measure twice...

 ..Cut once. Well, last Sunday we measured the apartment and took tons of photos to devise the plan. We had help! Our friends came too - Megan was kind enough to keep Hudson occupied, Amanda helped me measure and Dave and Ben poked around the attic. Brooklyn had eight(!) inches of rain on Sunday so it was good to see that it was bone dry. Our current apartment building, however, was not. Fire trucks came to help release some of the pressure from clogged drain pipes on the roof that caused a waterfall of water down 12 flights of fire stairs. Thankfully, our current apartment was dry as well!

                                 

So after all that measuring, we headed off to the country for some R&R. In the evenings, I was able to focus on what our apartment would look like and we have narrowed it down to two options. They are very similar. Option 1 gives a bit more room to the washer/dryer closet and requires the demolition of one nib wall (and consequently some ceiling patching). Option 2 requires no wall demo (just the half-wall in the kitchen) and has about 12" less space of kitchen cabinets. Both are workable and we will see what fits more in the budget later on. We met with the contractor on Friday and should have pricing by Monday (gulp!). Will have more detailed posts on the plans for each room coming up! We are excited about the process and hope it will continue to go smoothly!

              

We also bought the first item for the apartment. Dave found an amazing deal on a Bosch dishwasher in black (as shown in elevation D) for 50% off! We hope we can find such good deals on the other appliances too!

turn off the lights!

Sometimes the sun is just too bright. Especially when Hudson's bedtime is 7:15pm and the sun doesn't set till almost 9 (It's been hard to read The Going to Bed Book - "The sun has set not long ago" when your apartment looks like it is 3pm with the shades down!). We've been hearing him toss and turn and whine till almost 8:30 some nights because it's too bright to go to sleep.

We've recently made some updates that has been a huge help (Hudson sleeps longer which is *always* a good thing). We went to Ikea a couple weekends ago with our friends M+B and picked up some black out shades.

I proceeded to chop up a shade to line our existing roman shades (we couldn't mount long panels because there is a radiator cover in the way and short drapes look silly). I used 'stitch witchery' to seam the edges and cut unfinished buttonholes in the back to accommodate the exiitng hardware and sewed the liner to the bamboo shade.

That's Dave re-hanging the shade. I'm sure my mother is asking why, why didn't I use the sewing machine? Truth is that is long gone (a CL sell a year ago) to make room for baby. Sometimes you gotta make do with what you've got and I have an iron board and mad ironing skillz ;).  You may be wondering why is it night outside? Well, Saturday night is our in-house "date night" we put the baby to bed in our bedroom and take over the living dining room to ourselves - make a leisurely dinner and watch a movie. Come bedtime, we either transfer baby, or blow up the air mattress and camp out in the living room. I know - it's the small things in life.

Anywho... below is the final shot. It's hard to tell with the flash, but the liners do cut out most of the light (see the bright sun along the edges?)! We figure it will be great insulation in the winter (and our electric bill has gone down even with all the AC usage :)).

The other improvement to the living arrangements has been adding a curtain to the entrance to the living room. The sunlight from the kitchen was reflecting off the artwork in the hall and still bringing in light to Hudson's sleeping area. A sample from work and 'stitch witchery' and the iron did their magic and we had the shade installed. I got the hardware off of west elm including the drapery clips (a decorator's best friend!) in the gunmetal finish. I liked that the hardware relates the dark bookcase. Below are the open & closed photos. The drape relates to the color of the sofa (it's a light color, but doesn't blend too much with the wall) and looks good open during the day and does it's job at night! Dave installed the rod with lead anchors in our plaster walls as Hudson loves to tug on things. I wonder if he will think his name is "no touch!" soon? Ah, the joys of the active baby!

And we can't have a blog post without at least one baby photo...