Spring Awakening Ikea Style

It's spring in New York. And at Chez Hainz, progress is busting out in every corner. Here are some of the latest developments...

The view from our window is green again!


And where there once was just a blank kitchen cavity...



We now have cabinets!


The rest are here (btw--our cabinets are white not blue--that's just the protective plastic)


Today at Ikea, we discovered this nifty little bumper that makes the doors close softly. It's amazing and brought us tremendous joy. Seriously.


We installed them ourselves.


In other news, our first MR16 recessed lights were installed in our den.


And our celings that have long been cluttered with wiring, j-boxes and other junk...


Are now all cleaned up and awaiting some our new lights.


Estimated date of completion: June 15th. Fingers crossed.

The Agony of Choice, the Ecstacy of Delivery (And Still Liking It!)

We've made a lot of choices through out this process. And there is always that scary moment after you've ordered, paid, coordinated delivery and then that choice that you've made actually gets INSTALLED PERMANENTLY into your home. You pray that you still like it.

This day finally came with our flooring. We chose to replace the terribly damaged old floors with an environmentally friendly bamboo flooring that we like a lot. It's called Teragren and you can read all about it here. We chose the Synergy Strand in Chesnut and thank goodness we did because it is beautiful AND also very hard, durable and made from a sustainable material.

Did you know bamboo is actually a grass?

Presenting...our new floors.



A little nervous that they are going to get scratched, but Idriz promises to cover them up


The floorboard work station


Nick tests out the Teragren

Pocket Door Power

We've got high celings... which is one of the features of our apartment that we love the most. The only catch is that high celings require tall doorways, extra-long window coverings, long lightfixture cords, etcetera, etcetera. And all of those things are hard to come by and often need to be CUSTOM. A scary word when you're on a budget.

Our doors needed to be custom and for a while we tossed and turned, stressing out over how we were going to build pocket doors that are 8'6" ie. 102 INCHES (that's a large door) that wouldn't warp or weigh so much that we couldn't open them. The whole process kind of reminded me of what it's like when I'm trying to find pants that are long enough for to fit my tall frame.

In the end, Garrick came up with a solution with Halit executed on BRILLIANTLY. It required routing (i.e. hollowing out) two pieces of MDF and then gluing them together. Clearly, I'm simplifying. Here are our first two doors. We love them and the glide like butter.

Entrance to the back hallway


And...OH YEAH...look at that door just slide on in


Entry from living room to master bedroom open


And closed

Gettin' Some Nookies

The driving architectural concept behind our apartment design was to start by envisioning the space almost as a solid mass and then carve out middle and create these sort of "punches" into the mass. Do you follow? No worries if you don't. The bottom line is...we've created some customized nooks and they are really coming together.
Check them out:

This is the entry nook--for putting keys, mail, etc.


This will be our built in bar. More details to come...


Build-in desk will live here. How cool is that?


Another view of the entry nook with what I call the MegaNook above. Again, taking suggestions as to what to put up there.

Rub A Dub Dub: Our First Fixture

After much consternation, the tub is installed..

We Got Drywall (Week 8)

Technically it's sheetrock that has started to flesh out the scrawny skeleton of our home. After so many months of using our imaginations, the smooth surfaces enable us to see our place as it will be. We dig it.

BEFORE--The Skeleton


AFTER--Cool Nook
If you have any ideas of what we can put in here--let us know.

 

BEFORE: Entrance to Family Room



AFTER: Stunning

Houseguests!

This weekend we entertained at Chez Hainz! Our first guests were our lovely and ever patient neighbors who were curious to know what was behind all the banging and buzzing. We toured them through the maze of framing and clouds of dust. I think they were most relieved to see that we were putting double sheet rock and lots of insulation in the wall between our house and theirs. :)

Our second set of special guests were Nick's sister and her husband in from Chicago with our utterly adorable nephew. They wasthey scampered like mountain goats up onto the dropped ceiling and checked out the views from above. We hope that they next time they visit, we might actually have walls and even some furniture.

The Words of the Prophet...

...are written on the subway walls.

After spending a large part of our Saturday counting electrical outlets, looking at tiles, worrying about our toilet, we walked into the 14th street station and saw this...

 

Should we just sell now?

Tub O' Troubles (Week 7)

This week, there was some bad news on the bathroom front. Here's a quick run down of things that were stressing us out...

