We just got back from a much needed vacation. Now that we are back though, its time to finish the rest of the demolition so we can move on to the rough plumbing, hvac, and electrical. Paul and his brother have been handing most of the demolition until this point, but we will need to call in some reinforcements to finish the demo of the kitchen chimney. You read that right - we decided to take it out. At the end of the day, it just felt like a better fit for our family. 

In the meantime, I'm obsessing about wallpaper. I love wallpaper and especially in an old home like this where wallpaper was traditionally used to cover the lathe and plaster walls. The house currently has wallpaper in almost every room, but its in terrible condition and needs to be removed. We will have to skim coat the walls and most of them will be freshly painted. Right now I am thinking of wallpapering the girls hall bath and the side entrance between the kitchen/dining and the living room. 

For the girls I want something very girly and a little more floral. Their rooms are not too girly so I was thinking we could step it up on the fussy scale in that bathroom. Wallpaper is a good wall treatment in bathrooms because its typically easy to clean. I'm looking at two papers from Anthropologie for that space. Feel free to weigh in - the pictures are above and below.

For the side entrance I want something black and white. Its not a big space and we have color in other places, so I want something neutral but bold. Right now I am between a gorgeous Schumacher wallpaper called the Queen of Spain (right) and another one from England. I'm seriously leaning toward the Schumacher paper, but I'm going to give myself some time to make this decision since its one of the last things to go in the house.
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Our new gas service went in today! It seems like no big deal, but you only have a limited time to put new utilities in the ground before winter. There was an old gas line stubbed out in the basement but no meter. So Columbia Gas wanted to completely reinstall the line. My Dad is visiting and I got to show him the progress. Last time he saw the house you couldn’t actually see it because the yard was so over grown. He was impressed we could actually walk in the back yard. It was a good reminder that even though we have a ways to go, we have made progress.

There is going to be a short break in the posts while Paul and I go on a much needed vacation!

It’s a big weekend for us! On a personal level, some really great friends of ours got married (yay!) and it was my birthday. On the house front, they were almost done with our new roof when I went by the house today. It looked like a lot of work. The roof was in terrible shape. Crumbling, multiple layers - just a mess. On top of its poor condition, it wasn’t properly sealed between the main house and the lower roof line. There was actually daylight coming in through the valleys. But now it’s brand new! Almost the entire roof is ice and water shielded now so we shouldn’t have issues from ice dams going forward. It’s a beautiful fall weekend here in Medway, but it will be winter before we know it!

For those of you that have been reading the blog since the beginning, you might be interested to know we made a decision about the chimney in the kitchen...I have big plans for the pile of bricks in the backyard.

The 1/2 bath in the house is currently located in the addition that joins the barn to the main part of the house. We are not keeping it in that location for a couple of reasons. The first reason is because its about as far away from the main living space as you can get. The second reason is its not easily accessible from the crawl space in order to run new plumbing. 

My original idea was to put the bathroom under the main staircase since the staircase is basically floating. Toilets can go under a sloped ceiling since you are sitting back when you go to sit on it...basically this means you won't bump your head. There are a lot of really cool options for this kind of bathroom. I'm attaching a picture of one of my favorites. 

Since then though, I've gotten to spend more time in the house and feel like the floating staircase is one of the coolest things about it. We've decided to keep the staircase as-is and put the half bath in what is currently a large closet just behind the stairs. Its not going to be a large half bath, but we really don't need a large half bath anyway. Also, I feel like in really old homes, like this one, its pretty typical to have a smaller half bath on the first floor (if you even have one at all!). The new bath is going to be similar to this picture which has always been one of my favorites. We will style the space a little differently, but this gives an idea of the goal.