DESIGN IDEA FULFILLED: Painted Plywood Floor

We have done a lot of posts about "Design Ideas" and, to date, I think only one of them has been completely fulfilled (see: the door in the window).

But about a month ago V and I finally accepted that we cannot afford to put down hardwood flooring any time soon so our tenants will just have to live with plywood floors in the master suite and in the Great Room.  The kind of folks who are likely to rent might actually get a kick out of this.

Happily, this realization coincided with the arrival at BIG NYC Queens of several pallets of a product called Basic 1 - Satin waterbased wood floor finish billed by the manufacturer as an "Economical Waterbased Floor Finish".  BIG had so much of it that they were giving away free, so I went out and picked up two cases (8 gallons) of the stuff.  I figured there was no reason to spend a lot of money on fancy urethanes since we're just putting it onto fairly rough 4'x8' sheets of plywood flooring and we intend to save up for the hardwood to sell the house with.

Anyway, around this time, my lifelong best friend B was on his way out from California to work on the house for a few weeks.  Having just quit my job, I was to spend my first week of unemployment up at the house with him trying to get some stuff done.  One of the first items on our list was to finish the floors.

Anyway, since the plywood looked pretty boring, V spent some time discussing what we might do to soup it up at low cost and in a way that might make it show better for both tenants and potential buyers.  As I left the house for a week upstate, I encouraged her to think about painting or staining or whitewashing the floor and send me photos.  I might even have suggested that we could be "whimsical".  Anyway, the two posts immediately prior to this one are her responses to that suggestion. 

We agreed to just whitewash the master suite floor, so B got to work on that.  Despite some serious problems with the whitewash product drying too quickly, that floor came out looking pretty good.  After 3 coats of the Basic 1 Satin, I think it is about as good as it is going to get - certainly good enough to walk on and for tenants to lay some rugs on.

Based on the look of the master suite floor, I decided I did not want to use the same look on the Great Room floor so I went back and looked at V's inspirational suggestions.  As I looked through the photos V had posted, this one particularly caught my eye - I love the worn look and the variation of pattern and color while still maintaining the repetition - I know I'm not going to live with this myself, but that's no reason to suppress whimsy - If we love it, then maybe someone else will love it too.  Or at least that's how the thinking goes.

I was pretty hungry and in no condition to be making big decisions, but I said to B, "Hey! We could do that!"  I think his response was a fairly unenthusiastic, "yeah.  We could do that."  He wasn't thrilled about all the work that was going to go into painting a bunch of different color squares.  The fact is that he didn't really know what I was suggesting at the time and if he had known, he would have talked some sense into me.  Fortunately, he did not.

We discussed it briefly and I jumped in the car and headed to Home Depot to buy some cheap house paints in a variety of colors.  But before I got to HD, I swung into the parking lot of the Habitat For Humanity Restore.  One of the guys took me downstairs and showed me all the rusting gallon paint cans people have left on their doorstep.  I ended up taking 8 cans and zipped back up to the house stopping only for beer and hotdog fixins - workmen have to eat too, you know!

We set up a paint mixing station and got to work stirring the cans (most of which dated back to around 2005) to see what they looked like.

When all was mixed and ready, we had a pretty good bunch of colors (and beers) to start working from.

Next, we began laying out the design on the floor.  My first estimate was that it would take about 8 to 15 minutes to lay out each 4'x8' sheet before beginning to paint and that we could mostly finish the paint job in one night.  

We set to work around 8pm.  B made the club-star stencil while I focused on pencilling in the design on the floor.  Laying out the design was much harder than I had expected and being down on my knees on that floor was not at all comfortable.  We decided to lay it out sheet by sheet and paint as we went.

Fair to say that B was right and I was wrong about how long it would take.  The next morning we had not accomplished a whole lot.  But it was enough to convince me that I really liked the look of it and we had to keep going.  If it looks this good now, I told myself, just wait!! People are going to be clamoring to rent/buy that crazy round house with the groovy hand-painted floors.

