East Village Gem!

So I have been in New York for a few months and I am still very much enjoying the vibrancy of life in this fast paced city. We have mostly finished with decorating the apartment and overall it has come out quite nicely. We went for a modern look with some vintage touches, we still need some more art for the walls but overall we are pretty much complete.

Our apartment is a 2 bedroom 2 bath(yes a 2 bedroom apartment in NYC!) in the East Village which is a very hip and interesting part of NYC with many bars/restaurants to try out. There is even a nearby park that boast the city's very first dog run where our little Trinity meets many friends in the park specifically for small dogs. Also an amazing feature for a Manhattan apartment is en-suite laundry which is incredibly rare as this is a feature that only 10% of Manhattanites have.

I will be doing a few more blog posts on some of my favorite elements in the rooms but for now some pictures!

 Living Room(my favorite room):

Kitchen:

 Dining Room:

Bedroom:

Guest Bedroom:

New Location & New Life

So it has been nearly two years since our last post and a lot has happened both with the house and our lives. Things ended up not quite going to plan with the house, my ex-wife and I separated and went our separate ways and therefore the house needed to be sold. We managed to fully finish all the critical elements of the house before we sold and all of our work paid off when it sold. The house ended up inspiring a frenzy of interest and eventually went to the highest bidder with 14 bids and substantially above the asking price.

I have now moved on and taken my tools to a brand new city where my new girlfriend and I are mainly furnishing and fixing up our new apartment and helping out some friends with their small projects in our spare time.

Here are a couple pictures from the roof deck of our apartment, its an amazing location in the east village:

Yard update

Between rain and holidays our yard took us a while to get done. It's now pretty much done with the exception of the shed that we still need to install.



The deck with the super cheap patio set we got from Home Depot and lounge set from Canadian Tire. We really enjoy having dinner/cocktails out here when it's not 40 degrees C. :D

View of the yard from the deck. To the left is grass for our dog. To the right is our "car-shaped patio". It'll be useful for parking on and will be good entertaining space for parties etc. One thing we figured out after removing our shed that our lot is 20' wide and we have a pretty ridiculously huge yard (for inner city Toronto anyways ... ;)

We made paths to go around the front of the deck and walkup....

...which lead us to build a funky modern shaped planter bed.

So that's the yard for now. Up next.. waterproofing (we're hiring that one out.. we've had enough digging for one life time) then the basement.

shed --;

With summer on the horizon we're working to finish up our yard. Last year we built a deck. This year we're tearing down the "garage", redoing some fencing and making a parking pad. You can see a rough plan here.

Today we tore down the shack er.. garage. We managed to get most of it into our dumpster but a sizable chunk of it is still sitting in our yard waiting for the next dumpster to come tomorrow. *woo*.

Time to let a good friend go.

You may remember Big Red, our drywall lift, from earlier days of our reno. This drywall lift saw us through 2 bathrooms, 2 bedrooms, livingroom, diningroom and kitchen of drywalling. It is very handy for drywalling ceilings and is pretty useful for the higher up part of walls too. Since we are now basically done drywall (except for our basement where the ceiling height means Big Red is overkill) we've decided it is time to say goodbye to our old friend. If you think you might be in the market for a drywall lift for $100 OBO please send us an email: 416fixerupper@gmail.com .

Post #201 : Building a new bed

Today we pass the 200 post milestone. *woo* We also finished our latest project, building a new bed. After sprucing up the master bedroom closet (similar to the guest bedroom closet), the rest of our master bedroom started to look kind of drab. Since we're probably moving in the next couple of years we want to avoid spending alot of money on new furniture. So this bed is the first of a couple of new furniture creations to spruce up this room on the cheap.


We built the frame and headboard out of 3/4" plywood. We built out a border 2.5" around the entire headboard since we're still debating adding nailhead trim to the headboard. It also made the headboard more sturdy/thicker.

We scored some sweet bed hardware from Lee Valley Hardware. There were 4 sets like this for the corners and 2 sets of hardware for a cross brace. In the above photo you can also see the 2x2 we attached to the side rail to support the box spring.


We used spray adhesive to put a 2" piece of foam in the area between the 2.5" border and then put a layer of batting to make it extra plush.




We then finished up by upholstering it in a cream fabric we found at Designer Fabrics. This store is seriously awesome. It totally deserves its reputation as the go-to place for fabric.


We got the idea from this headboard shape from the Loft Bedroom episode of Sarah 101 on HGTV. We knew it would be a bit challenging to upholster but it was easier to wrap our heads around making this design symmetrical.



And here we have it. The bed came out way better than we imagined. For the frame we just wrapped 1" foam around the outside of the plywood so it's also nice and squishy :). There are also bevelled/stained pieces of 2x4 acting as legs.

Antiquing in Hamilton

Today we took a trip in the rain out to Hamilton to do some antiquing. We hit up Antique Avenue thanks to a tip from Rambling Renovators.

We saw some neat things and ended up bringing home this little red bird figurine.



Many other interesting things to see in the store:

Kidney pills anyone?