Toothpicks

My contractor is great and he's old school too. I asked for small spacers on my bathroom tile and he came up with something I've never seen before.

Kids Talk

I came across this commercial yesterday and had to share. It's brilliant! As a mom of two girls I think it's a great idea to have girls involved in more technical fields and most importantly to make sure all fields are available to girls as well as boys. A couple of days ago my 3 and a half year old told me she wants to be an astronaut and go to the moon. It made my heart sing. 

Go Girls!

The Good, The Bad and The Ugly: The Ugly and The Bad

As charming as the house is, it's been neglected for years and last renovations were done in the seventies and it shows. The paneling is fortunately in only one room and I already have a color picked out to paint it. From the color palette it's obvious that the previous owners loved green and pink. I see paint, paint and more paint in my future.

The Good, The Bad and The Ugly About Our Home: The Good

Our home is a lovely Victorian with major charm and a lot of historical details. It was a first house we saw on our brief house hunting adventure and nothing we saw later compared to it and we simply knew it was the one. It is in need of TLC mainly in the kitchen and bath. Here's what we fell in love with.

Our New House

I wanted to write a little bit about our new house. 

When we saw the house we weren't looking to buy just browsing. Trying to decide which town we would like to move to once our kids reach school age. The city we lived in had pretty bad public schools, so we knew a move to the burbs laid in our future. Our house was on a market and I saw it on Trulia many times, but it looked liked it was located in a flood zone and on a corner lot, which for me was a big concern. Turns out that the property is long enough that even in hurricane Sandy, when the town got flooded pretty badly, the river didn't reach the house. As for the side street I saw in pictures, it's a dead end street that's used mostly by us and next door neighbors.

The house was built circa 1890 and it's a Victorian. It has a lot of charm, character and more space than we will ever need, yet it doesn't feel over sized. Most importantly, it is located on a beautiful lot and we even have a river in the backyard. The lot itself is over .6 acres, which is almost miraculous if you consider the fact that we are only about 20 minutes away from Manhattan.
What can I say? It was love at first sight. The house has a great flow, lots of light, beautiful parquet floor on the first floor, high ceiling, pocket doors and original base boards and molding.
Details, that are hard to come by in newer construction.

 

 

Now it's not all sweet and preety. The house is very dated. Half of the rooms have wallpaper in them. There is old wall to wall carped on the second floor and most importantly 40 year old kitchen with the worse, most bizarre layout one could ever imagine. There is no bath on the first floor and the existing baths on the second floor are very dated...and pink.

Just little details, right? It's our forever home and we can put out touch on it, which I very much looking forward too.