We spent the whole of the next day on our knees laying it out mixing paints and filling it in and with every square we completed, I got more excited.

I had to get back to V and S before we were completely done so I left B up there to finish it and seal it.  I didn't see it again for two weeks and, when I did, this is what I saw:

(The registration marks in the doorway were my idea - I'm pretty pleased with how they came out.)

It is still plywood, but I am super happy about this!!  SUPER HAPPY!!! (not a feeling I have had often on this project).  B did an amazing AMAZING job!!
I have to be honest and concede that it is probably not increasing the rental or resale value of the house a whole lot more than a clear coat of satin would have, but it brought a little joy to a project that is proving pretty joyless (and financially difficult) of late.

The Door in the Window - Nearly Final Edition

This will be the third post about this one little design element, but I think it is well deserved.

Remember this:

And this:

Well, today they look like this!

Framing a Painting

I just went back through old posts and it seems that there has been no mention of any of the key elements of this post: a frame, a painting and a hammer.  Shame, it would have been so much easier to point back and say, "remember this and remember that? Well guess what?!"

But let me start at the beginning.  Around three and a half years ago, shortly after I first discovered Build It Green NYC, back when they only had the Astoria, Queens location, I was out there picking through stuff with nothing special on my shopping list when I found a cache of very nice picture frame material.  There were a few dozen pieces in lengths ranging from three feet to seven feet long, no two the same.  Mostly, it was moderately ornate, gilded (or silvered) frame stock with deep, undulating profiles, mostly made in Italy.  It seemed to be the leftovers/remainders from jobs done at some higher-end frame shop.  The price was a song so, certain I would find a use for it, I took it all.  And then I did nothing with it.

This past May, wandering through our favorite flea market in the whole world, Marche Paul Bert at the Marche au Puces Clignancourt in Paris, I found a painting I liked - a small oil on wood panel of a lion in a landscape from the mid-1800s.  The seller described it as a "salon painting" - unsigned, unknown artist, unimportant - but lovely in its way.  The painting itself was just about 8" x 6" but it was in a huge, impossibly ornate, gilded rococo frame.  The frame was at least 4" wide, maybe more, and... well, it was basically crazy-busy gilded gesso sculpture.  In any event, I wanted the painting but I didn't want the frame - and not just because it would have been a huge pain to carry it back on an airplane.  Long story short, after some negotiation, I bought the painting and left the frame -- the seller probably thought I was crazy to want this unimportant little painting and not the spectacular frame that made it seem like it might matter.  The painting has been tucked away in a drawer ever since.

Then, earlier this year, probably around the first of January when I was thinking about New Years Resolution type stuff, I realized that one thing I'd like to be better about is not postponing enjoyment of the things I already own while focusing on the things I want and don't yet have and how to get them.  A prime example: a piece of unframed artwork in a drawer.

So I began shopping for just the right frame for my salon lion.

After stopping in to a couple local frame shops I remembered all that frame stock in my basement and I went down and picked out a couple pieces that seemed right.

One of our local frame shops is so backed up that they will only work on frames you buy from them.  The other good local shop (Brooklyn Frameworks) was happy to take my old stock and put a frame together for me (although I did end up adding a linen liner - which is basically another picture frame inside the first picture frame).

I picked up the picture frame today and mounted the painting the minute I brought it in the door and then hung it right away.  I am thrilled - not just with the framed painting, but with the progress I've made in just enjoying what I have.

So, without further ado, here it is:

I hung it just above my dresser - if I had a dressing room, I would have hung it there.  It feels like a personal painting and over my dresser feels like a personal spot.

