Catching Up

It's been over six months since our last blog update, but that doesn't mean we haven't been working. While we have been chipping away at a host of home improvements, our progress has definitely been a bit more scattered as we:

• graduated from grad school
• vacationed in New York
• traveled to a number of weddings
• celebrated our one year wedding anniversary
• rooted the Giants along to a World Series win

The room we last left you with was the downstairs bathroom. The final touch was figuring out a replacement for the cabinet doors above the toilet. Let's just say our male guests didn't need a mirror reflecting their "release." We chipped the mirrors off and Ilana re-purposed the old doors with some amazing tiling work:

The final product:

One of the other rooms that we left you with was the den. As you may recall, we took out the old closets (again for mirror-related reasons -- why did this place have so many GD mirrors?). We wanted to replace the built-in closet with something that offered more shelving options and could, if necessary, be moved. So, as we so often do, we looked to the brilliant minds at IKEA for a flexible and affordable solution. Here's Ilana working on Phase 1 (of many, many phases):

And here is the start of Phase 2:

A couple of phases later, we had:

And eventually:

The next project was to extend out our 2-inch mantle to something that you could actually put something on. Here's what we started with:

And with Seth's awesome woodworking skills it became:

We then turned our attention to the upstairs bathroom. It's funny that when we moved in, we felt that the bathroom was the nicest space in the house. It was the only room that had actually been upgraded since the initial 1969 construction and seemed so futuristically mid-80s in our otherwise oh-so-70s abode. But after making almost every other room in the house our own, the bathroom seemed out of place. We stink at remembering to take before shots, so the light is in this picture is new, but the rest is not:

Another shot, minus the rusted medicine cabinet mirror, but including the cracked sink and broken vanity:

Out with old (demo is never as easy as they make it look on tv):

The mirror hole gets sealed up:

And to get the cabinet shelf to fit with our piping, a small late night modification had to be made (luckily, the Unabomber was in the neighborhood and is handy with a circular saw):

Behold, a new bathroom:

We also painted the walls, but the color is light silver, so it's difficult to see the different in a photo. Also, that cabinet in the corner used to have a mirrored door:

But since we can't ever just leave things be, Ilana used her special spray paint + texture technique to transform it:

Boy, we really hate mirrors.

After the bathroom, and just because she's so good at it, Ilana finished up the caulking of the crown molding in the bedroom:

That brings us up to date. We have a ton of touch-up work to do on all of the rooms, but our attention is now turning to the grand finale: the office. So, be on the lookout for our next entry. Quite a cliffhanger we're leaving our four (maybe three depending on how busy Abby is these days) blog readers with...

But before we bid our loyal fans adieu, let's end by celebrating the completion of an entirely different type of project. After months combing Petfinder.com and meeting all kinds of dogs in all kinds of random Petco parking lots, we proudly present Benny, a new addition to our family. He's a fabulous dog, but much like Seymour, refuses to engage in manual labor: