Coming This Winter to a Winnipeg-based Home Reno Blog Near You!

Well, with December having commenced this past weekend, our official To-Do list for Winter 2012-2013 has just begun, and this is what we have to look forward to until February. For your benefit, we've included some rationales for why these items have been included now during the coldest part of the year:

Plans Plans Plans

• Design/quote bathroom
• Design/quote kitchen
• Design/quote deck
• Design/quote basement
• Design/quote upstairs ensuite/walk-in closet
• Design/quote landscaping and outdoors

Why now? Because we want to be able to budget for some of these projects over the next few years. And because it's cold outside, and dreaming up cool ideas for the future warms the cockles of our hearts.

This diagram clearly fails to illustrate where exactly the "cockles" are.
This article disturbingly suggests that cockles refer to snails.
We're going to stop researching this right now.

  

Window Coverings

• Quote blinds and curtains
• Install blinds in master bedroom and living room

Why now? Because we hate wearing clothes indoors want more privacy and because we feel self-conscious using our Wii-based exercise games in front of our only TV in the house in the living room, for all the world to watch us out our big picture window.

This gives you an idea of what you might see if you looked in our living room window while we were exercising using our Wii-based exercise games. Except, instead of "cool workout clothes" picture "ratty sweat-soaked t-shirts" and instead of "attractively bronzed men" picture "pale out-of-shape newlyweds dry-heaving during jump squats."

Light Fixtures

• Replace bedroom/hallway light fixtures
• Replace living room light fixture
• Replace dining area light fixture

Why now? Because IKEA just opened in our city and they have really cool lights. As well, our living room light fixture fell from the ceiling and nearly injured me more than a month ago (it was as dramatic as you imagine it) and, as of right now, we haven't done anything about it.

Garage Door Openers

• Remove existing garage door openers
• Install new garage door openers
• Identify lighting solutions

Why now? Because Philip's dad says Sears has a sale on garage door openers in December. As for why that is, well, you'd have to ask Sears.

Interior Doors

• Remove bedroom/bathroom doors
• Paint
• Rehang bedroom/bathroom doors

Why now? Because none of our bedrooms have doors on them right now. Which means  changing clothes when we have company over involves a complex system of full blindfolds, bedsheet curtains, and sombreros. Don't ask.

"Señor, please put that blindfold back on!" (Changing at our house involves everyone else dressing like a stereotypical Mexican bandito.)

Gut Upstairs Bathroom

• Remove mould
• Discard wall tiles
• Discard bathtub
• Discard flooring
• Discard sink
• Discard vanity/cabinets
• Uninstall toilet
• Replace window

Why now? Because right now we shower in the laundry room in the basement, and while the bathroom was once in style, that was when "Watergate" was something you might open to let a riverboat through.

Upstairs Bathroom

• Install new shower/tub
• Install new lighting
• Install new flooring
• Paint/tile
• Re-install toilet
• Install new cabinets
• Install new sink
• Install new mirror
• Reconnect plumbing

Why now? Because unlike with the gutted basement, we don't intend to let the bathroom stay gutted for very long. And yes, we recognize having to go down to the laundry in the basement to have access to a hot shower is one of those classic #firstworldproblems, but it's at least a problem we have the power to correct.

As for more recent news...

Since we haven't updated you on the status of our bedroom reno since last Wednesday: Yesterday night we got a little bit overwhelmed because we're trying to get our bedrooms done (a project that has really unfolded to be a lot more complicated than we'd originally anticipated) so that we can make our living room a little less chaotic by this weekend when we have a Christmas party happening at our house. Wish us luck! As soon as we're done that it's full speed ahead with bathroom renovating - a little bit nervous about getting that all done on schedule, but we're doing our best! Started planning out yesterday some vanity choices and figuring out some obstacles ahead of time. 

Remember to fill out the poll today before we reveal results tomorrow (we've learned that comments and polls aren't working for iPad users, so get your computer out!). We'll be sharing a bit of our Christmas preparations as well tomorrow. 

What do you have in store for Winter? Anyone else crazy enough to tackle a major renovation while Christmas shopping and hosting holiday parties?

Poll Results

Well the ballots are in, before we get into it though, we thought we'd share our answer to this question.

