Movin' on up

I've outgrown blogger and am going to try Posterous for a while. We'll see how it goes.

Stay tuned for the new address! It will most likely be:

http:///www.saxondeck.posterous.com

Tiles Tiles Tiles!

We went back out yesterday for tiles. It's been a long road. You find a tile you like, but it's $190. You find a great tile for the floors, but it's only for walls. You find a great tile for the walls, but it's only for floors. You find one for both, but it's out of stock until March. This has been weeks and weeks of shopping and after while they all start to look alike!

Admittedly, it was really fun for the first few trips -- I've always loved the idea of tiling a bathroom - but the reality checks have taken some of the thrill away. Still, it will be worth it once we're in the house.

We took home some samples to see how they look in the bathroom. We've narrowed it down, which is a major relief, but there's going to be some sacrifices. I know they're safer, but I don't like matte floor tiles. But the tiles we like the best only come in matte. We've been to virtually every tile store in Auckland so I'm ready to acquiesce.

Additionally, the tiles I wanted for the backsplash in the kitchen are coming in way WAY over budget, so we might have to go with regulation white tile.

Iain was disappointed that I vetoed tiling the kitchen in this cow pattern.

Dunedin!

Yesterday, after a bit of house-related drama over whether or not to stain our hardwood floors (we chose not to), we packed our bags (Blue helped) and hopped on a plane to Dunedin for Christmas.


Li'l geography if you're interested: Dunedin is on the South Island and Auckland is on the North Island. It's a distance of roughly 1430km / 888 miles (according to Google maps).


Dunedin is like Buffalo, and not just 'cause it's Iain's hometown, boasts inexpensive real estate, and gets snow. It also has awesome food. The best burger in NZ - here in Dunedin. Cheese rolls - a South Island speciality -- we're having those for lunch. We celebrated in style this morning with mince and cheese pies for breakfast.

Last night Iain's parents picked us up at the airport and we headed to their house for a bottle of red and a quick catch up, before retiring to our motel for the night. The weather is supposed to be in the mid-high 20s (~75˚F) tomorrow which is PERFECT for a Christmas BBQ at Iain's brother Gary's house.

Colors - done!

We've chosen our colors! We've got names like Sandfly Point, Shagrock and Oriental Bay, and we're really psyched!

Even the cats helped!

Paint!

It's finally time to choose paint colors. A few weeks ago, our builder Stan said he needed to know colors before Christmas. This seemed like plenty of time, but then we got hit with some late nights at work, early morning meetings, the token company holiday parties and more work, until we realized, "Holy crap - we only have a week left to choose!"

Like everything, we've had a lot of back and forth on what to do. All off white? Off white with accent walls in bold colors? A subtle color throughout?

Yesterday we rounded up as many color palettes and wheels we could find and sat down in the living room for a few hours and really talked about it. We looked at magazines, pictures of friends' homes, and discussed our what would go with our existing furniture.

Then we headed out to the stores for about 20 test pots. This morning we're going to paint a bunch of big swatches, take them down to the house and decide!

All of this running around made us pretty hungry so we stopped off at Denny's for a healthy, low cal meal.

Weekly House Photos

Here are some exciting new shots of the house.

Pictured below:
Here is what will be the tiled shelf in the shower.

Here is a dorky picture of me in what will be our shower (this was taken before they put the walls up)

Here's the cutout between the foyer and the living room.

Out with the old! (and I don't mean Iain)

This morning our friends Vicki and Mike were gracious enough to lend us their station wagon to return the vanity. Actually, it worked our perfectly. Mike and Iain moved the vanity and went to Placemakers while Vicki and I had brunch!

The new vanity and mirrored cabinet!

Vanity

We've accepted the sad truth that we jumped the gun with our vanity and wound up with a plastic-y piece of crap in an fugly color and even worse handles. There is nothing redeeming about this impulse buy. Even the price tag isn’t as great as we thought 6 months ago.

The real salt in the wound came last Sunday. At the store where we bought our lovely mirrored medicine cabinet, we spotted the vanity that goes with it. It’s a gorgeous dark wood vanity with nice shiny handles that’s actually CHEAPER than the Ikea knockoff stinking up our garage. This resulted in an afternoon of soul searching as we debated long and hard over how to handle this dilemma.

Then, on a whim, Iain called Placemakers to see if they'd be willing to take it back for store credit.. a discount... anything! We didn’t have high hopes: it was a sale item purchased in June. We also put it up for auction online.

Amazingly, Placemakers agreed to a cash discount minus a 20% restocking fee. Yay!

