Lulu Bliss

What have I been up to?

Not crafting, that's for sure. 

I know my images aren't the greatest, but you can get a sense of what types of things we have been doing for the past week.  We have started renovating our 1922 house and the first room on my list was the living/dining room that was remodeled in the late 1960's or early 1970's.  This room made my skin crawl.  Take a look for yourself:

This is a good view of the real pretty light wood paneling and the lovely gold drapes that came with the house.  You can get a peak at the fancy popcorn ceiling and gold shag carpeting.  I know you want some!

Another image of the funkiness that was our living room.  You can see in a bit of the hardwood floor that we discovered when we took up a corner of the carpeting.  The lamp also came with the house, the previous owner's love gold!

And they did the unthinkable... tiled over perfectly fine hardwood.  We ripped this stuff out too!

The below image is the night before the guys came to remove the popcorn ceiling, we were taking out all the paneling and drapes.

We had a helper... Mikey is enjoying his last night of running in circles on the carpet.  He is still a bit depressed that it is gone.

Ahhh.. the after shot!  Such a big improvement, even with the glue marks on the walls.  We kept the gold flowers up (again they came with the house), I think Matthew is a bit attached to them.  Mikey is testing out the slipperiness of the hardwood floors.  You can also see on the bottom left side of the the picture, what looks like a patch in the hardwood, that is where the original built-in cabinet was (which we still have and will re-install in the same place).  We also learned where the french doors went, that are in the basement... this huge room (28' by 14') used to be two separate rooms separated with the french doors.  I would love to rebuild the wall and install them again, but that will have to wait for now.

Here is my next project... pulling up the original linoleum in the kitchen and laundry room.  I love the color and pattern of this stuff, but it is just crumbling under our feet and needs to be replaced.  We are going to put in new tile linoleum, in a yellow and black checkerboard pattern.  The new linoleum will match our yellow and black tiled counter tops (that are original).

Rediscovered treasure!

I put an old box in storage and quickly forgot about it.  Ever happen to you?

Recently I decided to stop paying for a storage unit, so I needed to clean it out and move all my stuff to our house.  In some stolen spare moments I have been going through what was in my storage unit to get rid of some and to organize the rest.  I stumbled upon an old dirty beat up box and couldn't for the life of me remember what was inside and why I would save such a beat up box.  Then I opened it...

What is this pile of fabric scraps?!?!  Can you guess?

Yes, they are cut-out pieces for a quilt top from vintage fabrics dating from the 1930's to 1940's.  I found this treasure hidden away is a dirty old box at a flea market a few years ago and had big plans for making these pieces into a quilt.  Well, as you can see those big plans haven't quite happened yet.  The cut out pieces I bought are only the center square and the "star points" of the block (does anyone know the name of this block?).  Luckily there were a few finished blocks, so I knew what they should look like.  I will have to take one of the finished blocks apart to make the patterns for the white pieces.  I bought white fabric to finish cutting out these pieces and just need to actually do it.  It will be a big project, once I am able to get to it, but I wanted to post some images of the vintage fabric eye candy.

For some quilting inspiration check out Moonstitches Flickr images of the Tokyo International Quilt Festival.  Some really amazing stuff.  One of my favorites is this beauty.

Quick Little Vintage Tidbit...

I recently found this vintage pattern beauty, on one of my thrifting outings:

I love love love the styling of the A version!  The tie at the front waist and the tucks at the curved shoulder seam, these type of details you don't see on many modern designs. I want to make it in something soft and drapey.  I still need to actually check to see if the pattern has all it's pieces.  There have been many a times that I picked up some fabulous pattern and to find out later it is missing pieces.  Not really a big problem for me, since I am a pattern maker.  But it can be frustrating, if it is  important piece/s that go missing. 

One the home renovating front... the biggest issues I have with our house is living/dining room that was redone in the late 60's or early 70's.  It has all the ugliness of home decorating from that time period:

-faux wood paneling in a light beige/off white combo

-gold shag carpeting

-matching gold drapes with sheers and antiqued gold curtain rods

-and the topper, A FREAKING POPCORN CEILING!

While doing a little preliminary research on where to start with this room remodel we came upon this forum.  Just gotta love a forum out there uniting all the popcorn ceiling haters.  I learned a lot, but it has also brought up more questions.  I am pretty sure (based on the time period the popcorn was put up), that we have the type with asbestos, so the question is to test or not to test it.  If we test it and it comes back positive for asbestos then we only have to options, have it removed by asbestos abatement folks (very spendy) or remove it our selves (there are very detailed instructions and a lot of safety stuff to deal with).  We haven't decided what we are going to do yet, but I am leaning towards doing it ourselves, with the proper equipment and disposal, it could all be done in a few days. 

I will post some pictures of our oh so dated living room soon.