401 Cape

Shopping Spree - Liz

2010-11-19T13:28:00.000-05:00

My amazing friend Liz did a little shopping for some much-needed basics (jeans, cords and a fabulous purse). She requested that I find tops, flats and boots to round out her fall/winter wardrobe.

Shopping List (including her recent purchases):

shopping list - Liz

Outfit Ideas:

Happy shopping, Lizzy!

New Job = New Wardrobe

2010-11-11T13:14:00.000-05:00

Ari

Photography Assignment: Wickford, RI

2010-09-22T13:07:00.000-04:00

This past summer I took a photography class at RISD. I've always loved taking pictures, but this course helped me learn how to get out of the dreaded "automatic" mode and start playing with aperture, ISO and shutter speed. Here are some of my favorites from the landscape black and white assignment which were taken in Wickford, RI. Wickford is a really special place. If you're ever in the area, I highly recommend spending a few hours there.

Upstairs Bathroom

2009-07-01T11:48:00.000-04:00

The wallpaper in the upstairs bathroom was the least offensive in the house and was the last to go. The remaining features of the room - aqua toilet, iridescent vanity top, fake wood vanity and brass fixtures were all awful and as I entered my second trimester, the urge to rip it apart grew. We removed the wallpaper and painted the walls and the ceiling, painted the vanity, gave it a new top and faucet, installed a new toilet, covered the floral tiles with tile tattoos, installed all new hardware and framed out the mirror. This was a very low cost makeover (less than $500). While it isn't our dream bathroom, it is definitely much improved.

Before:

During:

After:

64 Coffees, 12 Trips to Lowe's, 4 Visits to Home Depot, 3 Gallons of Paint and 400 Man Hours

2008-12-02T13:30:00.000-05:00

That's pretty much what went into the family room project. The extended Team T-J (us and my parents) worked our tails off, hyped up on Dunkin coffee and adhesive fumes to finish in time to host Thanksgiving, but barely. There are still a few loose ends to tidy up, but the room looks amazing and we are thrilled with the results. Check out the project from start to finish here:

As a side benefit of this massive undertaking, Matt became quite the carpenter. Check out his collection of templates:

What can I say? I'm a lucky lady!

Bruce is in the house!

2008-11-08T15:06:00.000-05:00

Our Bruce flooring that is. It came in earlier than expected and just as we finished the beadboard. We just might be back on track after all. Or will we?

Progress after Day One of floor installation:

Rock Out With Your Caulk Out

2008-11-07T14:41:00.000-05:00

Sorry, but the pun. It was irresistible.

We began the first weekend AD (after discovery of the floor issue) by purchasing, cutting and painting the beadboard, painting the room and starting on the beadboard.That day only two panels were hung. Color me frustrated.

Even Doug was annoyed with how slow the progress was

Over the next few weeks Matt and Glen slaved away weekend after weekend, scribing cuts on to beadboard, hanging said beadboard, discussing molding options and finally getting to use our caulking gun. Sue and I headed up trim painting. You'd be amazed how much trim was in that room.

Finally all of the beadboard was hung by the chimney with care, with hopes that hardwoods soon we be there.

Great job guys! The room looks amazing and as Glen pointed out, a professional couldn't have done a better job.

Family Room, Weekend One - the DRAMA

2008-10-05T14:04:00.000-04:00

Before - A Pink and Green Paradise

As with most 401 Cape projects, the family room renovation began with an organized and well-padded timeline in place. We peeled back a corner of the carpet to reveal that there were subfloors in the room (score) and confirmed that hardwoods and beadboard would be installed. The room color was still under discussion. The team had also volunteered to host Thanksgiving, so we went around and around about starting this monster project before or after the holidays. While hotly contested, before the holidays won out.

Last winter proved a severe lack of heat in the family room, thus the installation of radiant heating was discussed. Research was conducted and an informational DVD was ordered to learn how to install it. Upon viewing the first five minutes of the DVD, it was determined that we were in over our heads. Plan B (a.k.a. having the existing electric baseboard repaired) was implemented. That went smoothly and we even had the electrician install a wire to add another baseboard later if we needed it. Look at us thinking ahead...

A scouting mission revealed that Home Depot had the best deal on the floors we needed, so we ordered them on Saturday afternoon and headed home. Then, in a Trading Spaces-like frenzy, we cleared the room and ripped out the carpet. That's when we hit the first roadblock of the project - only half of the room had subfloor and the other half was cement.

We called in the Glen Squad.

