/Metrie

THE ONE ROOM CHALLENGE | WEEK 5 UPDATE | DETAILS, DETAILS

Raise your hand if the last 5 weeks have flown by in a sawdusted swirl of activity! My, how one little project – when added on top of two full-time jobs and two full-time kids for two full-time grown ups – can make the time simply evaporate! But here we are at Week 5 of the One Room Challenge and things are starting to get good.

If you’re only just joining in on the fun and aren’t familiar with what this madcap adventure is all about, check out my intro post on the One Room Challenge as well as my updates for Weeks Two, Three and Four.

I love this crazy stage of a design project, when the details descend upon the space and the “after” starts to take shape out of the dust and chaos. We still have SO much to do, but here’s where things are at right this minute:

Our amazing French Curves baseboard from Metrie has been primed and cut and is ready to be installed and painted. I love the dimension and elegance of this profile, and it connects so well with all of the paneling we have throughout the rest of the house. Très élégant.

The matching casing from Metrie is just as lovely and ready to be filled and painted. Getting there!!!

Now onto one of my favourite solutions in this space. As you’ll remember from our hideous “before” photos, we have a water heater and furnace in our laundry room that could not be moved. I wasn’t willing to settle for those elephants in the room, so I worked with the amazing Don + Ed at Upper Canada Specialty Hardware to come up with an elegant solution. We built a bulkhead to accommodate the header track and installed a matching floor track in order to allow us to install their beautifully functional and totally fluid Crowder sliding door system in front of the water heater and furnace. Using these gorgeous raw white oak slab doors from Metrie, we have now almost finished installing what will be a most elegant solution to a most unattractive problem.

It was the solution to that problem that led me to the design choice of the raw white oak floating shelf {above} instead of uppers on the cabinetry wall. I love the clean lined openness of it, and I love that it speaks to the humble poetry of the natural and unstained wood of the Metrie doors on the opposite wall of the room. We called an audible on this one and had my amazing furniture maker Matthew make it for us. We were just getting to the point where it was clear that we were not going to get everything done on our own, and it was the best decision we could have made, as it looks gorgeous! Our incredible contractor Pete came over last night to help Graham install it as it was truly a two-man job, and I have to tell you, I L-O-V-E love it!

Our CREE Canada pot lights are finally installed and they have transformed our dark little dungeon into a light, bright and airy space. I am extra happy about them because CREE pot lights are no ordinary pot lights. They are LED pot lights, meaning that they are so energy efficient we may not have to change a bulb for the next 20 years! Unlike LED’s of the past, these babies have come a long way and offer a warm, natural-looking light that is not at all harsh or hard to look at. My Eco-Chic conscience is very happy about this design choice, and my next house will have CREE Canada LED pot lights from stem to stern!

Our amazing Blanco sink from The Home Depot is in place and ready to be hooked up to the plumbing which is all kinds of exciting! This sink is so generous and will be perfect for soaking soccer cleats and stained shirts and cleaning out paintbrushes and garden tools and taking care of just about any other messy job we can throw at it. Just what every mom of boys needs!

On the organizational front, these incredible Tyvek bins from TooFifteen are being assembled as we speak and will grace the top of our beautiful floating white oak shelf with effortless style. If you follow me on Instagram you will have seen another photo I posted of a TooFifteen bin earlier this week. I am still swooning over their elegant simplicity. To me they embody a kind of Scandinadian {Scandinavian + Canadian} aesthetic that I’m crazy about. They are perfectly imperfect in their rumpled, casual sophistication, and they are remarkably sturdy and functional despite their paper-like appearance. They are equally as strong wet as they are dry which means you can even plant a tree in one if you’re so inclined {I already have plans to do this with my Christmas tree this year!} and they wipe clean really easily, resisting oil, grease and stains like a champ. They are the perfect mix of feminine and tough all at the same time. Totally my jam.

Again with the Instagram reference {go follow me there if you don’t already!}, but I posted a concept I had for the labels for the TooFifteen bins earlier this week. While I loved the concept, the black ink blots were too harsh for the stark and simple beauty of the TooFifteen bins, so I collaborated with my friend Aileen from Plume Calligraphy who gave me a calligraphy lesson earlier this week and helped me find my calligraphy-nib-soul-mate. At Aileen’s suggestion, I also played with some gouache instead of ink and landed on what you see above for the bin labels.

What do you think?

I still have lots to learn from Aileen in the calligraphy department, but I was pretty happy with the result. {You should follow her on Instagram too – her work is amazing!}

Speaking of following along, go check out what all the other beauties are up to as a part of the Spring 2015 edition of the One Room Challenge!

Coco + Kelley * Jana Bek * Autumn Clemons * The English Room * Vanessa Francis * Greige Design * Hi SugarplumI Heart Organizing * Jenna Sue Design * Stephanie Kraus * The Pursuit of Style * Julia Ryan * Savvy Home Simple Details * Simply Grove * 6th Street Design * Jill Sorensen * Swoon Worthy * Waiting On Martha * Kimberly Shlegel Whitman * and my friends and linking participants Lisa Canning and Abby M. Interiors. Go to Calling It Home to check out all of the 150+ Linking Participants for the April 2015 edition of the One Room Challenge!

