Baby Proofing does =Beauty

Well, in very few cases and I am lucky to have one of them.  After almost a year in the making, I got to pick up the first set of the of leaded glass windows today and boy, are they beauties.  And boy, will they keep my little turkey out of trouble...at least for a little while.  Due to some unforeseen delays with other projects, the man making the leaded glass panels will not have the other two sets ready for us until later this month-total bummer but at least this set is ready as it is one of Ben's favorite places to bang on right now.

luvin the leaded glass

finally got to put back (and dust) all my treasures, one of the Japanese Saki glasses succumbed to the little dude

He is so proud of himself when he helps "unpack"

trying to cause trouble, note baby-proofing on built-in; the only door in the dining/living room he has figured out yet

Take 2

So after months of himming  and hawing (or more like procrastination), we finally bit the bullet today and re-ordered and dropped off our living room and dining room built-in doors to have real leaded glass done, as opposed to the faux type we ended up with the first time I went through the whole leaded glass ordering process.  Well, shocking, yet not surprisingly, it costs much more and we are going to have to sacrifice our first and only born, Ben to complete it.  However, these are promised back March 1st-ish.  Can't wait and will post pictures just as soon as we get them.  I tried to post pictures of the design but cannot figure out how to save them...I believe they are locked.  

Here is a link to one of the pieces and a similar design to what Tom, our leaded glass guy, is creating for us.  We will not have bevels.

http://portlandglass.typepad.com/photos/recent_works/dining-room-window.html

Mid-Summer Projects Indoors

As many of you know and experience yourselves (unless you live in California and have year-round summer, as I did for the first 25 years of my life), when summer comes, projects move outdoors as there is such a short window of opportunity to get them done.  However, we have managed to fit a couple indoor odds and ends onto our summer list.
      Progress is going really well on our buffet; we are going to go view  it and hand over the salvage hinges we got from Rejuvenation and slot screws from Winks hardware on Thursday and Mike reported that he may even have it completed and drop it off to us by Friday! 
   Steve has once again entered a clean out phase on the house and the current project is selling books, CDs and DVDs from his parents house as well as some of my text books from grad school (I am happy to report that most of them were actually still worth some money 4 years later and they are selling fast).  Here are a couple pictures of the upstairs front room which is embarrassing-ly messy (mostly with things from Steve's parents house that we need to sell) as well as the bookshelf we set up with all the things we have listed on Amazon.  I would like to say (but not sure if we were ready to take on the project) that we might have started this process a couple years ago when we sold the parents house, but items need to be shipped within 2 days of sale which made it impossible with a full-time job. 

I have also been dealing with our "leaded glass."  After unpacking the glass, I realized that it is not true leaded glass, rather it is a sticky lead material that sticks onto a full panel of glass.  While the doors look awesome, I am very concerned about how well they will hold up with a toddler in the house and I feel that the cost is too much for a project I could have completed on my own.  I contacted the place that made them and she sympathized with me and told me that she would get back to me with some options on what we could do about it (she said that she almost always explains that it is not true leaded glass) but I have yet to hear back several weeks later so I left another message today. 

Friends are exploding with babies as well so I have kept busy making baby quilts, burp rags and baby towels which I enjoy doing...sorry, I keep forgetting to take pictures but hope to soon.  Ben keeps telling me how excited he is to have all these friends coming.

Leaded Glass Design

I finally took the time last week to finish working on estimates for our leaded glass panels that we wanted to have made for the dining and living rooms.  We ended up getting a very fair bid from Linda at SGOPortland.com .  We decided on a classic leaded design and are going to be using tempered glass on the lower doors and a vintage glass for the upper doors.  We are anticipating that our little man will be crawling everywhere and wanting to bang on the doors/get to the things inside in just 6 short months.  Attached is the design and a couple pictures of the dining room cabinets-my sister helped to reorganize them with some new pottery we found at an estate sale in Portland this weekend :)  I dropped the doors off on Friday and Linda said they should be ready in 4-6 weeks.  She just e-mailed me the final design to approve.

 

new pottery on bottom right

The second shelf (left side) displays all the things we have found in the house walls, etc.  

The camera belonged to Steve's great uncle.  
We also found the framed dog print hiding behind the top shelf wine glasses in the house.

Built-in Updates

It has been quite awhile since I have updated on our built-ins. They were finished being built in early Spring (our contractor was fabulous). He did most assembly off-site and did the final details and installs in our home (not surprised by how many little adjustments that we can't even tell are there were needed being that our almost 100 year old walls are not level). We were left to hours of staining and still need to install glass door panels as well as re-install that electrical outlets. We are debating on stained glass and regular glass but are unsure based on the price of stained glass-may just do regular glass for now and add stained as the budget and design creativity allow in the future. Fireplace tile has finally been delivered and is set for install next week.