pardon monsieur, ou sont le salle de bain?

Right this way, s'il vous plait.

You may use our shower, and fancy little showerhead attachment thingy, too.  Faites comme chez vous!

Le toilette, naturellement... we put it in the corner ('dans le coin') for as you can see, a regular toilette would have stuck out into the doorway.   N'est pas bien!

Voulez-vous un choodle dans son bain?

Don't forget to check your coiffure in our miroir on your way out.  Merci beaucoup -- revenez bientot!

finally... a home for my shoes

Look at that-- finally a closet with decent shelving for my ever-growing shoe (and clutch) collection! If you can recall, this was originally two smaller closets. We knocked out the dividing wall, and with a little (a LOT) of help from Oscar the Cabinet Guy we now have a super functional walk-in closet!

Look at all those shelves! It almost makes me want to get on eBay and start looking for more vintage beauties to add to my collection (don't tell Daniel)!

 

Along the other side of the closet we have a combo of hanging rods at different heights-- perfect for shirts, skirts, and long dresses.  There's also a hanging light installed, and the closet ceiling holds the trap door entryway to our super creepy/cool attic! Maybe there will be an attic blog post soon....

new windows!

Our new windows are in! The old ones desperately needed to be replaced-- they were, as Daniel described them-- "worse than windows in a Motel 6"! Really, they were bad. About 80% of the locks were broken, and a few didn't even close the all the way. That's alright for an empty house, but we wanted to make sure things were secure before we start moving our belongings in. Daniel would also like you to take note of his impressive photography skills-- he caught the reflection of the Library Tower in our window! I can practically see where I work from our front porch... don't know if that's good or bad?

Here are these two just hangin' out in the new window. Looks like Wylma has spied a tasty treat in the front yard, maybe a stray cat or some lunch remnants left by the contractors?

The new windows look just as good from inside the house. This is the view of our little walkway alongside the house. The cactus will definitely be staying-- I love it. Our neighbors have a vegetable garden that is toppling over onto our side of the wall. Occasionally I've found a cherry tomato hanging on that vine-- yummy! Free tomatoes!

tadpole green & mushroom bisque

Well, it's not totally finished but our paint job is coming along.  There's still a lot of little drips and drops and details to fix, but at least we have the basic color scheme in place.  The green is called Tadpole Green (we didn't make up these names) and the trim is called Mushroom Bisque (mmm).  The door is a mystery color that I think Home Depot made by mistake but it was our favorite of many we tried (it's sort of an oxblood).  And the porch top details are a shade down from Tadpole, and that color had some funny name too (something like Egyptian Grasshopper, I forget).  The guys did the big stuff, Sarah painted the door herself and I painted the details up top.  We like it so much better than Pepto Bismol Pink!  (P.s. we have really neat vintage art deco light sconces that are going in those bracket holes.)  (And glass that's going in those window frames up above the porch.)

Kinda cozy right?  Like snuggling up between a tadpole and a mushroom...

It was much, much trickier to come up with nice-looking exterior colors than we thought it would be.  We dashed our ship against the rocks of the Home Depot paint-chip selection for many days and nights before finding the safe harbor of Tadpole & Mushroom.  Along the way we ran through countless samples and swabs of awful, mismatched, misbegotten colors that we thought would be wonderful until they actually went up on the wall and made us scream.  We went through Amazon Jungle, Creepy Crepe, Olive Nightmare, Brackish Swamp, Peyote Sunrise, Man-Eating Crocodile, Children of the Corn Husk, Weird Woodsman, Moldy Tea, Cabbage Castle, Dyspeptic Hobbit, and many others.  The door was particularly tricky... for a minute it was Toasted Nutmeg (an awful sickly orange-pink) and then Red Pepper (a glaringly loud pizza-sauce splat) before Sarah finally figured out the winning color.  If you're ever painting a house, we submit from our painful experience that (a) a little color goes a long way and (b) you must, must must use color samples before you start buying gallons of the stuff.  Enough said!

It's far from finished but at least it's looking a little nicer.  The Monticello of Hi-Fi I call it!  Which makes me... the Thomas Jefferson of Outer Echo Park.  (My San Antonio college, Trinity University, used to call itself "The Harvard of the South", which we got a kick out of.  They didn't make too big a deal out of it, but it did say that on all the matchbooks in the cafeteria.)

what's cookin' in the kitchen?

Gustavo aka Osacar built us this groovy kitchen setup, just the way we wanted it.  We got sagey green cabinets, biscuit porcelain sink, butcher block countertops, fridge hutch with a fridge in it, everything but a robot chef!

This kitchen is way neater than the kitchen in our apartment.  We're gonna be cookin' up some good times in here!

Look what's in here... a lazy susan!  Apologies to any readers out there with that name.  I'm sure many Susans are just drowsy or unmotivated, not necessarily lazy.  I'm glad there's not a device called a "worthless Daniel" or something.  What a libel on all the productive Susans of the world.  This susan will definitely get the job done.

paint preview

Our house is no longer pink! That alone is reason to be excited-- and yet there are so many other developments to share. Now that Daniel and I are both on the mend from a pretty persistent cold, we'll be posting all the new and exciting things very soon! Think new kitchen, bookshelves, closet overhaul, and pretty new paint! Can't wait to share it all with you guys!