More Floor Palettes

Love this! looked more blue than grey in another version of the pic, which I liked. Like the darkest is steely midnight and the lightest is greyish white. I think this is the only palette I've picked that could conceivably be different values of the same color.  Seems pretty tenant friendly too.  Not too artsy.

I like this green. variations on this.

I think a pink like this and a cooler grey/white would be calming.

Same greeney color, next to some kind of white and/or neutral plywood color. I still like the idea of leaving a little negative space. 

Love this and seems totally doable. Not whimsical enough?

Wasn't thinking about yellow but I LOVE this combo. Sort of a marigold color and charcoal and white. ARG, I know I keep picking things with three diff colors in them which is making things harder, it just looks so cool! I like the contrast.  

But then, I guess we don't have to live with it, so you make the call.  What is best for bidniss?

Painted Patchwork Floor Ideas

Hello, I'm getting on board with the "whimsical" idea but still not going as crazy with color as maybe you'd like. Can I ask, is "whimsical" something you're thinking of doing because it fills your bucket or because it is actually good for rental/resale?  Isn't this edifice already pretty whimsical without going colorwacky on the innards?

Here are some color combos I like. Not quite a variation on one color, but I'm looking.

I should just say that I LOVE pretty much all the stenciling ideas that are out there, especially these geometric shapes, but I realize that is a ton of work and not what we are talking about. I was just looking for examples of these colors next to each other on a floor. So yes, I love these entire looks including pattern, but I am just posting them here to show color palettes. I'm down with painting one board at a time, but also like the checkerboard look as well as more complicated stenciling.

Will keep looking for one color light-to-dark schemes.  Just remember, I'm telling you what I'd be happy to live with, but I have no idea what tenants (especially country-folk tenants, or city-folk vacationer tenants?) or buyers will go gaga over.

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Really love this shade of blue if you wanted to do one solid color or variations on one color, but I actually like this combo more. Realize that is lots of colors, but it could be black/blue/whitewash/ and negative space plywood.

I like this scheme also. Greeny grayish to yellow and white. Ugh, too many cans of paint.

There's a whole bunch of stencil options on the internets, which is more work BUT in a way maybe it's more forgiving? Paint a darker color, dark grey or blue, underneath and do a white stencil over? I like this one where it is not such a crisp line, not sure how to achieve that. Or even just white stencil over clear-coated plywood, for texture and to cover unevenness. Again, more work but maybe more forgiving overall than trying to get a solid, even color.

Same principle here, and it is pretty and rustic. Could do patchwork style by painting each board OR I like the checkerboard a lot too. Maybe way too much work but there are plenty of tutorials. Just make sure there is a square on the dog puke spot.

Painting the Subfloor

I am beyond okay with the idea of painting our subfloor in the bedroom and main room, while putting off doing the reclaimed-wood-floor-of-our-dreams thing. We're just gonna put down rugs anyway! Psh! We save money, get to do some diy but not the really hard stuff JUST as winter approaches, and we get to keep our eyes peeled for the flooring of our dreams that is out there somewhere.

One thing to keep in mind -- the bedroom is all full of nails from the floor getting ripped up. Ouch.

People paint their subfloors all over the internets. There's a million of these, but check it out:

http://www.lovelyetc.com/2012/01/amazing-painted-floors-how-to/

http://www.chrislovesjulia.com/2012/05/above-par-studio-sub-floor.html

http://ashleyannphotography.com/blog/2011/01/24/diy-stencil-painted-subflooring/

http://tparty.typepad.com/the_tcozy/2010/03/my-studios-checkerboard-floor-revisited.html

Stone Haul, or How I spent my Saturday

I rented a pickup truck at Home Depot on Friday night (Why Friday? Well, that was the only way to make sure I had it waiting for me on Saturday morning.).  Then on Saturday morning I picked up the truck right where I left it overnight in the Home Depot parking lot and I went and picked up my friend Lou In Wburg and we headed over to BIG NYC in Astoria Queens. There we picked up all that calacatta gold marble I bought last Saturday - approximately 900 pounds of it - along with 160 linear feet of lovely oak crown molding.  And, as long as I was at BIG with a lot of extra room in my truck, I decided to take a look at the rest of the stone they had for sale.  Just to be safe, I decided to buy 170 Sq. Ft. of 12"x12" travertine tiles.  They are a variety called "noce" or "noche".  Anyway, here are some photos.