And now I’m off to hit the to-do list with Graham, including:
* Hook up the plumbing to the sink and install the faucet
* Finish installing baseboard
* Fill holes and paint trimwork
* Finish installing sliding doors
* Install backsplash
* Style, shoot and REVEAL!

One more week! Can’t wait to show you the final “ta-da” and see everyone else’s transformations as well. Soon, my loves!

xo
s.

P.S. Couldn’t resist including a little teaser of the extra “bonus” room I decided to tack onto this design dare deadline. Marine blue + dove grey crosses = total eclipse of the heart. Swoon! More soon…



By |April 30th, 2015|4 Comments

THE ONE ROOM CHALLENGE | WEEK FOUR | I Have This Thing With Floors

OK, so I have a confession to make: I have this thing with floors. I have since, well, forever. Looking back on over a decade of design projects, I can’t think of a single house where I haven’t created a tile carpet or custom tile pattern of some kind. Quite seriously, in every bathroom, entryway and otherwise tiled room of every house I’ve ever done. Not for the sake of overkill. For the sake of custom design. And for the love of details. They are, after all, a love language.

So it should come as no surprise that when it came time to design my laundry room, the floor was front and central in my mind. So much so, that I scoured the earth {OK, so just the Americas} for exactly what I was looking for. And friends, I found it!

But I was not satisfied with just finding my treasure and keeping it to myself. No, no, I wanted to make sure this tile would be accessible to everyone – designer or otherwise – and so I called upon my long-time friend Enrique at Creekside Tile here in Toronto to see if he would be willing to be the importer. The awesome news is, he said yes which means I can now point you in the direction of an incredible tile purveyor who can help you access these amazing encaustic cement tiles {along with just about any other pattern of encaustic cement, marble, ceramic, porcelain or glass your design-loving heart could desire!}. Go see him. He will not disappoint you.

And without further ado…It. Is. IN!!!

I can’t wait to show you even more of it with the full reveal and proper photos. It is graphic and dramatic yet somehow feminine and classic all at once, and I lurv it. A lot.

If you follow me on Instagram, you’ll know I posted this photo earlier today of the amazing Lewis Dolin brass bar cabinet pulls from Upper Canada Specialty Hardware.

They are so pretty I want to bite them! Perfectly crisp, brushed brass bars of beauty. It’s a lot of alliteration, I know. They’re worth it. Who knew four cabinet pulls could make a girl so happy?

That of course leads us back to the Gold vs. Brass debate of last week. Here’s how our Delta Trinsic and Brizo Solna faucets look with the Upper Canada Specialty Hardware Lewis Dolin pulls:

They have their backs to one another because they know someone’s getting voted off the island here.

Thoughts? I’ve settled on my selection but would love to know where you all land with it now that you can see the pulls and the faucets together.

As we speak, Graham is installing the base cabinets in prep for the counter template tomorrow. The counters take quite awhile to manufacture so that has been forcing Graham to burn the midnight oil. Can I just take this moment to say how incredibly grateful I am for my incredibly hardworking man? Seriously. He’s remarkable. This project simply would not have happened on our tight little budget without his faithful devotion to his family and to gittin’ ‘er done. Love him like mad. And dreaming up ways to reward him for all his hard work when this little luxe laundry is a fait accompli.

We had the drawer faces colour-matched in Para Paint in order to paint out our MDF end gables. This is going to make our builder’s box base cabinets look way more custom. And in prep for the counter templating we also picked up our amazing Blanco undermount sink from the fine folks at The Home Depot.

From soaking painting smocks after crafting with Tate to de-stinkifying sports gear after Noah’s games, this sink is going to be the workhorse sidekick to our washer dryer, and I’m thrilled it’s as clean and modern looking as it is functional.

The to-do list remains lengthy as we didn’t manage to get the walls painted this week thanks to a classic, slapstick “slip and fall on a hidden toy at the bottom of the stairs and spend the day in emerg with an evulsion fracture in my foot” moment I had earlier this week. Sheesh! It’s been quite the last couple of weeks, hasn’t it? These things always happen when it’s least convenient.

But that said, we’ve persevered and it feels like we really are rounding the corner to the home stretch.

This week’s to-do’s?

* Paint ceiling and walls after very carefully protecting the floors and cabinets {not my preferred order of operations}
*Finally finish installing our CREE LED potlights
* Install sliding door system from Upper Canada Specialty Hardware with our raw white oak slab doors from Metrie
* Install and paint baseboard and casing from Metrie
* Install floating shelf

So you know, enough to keep us more than busy here. Then of course there’s the styling and the photography and well…one day at a time, right?

Be sure to get caught up on what the other designers and bloggers are up to here and let me know which ones are your favourites:

Coco + Kelley * Jana Bek * Autumn Clemons * The English Room * Vanessa Francis * Greige Design * Hi SugarplumI Heart Organizing * Jenna Sue Design * Stephanie Kraus * The Pursuit of Style * Julia Ryan * Savvy Home Simple Details * Simply Grove * 6th Street Design * Jill Sorensen * Swoon Worthy * Waiting On Martha * Kimberly Shlegel Whitman * and my friends and linking participants Lisa Canning and Abby M. Interiors. Go to Calling It Home to check out all of the 150+ Linking Participants for the April 2015 edition of the One Room Challenge!

xo
s.

By |April 24th, 2015|3 Comments