For those of you who don't know my Dad, Glen, he's always the first to swoop in to help with a home improvement catastrophe. Since he signed up to help us hang the beadboard and install the floors, the cement issue was a problem for him, too. Some drilling revealed that we weren't dealing with cement board that could be pulled up and replaced with subfloor, we were dealing with a cement slab. HOT!

We went back and forth about what to do:

Install another carpet: Nope.
Split the room and put tile down on the cement side and hardwoods on the other: That would make the room look small and stupid.
Tile the whole room: Too cold.
Put in new subfloors: Nope - Expensive and would require raising the doors and heater.

We went with the one that was unspeakable for the first 12 hours after our discovery - engineered hardwood (Engineered hardwood flooring is a product made up of a core of hardwood, plywood or HDF and a top layer of hardwood veneer that is glued on the top surface of the core. The product thus has the natural characteristics of the selected wood species as opposed to a photographic layer. The "engineered" product has been designed to provide greater stability, particularly where moisture or heat pose problems for solid hardwood floors. )

This decision required returning the flooring that we had bought (but luckily not picked up yet) and finding engineered flooring the same width and color as the floors in the rest of the house. The only one we could find was ordered at Lowe's. That's when we found out it was on back order. Until November 10. As a reminder, Thanksgiving falls on November 27 this year. Looks like the timeline is shot to shit yet again.

Getting Our Mojo Back - Kitchen and Hallway

2008-07-05T13:03:00.000-04:00

We took some time off to focus on being puppy parents and had trouble getting our mojo back. How to solve the problem? Decide to host your grandmother's 88th birthday party! We got a ton done in a few weeks including painting the kitchen, hallway, five doors and taking on a landscaping project. It all worked out in the end, but was far from fun while it was happening.

Behold the thankless project known as the hallway:

We were so excited to get the kitchen done. We'd been chipping away at the project since we moved in by replacing the cabinet hardware, switch plates, dishwasher, stove and covering up the fruity tiles with tile tattoos, but waiting to take down the country wallpaper and brass light fixture was torture. The birthday party was just the motivation we needed to get the job done. We chose "shady cove green" to coordinate with the stained glass blue lobster my grandmother had given us for a wedding gift. The room is so comfortable and so us now.

We got a puppy!

2008-05-05T13:30:00.000-04:00

Meet Doug. He's a ball of puppy goodness and we adore him. Most of the time.

Living on a prayer...

2008-04-20T12:58:00.000-04:00

We tackled the living room at the same time we worked on the dining room and hit all of the same issues. We also wore the same outfits. Finishing this room was a great accomplishment for the team - we started to taste the victory that carried us through the next few projects.

Dining Room: 1; Team T-J: 2

2008-04-18T22:06:00.000-04:00

Pretty much everything that could go wrong in this room did - it took forever to take the wallpaper down, the walls were holey and uneven and rejected our skim coating attempts, then the primer puddled on the wall, blah blah blah... With all of the roadblocks we hit, this room took us about three months from start to finish. Good times.

Everything's Happy Underground

2008-03-02T13:16:00.000-05:00

As we were in the midst of the living room/dining room madness, our hot water heater went, flooding the basement. While this room was not even close to the top of our to do list, it rapidly rose to the top when we discovered that the carpet was ruined. There as no sense in crying over the rusty water everywhere, so we ripped out the carpet and had a new one put in. It looks pretty much like the old one, but the update inspired a tri-state road trip that brought a bar, a booth and a ping pong table into our lives. Awesome! Thanks Liz and Bob for your donations to the Underground and to Richard for taking a day to drive all over New England gathering the makings of our basement bar!

Master This, Bedroom

2008-02-06T21:45:00.000-05:00

After conquering the office, we decided to renovate the master bedroom. The main issue here was the abundance of mint green paint (on the walls, the trim, the doors, the heater...). It took a few weekends to banish the color, but we eventually won.

Seriously - You People Are Killing Me

2008-01-16T14:33:00.000-05:00

Dear Previous Owners,

Happy New Year! We just wanted to thank you for painting every surface in the house a different coordinating color. We especially wanted to give a big shout out for the master bedroom. Ah, mint green. It is funny how what appears to be a harmless color can take over your life (and weekend) when covering every surface. Walls. Trim. Closet doors. Shutters to the storage under the eaves. The heating register. All of it. What possessed you to do this? A seven-hour priming marathon barely made a difference and our sanity is at stake. We know it will only get worse when we attack the blue and pink rooms and that scares the bejezzus out of us. So thanks. Thanks for killing our dream and our schedule of renovations.