Why personal?  The painting makes me think of my father, which is odd since he passed away a few months after I bought it, without ever seeing it.  It makes me think of him because I knew when I bought it that I wanted to show it to him.  I thought he might like it, the folly of it, an odd lion in a landscape at sunset rendered with big gloppy strokes.  I thought something about it would make him smile.  Mostly, I knew he would really look at it and think about it and then, almost certainly, say something appreciative about it as he did about almost all the art I have bought and hung.  I wanted his good opinion and perspective on it.  I didn't get that, but I still think of him when I look at it because one of my plans for this painting was to show it to him and talk to him about it.  I imagine what the conversation would have been like and it makes me feel closer to him.

Oh, right, the hammer!  I bought two nice old cobbler's hammers at a flea market last fall.  Then I put them in a box and never did anything with them.  This evening I used the skinny one to nail the little hooks into the wall to hang my painting.  It was kind of thrilling.

INVENTORY: Bathroom Vanity Lights

This is certain to be a boring post.  And I am not sure why I care.  This blog is supposed to be a dialogue with my wife and heaven knows I often bore her much worse than this post ever could.  But still, on the off chance anyone else is reading this, go ahead and change the channel.  And away we go...

We have pretty much every fixture in the master bath figured out now except for the following:

• Towel Bars
• Lights over the sink / Vanity lights
• A chair or stool to set beside the tub to accommodate a baby washer or a dry friend of a tubber - but that is just furniture

This post is concerned with the lights over the sink.  As with most things in this house, the requirements for the lights over the bathroom sink present certain problems. Specifically, although the wall behind the sink is flat (unlike the rest of the house), it is not square - by which I mean, this bathroom is on the top floor and the ceiling/roof slopes down towards the right side of the sink counter.  Therefore, the placement of the light on the right side of the sink is going to be a little cramped by the ceiling dropping down over it.  Look.

It feels pretty cramped on the right side of that space by the wall with your head bumping the ceiling.  And, because of the ceiling the light on the right has will probably have to be placed a little lower on the wall than you might normally install it - and, inevitably, the one on the left will be positioned to match.  The wires you see in the photo are just guesses at light location - they will be moved and boxes will be installed in the final location once we pick out our lighting.

Anyway, there is no dearth of choices when it comes to vanity sconces.  Resto Hardware, West Elm and the rest are positively bursting with them - but obviously, that isn't how we roll (we being me mostly).

Anyway, to the point, last weekend I found a pair of wall sconce lights at BIG NYC in Astoria that I think will probably do the trick... maybe.  Here they are.

What are they?  Urban Archaeology "Loft Light".  They are supposed to have glass cylinders on them.

The pair only came with one glass cylinder - but happily I found that Grand Brass sells matching blown glass "opal" milk glass cylinders for a fraction of UrbArch's price (about 83% less).

Here is what they are supposed to look like:

They were very reasonably priced (do I need to keep saying that about everything I pick up? By now it should be clear that I would not purchase it if it weren't reasonably priced - or, if I did, I would try to justify how much I overpaid).

So, why do I think these will work?  Here is why: most of the sconce lights I like sort of blossom off the wall up and a little out, like they need room to grow.  As a result of the sloping wall/ceiling, a sconce with such ambitions is going to look cramped.  Happily, the design of these sconces with the back plate framing the sconce/light element seems to contain that expansive quality.  The frame creates a finite space in which the fixture lives.  I think this makes sense.

As I think about it further, what would probably make most sense would be an overhead vanity light - something situated horizontally over the center of the sink.  It's never too late I guess.  But, for now, we're going with these (unless something better shows up at BIG).

Inventory: toilet paper holder (why I choose what I choose... sometimes)

I picked up this toilet paper holder at BIG Gowanus yesterday.

If you asked me why I bought it, I think my reasons would be unlike most people's reasons for selecting their roll holder.  I wasn't looking for one. I had already paid for what I was there for. But then there it was with some other hardware and it caught my eye and I picked it up and I knew.

