The Housewarming Party!!

We have been playing beat the clock with the baby and have been working like crazy to get the house ready (hence, there has not been much blogging going on). One important deadline was a housewarming party to a few of our friends on Saturday 8/28.

My au pair made this fabulous cake with white chocolate and raspberry filling. It was yummmyyyyy! 

And here is my party outfit - less than a month to go before my due date so outfit was pretty much whatever comfortable I could find that would cover my ever expanding self :-)

Yet another lesson learned...

And that is, if you snooze you lose..

I finally made it to CB2 today to pick up the rug I've been planning to use in the entrance, the super cool "Keep Calm and Carry On" rug. What a humongous disappointment to find out the rug has been discontinued, and there is none to be found in any CB2 location, anywhere, from Illinois to Florida (I know because my darling husband called each store to find out whether they would have had a random rug left - and the best advice he got was to try eBay, which also did not yield anything).

Not sure what to do with the entrance now. CB2 has a Hopscotch rug that I may consider as plan B. It would be fitting for a house full of girls. But I have not made up my mind about that yet.

Time Crunch + Renovation Status

I don't know if it is because I am highly pregnant but I just feel so inefficient and like I am not getting enough done in a day..every day is a time crunch! There are still boxes and piles of stuff everywhere. I am really getting the message in the saying "less is more". It really is! And I will truly try to remember that from now on and live by it.

I met my new neighbor the other day, who happens to have two kids same age as mine, and she told me that she still has unopened boxes in the basement and she's been here two years. She moved from City as well and is very nice!

Renovation-wise there are a few nagging things that just seem to take forever to get fixed, like the cooktop (which hasn't arrived yet!) and the vanity top in the children's bathroom. The vanity top was supposed to come in today, but now they told us it's coming on Friday. We shall see.. It would make life a lot easier if we had the top, sinks and faucets in the bathroom! Another nagging item is the washer and dryer which have not been installed yet. Laundry is piling up like crazy. Now I am happy that the kids have a ton of clothes so they at least can wear clean stuff.. But regardless, we need to have those machines hooked up sooner rather than later. The basement is still a complete disaster, we have not even been able to really decide what to do there. A full basement renovation will probably need to wait until next year. Right now we'll just make do by changing the carpet and painting the walls.

A Nasty Surprise!

I have never had problems with moths, in fact, I don't think I've ever even seen one, until today... We brought in an antique woolen rug from storage where it was stored for a couple of years, waiting to find a right place. We now finally have use for the rug, which is actually very beautiful, light colored, traditional rug. It was to go in our dining area. Anyhow, when we opened the rug it was infested with moths, and they had fully eaten the fringes off of both ends of the rug. Yuck!

We quickly removed the rug from the house to the deck where we broomed, vacuumed and sprayed with a pesticide. And then my other half jumped in a car to drive to the nearest Home Depot to buy some moth killer stuff.. Hopefully we can save this beautiful carpet. 

Entrance Evolves + more renovation status

The plans for the entrance have totally changed along the way. I had planned to make it really glamorous and put in black marble tile for the floor, full wall of mirror, a sleek and slim black high gloss desk, with a black chandelier hanging above for added oomph but that plan has been totally scrapped (maybe in the next home when kids have all grown up..). The floor is now bamboo, same as elsewhere in the house, for a nice continuous flow from the entrance to living room, kitchen and corridor. The entrance area is still evolving, but we recently reserved the Linea dresser from Crate and Barrell as our entrance storage piece. The piece does not look too much like a dresser, and is a perfect fit for our entrance. I guess it is a very popular piece as the estimated delivery date is on 9/18! However, it's made of solid teak and will probably last forever. Now we have to figure out whether to do a mirror on top of it, or a piece of art..probably art, something colorful and modern. I am still planning to use the "Stay Calm and Carry On"  rug from CB2, to give a bit of humor and flair as you enter the house. We also need to find the right light fixture to tie it all together..

