 |
We also got a porch floor this week, which is really nice. We are going to paint it dark green to match the shutters.
Speaking of paint, we've been asked to select exterior paint colors already!
The house will be white, but it turns out that there are a LOT of "colors" of white. Exhibit A:
They all kind of look the same on my monitor. I'm hoping Charleston White works, on account of the fact that it has the best name. Why yes, I DO tend to buy books based on their covers!
This is fireplace wall looking into the kitchen from the living room. The walls are primed and the floors are down!
The study's pocket doors are finally going in. Not sure what took so long on those.
View from the front of the house in the mid-afternoon. I swear the camera is making this far worse than it is!
 |
| Wasn't there a scene like this in The Shining? |
View at the top of the stairs, no railing yet!
Master bedroom.
We will start trim really soon, which is pretty slow, so the next few updates may take a while but they should be fun to see.
In other news, we FINALLY found countertop material.
I've been stopping by Houston stone yards since this summer, because I'd been told it's very hard to find white Carrara lately. Everything coming in has been gray almost to a point of looking blue. Omni Surfaces here in Houston told us that the fabricators (the people who actually make countertops from the slabs) have been buying Carrara marble by the container straight off the ship without even seeing it. We can't exactly compete with that - we only wanted to buy 6 slabs! Colors of the Rainbow, which is about 3 minutes from our apartment, had over 100 slabs of white marble (a mix of Calacatta, Carrara, etc) and could not even find 6 slabs from the same block of stone that were unsold.
I started looking into alternatives and found a place that we hadn't been to before. Our builder didn't have an account there but they had stone from some places (like Vermont) others didn't have, so we decided it was worth a shot. Lo and behold, they had some Carrara that wasn't dark gray, and they had EXACTLY 6 unsold slabs.
We snapped this up right away:
For comparison's sake, everything else looks like this, and the lights are skewing it at the top:
The slabs are polished, but we are going to have the kitchen slabs honed and sealed. Honing the marble will lighten it up, but it's mostly to hide etching. Marble can be sealed so that it won't stain (the stone is porous, so it will stain if you aren't careful and don't seal, but the flip side to porosity is stains tend to lift out after a while based on anecdotal evidence from people we know with marble counters). However, anything acidic will etch it. Our favorite restaurant in Houston has a marble bar. With the amount of food and alcohol spilled on that thing on a daily basis, we decided if we still loved that counter, we'd be just fine with marble.
We also ordered a bunch of lights this week. I don't have a good photo of the dining room chandelier, but it's an antique that reminded us of the fixtures in our favorite palace in Germany, so we are beyond thrilled with it.
As far as other fixtures, my sweet grandmother bought us these for our master bathroom mirrors:
Our interior designer helped me pick out the rest of the downstairs fixtures. These are going on the wall going up the stairs:
And she picked out two of these for over the island. They are iron like the fixture my mom bought me for my birthday, which will go in the room adjacent to the kitchen right next to the fireplace. Nicole is going to have that fixture "antiqued" by refinishers she often uses.
Now if I could just pick out a paint color or three we'd probably be good to go.
