I got bored so I made some curtains

I was sick of looking at my ugly mud room and its ugly windows so I decided to sew up some cafe curtains for it. I'd had my fabric bag out a few weeks before for some random reason and I found some sheets I'd bought a year or two ago (who can remember these things?) and one sheet in particular I've always really liked and now it has a purpose!

It didn't take too long to do the curtains. There were three windows the same and then the side windows, both of which were different. I cut them, sewed them, and then hung them using fishing line and thumbtacks.
For a simple pick me up I think they turned out pretty good! I may yet take hem down and line the back with white or something because the sun shines through them pretty heavily but also the back side of the sheet is what faces out to the deck and it looks kind of ghetto.
Whatev.

it was kind of dark in the room

but u get the idea

My Couch

I used to have a big orange corduroy sectional that was given to us from some friends. It was mammoth, and quite comfy, but at the end of its life.
Here it is in all it's orange glory:

See in the middle how the back cushion is all ripped? There have been three spring repairs and it smelled kind of funky. So we were on the lookout for a new sectional. We knew we'd find one when it was meant to happen. You can't force these things :)

THAT my dear readers, is how I came to possess my awesome royal blue couch with filigree designs!!!! LOVE.

So this sucker even has a lazy susan in the center. Mirrors on the arms, mirror inside the lazy susan, this thing is asking to be in a drug den. But it is in my basement den instead. Hope it doesn't mind cats.

the light of heaven shines down upon my awesome sofa

It is not as comfy as the orange couch but i am not too worried cause we don't spend all that much time downstyairs anyways. we watch the news at night an that's about it.

Funny thing is, Once I bought this couch, my friend Andrea sent me a link to the London Kijiji cause someone was selling this:

not a big fan of the reversable look

And THEN i found another one on Ottawa kijiji that I thought I saved the picture of but I did not! Anyways it was really awesome and a brownish tweed though the arms were flat to the couch and also tweedy. In any case.. three awesome sectionals in one month!

The ad for the blue one above shows that the cushions were reversible and said it was a model from 1962 or 3 (I think......could have been '69 too!) Both of the ones i saw later were $500. Mine? $120. WHO SCORED A GREAT DEAL??
I did :)

Solly has his own disco party inside the lazy susan

Greg does some Lada research while Solly and LaDynasty look on

Which brings me to our new friend LaDynasty!! She was a $20 Kijiji find. A beautiful boudoir velvet painting! Her name is at once Trashy and Dirty; La Dynasty spelled out is also lady nasty :)
I think she is Lady Gorgeous!

non of our older family members seem to like LaDynasty as much as we do :(

 

Wood Floor Redo (and maybe some tiling, too!)

When we bought our house, the front room was carpeted in robins egg blue carpet. After we painted the same coloured walls, we ripped that crap out. It took a bit of work but not too much. We had to remove all of the little nails and staples, and clean it up really nice, but in the end the floor was in decent shape. Decent enough that we could live with its flaws, anyways :)

a reminder of what it was before

Greg decided it was time to do the floors when we had some out of town houseguests for a few weeks. I'm not sure why he thought that would be a good time to do it, but hey who am I to argue, he was the one paying for it all :)

Here are some before pictures:

where once there was a strip of carpet nailed to the floor, now stands a stain of brown

the floor finish from many years ago was very uneven/nonexistent in areas

the scones on the wall make no sense at all. what up with that crappy placement?

oh blue tile, how I have loathed you for three years...

First, Greg ripped out the blue tile from the front door. Under it was matching red tile from our den. under that was a second sub floor. Greg took it down to the main floorboards and put in a new sub floor. We hoped this would bring the tiles level with the hardwood (the tiles had been quite high up before, but it had been level with the carpet.)

