

After hearing from friends with tile in the kitchen that it's still a pain to keep clean (especially the grout), we decided to look back into hardwood. Besides it would make the main living space look cohesive.

We brought along pictures in order to identify the type of wood: red oak (although, of course, there are several variations/qualities of red oak). Thankfully, red oak is one of the more inexpensive wood types (no Brazilian cherry for us!) and because the grain of our current wood is varied across the various planks, we wouldn't need the "select" (which means all of the grain looks consistent across the planks).

Here are a couple examples. You can see the variances.

Select:

Grade 1 (I'm thinking something like this would look nice):


Rustic:


The flooring guy mentioned that he even preferred the other types because they have more character (he also said our floors were in great shape).

At Lumber Liquidators, we would be able to buy enough unfinished red oak flooring in order to cover the kitchen and eating area. This would allow us to get the listening room floors and kitchen floors finished at the same time (and we would be able to keep get the stain matched to the rest of the floors in the house).

It looks like a great possibility, and I'm definitely excited about getting rid of our current floors (which are impossible to keep clean because of their light color and are now spattered with the occasional paint dripping).

Where to Find a Modern Door?

There don't seem to be too many modern-style doors that are readily available. In fact, the basic home-improvement store like Lowe's or Home Depot doesn't have any.

Since the front of the house is the first thing people see, we really didn't want to put in a more traditional-style door. In fact, we really liked the style of our current door and would be fine with putting up one that looked just like it.

We did some searching online, and everything pointed to Crestview Doors, which is based in Austin, Texas. Crestview Doors "designs and builds custom, solid-wood core entry doors inspired by vintage 1950’s and 1960’s designs." They have "front doors and exterior entry systems for mid-century modern houses, 1950’s ranch homes, retro ramblers, post-war bungalows, and new construction."

We even found a solid wood door that we really liked:
However, the high price made us keeping looking. Besides there had to be some place in Charleston that at least had salvaged doors.

A friend recommended we check out Carolina Building Materials and Salvage:

They have a huge supply of everything from doors and windows to reglazed clawfoot bathtubs. It was really fun just to walk around and check out all they carry.

We even found the exact style of our door:

So we loaded up the Protege (we do have plans buy a Honda Element later this year, which should really help out in transporting all of the supplies for our many home improvement projects):

It's going to take a little time to get the holes drilled, the door hung, the locks in, and the door stained, but it's definitely going to be worth it. So stay tuned for the results.

Updates

I realize that lately I have done a terrible job of updating, so it's definitely time to get back into gear with the posts. Daniel and I really didn't tackle a lot during the entire month of January, so the house pretty much stayed the same (and the projects that were unfinished before the holidays) remained in the same state after the holidays. With the recent good weather on the weekends, however, we've actually managed to accomplish quite a bit (and, as usual, we've learned a lot in the process).

Last weekend, we attempted three projects: putting the final coats of shellac on the listening room wall, sanding and painting the window ledges in the kitchen that overlook the den, and stripping and staining the front door.

Applying the shellac in the listening room was extremely easy, and we are thrilled with the result. It is a near perfect match with the rest of the walls (the only difference is due to the age of the wood). Once furniture is in and a bookshelf in place, I don't think anyone will even notice that those five panels weren't part of the original wall.

The left-hand side is the original panel, and the right-hand side is the new panel:

The two windows in the kitchen that overlook the den (and overlooked the backyard before the addition was added in the 1970s) had really ugly spindles dividing the space. Daniel karate chopped these spindles out on the day we moved in, and we never got around to sanding and painting were the spindles once were.
Wood filler to fill the holes:

It is a definite improvement:

After months of envying one of our neighbors' front doors (which looks just like ours except it's unpainted), Daniel suggested that we should try stripping the layers of white paint from our door to see if we could return it to its original condition. I wholeheartedly agreed, as a "new" door could definitely liven up the front of the house, and I also assumed stripping the paint would be much easier than when we attempted it with the trim because everything was flat.

So again we armed ourselves with paint stripper (two enormous containers!) and went to work. The first layer came off with relative ease, which was encouraging. We even felt that we would be able to have the door finished in that same day. The second layer of paint stripper didn't seem to eat through that next layer of paint as easily though, and we ended up scraping until our arms felt they might fall off. We did manage to scrape down through one last layer of old paint and were able to see the original wood of the door, which was enough to keep us going.

It became obvious that this last layer of paint wasn't going to budge.

So we called up our friend Brian to borrow his sander, then we bought a respirator mask (just in case there might be lead-based paint) and went back to work.

Unfortunately despite all of the sanding, we still weren't really making any good progress. In fact, we discovered that the condition of the door wasn't in as good of shape as we had initially thought (the wood was peeling and chipping and the bottom, and it wasn't too terribly solid for a front door). Not to mention, the paint was not budging from the grain of the wood, and we didn't have a lot of room to sand down.

With the night looming, we rehung the door like this:

Yes, it looked really, really bad:

And I did a quick paint job.

We now needed to find a new door.