mad maison

How unfortunate–a quick post in September teasing about a reveal and then nothing for months. There are reasons good and bad, big and small for our absence. The biggest reason for the delays is because we’ve bought the house that we’ve been living in for over two years. Given that the house was already in our family, our original plan was to live in the house without purchasing it. After rehabbing almost every room inside the house, we starting thinking about and planning the major work that needs to be completed on the outside. As we started to add up the costs required, we all realized that mad purchasing the house made the most sense. Buying any property in San Francisco is a time-consuming process, even (or perhaps especially) for an in-family purchase. It took us over three months to complete the process–but we’re happy to report that the house is officially ours (and the bank’s, of course). Once the process began in earnest, I didn’t want to tempt the fates with a blog post here (I’m a little superstitious). Since our last post, we’ve actually been working on a few projects that we’ll report here soon, including:
1. Rehabbing our front hallway.
2. Refreshing our living room fireplace.
3. Rewiring one of our ceiling lights.

The biggest project is the one we’re still immersed in–at the end of December we started to rehab our kitchen. We’re far from done, but we’ve accomplished enough where we can see the light at the end of the tunnel. The kitchen project also means the whole house is in a bit of chaos–throwing a bit of a wrench in the “reveals” of our other projects. But you’ll hear (and see more) soon.

2012 is also big for mad maison because we’ll start the process of improving the exterior of our little maison. It’s been decades since the house was painted–and it’s in need of a thorough restoration and refresh. In addition, we still have a kitchen to finish and a bathroom to rehab. There will be plenty more to see here, I promise.

I have no excuses. I’ve been back from my business travels for a couple of weeks now, and honestly, it took me a while to recuperate. After the Thanksgiving holiday (and I hope all of our readers had a pleasant holiday), I knew I was starting to feel better when I cooked honest-to-goodness meals in our kitchen every night last week. Our kitchen was remodeled in the 80’s, and we had some new appliances installed before we moved in. So while the honey-oak cabinets and flowered wallpaper isn’t to mad’s taste, it’s a little more fun to cook in that our tiny galley-style NYC apartment kitchen. After all that wholesome nutrition, it’s not surprising that I felt inclined to get back to work. Mike and I attacked our bedroom walls and we have removed almost all of the wallpaper. Mike and I are confident that with some additional work during this week, we’ll be ready for plaster repair next weekend. Our goal is to have the bedroom walls complete (including paint) by the end of December. I know I say this with every room, but I do believe this is the hardest room we’ll have to complete. Unlike the dining room or other bedroom, the room we’re working on now (like the living room before it) has painted-over wallpaper, which is particularly challenging to remove. But thanks to copious amounts of DIF wallpaper removal gel, a Wagner power steamer, and lots of elbow grease, we’re getting it off. The fact that wallpaper has “come back” as a design trend boggles our minds–and we think anyone who is thinking of installing wallpaper in their home should come to ours and help us get this stuff off the walls.

In the meanwhile, I was looking at one of my favorite blogs, Apartment Therapy, and read an interesting post about a simple remodel that involves the two primary things mad plans to do with our kitchen–paint the cabinets and replace the counters with butcher block. Feel free to take a peak at a place that a little more “finished” than ours.

A little eye candy. Photo credit: thekitchn.com

Progress on mad maison, both the house and the blog, has slowed a bit due to my October business travel schedule. Over the course of one month, I will have flown over 20,000 miles. Traveling for work has its perks (you get to see colleagues you normally wouldn’t, and in the case of my most recent travels, I’ve gotten to see customers as well, which is always fun), but it is always grueling. There’s no sleeping in to get over your jet lag, very little decompression time, and the knowledge that your “regular” work will be waiting for you in exponential quantities when you eventually get home. And I can tell you, even when your house isn’t perfect, you miss it terribly. Even though the water pressure here in my UK hotel room is better than the mad shower, I still miss home. And of course, there’s the guilt I feel about taking Mike from his hometown to the city by the bay, only to leave him alone to scrape wallpaper and care for our cats. Of course, he’s a trooper and happy to help, but my guilt persists anyway.

When we were originally planning to transform my father’s childhood home into mad maison, we were comforted by the notion that two of the rooms (our bedroom and the living room) didn’t have wallpaper. We were wrong. They have the worst kind of wallpaper–insidious, hidden under layers of paint, and unevenly applied over badly cracked plaster. We’ve repaired the walls in the living room, and Mike has been tackling the bedroom inch by painful inch. It’s taking every ounce of steam, DIF goo, and elbow grease Mike has to get the wallpaper off, but he is making progress. Until then, we’re still living in a serious state of transition and we’re eager for that to change. I’m also eager to actually scrape by Mike’s side when I return from Europe this weekend.

They may not be slippers, but they are red. Perhaps if I click my heels in them I'll be home again.

I know that we owe a full set of pictures on the living room, but I thought I would share the next room mad has started working on. We were foolish enough to think that no room would present us with more challenging wallpaper than the living room. I was wrong. The room that will be our bedroom has walls that are in terrible need of plaster repair. I’m guessing someone before mad realized that, because the walls are comprised of some kind of mysterious cardboard-bandage-wallpaper hybrid that sits on top of some kind of magic adhesive, but underneath a layer of peachy-pink paint. Yup, it’s that bad. Honestly, mad would have simply repaired the cracked plaster and painted on top of the mystery walls if not for the visible horizontal “stripes” of wallpaper that can be seen on the two long walls around the 6-foot mark. So, mad has been diligently removing layer after layer of mystery substance. The only thing that keeps us going is the knowledge that one day we’ll have a real bedroom with walls that we completely understand.

Can you see the mystery stripe? It's really there, I promise.

