Townhouse Update #8

Hello from Croatia!  I’m over here for a week to spend some time with Mike who is finishing up his bicycle ride from London to Dubrovnik via Venice.  He’s a tired boy, but we wanted to spend some time together taking in some sites.  Because of the storm that was headed toward Charlotte, I had to change my flights.  That meant that I couldn’t visit Little Miss and enjoy her birthday party with her.  Instead of flying south out of Lexington, my new flight schedule took me north so that the hurricane couldn’t mess up my trip.

So much has happened since Mike has been away, and other than showing progress on our Instagram stories, I haven’t kept you up with the goings-on.  I really have been operating on nervous energy the past month.  Being in charge of a building site while living there took a lot of  time and stamina.  I might have aged a little.  (Insert unhappy face!!!)  There are still some minor things that have to be done, but we get home Saturday, and our belongings are arriving next Monday.  We will still have workers in and out tweaking things.  All of the dirty/dusty work is finished, and I have done the major clean-up.  I’m only going to show you the main floor today.  We will have big reveals as things get finished and decorated so these are very much in-progress iphone photos.

The floors are finished and look gorgeous.  We selected a dark walnut for the stain.  We ended up using two different companies to do the floors because of scheduling.  One did the upstairs, and one did the main floor.

The kitchen cabinets and counter tops are in.  I am absolutely crazy about the way it is looking.  They still have to add the hardware, panels on the sides, shelves, and cover the fan vent over the cabinets. I am MOST excited about the fan hood.  We had it custom made in Cincinnati, and I consider it the star of the kitchen.  It is steel coated in enamel with stainless steel strips.  I just realized that I forgot to take a photo of the bar and the beam.   You’ll get to seem them soon, though.

We combined two different counter top materials.  One is a dark walnut that goes on both ends of the stove wall.  The pieces were custom made and look absolutely like fine furniture.  The other material is a man-made quartz created by Italian engineers.  As you probably know, we had real Carrara marble in our last kitchen, and although I loved it, I didn’t love the upkeep.  I wrote a blog post about it here.  The quartz we now have looks just like marble, but it doesn’t have the personality issues that natural marble has.  We used a big slab on the island, a big slab on the back splash and smaller pieces on the bar and cooking areas.

The bonus is that we discovered that there is enough left over so that we can use it here in the pantry.  It is being fabricated now and will be installed when we get home.

Both of the fireplaces have been rebuilt and tiled and are waiting for their logs.  I’m going to write a post about how to update a fireplace.

 

The powder room is almost finished.  We are still waiting for the wallpaper to be hung.  My wallpaper man has been in the hospital and said I need to find someone else.  If any Lexington readers have suggestions, I would love to know.  The painters used navy sizing on the wall so it gives me a feel for what the navy paper will look like.

Most of the shutters are up.  We still are waiting for the kitchen and living room shutters to arrive.

I had Ballard Designs make these seats for the kitchen island.  The fabric is Sunbrella and will be resilient to spills.

The stairway looks fantastic with its new railings and paint.

That’s the latest update.  The biggest amount of work still needs to be done by the kitchen installers and the electricians, but the movers are coming.  We will work really hard the day we after we get home to do another cleaning, take up the construction paper on the floor, and get ready.

 

Take care.

 

 

 

 

 

Take care.