Renovation: Baby's room!

More renovation has been happening at our house. After Frank so lovingly completed the Pink Princess room for Carys he began working on creating a room for baby. The space was a room that had to be walked through to get to Jasper's room, you can see his door there on the far wall. So, we figured that the space would be much more usable as its own room, and Frank put up a wall to divide the space...
  

Frank finished the room within one week, and once the electrician had rewired the lights and the walls were closed up and painted, then the fun began! Of course the most fun thing for me has been spending the past week decorating the room, as we wait for baby to arrive.

We had given away all of our baby things before we moved from Brooklyn, which felt discouraging at first when expecting another baby, I just didn't want to have to buy things again. I found that as I went through and sorted our things for the kids, and saw what they are using and have out grown, I was able to come up with so many cute things for baby's room within what we already had.

In the end the only things that we had to buy for baby are the crib and the pack 'n' play. We are starting off with the crib set up next to our bed in our room to make nights easier for the first few months, so the pack 'n' play is standing in his room for changes and play time. I was able to know this time that I've never used things like a changing table, so I kept the room simple and tried to only use things that I can picture him growing with and using for a while.

For the decorations I drew pieces from things that we've had in the kid's rooms over the years, things given to us by dear friends, and things that we have from when Frank and I were children! Notice the hot air balloons? Those are a fun project that the kids and I worked on for baby last week, can't wait to post about making them.

While decorating the room has been satisfying, nothing has been sweeter than preparing baby's clothes. Its is a ritual that I remember from the last days of being pregnant with Jasper and Carys, washing and folding each piece and while touching them picturing his little baby body inhabiting them sometime soon.

We are so excited, but trying to stay balanced with patience. My chiropractor shared a short mantra with me last week when I was expressing my impatience with waiting... she said to remember that whenever baby chooses to come will be the "perfect" time for him to be born. He will chose his perfect timing.

I'm holding onto that, repeating it over and over!

Renovation: The Pink Princess Room

When we bought our new home here in Charleston it was fun that we were able to learn the history of the house. It was built by an older couple as their vacation home, and the whole upstairs was supposed to be for their daughter and her family when they visited, so the space is a bit unusual. Along with a bedroom and two bathrooms, there were a couple of large spaces that we imagine were intended as play and sleeping areas for their grandchildren. There are two spaces upstairs in particular that have taken us a while to figure out the best way to use. This large landing at the top of our stairs was one of them. Finally, we decided to build it into a bedroom for Carys...and we feel a little silly that we began the construction only a few weeks before baby number three is due!

I love to brag about my handsome husband's talents and construction is definitely one of them, he's so good at it and learned so much from renovating our home in Brooklyn.  So he got to work and very quickly finished the room, doing all of the construction himself, he's amazing!

He completed it over the course of just under two weeks, and then moved onto work on making another of those hard to figure out spaces into the baby's room, more on that in my next post!

Right now we are still waiting on the doors for Carys's room to arrive, and we're using a wooden asian style screen that I normally use in my studio as her door until then.

She picked a very sweet color, called "bunny nose pink" for her walls. Originally she had said that she wanted to have a mermaid room, but then the pink took over,

and with the canopy "princess" bed that we gave her for her 5th birthday last April, the same one that I had in my bedroom as a little girl, her room has evolved into a pink princess room.

Since she has always shared a room with Jasper I am so excited for her to have a place now to really let her girl-nature shine! She has her own closet now (still with no door), and many shelves to display toys and pretty things.

There's lots of organization still to come, but she and I are taking it slowly...I'm sure the decorating will continue after baby arrives.

She just loves it, and so do I!

Living, Loving, Decorating...the Porch

Each day I spend so much time on our screened in porch, it is truly my favorite space in our house, in the evenings it just glows, and during the days I've been painting out there, and even from when we first moved in its the space that the kids and I just like to goof around in.