Next, Greg took down the panelling. I told him that if he wrecked that panelling I would divorce him (I've used this threat before and each time I do it gets less threatening for some reason! ha ha). Luckily for him it came down easily. We were always a bit frightened as to what sort of Gerard-esque wiring was going on back there and now we know. It seems there was a fake fireplace there are one point (we'd suspected as much due to some wear on the floor in the shape of a mantle and hearth) that was panelled over. I think those sconces had been on each side of the "chimney" and when they took that part down they kept the sconces because they liked them and they matched the chandelier. Anyways, there was a wire who had a trench dug through the drywall, that came out at the bottom and got plugged into a wall socket. Check out this amazing wiring work:

look u can see the fireplace! Not sure what that top hole was ever for. the wire trench is a nice touch. the wire was stapled into place.

Because there were holes cut in the panelling for the sconces, we covered them up with a sweet painting we got at an estate sale. In fact I think it is this painting purchase that spurred Greg to want to do the floors. In any case, the panelling went back up, greg moved the sconces over, and made a proper wire box for them in the wall. Now there is a switch we flick to turn them on and I don't worry about fires as much.

apparently this is paris. if so it matches out panelling theme. can u see the switch box over by the wall?

Next up was the wood floor. We rented a floor sander from Home Depot. We just needed the one sander that I can't remember it's name, as there really was no finish on the floors at all to sand off.

greg was so happy to have his picture taken, as usual.

This took way less time than I thought it would. We put I think 6 coats of Varathane on the floors afterwards. We used the low sheen kind as the room is quite large and sunny and we didn't want to get blinded by a high sheen finish. Also high sheen shows wear more and we have two babies now. We also did not use a tint at all, we wanted the floors to show the natural wood colour as much as possible.

you can still see the brown stains a tiny bit but they are WAY less noticeable than before.

shiny happy floorboards

the room has a much more "finished" feel to it.

Next up was the tiling.
This was the first time Greg ever tiled anything and he gets an A- for his efforts! We bought tiles at Lowes, in a pinwheel white ceramic tile pattern. We thought we might use these in a bathroom but they are really wall times and so I'm not sure how much use they can really take. We don't really use this door ever so we're not worried about wear and tear. There are a few spots where you can see the squares of tile, so this is why Greg gets the A- not the A+ :) It also, happily, fits flush with the floor so there is no fear of stubbed toes any longer!!! Yeay!!

all done!

look at how level that is!!

The last thing to do was to replace our old door. It was a wood one with a brass and glass window. It wasn't a bad door, just totally not our style:

sold this sucker on Kijiji

Our neighbour had their original door on their house and greg and I always said we would ask them for it. One day we got back from some errands and they had a new door strapped to the roof of their car. We asked for the old one and of course they gave it to us! Joy! They have a big poodle and he'd done some pretty deep scratches on it but Greg sanded them down and we repainted the door. It doesn't fit the best ever so we have to do some weather stripping on it but it looks so much better than the old one! Plus we got a little friend for the front:)

welcome to my home

sweet original handle. greg polished it up.

knock knock. who's there? squirrel.

So that's about it for the front room floor redo! It took us 3 years of complaining to finally do it and now that it's done, we are very happy :) I love the new tiles best of all. The blue ones were the last remaining evidence of the nasty colour the front room used to be. PEACE OUT BLUE TILE!!

Oh I almost forgot, I wanted to share our giant awesome mirror we got at the Bentley Flea Market and the mirror greg made:

this is made from 6 mirror squares. it was behind the shelves in the bar that was in our basement, which we ripped out. this was too cool to throw out!

the heaviest mirror known to man, complete with seagulls.

THE END!!!

Where the hell I have been

So I just noticed that I havent posted anything since August.

Whoops!

I have been a bit busy. Else is now 20 months old, I've been working full time, AND I just had another baby!! We had a baby boy on December 1st and his name is Edward but we like to call him Eddie. Else loves him.

But all of this has kept me away from my blogging! Now I am back on Mat leave so expect some nice new posts cause we certainly have been working on stuff!

I would just like to mention that I have found a Mid Century Modern goldmine of info, right here on Blogger. Saul is a realtor but has a passion for MCM design. He has a floorplan for pretty much every style of MCM house built in Ottawa!! I am totally impressed with his blog and all the insights it has. However my hood is not included. Maybe it is too small, or maybe he just doesn't know about it. Anyways hopefully he will be able to help me out cause we are thinking about our future in this house.

