The Pursuit of Happiness in Manhattan
Welcome to 2016! This is going to be an amazing and busy year and I am excited about all the plans we have for our Half Classic Six. Our slate of projects is even bigger than last year, but I am super excited that we can get things rolling and accomplish a lot. Priorities: 1: Kitchen renovation 2: Bedroom decoration 3: Bathroom face-lift. Here are our high level plans as well as additional goals/projects I would like to accomplish.
OK, I know…. You are probably tired of reading year in review posts and articles by now, but this one is important (to me at least) so pay attention, there is a quiz at the end, and a prize for the winner! 2015 has been quite a year for Yoav and me. We made huge progress in certain areas of our apartment, and fell way behind in others. As I was relaxing this past weekend, taking in the quiet moments in our currently clean and somewhat ordered home (before the chaos of renovation takes over our place in the next month or so), I looked back over the year and began to go through my posts to remember the changes. And changes were a plenty this past year. Whenever I feel like it is taking forever to get anything done, I just need to look back at where we were. Which in some ways is the entire point of my doing this blog, I wanted to document our process and share it with family and friends as well as anybody else who is curious.
Let’s go back and see just how far Yoav and I have come since January.
Finally I can finally say that 90+ percent of our plans for our new kitchen are finalized. I can also say that just as Hilary has evolved on same sex marriage, we too have evolved on our kitchen plans. We are now planning on doing things we would never have approved of (or even thought of) in the past. With each passing day we are getting super excited because this sh*t is finally getting real! How real?
As we get closer and closer to finally starting our kitchen renovation after many, many, many delays, we are finding that there has been an unexpected benefit to having postponed our renovation for so long. That unexpected benefit is that with each delay comes continued insight to plan as it relates to materials resulting in a much more refined final look which we would never have done had we just gone with our initial plans.
Again the gap in time between posts is longer than I would prefer, but here I am with another useless tidbit about my complete and total obsession with details…
To catch up, I last posted about our making a major shift in plans by abandoning Ikea cabinets with doors by Semihandmade (sorry folks at SemiHandmade, not so sorry for the Ikea folks) for an entirely new cabinet option using Barker Cabinets instead.
This past spring and summer I posted about my dreams and desires for what would be my perfect kitchen and my frustration about how my perfect kitchen is really only available to folks who live in the United Kingdom.
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.
[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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