So, this spring I reorganized the space. We shifted the furniture around and I had Frank cut the legs down on our round outdoor dining table that we've had forever. I think its so much more functional as a big coffee table.

One of my favorite new details of the space is that Frank painted the ceiling light blue! It opens up the space and is also a Charleston tradition, painting your porch ceiling blue is said to confuse insects, who think it is the sky...but we just liked the look.

I had fun with the details. The lanterns that we made for our Waldorf Playgroup lantern walk back in Brooklyn, sit right in the middle of our table, beautiful and reminding us of special times with friends.

Along with some new lanterns that are fun in the evenings and remind me of exotic nights in far away places...

Our shelf still holds lots of details, including part of my grandmother's green glass collection that catches the light so perfectly out here. Along with things that we collect, mostly on the beach...I found the large plastic half clam shell (on the second shelf bellow) at a consignment sale and its the perfect spot to throw beach finds and trinkets.

I also filled plastic bins with the kids art supplies on the bottom two shelves, right next to their little table, so that art time is always an option with we are out on the porch.

Its where we often are these days, filling this room with all of the wildness that goes into living.

I've enjoyed Pinterest so much recently, especially as I was gathering ideas for how to organize this room. Do you see the new Moroccan inspired latticed patterned outdoor rug that I got for the porch? Totally inspired by Pinterest! Come on over and check out other things that are inspiring me there.

xo

Vigil: continuity and connectedness

Vigil

Throughout my life I have looked for the continuity of those happy accidents that serve to remind us that each of us really are all deeply connected in a real, tangible, way.

When I was 9 my family moved from Philadelphia to Buenos Aires, leaving all of my friends at that age was hard, as was jumping into a completely foreign place, language and culture, it was something that I struggled to make sense of. However, even there I discovered those marks of continuity. At my international school I met a girl in my class who's father's sister was the college roommate of my parent's best friends. Seems like a remote connection, but those friends of my parents had a daughter who had been my best friend since we were 4, and the girl that I met in my class had played with my best friend on multiple occasions. Finding this out really blew my little mind, and was a source of comfort to me for while, knowing that even so far away there was someone who had played with my old friend made me feel more immediately connected to my new friend. (Many years later I ran into this friend that I made in my class in Argentina, on a street in Washington DC with my baby son, and then even later I served as her doula via email as she waited through the last hard days of her overdue pregnancy, but that is another story)

So, since then I have loved finding these connections, and once I began to look for them I have found them everywhere. Even, within our recent move from NYC to Charleston which felt at first like such a break from everything that we knew, there have been so many of those connections with many of our new friends here.

This has got me thinking about another connection that I have been struggling to make sense of and that connection involves my painting Vigil, whose picture sits at the beginning of this post. The Realtors who worked with us to sell our house in Brooklyn were old friends of ours, I had known them for about 12 years, most of my time in NYC. They understood how much effort and really how much of ourselves we had put into our home through the renovation that we had done and they found wonderful buyers for our home who really appreciated all of the details of that renovation. I can not tell you how much it meant to us to have people taking over our home who really liked everything that we had done in our renovation, which really was a labor of love, you can read my posts about it here. These buyers also fell in love with our art work, which was hanging all over our home when they saw it. They had wanted to buy some of the pieces that we had up, but those pieces that we have hanging in our home are all pieces that we never want to part with. So, our Realtor friends ended up buying my painting Vigil for the buyers as a surprise "moving in" gift, at the big show that we had right before we left.

They told me that that they gave it to the buyers shortly after they moved in, and that they loved it. I was told that they hung it in the kitchen. Knowing that one of my paintings is there in our old home was really hard for me at first, since leaving that space was so difficult. We were so connected to that home, I birthed and raised my babies there. They took their first steps in that kitchen. We renovated that space top to bottom and we know every detail, every fixture, every nail hole. But, as I digested it over these past months I have come to find comfort in the continuity of my painting being there, a piece of me is still in that home. The title of the painting now seems so appropriate and almost prophetic.