-m&a

The Office

2008-01-15T13:43:00.000-05:00

As all three of my readers know, Matt works from home, so setting up his office was one of the first things we did upon moving in. As far as rooms in our house went, this one wasn't too bad. There wasn't any wallpaper (one of two rooms out of 10 to achieve this status) and the trim was actually white (score) so he figured he could live with the stenciled sunflower border for awhile. Which he did.

Finally in January when the New Year's Eve hangover wore off and the memories of the horror that was the bathroom renovation had faded, we decided to take on the office.

It actually wasn't too bad in retrospect. The main goals were removing the sunflowers from sight, painting the walls a slightly different yellow and removing the previous owner's paint spatters from the hardwood floors.

To remove the traces of former paint jobs gone wrong, we purchased Goof Off. I gotta tell you, this stuff is GOOD. It is also strangely addictive. Over the past five months I've spent no fewer than two days using this stuff on every inch of or floors. It works and it is cheap and you might even get a bit of a contact high from it. I'm just sayin...

Here is the room during said painting/removing weekend:

And here are the after photos...

We were going for a modern, hippy vibe that I think we accomplished.

For more pictures, check out the slideshow:

We're going to renovate the bathroom this weekend...

2007-11-19T14:17:00.000-05:00

...and the next weekend, and the next weekend, and the next. Why? Because it is hideous. How did it take that long? Um, everything was yellow. And ugly. And trapped in some tacky baroque decade that I'm not familiar with. Here's how the project shook out.

We took down the wallpaper, used an epoxy paint to change the yellow tile to white, painted the walls blue the trim white and changed out vanity, faucet and light fixture. While it took forever, we are thrilled with how it turned out!

Just to remind you how hideous the room was, here are the before pictures again.

A Photo Essay Entitled "Before"

2007-10-16T14:17:00.000-04:00

Here's a slideshow of the whole thing if you're interested:

Thanks for checking out our new pad. Come back to see how long it takes us to bring the house into the 21st century.

Go Wawh-wik!

Note: All photos taken by our amazing friend and photographer, Elizabeth Squillacote. When she gets her kick-ass photography website up and running, we'll add a link. Oh and she used a fish-eye lens for all of these pictures, so every thing looks bigger than in real life. Including us.

What do you get when you cross an overflowing POD with 5 amazing friends?

2007-10-15T14:14:00.000-04:00

You get an almost pain-free move. We are so grateful to all of you for your energy and willingness to help. Here's a picture of the team post-move.

Walk-through & close - DONE!

2007-10-01T12:28:00.000-04:00

We did the walk through before our close this morning. While we still LOVE the house (good thing), there is a lot more work to do than we remembered. Um, when did the downstairs bathroom get so damn' ugly? Can't wait to get in there and start tearing down the wallpaper and ugly light fixtures...

The close was uneventful and anti-climatic since we're renting back until 10/12. FUN!

Holy S@#$!

2007-09-28T15:37:00.000-04:00

I just found out that we're moving earlier than anticipated! This being the first good (house-related) news in awhile, I'm flabbergasted. I gotta go call the POD people! :-) Have a great weekend!

One whole year!

2007-09-22T17:24:00.000-04:00

Today is our one-year anniversary. I cannot believe how quickly the time went or how much has happened. We both have new jobs, live in a new state, are almost homeowners, Matt has a new car and we live in my parents' basement. Life is good. Here are some pictures from the best day in the life of Team T-J.

A special thanks to the ladies of honor who keep me as sane as possible. You girls rock!

More moving fun!

2007-09-01T17:20:00.000-04:00

Yesterday was Matt's magic birthday. While a good time was had by all during the evening festivities (despite an early forced departure from Lucky's Lounge) the big day was clouded by a road rage incident and notification that we won't be moving into the house until mid-October. Awesome.

Feelin' Hot Hot HOT!

2007-08-27T17:00:00.000-04:00

Moving day is never fun. Not for your amazing friends who help (thanks guys) or for the OCD wife who attempts to orchestrate it. We went through two bags of ice, endless bottle of water and one 64oz bottle of Gatorade and all we got was a packed to the roof POD. Check out the fun we had!

The Bobs & Matt finish the first shift...

Sadly, due to the heat, I lost my head and didn't take pictures of the second shift of hard-working movers - Pat & Nate. Thanks for bearing with us guys!

Finally, on Sunday night at 9, Team T-J finished filling the POD.