Tomorrow we’re borrowing our friends' stationwagon to take it back, and the gorgeous new one (that goes perfectly with the cabinet) is ordered and ready!!

The Gib is Up!

Do they have gib (pronounced jib) in the US? I'm not sure. It's the stuff they put up before they start plastering and painting. Anyway, they've started putting it up and it's the first real sign of the house starting to look like a house. The absolute best news is, we both secretly feared that the house would look smaller once the walls were up, but the opposite is true. We're really getting excited now.

Here are pictures of the kitchen and living room, respectively.

Wondering where cricket matches and episodes of Law & Order SVU and will be broadcast? You're looking at it! It's all wired and ready for the TV!

Here's a picture of the upstairs dressing area and bathroom, obviously not gibbed yet. I love the sun that this gets, and the cats will be in HEAVEN. Outside those windows is a narrow, flat expanse of roof, perfect for kitties! One might think we designed the entire dormer around the cats' comfort (we didn't).

We made a wonderful discovery on a trip to the house at around 7.30am: the morning sun comes in through those two dormer windows (which will have blinds) NOT the huge triangle window. This alleviates two fears: getting woken up every morning by the blinding sun streaming through this massive window OR the horribly expensive custom-made window treatment we would've been forced to buy.

Saturday

Goals for the Day:
1. Doorknobs
2. Front door handle
3. Ceiling lamps for vaulted ceiling over stairway, plus living room and dining room
4. Pendants for kitchen peninsula
5. Tiles for bathroom

7.30am:
We head down to the house with cardboard mock-ups of the different types of lights we want for the living room, dining room, and over the peninsula in the kitchen. We discuss sizes, how low or high they should be, and if we're still in agreement over the lights we've chosen.

We also discuss cutting a hole in the wall through the living room and the foyer to add more light. We were always concerned that the foyer would resemble a dungeon and well, it kind of does.

Mistake #7: buying a front door without a window.

Our builder said he could easily cut a hole and it should look pretty cool, though it now limits our real estate for pictures and artwork. Oh well.

Then we head to the garage to take a look at our vanity, which we bought 6 months ago in what we thought was a dark wood color.

It's not.

It's a dark grey woodtone color that's really weird. What the? Did the store screw up? No, I did.

We can't believe it.
(this picture does not accurately demonstrate how weird the color is)


Mistake #23: Actually look at the vanity you bought, idiot.

Realizing we've wasted the last MONTH shopping for bathroom tiles for a vanity we don't even have, we decide we'd better head out pronto and get shopping!

Mistake #64: Get your tiles first, THEN buy a vanity that goes with them.

9.00am:
Drive to South Auckland (we're in the north). This part of town is rumored to have lots of tile stores. We navigate through horrible highways, almost get lost, and wind up at three grotesque tile stores with designs ranging from Inexpensive Employee Restroom to Old Lady Powder Room circa 1978.
After passing the Church of Scientology, a handful of creepy bars and fast food joints, we decide this part of town sucks and head back to the North Shore. We're annoyed and feel like we've wasted two hours messing around in this crappy part of town when we still have so much to do. Who's hungry?

11.45am:
Frustrated and starving, we stop off for lunch and a beer. Suddenly everything seems much, much better. What are we getting so worked up for? It's just a house! No worries... we'll figure it out. House shopping is fun! Should we get another beer? Nah... we've still got a lot of work to do.


1.00pm:
We hit a bathroom store to check out their tile displays. We don't find anything useful, but I fall in love with this display featuring walls similar to Benjamin Moore's Electric Blue. Thanks to Shelby, I already have a paint swatch! I think it would be really cool to paint one of the rooms a color like this, like the downstairs bathroom or one of the guest rooms. Iain's not a fan.


1.45pm:
Drive to the lighting store. It's the same one we've visited 3 times already and they recognize us immediately. Our morning trip to the house has confirmed that we're ready to buy, but we need to decide on what color shades to get.

If this was our ONLY project, I might take weeks to visit fabric stores and find The Perfect Fabric, agonizing over modern vs retro or patterned vs solid, but lampshades are one of about 9 decisions due to be made today. We look through the swatch books and find what we want. That said, we still need to get one of these for our stairwell, and we decided to take more time with that since it's going to be a real feature. We'll do that another day.

Iain looks longingly at his ideal stairwell light but knows it doesn't really go with our decor.