Though we have left, it is keeping the Vigil, holding the space for that piece of ourselves that we left behind there.

All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another. ~Anatole France

August Break: Magic tree house

Along with renovating a Brooklyn Brownstone another of Frank's dreams has always been to build a tree house for his kids "someday"...and suddenly, with our new yard we had lots of trees to choose from and "someday" became "now" this summer. Frank got to work at the beginning of July, first making sketches and reading the Black & Decker The Complete Guide: Build Your Kids a Treehouse (Black & Decker Complete Guide) 

What started with four posts cemented into the ground behind Jasper above, quickly become this...

and then this, all done...

with places for telling secrets,

and playing house.

One of my favorite parts is the clear plastic roof to let lots of light inside.

The next step will be picking out a perfect outdoor fabric to make some window and door curtains, to make it a real "hide-out". Frank also plans to build some shelves on the walls so the kids can leave treasures in the tree house and really make it their own. We are also throwing around ideas for painting the tree house, but getting these two to agree on a color is hard! I'm voting for just little pops of color (turquoise!) here and there.

In a case of perfect timing we have been visiting our local library and reading our way through this fun series, the Magic Tree House Boxed Set, Books 1-28 , about a brother and sister who find a magic tree house and go on adventures through the books that they find inside. So the kids are even more excited to have their own tree house now, as if that were possible.

Before and After: the front door, and conclusion

Here we are, the last and final post of my Before and After series on our Brooklyn home! The front door of our house was, of course, one of the first things that we noticed about the house seven years ago when we bought it. Here is the house the day we closed the deal,

After taking down those brown awnings that covered both of the entrances, the front door was one of the first things that we knew we wanted to replace, but, as we worked on larger and bigger projects, eventually renovating the whole house, we got tired of having work done and since the front door worked we simply painted it blue and left it. For seven years. It had gotten to the point where we still talked about replacing it, but really I hardly even noticed it anymore.

Then, in January, as we did the final renovations on the house in preparation for putting it on the market, we knew that the time had finally come to replace the front door. We just knew that a new door would make the house "sparkle".
It felt darkly comedic when we found out that the day the crew could come to put our new front door in was going to be one of the coldest days of the year. Note to self, do not ever replace a front door in the middle of winter! During the installation it felt like our house was having surgery,

Those guys really were so good to work outside in that cold! Once they had installed it, then Frank got to work finishing it off, sealing it and painting it. So, after a few days, much work and many coats of paint. Here is our new front door,

Again, before,

and after,

Frank and I both feel like the new front door is the cherry on top of the house, the finishing touch, the icing on the cake. We love the way it looks, and it feels like it ties everything else together, and gives major curb appeal.

Wow, I love seeing these before and after pictures all together here, I have enjoyed writing about our "before and after tale" so much! It gives a good idea of the scope of the project that we took on with this house. When I look back at the before pictures I tend to feel just how we really didn't know how much work we were getting ourselves into. I remember thinking, "Oh, a little demolition and then we'll just bring in what we want.", if only life were that simple! I think it's a good thing that we didn't have an idea of just how much work was involved, because we might never have started the project. This renovation has been one of the biggest, and most fun, projects that Frank and I have collaborated on. As I mentioned way back in the first part of the tale, renovating a Brooklyn brownstone was one of Frank's dreams. I'm so glad that I joined him in fulfilling that dream.

There are quite a few "old timers" who live in our area. People who have spent their whole lives living right in this part of Brooklyn, who have seen the neighborhood evolve and people come and go. One of them was recently talking to Frank about our house and he said, "You brought that place back to life man.". Which is a quote that I will always treasure. I think we did, I think we brought it back to life after years of neglect. We saw its shining core underneath years of dirt, dust and bad aesthetic choices, and we had the courage to do the work.

It has been the perfect place to live, and start a family. I will always be especially connected to the house as Carys was literally born in it. Even as we will go on, to live and grow in different houses, I will always think of it with deep and abiding love.