The truck.  What a bargain! $75 for a full day with no mileage charge.  And it handled really nicely, even with a ton of stone in the bed.

On the right is the Calacatta Gold.  On the left are the styrofoam 10 packs of travertine noce.

Another shot of the travertine.

And here is friend Lou going above and beyond helping unload the stone.  Why does he always get stuck coming with me on the heavy days?  Just lucky for me, I guess.

Calacatta Gold - Stone Score

I spent about four hours at BIGNYC Astoria on Saturday and it seems to me now like my mission was a success.

First, I was hoping to find some additional stone tile for the master bath.  I had just picked up 90 s.f. of 4"x12" white carrara subway tile ($15@s.f.) at Classic Tile in Dyker Beach (or Dyker Heights or whatever).  So, I was feeling pretty bummed about the big ticket for the stone for the interior of our shower and figured I might be able to lower the cost of the shower if I found something nice and cheaper to do the lower part of the shower walls - maybe return four or five boxes.  Because, remember, we still have to buy the glass and have all this stuff installed.  Ugh!

So, what did I find?

Well, I ended up getting a ton (literally) of 3/4" thick Calacatta Gold marble, mostly in 1'x2' tiles but with a whole mess of various other size 3/4" strips.  I'll post photos of them later, but here is the basic look of Calacatta Gold:

I ended up with 29 full 1'x2' tiles (58 s.f.).  I got another dozen or so pieces measuring 6"x36" - i.e., 1.5 s.f. each (~18 s.f.).  And then there were a lot of 3"x48" boards (1 s.f. each) - maybe 16 of those (16 s.f.).  Anyway, I ended up with over 70 s.f. of this stuff.  It is pretty great looking, but impossibly heavy.
It is going to take me 2 or three trips to get it all up to the house because my suspension just can't take too much of it.

The second thing I was looking for was about 90 feet of flexible crown molding to cover the visible plate at the top of the wall on one side of the main room.  I ended up getting about 160 linear feet of really pretty oak moldings.  They definitely show some flex, but I don't know if it will be enough.  I certainly hope they can be bent to our curve.  We'll see. 
I will add photos of all the moldings in a subsequent post.

SCORE: Carrara Bianco Gioia Marble - INVENTORY

I stopped by BIGNYC first thing this morning to drop off some cans of paint and varnish and stuff and I saw they still had these 15 unopened boxes of 12"x12" white Carrara marble tiles which I spied last weekend. We still need flooring for the master bath upstate and V and I agreed last year that we would be fine going with white Carrara so it seemed like a good opportunity to get this procurement problem out of the way.  The price for the whole lot was right and I took them all. 150 Square feet. Done!
Anyway, the photos here are of the actual boxes but the picture of the marble itself is a stock photo from the web. We don't actually know how much movement or shading or spider webbing there might be on them. Won't know until we open all the boxes. I guess that is how it works when you buy natural stone - you get what you get. Fortunately they are all Gioia, meaning that they at all quarried from the same region in Messina, Italy. So at least we know they should have some consistency.
Hooray for BIG NYC.

DESIGN IDEA: Where the kitchen meets the living room

We have been so distracted by our expansion into the third floor that thoughts and plans for the round house have sort of fallen by the wayside.  But Spring is coming and I want to get thinking and working on it again.  To that end, this post got me really excited about what we can do with simple materials (looks like they stole their pix from a print magazine):

http://vosgesparis.blogspot.com/2012/07/industrial-white-home-designed-by-paola.html

Especially this pic:

There is NO WAY I am not stealing this idea for blending the marble kitchen tile floor into the plank flooring in the LR.  I want it!!!

Also, that dining table is just fantastic.  It might have a few too many legs for my under-table toe-stubbing pleasure, but it looks great.

This bathroom is awesome! Granted, they don't have to deal with the sloping round walls, but the mish-mash of materials works great.

I don't know if I want black shower walls (though they would be a nice tribute to the fire the house suffered that made it affordable), but everything else in this shower is pretty much perfect.