Turning Ourselves Into Professional Interior Designers
Rebuilding a Beautiful, Vacant Historic Detroit Home (Episode 43)
Painting is Nearing the Finish Line!
Who’s counting? Me, I guess. We are well into the 8th week or so of painting and we’re finally down to the last couple rooms before painting will be complete! It’s a great feeling, our home went from feeling very livable the weeks we moved in to returning to its sort of pseudo-construction state. Tarps everywhere, floors covered once more, and furniture being stored in all sorts of places around the house. But our time is finally starting to pay off, because Jeff and Kurt have done a fantastic job with prep work and so final paint looks spectacular!
Having watched them work full-time for the last two months, it’s really clear that Brandon and I wouldn’t have been able to achieve this quality of a paint job on our own in any reasonable amount of time. Jeff and Kurt have easily racked up over 600 hours of work in our home just on sanding and painting, and we haven’t even gotten to the wallpapering yet.
Room Status
1st Floor
Everything except for the main living room and wallpapering is painted!
2nd Floor
Everything but wallpaper and some crown molding we want to add in the master bedroom now.
3rd Floor
Everything but the hallway and stairs which are primed but not painted!
Wallpaper Starts to Arrive!
We’ve finally been starting to receive some of our wallpaper choices in the mail and it’s really exciting! Jacquelyn of Elegance By Design in Ferndale has done a great job of finding us wallpapers that look amazing.
Our biggest struggle has been finding a wallpaper for our bar/lounge we think is appropriate for the space. We were inspired by one of our favorite shows Westworld, and really wanted to find a dark, moody damask to go in this room. This proved to be incredibly difficult, with many damasks either being too feminine, having too much of a light/dark contrast, or not being able to find one in the color we liked. After weeks of searching and ordering samples, we came down to 3 or so designs we thought could work, but all had their downsides. As the next photo will demonstrate, one of the 3 choices is a single color, with the damask design being only in texture, this means that in many lights and especially looking directly on, it is incredibly subtle and hard to see compared to the others.
Tips for picking wallpaper
- Budget before you start looking — you don’t want to fall in love with something you can’t afford and then can’t find a replacement you like better. Wallpapers range from as cheap as $20/roll to well into the $300/roll price range.
- Always Order Samples — Until you see it in person, don’t decide on a wallpaper. Some look incredibly different in person, or the scale is very different from what you expect. Order big samples if you can!
- Try to find images of the wallpaper in a room — It’s incredible how different a wallpaper will look or feel between the sample and covering a whole wall. Some samples we liked in person, but when we saw an image of it installed across a whole wall, we realized the design was not what we thought. (see below)
We were skeptical about the textural dark wallpaper at first. But after looking at these images and images homeowners had posted online of these wallpapers in action, we realized that subtler might be better in this space, and allow us to still have the opportunity to hang a piece of art or a mirror on the wall without it competing.
So without further ado, here’s the wallpapers we’ve chosen for the house:
We’ve received two in the mail already and are expecting the rest sometime this week, so hopefully wallpapering will get started next week!
Brandon and Miranda Become Decorators
Time for Furniture!
With painting reaching its completion, it is now time for us to start thinking about furniture. Some furniture we are keeping, like Brandon’s Eames Lounge Chair, a peach velvet couch we got from Brandon’s parents, Brandon’s old bedroom furniture, my old bedroom furniture, and some of Brandon’s brown living room furniture. Other things we are receiving from family, like an amazing mint condition 1960s avocado green and brass bedroom set that was Brandon’s mother’s in grade school. Some things we are making, like our dining room table I am creating from a cast iron drafting table and portion of a bowling alley. But there are still a few rooms where we need to find new pieces, namely, our bar/lounge.
We knew early on that we want the bar/lounge to be a mix of different furniture types, mixing old and new for an eclectic blend of style. We also knew that we wanted to incorporate a leather chesterfield if we could find one in our budget. After talking with Jacquelyn, she directed us to a chesterfield made by Norwalk Furniture in Ohio. This company allowed us to customize our couch in a very detailed way. We chose from 20 or so leathers and hundreds of fabrics.
In order to avoid the “cigar bar” look, I took some inspiration from images I found online, and Brandon and I decided to do something a little different with our sofa. Rather than using the leather we liked across the whole couch, we decided to combine the leather and a fabric we liked into one piece to make the couch more comfortable while also tying it in aesthetically with the Mid-Century Modern furniture I knew would be in the same room.
The couch will be primarily leather, with the fabric used on the seat cushions, but the piping on the seats will be made in that same leather to tie it all together. It will take us about 3 months before we’ll see the sofa, but we’re excited we’ll have a truly well-made piece we can keep for a long time.
Other furniture shopping
We’ve been looking all over, including in Ohio, for furniture to put in the house. And we’ve spotted some really cool pieces so far, but working around a budget is very difficult when there’s so much cool stuff in the world! Ultimately we’re planning on having the Amish family who created our kitchen cabinets build us a bar as well, so finding the time, energy, and money to make all of these decisions is tough. But it certainly feels like one of the most fun parts of the process.
Artwork
I’ve also been working on finding and creating some artwork for the house and have come up with a few ideas that I think will be really awesome and affordable for the space. I recently printed on a large format printer some images of old 1920s maps of Detroit. I found these through the Detroit Public Library’s Burton Historical Collection, and I paid a small fee to have them re-scanned at a very high resolution, about 1200 dpi. The result is a really cool piece of art and history that really hasn’t cost me much of anything besides the frames we’ll have to put them in. I used photoshop to experiment with adding some color and to highlight our neighborhood of the University District.
So this has turned out to be an incredibly long post… but you get the idea. WE ARE WORKING SO HARD WE JUST WANT TO BE DONE BUT WE KNOW THIS WILL NEVER END. *sigh* I feel better now.
Next…
Hopefully wallpaper and some more furniture choices and maybe even some yardwork if the snow goes away!
Our journey isn’t over
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