And, talking about light fixtures, we found yet another funnel pendant lamp for our kitchen, and I was finally able to arrange for a delivery from the Greenwich store, yay. I was not looking forward to a day trip to Greenwich in the middle of everything now, although it is a lovely place and holds a lot of memories for me..

We now have a working dishwasher, fridge and the chandelier hung in the dining room. All the electric outlets work and the central air conditioning ducts have been cleaned so that we can breathe clean air :-)

Here is a picture of the piece that will go to the entrance:

Renovation Status & Lamp Trouble

The electricians came again yesterday, and did their magic - we now have working outlets in the kitchen, and the beautiful Samsung fridge is cold and good. I just love the look of the french doors and it is wonderful not having to bend down for the veggie box. And now we can get rid of our temporary white monster - it is going to be banished to the basement where it can serve as the back-up fridge.

The electricians are coming back today to hook up our double wall oven and the dish washer, yay. They are also finished with their work up in the attic running wires, putting up new boxes or circuits or whathever they needed to do, which means that we can finally really clean up the attic and use the space for storage purposes.

No word of the cooktop yet, though, I think I had mentioned that the Bosch Induction cooktop arrived with the ceramic top all smashed up, and we have been waiting for the replacement for a few weeks now... We have been eating a lot of take-out! Anyway, last weekend my husband bought a giant barbeque grill, the Weber S-670, which the company calls their "top-of-the-line grilling masterpiece" :-) And we already tested this masterpiece when we had our first BBQ on Sunday night, with first guests coming to check out our new place. There will be losts of firsts :-) I don't know about masterpiece, but the corn on the cob came out perfect, as did the hot dogs and chicken wings..

There was bad news last night too - and it was the gorgeous funnel pendant that was supposed to hang on top of the kitchen island. The electrician installed it but it did not work. The wire was live, the bulb was ok, but there was something wrong with the lamp itself.. I was so disappointed because it really looked amazing hanging there.. Not sure what to do now, try to get another one or just return this (and the one we did not even pick up from Greenwich yet) and look for another suitable pendant light. Well, the price was too good to be true anyway.

The Funnel Pendant

We recently purchased two pendant lamps to hang on top of our kitchen island. The Funnel pendant is made of aluminium and goes well with our kitchen with its stainless steel appliances and aluminum trim of the glass cabinet doors. We got so lucky with these as they were on sale, more than 50% off. Apparently the store won't carry them anymore so they heavily discounted last stock. The only thing is that our local store only had one, and we needed two. Luckily the Greenwich store had another one, so now we have to take a trip to Greenwich to pick that one up - the store does not arrange for delivery on these floor sale items!! Despite the lack of the delivery service, it's still my favorite store, Design Within Reach. I just love that store and its amazing collection of new and old design classics.

Book of the Month

As an avid reader, I totally dig Kate Spade's new clutches! They are so cute and adorable I may have to get one..although it is doubtful that I will have a chance to wear it in the few upcoming months, given my impending maternity leave and ever expanding state in which I have seem to give up all hope of ever looking stylish or cute again. I am pinning all my style hopes, dreams and wishes to January 2011 when life will return to a more normal state bodywise (hopefully).

Moving = So NOT Fun

I had totally forgotten how horrible moving is. Or maybe I did not even know how bad it could be, since the last time I moved in 1998 I hardly had any furniture or much of anything other than some personal items, clothes, etc. There were no movers required, just a borrowed van and a husband to carry my stuff in.. Fast forward to 2010 ---> ---> ---> it took 6 guys, 2 16-foot long trucks and 12 hours to move our stuff. And we took a lot to the house little by little on our own...

We had so much bad luck with the move; it is going to be material for stories for years to come. But let's not dwell on the negative - all our belongings have been moved to Long Island, and we are now living amidst a chaos of boxes, and all kinds of stuff piles here and there.

The most important thing is that I love, love, love the new house. Why did I resist the move so many years?