Basically, it is big and incredibly heavy (1lb 14oz) and feels good to touch and hold. From the weight, I could tell it is chrome over solid brass. And the chrome is really thick. And the spring in the spool is unusually strong - so strong that you could knock out a tooth if you accidentally let go while squeezing it to install a new roll.  And those flanges on the sides of the spool... Well, they're just so big and heavy. I bought it because it is really well made and a nice simple look. 

So there it is. I'm a sucker for the overbuilt.
When I got home, just for kicks, I took a stab at finding it on the internet. It has no markings on it at all. But I had a hunch. It took me a total of thirty seconds to find it. It is the Yale Club toilet paper holder from Urban Archaeology. No wonder it weighs so darn much.

Transom / Clerestory / Skylight Window - UPDATED

I can't recall if I have spent any time explaining our thoughts about the opening high on the wall that divides the master bathroom from the master bedroom.  Somewhere along the way, I instructed one of our many many contractors to leave a large opening high up on the wall -- so they did.

Here it is, seen from the bedroom side.

And here it is (or a sliver of it at least at the top of the photo), seen from the bathroom.

Here is a better pic taken before the bathroom was tiled.

So, basically, it is a rectangular hole that spans from above the shower to the far edge of the bathroom door.  And, if you stood in the shower and climbed up onto your showering partner's shoulders (which I don't recommend), you could look through it down onto the bed in the master bedroom against the opposite wall.

My thought was that, since the windows are low on the walls and the ceiling is very high, I would want to create as much light high in the bedroom and bathroom as possible.  There is only one skylight in the bathroom and three in the bedroom so I figured this would allow a lot more light to move around over our heads.

But how to fill that hole?

At one point I thought we were going to fill it up with glass bricks.  So, I went and bought a big stack of cool old glass bricks from BIG NYC.  Then after looking at photos of glass brick projects, I realized that glass brick really isn't the look we want - it is so... so... 1980's.  So, we have a couple big stacks of glass bricks out beside the shed.

From time to time I have had visions of stained glass windows or old casements windows in that space - but I really don't know how that would happen.  Seems like a lot of framing to make smaller casement windows fit.  And finding just the right size stained glass is a virtual impossibility. 

Our current contractor is a thoughtful guy - the first we've worked with in quite a while - and he asked me the other day whether he should have the glass guy measure that opening for a window as long as he is coming up to take measurements for the shower door and upper half of the shower walls.  I told him to have the measurements taken, but not to order the glass yet.  I still wasn't ready to give up the dream of something more specific than a cut to size piece of flat glass.

So, what then?

Well, I was at BIG NYC out in Astoria today and I saw this beat-up old door.

It has a couple things going for it.  First, the glass panes are thick and clear and beveled all the way around so they have a really nice tone and light to them.  And all the original panes are still intact and matched - no unbeveled replacement panes.

And second, it is a heavy old solid wood door which means the wood portion surrounding the windowed center section can be cut down without falling apart the way a hollow core or poorly constructed door would.  Also, it is in really solid condition with all the panes and window trim very tight and clean.

The one catch is that I don't know the measurements of the rough opening in the wall, but I took measurements of the glassed center section of this door and just eyeballing it against the photos, I am pretty sure we will be able to trim down the wood and still fit all ten glass panes.  I hope it fits!!  

It was very reasonably priced (far less than a new piece of glass would be) so I figured better to buy it now and return it if the measurements are wrong than to miss out on it.  Turns out I was right because after I paid for it, when I went to put the SOLD sticker on it, there was a couple pawing it and seriously discussing how they would use it.  Why does that always make a purchase feel like a score?  Why does someone else wanting what I just bought seem like a ratification of my purchase?  It isn't like there is any possibility that their particular needs for this unusual item and my own are the same.  But, it does feel nice.  

Now I better call the contractor and get those measurements and tell him not to bother having the glass guy measure that opening just yet.

UPDATE: The contractor just texted and the rough opening is 82" x 23.5".  IT WILL FIT JUST FINE!!