You’ve heard the adage measure twice, cut once? Today, mad is going to remind our readers why that adage exists.

One of the benefits of living in an older Victorian is the beautiful woodwork that surrounds our windows and doorways. The woodwork, coupled with the relatively small size of our living room, inspired mad to get roman shades to cover the downstairs windows. My grandparents used to have both shades and sheers on the windows, so we decided to go with something a little more sleek and straightforward. I found beautiful red cotton shades. I knew we wanted to do an interior mount on the shades, so I measured the windows multiple times and called the company to make sure I was getting the right size. When the shades arrived, we learned that they weren’t as long as stated. After calling the company they sent me an extra shade for free and I found an awesome seamstress to graft the extra shade onto the original three shades. Unfortunately, when we started to install the shades we realized that one of the three windows in the living room is two inches wider than the other two. I measured twice–but I didn’t measure each window twice. Thankfully, mad had already planned to use the same shades in the the dining room, so I can use one of the recently lengthened shades in there. But of course, we still need to receive and install the wider shade on the middle window. Yesterday, we installed the two shades that fit in the living room with the assistance of the brother-man. It seems that many things with this house turn out to be a little more complicated than originally planned–the brother-man had to drill an extra hole in the metal bracket so everything would fit correctly, but once he did everything moved along nicely. We love the color–especially against the paint color on the living room walls.

Of course, this means we can’t show you the full reveal until we receive the wider shade for the middle window (lengthen it if needed) and install it. Honestly, we’re pretty happy with two nice, new window coverings. I’m clearly getting easier to please.

our beautiful new window coverings--not on every window, but we're happy to have them on any at this point.

My apologies, loyal readers. A series of annoying (yet not too devastating) setbacks plus an unrelenting work schedule have prevented me from posting lately. I’ll be back in regular form very soon. Shall I provide you with some teasers?

• The tarantula is gone and a light is up
• The new living room mantle is painted
• That old adage “measure twice, cut once” is still relevant today
• While the living room is not perfect, we’ve started to tackle our second room of the house

So you can see, there are plenty of reasons to come back to madmaison.com.

Transitioning from a nicely apportioned, full-service apartment building to a 100-year-old house that needs a lot of work is an interesting experience.  We can accept that we’re only living in two rooms and can’t remember what it feels like to have a rug underfoot. But we cannot accept the pull-chain light in the bathroom. Allow me to explain. The bathroom upstairs has some “period” details. Like the claw-foot tub that if given the opportunity, Duckie the cat would spend all day and night hidden under. So we keep the door to said bathroom closed. This wouldn’t be a big deal if not for the pull-chain light. Do you remember these? Perhaps from when you visited your grandmother’s house in the 1970’s (because by now she’s updated it). It also wouldn’t be such a big deal if the pull-chain light was somewhere other than the middle of the room right over the shower rod. Or if we didn’t have 1,000 year old plaster walls that would infect us with typhus and destroy our humor if we tried to rip them up to install a light switch (you would have thought that Gerard the electrician saw a ghost dropping a hair dryer into a tub filled with water when we asked if he could install said switch). So by week two in the new mad maison, we were ready for one of those new-fangled geeky appliances known as a light switch. We had dreams of going into the bathroom in the middle of the night and not stubbing our toe and stumbling into the walls while keeping our legs crossed looking for the darn chain. Like Joan of Arc or Deborah from the Torah, I was motivated to act.

I saw a light emanating from my laptop. It led me to google. And the internet spoke to me. Through a fellow blogger who long since abandoned her post, I found out about the wireless light socket switch. I’ve seen (and used) similar devices for outlets, but did not know that you could get such a device for a light socket. And so, my friend amazon.com fulfilled our needs and sent us the apparatus. Of course, we had to switch the light fixture out before we could use it–but once we had everything set up the fog lifted and the angels sang (or maybe that was just a cat meowing from outside the bathroom door). We can now walk into the bathroom and turn on the light with a flip of a switch. It might not be as good as an elevator, porter, and super on call, but it will placate us for a while, at least. Until we find the next little thing.

who knew this little device could inspire such prose?

OK, perhaps we’re grasping at straws, but mad is feeling pretty good today. We’ve been working hard over the past few weeks: scrubbing and scraping, and scrubbing some more. And while mad has finished tasks in the legal sense (scraping wallpaper off the living room walls, setting up our home network), today we completed something that doesn’t have another chapter. Our doorbell was broken. And when you live in a house with a scary metal gate over the front door (another task that’s almost complete), you realize having a doorbell helps. So today, thanks to spirit and wit (and a screwdriver), mad replaced the doorbell with one that actually works. Now, to say that mad completed this task is a little bit of a stretch. Mike is the member of mad that purchased the doorbell, he’s also the person who balanced himself at the top of the stepladder and removed the old, rusted doorbell, and he’s the one who installed the new doorbell. However, Mike says I participated in critical ways: the online research to diagnose the problem and suggest a remedy, reading the documentation, and handing Mike the screwdriver when he stood perched atop the stepladder. Of course, I also completed the test ringing of said bell. I admit, Mike is the real hero of mad today, but I’m happy to serve as witness and documentarian for this historic milestone.

Our completed doorbell project; please ignore the wallpaper, that's a different project.

Yes, we made it. Our cross country drive went pretty much as planned (more later, I promise). Today, our first full day in SF, the cable guy came and hooked up our internet access. In other respects, we’re camping indoors. It’s true that you don’t appreciate the little things like running water and a working toilet in the same room until you’ve lost it. Therefore, mad will be focused on some critical infrastructure projects this week before I go back to work–removing wallpaper and painting will have to wait until the little things like electricity and plumbing are addressed. But we do have broadband, which placates me a little and makes it easier to resolve the other issues.