When we found out we were having another baby, we started to think about how we would accomodate him or her into this house which is currently a 2 bedroom plus den. As you may know, the owners had switched the kitchen and master bedroom in the early 80's effectively ruining the layout for us in the future (I wish I could go back in time and make them change their minds!!!) I can appreciate that the kitchen as it is is like twice as big as it was, and that is a good thing, but we lost a bedroom!! And now we are thinking of putting it all back the way it was so that we can stay here. The kids can share a room for a while but there will come a time when that won't be possible any more. And when that time comes, will Else be old enough to have her own room on a different floor than everyone else? I am not sure sure about that.

The decision we need to make is if we are going to commit ourselves to this house for the long haul, or if we are going to sell and get a new place to start retro renovating. If we sell we are just going to redo the kitchen and keep it in the room it's in now. If we stay, we're going to do the switchover. We need to find the floor plans of our house to see how the kitchen was set up originally and if we can model around that using new materials and modern appliances (well, mostly modern, don't forget my turquoise wall oven and cook top!).

So, the big decision will have to wait..... stay tuned!!!

this is similar to our house but not quite the same. The window placements and the chimney are different and that actually makes a huge difference for our kitchen plans

Can you get more retro than a 1940's murder mystery game?

My friends Sarah and Oli live in England, and every so often make it to Ottawa for a visit. This time around I am pregnant so there was no wild pub nights in the cards for us. Instead we played 'The Last Train From Paris", a murder mystery set in 1940's Paris aboard a... you guessed it... train.
For dinner I made rouladen which was delicious, of course.

pile of meat. yum.

i was able to fit all the meat rolls into my giant Kitchenaid roasting pan.

There is a butcher down the street from me, who has been around since the hood was built in the 50's. They sliced up some inside round roast nice and thin so I didn't have to pound out the steaks like my mom used to do. Considering that I don't have a meat hammer, this was a nice luxury. Inside was bacon, onions and my dad's dill pickles (which are way better to use than store-bought) with some mustard and salt and pepper and garlic powder for good measure. They were a big hit with the crowd.

Speaking of the crowd, here are a few pictures from the night:

meeka the fashion designer

sarah the princess

chris as "the duke"

greg as the international man of mystery

oli as the terrible pilot who likes the ladies

tanis as the socialite

meeka has a sweet american accent

tanis does not belive that ren is not a spy

ren, you are a total spy

it was the princess. BUT SHE WASN'T REEEAALLY THE PRINCESS!!

All in all it was a pretty fun game. The company that makes these particular ones likes to throw in weird twists so it is pretty hard to figure out who did it.
Meeka I still have your weasels.

"Shit From My Garden Stew", with chicken

Yesterday I was the recipient of not one but two bags of tomatoes. Grammy brought some over, and then our neighbour Miguel did too.
What do you do with two bags of tomatoes?
YOU MAKE SOUP.

We grew carrots this year and most of them actually turned out quite nicely. We had harvested some earlier, but I think it was too early as they were pretty puny. The ones we are pulling now are big and tender and delicious! So I pulled some out the ground (a strangely sexual experience I would say) and took their pretty picture.

We also grew potatoes for the third year and most of them where also quite small. We had a lot of rain this spring and I really think it hindered early growth. In any case they still taste like good potatoes so I cut them up too. Here is a picture of the vegetables I used, minus celery (cause I forgot that I had some):

i did not grow the onion or zucchini. maybe next year.

So, I chopped up all these veggies and added a dried herb blend from Heritage Line Herbs. The smell of the tomatoes as they started to cook down was divine.

Then I cooked up some chicken with more dried herbs and some chopped garlic, and threw that in letting it simmer for about an hour. I really liked it, but Else wouldn't eat it. She kept saying "yucky, yucky" so she had PB&J instead.



Silly child.