We're so excited that we broke out a pose reserved for VERY special occasions:

The Maverick & Goose

Then, celebratory dancing broke out:

Big finish with jazz hands -

Then we locked it up and called it a night

Finally, the next day I couldn't walk but waved good bye to 99% of our worldly possessions from one of the two remaining items in our apartment.

Moving forecast - Sofa King HOT

2007-08-25T12:07:00.000-04:00

Weather predicted for moving our stuff into the POD day - 95 degrees and very humid. FAN-tastic!

The POD is here!

2007-08-24T16:49:00.000-04:00

The POD arrived right on time

Love that POD-zilla technology

Here are some hilarious pictures of my cute husband celebrating the appearance of the POD

Ah, the many benefits of working from home...

The POD is coming!

2007-08-20T16:47:00.000-04:00

Most of the apartment is pretty much packed up and the POD comes on Friday. Can't wait to get our stuff loaded and stop paying rent on a place that we're in together maybe one day a week!

Great yard sale or THE GREATEST YARD SALE?

2007-08-18T16:26:00.000-04:00

I'll go with the greatest! After a rough start with our scary neighbor Ray wearing only daisy dukes yelling in the front yard and a freaked out pitbull barking away the early birds, the yard sale officially kicked off at 9 with a countdown from seven about to be customers. The next few hours were a blur with Chrissy, who had to leave with the dog before she could open her lemonade stand, Liz, Matt & I all running selling various items to strange people. Both Liz and Team Tarbox-Johnson made good money from the sale. Here are some things we learned:
1) Start getting ready WAY before people are supposed to show up. It takes forever to set things up and despite saying no early birds expect them. A lot of them. Sleep in people, it is Saturday morning.
2) Beware of groups of three or more that arrive in the same car. Nothing but trouble.
3) Prepare yourself for lots of verbal abuse, because when you decide to not sell shoes that were more than $100 for less than $5, you're going to piss some people off.
4) Come to terms with the fact that you are going to get ripped off at least once. (I haven't forgotten about you cordless phone lady - you still owe me $3, bi@#h!
5) It is impossible to predict what is a good yard sale item - one of the first items we sold was a very offensive (drunken purchase by my husband) Little Joe Cooke Peanut Man tee shirt.
6) Winning the most interesting almost purchase - two ladies dressed like this:

attempting to purchase two dresses cut like this:

How's that for some food for thought...

Approved - yeah baby, YEAH!

2007-08-02T16:25:00.000-04:00

We're officially approved for our mortgage. Woohoo!!! Time to start packing.

Doo...doo..do..do..do...Inspector Kevin...Doo..doo..do..do..do..do..doooo...

2007-06-29T16:14:00.000-04:00

In case you missed it, I am trying to get the theme from Inspector Gadget stuck in your head, like it has been in mine since I typed the title of this post. Our home inspection was yesterday afternoon, and let me tell you, kicking it off with water in the fuse box is enough to give a first-time home buyer an eye twitch. Um, water & electricity shouldn't mix, right? Luckily, there wasn't too much else wrong with it, which is pretty sweet since the place is 57 years old. Our inspector, Kevin, was feakin' awesome - sending the report to us the same night and answering his own questions in a very Matt & Amy kind of way. Hilarious. Love that guy and looks like we're getting a pretty solid house. Nice!

We got it!!!!!!

2007-06-20T16:05:00.000-04:00

After a few rounds of negotiating and a few more nights of no sleep (on my part - Johnson can always sleep like a champ - jerk), Linda called Wednesday morning to tell us that we got the house - sewer hookup, stainless steel fridge and all. OH MY GOD - WE'RE ADULTS!!!!!

Making an offer...

2007-06-18T16:03:00.000-04:00

After seeing a few more houses (one horrible, one adorable but needs lots and lots of work) and losing several nights of sleep thinking "what happens if we lose the house to someone else - we'll never find another one we like that much again...blah...blah...blah," we visited 133 again on Sunday and decided to put in an offer. Another couple had the same bright idea. I smell a bidding war...

June 8 & 9

2007-06-08T15:59:00.000-04:00

After touring 9 houses (7 of which need TONS of work; TIP - never trust the photos you see online) in two days, we could actually "see" ourselves living in two of them. One is on the Warwick/West Warwick line (not ideal) and is only 5 years old and the other is rather close to the airport (again not ideal) but felt like home the minute we walked in. Since the second one just went on the market and is priced pretty high for the 'hood we decide to wait it out and check out a few more houses the following weekend.