We wanted the bathroom’s style to blend in with the rest of our old 1940’s house, using both new and vintage materials. We were going for a look that “the bathroom has been this way all along” and that it just had a few noticeable green updates over the years, like low flow fixtures, Low-E coated/ vinyl window, and florescent lighting over head. After two months of using it, we absolutely love the bathroom and wish we had done it…
The retro bathroom remodel we have been working on, kind of off and on for the last year, is finally finished! Our reinvented early 1940’s bathroom included walling up the doorway to the laundry room, lots of framing, breaking through the opposite wall and opening it into our bedroom, jackhammering out part of a concrete slab under the floor to make room for drains, insulating, updating all the electrical & plumbing, adding venting, adding the cast iron tub, moving the…
Yesterday was a “Murphy’s Law” kind of day. In Southern California, it never rains here in the summer. We usually have a long dry season from May to November. I bet you can see where this post is going…We were confident that we would be okay temporarily storing the furniture from our kitchen and the new cabinets for the laundry room/ mudroom/ office outside for a week while the rooms were gutted down to the subfloor of 1 x 6…
Tired Old Vinyl Floor When we bought our home, the polyvinyl chloride flooring, often mistakenly referred to as linoleum, that the previous homeowners put in the kitchen wasn’t in too bad of shape. Although we didn’t care for the faux tile or how easily it got dirty, it wasn’t that ugly nor did we want to rip out something just because of ascetics. We decided to wait until it was truly in need of replacing, and considering it was 10…
Last week I had to stop vacillating and finally make a decision in order to buy the retro colored tile for our mid century bathroom renovation and begin tiling. When it comes to making any kind of big ticket purchase or long term decisions, I ponder over them for days, weeks, or even months, rather than easily choosing. Tile fits under both of those categories. It didn’t help that the tile manufacturer, B & W Tile, had plenty of different…
Preserving the Look of Our 1940s House In remodeling and decorating, we try to respect the original character of our 1944 mid century home, and for our housing track, as well as most California homes from the 1920s to the 1960s, ceramic tile surfaces and counter tops were all the rage when they were first built. It has been frustrating that there are so few sources on TV and the web for preserving or recreating retro designs or original vintage…
Hoping to provide refuge and bring more solitary bees, like the native Valley Carpenter Bee, into our yard, the kids and I created homemade carpenter bee houses over the weekend.
Over the course of the last few weeks, I have been dismayed to find more than a half dozen dead female Valley Carpenter Bees, Xylocopa varipuncta, in both the backyard and the front yard. I don’t think the dog is responsible for their deaths because I also found one on the ground at K’s house across the street last week. Plus, the dog doesn’t hunt bees out front, nor have I ever seen him go after these, just honey bees. Disclosure:…
Now that our wet season is pretty much over, it is time to switch back to gray watering in the in the back yard garden. For a little over 5 years we have been using some of the water from our washer machine to irrigate part of the backyard. During most of that time, the washer machine water was just sent out through a hole I haphazardly made in the laundry room window and into a homemade surge tank. I…
I have to give my husband’s best friend’s grandma a big thank you when I see her. Back in the 1940s and 1950s, after she and her husband bought their home, she created a scrapbook full of clippings of home decorating ideas she liked. It has hundreds of either black and white or color images from a variety of old magazines and catalogs, everything from cute kitchen nooks, to furniture, to baby nurseries. Sadly, about 5 years ago, her home…