MONDAY MORNING ANNOUNCEMENTS

Remember that time I so brazenly said I wanted to start posting more often and on a regular schedule...and then didn't post for over a week? That happened. Life happens - however I'm back and ready for action! I am a YES for posting regularly starting with something I would like to call "Monday Morning Announcements"! A little weekend update if you will. This past week and a half has been filled with so many wonderful real-life things that I haven't really had time to internet! And so, these are my really good reasons why I haven't posted:

1.  To start things off, I graduated from my 200 hour yoga teacher training course! I am now a certified 200RYT - aka "Registered Yoga Teacher". Since October I have been taking part in an intensive, empowering, incredible training that has taught me so much beyond yoga! Every other weekend and every Wednesday night I took the time to be with 27 other incredible world-changers to learn how to accomplish amazing things in this world!

2.  And some extremely exciting news: the same weekend I graduated I was asked to help my amazing yoga studio with their expansion into a new space - opening March 1! (EDIT: Looks like opening is pushed back to April 1). I'm sure you all realize March 1st is only about a month away so the deadlines have been coming fast and furious. This is super exciting and commercial design is not exactly in my comfort zone but the two women who own the studio are incredible clients and amazing friends and this is going to be the most badass place to practice yoga in Texas. Absolute fact. I'm not really sure how much I can share right now, but hopefully after the grand opening I can get into a bit of the process!

3.  Equally distracting is this little guy (search #rookaroux on instagram for more of this sweet face). Houston's newest dog park just opened down the street and he may be a dog, but he is capable of manipulating the full range of human emotion; guilt being his strong suit. I've been doing my best to fulfill his dog park needs while meeting all the deadlines or else he sits by me when I work plotting  the most effective way to get my attention - usually in the form of nipping my legs, howling wildly, or actively trying to knock my coffee cup out of my hand and onto my laptop. I want to be annoyed but look at that face.

4. Things at the Wrightwood house are a little slow. We're waiting on the Houston Historic Preservation Committee to meet and hopefully approve us as a landmark (I honestly can't remember the official designation but it's the slightly-less-special one that still gets us discounts on permitting).

5.  The tile in the kitchen is all down (grouting today!). The floors are covered with butcher paper to protect them from our ogre-like steps but I just cannot WAIT to show you all the finished product!

6.  Finally, the bathrooms at Wrightwood are getting ready for floors too. Be expecting an actual post on that this week. (Seriously, I'm promising you this, would I lie? Don't answer that.) This specific picture is the half-bath we're adding under the stairs! If any of you know of a good source for 2" hexagonal tiles in a nice soft grey I will bless you with the warmest batch of just-baked break and bake cookies.

I'm recommitting to this whole blogging thing because I love it and it's something I want in my life so I'm going to make the time to keep y'all informed!

DELIVERIES

This weekend was treacherously cold and wet, not a lot of progress was made at the house and I decided sleeping fully dressed is the only way I'm going to survive the winter. One exciting thing did happen though: we found out that our suburban can handle 1,100 pounds of tile. Eleven...hundred. (BTW, ignore the obvious calculation error in the text. Clearly her brain was fried by the sheer prospect of unloading all that tile. Each box weighs somewhere around SIXTY pounds.) Thats the kitchen tile folks and what I'll be spending my day installing (#DIYtotheMAX) because the stove gets delivered this weekend and we want the delivery men to put it right in place.

 Moving the tile inside was enough work, thank you very much!

Just a little insight into what sort of look we're going for with the tile. It's not actual slate, but it's really pretty, durable, and (somehow) less heavy. The color changes beautifully depending on the light - greens, blues, grays, earthy browns - and plays off the existing wood floors in the best way. We'll be looking for a good gray grout instead of a stark white, and laying it in a running bond pattern perpendicular to the island. I really can't wait to share with you guys. The light bounces off the tile much like in the lower picture and despite the dark color really brings life and light into the kitchen - exactly as it should be!

In other news it's now 2015 and I'm busy making resolutions (I think a kind way to do that is to use the entire month of January to ease into new and better habits). One of those resolutions is to get on a 5-day-a-week posting schedule by March (and the sooner the better)! I hope ya'll keep tuning in, because I love sharing this process with all of you!

OVERHAULED HISTORIC: EXTERIOR PROGRESS

Happy New Year everyone! This is the perfect time for fresh starts and so...I finally present to you: Wrightwood. Lets be honest, I probably should have started with this post but I just got so EXCITED and had to post the other stuff! Having seen the inside of the house as it was when we bought it - you might be thinking "oh honey, why??".  THIS is why. Look at this pretty lady! True, when we bought her she had massive holes in the roof (I visited one day when it was raining and a witnessed water pouring down the inside face of a wall), tenacious vines were growing in and out of the walls, vinyl siding, and some sort of scary, cementitious, yellow paint covering everything. Forty-five completely out-of-shape wood frame double hung windows that needed repairing. First things first, we fixed that roof, I started obsessively watching you-tube videos about how to repair 100-year-old windows, and we got right on fixing her all up.

We removed the vinyl siding all over the house to reveal the original wood, waterfall siding...which then needed to all be sanded down and prepped for priming and painting. We also updated the front porch area. The structure was all there, but we faced out the columns to give them a more proportionate and stately appearance and we added a banister to the upstairs balcony that brought the handrail up to code (and made it look even fancier...form AND function? My favorite!). In the upper eaves we replaced the pressed vinyl panels that looked like shingles with actual cedar shingles - they're really beautiful, but they stand out pretty extremely now that the house is painted. We're really unsure what we're going to do in the end.

Picking paint colors is a whole different ball game. Exterior colors are tough...you need to test a large enough swatch on the wall to really see it. And you need to try it on all sides of the house and give yourself enough time to observe it in different lighting conditions and at different times of day. Oh boy did we ever test colors. I actually lost count; yellows, grays, blues. For a couple weeks my life felt like that scene in Devil Wears Prada..."You know, it's just that all these blue paints look exactly the same to me...".

But they aren't

They're close, but one is too green, one is too purple, too light, too dark, turquoise, lapis, cerulean...we were getting down to the wire, the primer was on (and oh so green, but what a difference!)...we needed to make a decision.

We pulled the trigger on a really crisp, clean gray: (Sherwin Williams' "Online" - the most modern thing to happen to this house in decades).

Every time I look at these images I get giddy! This house is just so dang good-looking! Theres still a lot of work to be done: touch ups, clean ups, and some final decisions on the colors of the columns out front. There is a skirt that runs around the base of the entire house. The skirt is constructed of wider siding and flares out from the walls to direct water away from the foundation of the house. And it's cute. We'll be painting it a subtly darker shade of gray than the all over house color. As you can also see: all the window trim has been painted white and the window frames themselves are dark, charchol-y gray - the resulting effect is modern, clean and updated but at the same time effortlessly classic. Another color we were super excited about picking (and you can see just a little sneak peek of in the after shot) is the porch ceiling blue - known in some parts as "haint" blue. I'll get a little more into that process, the history of blue porch ceilings and the color we finally chose a little later. (The color we chose is perfect.)

The tile for the kitchen floors is getting picked up today, and I've been working madly on drawings to get this baby permitted so we can get her inspected and really get the interior moving along! Plumbing, electrical, all the guts need to be updated and checked out by the city before we can get to the fun stuff on the inside. This doesn't mean we haven't been hard at work planning for what we want to happen. Get pumped, prettier posts are on the horizon!