I'm just kidding. Satisfied, we buy four lights:
1 drum lamp in scarlet for the dining room
1 drum lamp in this vintage cream/white pattern for the living room (below)
2 contemporary lights for over the kitchen island (pictured)



3.00pm:
Go next door to the door and handle store. Spend an absolutely ridiculous amount of time comparing round doorknobs: "Does this one look pointy? I know it's round but it looks pointy. Put it next to the other one. What do you think? I think it looks pointy. Or am I just being crazy? What about that other one? Wait, how much do these cost anyway?"


3.45pm:
Head over to Bunnings Warehouse (like Home Depot) and buy $1.50 sausages from the high school selling them for new uniforms. We never eat these things but since we've been shopping for house stuff, we hit Bunnings every Saturday and every Saturday, there's a sausage stand.

3.50pm:
It's a quick bathroom break at Bunnings, then over to their doorknob selection for more discussions and comparisons. It appears that the perfectly round polished steel doorknobs we wants are around $55, while the ones our builder budgeted that appear (but aren't) slightly pointed if you really really look closely at eye level are only $30. I accept this. We also look at front door handles, but it's too overwhelming so we leave.

4.15pm:
Our favorite tile store is closed on Saturdays! How could we not know this?

Mistake #9: Know your stores and their hours

4.30pm:
We arrive at Heritage Tile and spend a rather half-hearted half hour wandering around, not really knowing what we should choose. "Well, when we thought the vanity was dark brown, this would've been perfect but now...." We revisit old favorites, disagree on most. Iain likes this one, I don't. I suggest one, Iain doesn't like it. We sort of agree on a theme: lighter floors, darker shower walls. We order some samples and vow to ask our builder how much time we have before he needs to tile. Why is this so hard??

5.15pm
I remember one tile store with a great display that might go really well with our vanity, and we excitedly head over there. It's a bold look that might look almost too modern for our house. Iain isn't a big fan.

We have another wander around but still can't really figure out what to do. Stupid vanity! We're now discussing trying to sell it on TradeMe (NZ's eBay) and buying one we actually like. If we can get rid of it, then we get one in the right color AND with the right handles!

We head for home. Tomorrow, after a Skype call with my family and a meeting with a landscaper, we'll head back out. We're hoping to have all of the decisions made before Christmas break. Then we just have to decide on carpet!

Our builder has told us we should be moved in around February.

Everyone is welcome to visit us. We'll have two guest rooms and a full guest bath, which will be great because we'll be exhausted AND broke! I can't wait.

Weekend

This weekend and every weekend for a while now, we've been shopping for house stuff. Doorknobs, light switches, door stoppers, window hardware, carpet, bathroom tiles, overhead lights, kitchen and bathroom fixtures.... it's a lot. But it's been pretty fun, although I have had a few small meltdowns where I get really stressed and second and triple guess my decisions.

Yesterday, between tile shopping and looking at lamps, we stopped off for a bathroom break at this place.



Is this a resort of some kind? Is that a pool? A fridge full of champagne and beer? No - it's where Iain works. Want pictures of where I work? It's an office building downtown, next to a seedy internet cafe / poolhall and even scarier pub where people have been known to throw pint glasses at passersby.

Dormer!

They started building the dormer -- we're very excited. Pictured below is what our upstairs bathroom will be. The other half of the dormer will be a dressing room, which we hope will be great for resale since it can double as a home office or baby room.




If anyone has any ideas for window dressings for this window, please let us know!!!

We Got Building Consent!!!!

It's been an interesting week. My department's three month "restructuring" was finally announced. The result is full job descriptions and contracts for my group, ending everyone's daily paranoia about getting laid off. It hasn't been fun -- people freaked out, jobs were questioned, some quit, some got laid off, others got promoted. Now that the dust has settled, everyone on my immediate team has the exact same positions, but our titles are changed. I'm relieved.

And on the same day, we received approval from the local council to proceed with the house! Yay!!!!!

We celebrated in style with some cough medicine and a cheap take-out dinner, since I've been sick with a cold all week. We always said we'd really do it up once we got building consent ("We'll go to the Langham for a night!" ; "We'll have dinner at The French Cafe!") but we'll do nothing of the sort. We can't afford it!

We aren't out of the woods yet -- there's now a series of building inspections that may result in more repairs and more money, but hopefully the worst is over. I'm sure I just jinxed us.

We're also getting quotes from landscapers to finish the outside. Currently, it resembles a big muddy parking lot. To really do it up right with decking, retaining walls, etc. won't be cheap, so we're exploring all the options. We have to do something, though. Wood decks? Pavers? We'll see. The deck off one of the guest rooms is finished, and it looks great. It's a really nice feature.