1) Guest bath shower measurements were off. Implication: A tiny little shower (even for New York). I had nightmare visions of my 6'4" father coming to stay and getting stuck in our shower when he bent over to grab the soap.

2) Toilet in master bath placed too close to the wall. Implication: Bruised knees when doing one's business. Not cool.

3) Tub too darn big. Implication: PANIC. Tub is the one thing we ordered that cannot be sent back.

What to do? Serious creative problem solving was required. "The Team" gathered at 8 am on Thursday morning and we put our heads together. Here's what we came up with...

1) So that my Dad won't get stuck in the shower...we've reoriented the studs and expanded the shower a few inches into the "hall" which somewhat disrupts the clean line of the wall, but in this case function triumphed over form. We want our guest to enjoy bathing when they come to stay.

2) We're rotating the toilet 90 degrees so that we can sit on the throne without banging into the wall. This is going to require some plumbing wizardry (and some extra cashola-ugh), but our contractor thinks it's doable. We think it's well worth it.

The Original Plan--Too Cramped For Us Giants


The New Plan--Toilet Faces Out (Please note large pipe that has to be reworked in order for this to happen)


3) And as for the big tub. It's staying. But a door is going. We used to have two entrances to the master bath, now we have one in order to make room for our mighty tub. Every time you make an unanticipated change when renovating, you go through the mental exercise of convincing yourself that this is what you should have done anyway. So we've persuaded ourselves that eliminating the door will give us more privacy. The privacy that we wanted all along. I'm buying it.

The Tub Arrives--Can You Say Ginormus!?!


Unveiled--It's A Beauty, But Too Darn Big


Problem Solved--The tub will live here. Bring on the bubble bath!

Higher Thinking (Week 6)

Now that we've gotten past all of the concerns about how we were going to make our plumbing work down under our floors, it's time to turn our attention upwards to our the action going on up above on the ceilings. This week the team continued to make great progress on framing and started work on dropping the ceilings in certain areas. While in the main living spaces our of place, we want to take full advantage of our 14 foot tall loft, in the back areas we're playing with levels a little bit. It's looking very cool.

You may recall from early pictures that in the back of our apartment, there was a great, big white box hanging from the ceiling to cover the dropped plumbing from the 3rd floor apartment.

Bye, Bye, Big Ugly Box!


As you can see, it was a bit of an eyesore--and this week we bid it adieu. In it's place is an elegant and very cool hanging ceiling that still covers the plumbing, but because its slimmer in depth and wider in breath, it adds an interesting new level to guest room area.















Now that our ceilings are strong enough to stand on, of course we had to get up there and check out the view. Here are some shots...

We're putting a skylight over the master bath shower. True, you won't actually be able to see the sky, but we think it's kinda neat-o anyway.













View into the guest room.















Looking out across the kitchen to the great room.
















Peeking in on the guest bathroom






Dreaming of the day when he can make a fort in the storage nook



We sure hope our 3rd floor neighbor appreciates the fact that we're housing their plumbing cause, dang, it's a big ugly mess.

Step Up to Greatness (Weeks 4-5)

Construction came to a halt when last week we hit (literally) an unanticipated steel beam in the subflooring. This surprise discovery had implications for our plumbing which had us a tad concerned: we might have to have a Step Up.

What's the big deal with a step? Well, the bottom line is: we don't like them. Not generally speaking--just as it applies to our future home. The vision we have for our apartment is of a big loft space where people can glide easily from one room to the next. Step free. Stairs, in our minds, represented a disruption to our nice expanses of floor, a potential obstacle that that some one could trip on, and just a general zit on our clean design.



The steel pipe however, mean that we had to rethinking the plumbing as it could now, not be laid in the floor. Steps was one option, but there were others...we explored them with gusto. We got very excited when ur downstairs neighbors graciously agreed to let us drop plumbing into their celing. But our coop board was less enthusiatic about that plan. And when we found out from the plumber the cost of doing this, we reconsidered. The Step Up plan looked to be our best bet.



And so this week, the steps went in. There are three of them and...we love them! They are very minimal step--only 4 inches high. They are in very natural places and, counter to our steps=zits theory of two weeks ago, they actually enhance the design, creating a nice threshold to the back area of the apartment.

Disaster averted. For now.

Here's our step up and the platform. (We're now considering making the whole back area a dance studio.)



(Just kidding about the dance studio.)