Philip

I picked Elegant because my dream house is the house from Clue, and if you have a ballroom, I'm pretty sure you skew elegant. (I'll have to put together a Friday post someday about this; I prefer a pretty literal approach to Clue house design, save for the huge hallways, and yes, I've spent time researching secret passageways.) I was just in the Ralph Connor House over the weekend taking photos with my brother's wedding, and that was pretty cool, although it doesn't quite compare with Toronto's Casa Loma (probably the coolest house I've actually been in).
But my compromise with Cass is contemporary, whose light simplicity I recognize seems like a big departure from the oft-ornate and visually rich nature of more elegant tastes. You see, my love of the latter stems from my love of history and literature, with its majestic hearths in wood-panelled libraries (where pulling at a specific book may cause a certain bookcase to swing open).

...of course, the book you pull out has to have a name like Through the Hidden Door or The Secret Passage.

But my love of contemporary style stems from my graphic design experiences and love of mathematical precision. As Antoine de Saint-Exupery said, "perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." And since contemporary is more compatible with Cass' tastes, I'm happy to explore designing our home in that way.
Until the financing comes through on my Clue house, of course.

Cassondra

While I definitely have primarily contemporary taste, I can feel myself being pulled into the eclectic. Philip is fighting it big time because I finally got him on board with clean lined simplicity and now I'm trying to convince him that we love all things owls and personalized art and tons of accessories. I am definitely still a contemporary girl, but I also want our home to represent us in the artwork, accessories, and other things that personalize a place. Maybe it's all the Pinterest and Etsy I've been browsing, but I can definitely feel my style beginning to shift. My hope for our house is that is can be contemporary and modern, but have a lot of "us" in it. Our condo was definitely my style, but was missing the decor elements that I hope to bring into this house since we'll be staying here a lot longer.

You

It seems that most people leaned towards the contemporary although there is definitely some representation into the other groups too! This is good because it means you'll hopefully like what we pick out as we start decorating this crazy house.

What This Means (not an official dictionary or expert definition by any account)

The photos are all from houzz.com, I just selected the style category and chose from the pictures they provided for that category. I've tried to select photos that are our style from within each category, this way you can see what our style is like and 

Eclectic

To me, eclectic doesn't always have to mean cluttered and unorganized, but rather it contains a lot of visual interest, personality, and a mixture of textures, colors, and patterns. The way I see it (correct me if I'm wrong) a modern and conservative interpretation - and one I can get behind - might be the below. It's a mix of styles, colors, patterns to make a still cohesive look but definitely more visually interesting and has a lot going on.

Eclectic Bedroom design by Orange County General Contractor Patterson Construction Corporation

Contemporary

Contemporary and modern are often interchangeable, however, in my mind contemporary is a little bit less cold and can be a more lived in version of modern. To me it is almost like the difference between haute couture and ready-to-wear clothing, contemporary is like modern except more accessible to an everyday home. To me contemporary can also be a lot less cold.
There is also some solid overlap between these categories, for example the above photo is contemporary eclectic in some ways, and there is certainly contemporary country as well.

Contemporary Kids design by San Francisco Interior Designer Artistic Designs for Living, Tineke Triggs

Country

I think Country is pretty self explanatory, it can be just a little bit rustic, or straight off the ranch. I like this country style photo which is really cozy and sort of reminds me of my brother and sister-in-law's style, contemporary but rustic. 

Eclectic Living Room design by Atlanta Photographer Ashley Anthony Photography

Elegance

The below photo is elegant in its glamour and some of the ornate touches. I chose this photo because while it is more ornate and detailed, the decision to stay within a very specific colour palette  makes it more subdued and beautiful.

Eclectic Hall design by Dublin Architect Optimise Design

For the next poll we'd love to hear from you about your blog reading habits, make your vote and feel free to comment with any thoughts you have! We'd love to hear about the blogs you read or write.

Also in the comments, let us know which of the above is your favourite look?

Also if you haven't had a chance to read Philip's post from this morning, you can find it here.

Of House Layouts and My Beautiful, Amazing, yet Measurement-Inept Wife

Welcome back to my weekly platform from which I share stories with 100% more Y-chromosome and dispense testosterone-enriched wisdom.

Today I am proud to unveil our house layout drawing, which has been a long time in the making. Of course, telling the story of its creation is not complete without highlighting one of my dear wife’s shortcomings.

