The Pursuit of Happiness in Manhattan
The Apartment
A few weeks back, I entered our Entry Gallery into the Apartment Therapy Before and After – Big Reveal contest and yesterday they POSTED MY ENTRY! Woo Hoo!
Please visit our contest entry and consider voting for our entry by favoriting the post. (Registration as a commenter is required.) Feel free to comment as well! If we are fortunate enough to be in top four most favorited, we will be put up to a vote for biggest before and after change.
The reveal!
Ok, so last week I posted about what we started with and the process, and left you with a few images to get you thinking…. Now your patience will be rewarded….
One of the very first things that drew me to even look at the apartment on that day in May last year was the floor plan indicated a very long entry hall. And when we went to the open house, we were not disappointed. The front door opened to a lovely 22′ long and generous 4′ 5″ wide hallway with beautiful quarter-sawn oak floor bordered in mahogany. Immediately, I was dreaming about how we could use it as gallery space to display photography and art.
Last week marked a one year and a lot of change since Yoav and I sat down at a table with a group of disparate people, all with one common interest of varying degrees. Our mission, transferring the ownership of our apartment from the sellers to us, the buyers (or really our bank). Like most everything in New York City, nothing can be simple or cheap.
Part of the joy (or is that sorrow?) of owning an old home is that things inevitably wear out. Sometimes it is a slow process where it occurs over years and other times it is an unexpected emergency where you are forced to address it immediately. This (above image) is what it came down to in our bathroom. A bit embarrassing as this was cleaned less than a week ago. Fortunately for us, there was no emergency requiring expensive immediate attention. But that doesn’t mean that there is no sense of urgency. Drip, drip, drip…
[Mott’s Modern Plumbing Catalog from 1910. This would have certainly been a fancy kitchen in 1910, but it is still quite utilitarian compared to the “Old World” style kitchens we see today. Image: NYPL]
Kitchen floors and walls….. Using common tile and elevating it to classy and timeless.
[Update at bottom] As the plans for our kitchen renovation are forming and the anticipated start date of
[Photo: This is one of the more beautiful kitchen combos I have run across in my countless hours of obsessing and planning our new kitchen. Source: Remodelista]
In my last post, I went into great detail about how compromise won when it came to figuring out what we are going to do for our cabinets. I am completely in love with the shaker cabinets which are commonly available in the UK, but are not easily attainable in the good old boring US of A. But, in the end, I think I have a solution we can be happy with
“You say “Stiffkey”, “I’ll say Stewkey”. . .
Those close to me know that I have been obsessing over our kitchen design for months, and months, and months, and…. you get the idea. And in doing so, I have discovered that what I thought I liked three months ago may not be what I like today. As I have delved deeper and deeper into the possibilities of what we can do, I have made surprising discoveries about my taste and desires for the new kitchen.
Hi, my name is Devyn. This was my blog about the adventures of finding, buying, renovating, fixing up, restoring, DIY'ing, and decorating a part of New York housing legacy. We have left NYC for a new life in Philadelphia. Visit my new blog Our Philly Row and read all about our "fixer-upper-ing" an 1852 rowhouse
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