Cass is a wonderful lady, my best friend, and has many amazing talents and gifts. She concocts great meals without the aid of a recipe book. She makes me laugh with her oft-absurd antics. She is bright and wise and has a strong sense of character.

But she can’t measure.

Can’t is a strong word, but she herself acknowledges it, and it is the correct word in this case. Give her a lemon, she’ll make lemonade. Give her a crying child, she’ll pacify it. Give her a measuring tape, and she’ll alter the fundamental structure of the space-time continuum by making 18 inches into 7 centimetres and getting three drastically different readings in four different units of measure (including “seconds”) for the width of the same window. I exaggerate only slightly.

Of course, a house is a difficult thing to measure. In theory, the width of one wall in a rectangular room should be the width of the opposite wall. In theory, the corners of a square room meet at 90° angles (no, honey, we don’t have to convert that to Celsius). But in practice, walls vary in thickness, floors and walls curve and bow (usually imperceptibly), and if you’re looking for a right angle you’d be better off turning on FOX News.

So when it came to putting together a layout for our house, for both you our readers and for us to draw and dream with, Cass let me take this project on (although she was a big help in holding the other end of the tape measure in a lot of cases). I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.

Our main floor layout at the time we moved in. (Spoiler alert: It hasn't changed much since then.)
As always, you can click the image to enlarge it.

The final product is off by, at most an inch and a half either way. In the picture you see here, I haven’t inserted where the cabinets are in the kitchen or where the built-in entryway shelving unit stands living on borrowed time, but this gives you an idea of what our main floor looked like when we moved in.

I designed it in Adobe Illustrator, which is more popular among graphic designers than interior decorators, but it’s the best option I had and it worked beautifully. Since then, I’ve found out there are a few free home design programs that probably could do a pretty good job too, if you don’t have a career that requires you to know industry standard design products (and perhaps I’ll test one of them sometime to see how well they work).

We’ve also posted this as part of our new Take the Tour page, a companion piece to the To-Do List. As we cross off items from the list, we’ll start to update the layout so you can see where we make our changes, moving walls, wiring lights, placing furniture and the like. Hours spent in fruitless meetings as part of my corporate existence has caused me to hate the term “living document,” but if that’s something that makes sense to you, that’s what we’re going for here.

Master Bedroom Inspiration

We're getting pretty close to the painting stages of the plan, so it's time to start giving some thought into what we'd like these rooms to end up looking like. The first room we're planning to tackle is our bedroom, so we can move in and have a room of sanity to begin and end our days in. 

I had already collected a lot of pictures and ideas of what I thought would look good, but Philip has been pretty busy with boiler removing madness so he hadn't given a lot of input. This past weekend we both sat down and he looked through some photos on Houzz to see what kind of style we were both leaning towards for our bedroom.

In the end, we both landed on the below photo as a good inspiration for our bedroom. It's a very similar color as our bedroom at the condo which we really liked (Benjamin Moore's Smoke) and we still have paint left which means we can save some money using the leftovers.

Contemporary Bedroom design by Minneapolis Interior Designer Martha O'Hara Interiors

After spending a bit of time deliberating over what we liked about this particular photograph we came up with a few key things that should help us when choosing accessories and achieving this look. The textures and layering make the room look airy, but still with a lot of visual interest. These are the kinds of characteristics on our checklist when looking at accessories for the space.

We have a few more boring items to get off the list for the room such as installing the new white trim, buying new doors for the closet and just the regular door too, some racks for the closet, and blinds. After that, some of the items that are more fun to choose are also on the agenda.

The first is a textured light fixture. After one quick trip to Rona, we walked away with a few different ideas for adding texture and interest through the lighting, similar to what was shown in our inspiration photo. Definitely haven't narrowed it down to one yet, and have some more shopping around to do, but having this inspiration photo has helped to eliminate some less than interesting options since we know the look we're going for.

Some of the other items on the shopping list include robe hooks for behind our door, accessories for the side tables, artwork, potentially a chair for the corner, euro shams and fabric, fabric to make a headboard that's a little higher than our existing one, and potentially an area rug. We'll keep you posted!

Anyone seen a picture of a beautiful bedroom lately? What projects are you working on? 

Side note: You'll notice we added a page with our master list that we can update as we complete things, and Philip made a great banner for the top of the page! I've also heard some people had trouble with commenting...let me know what the issue was and I can try and fix it? Thanks!