Pack it up or pack it in?

David & John came over for a little packing party on Sunday. Damn, we've got a lot of crap. We purged quite a bit about a year ago but I see a yard sale in our near future. One thing we won't be packing are the fish. We decided that the dog and cat (pictured) are quite enough to deal with and the fish tank is something we can do without for a while.

So I flushed them, kidding!! I "donated" the fish back to the pet shop today. Now we'll have an actual basement where we can keep things like old fish tanks, cool! What we should really do is put the fish tank up at the yard sale so the basement doesn't become full of things like old fish tanks.

Special Delivery for Labor Day?

It's looking like we may indeed be able to close and move in by the end of this month! It wasn't looking that way 2 days ago. Yeah!!!

I'd Like To...Think about the Kitchen

I guess I’ve got to say something about the Kitchen. The electric stove has been swapped out for a gas stove. I’ve no idea what kind. I like those new Dual Fuel ranges that have double ovens (one smaller above a regular size) in one unit.

The cabinets aren’t great but I think we can make do for a while with some stripping and refinishing. There are certainly plenty of them. I think some of the drawers are in rough shape though. We’ll have to find a kitchen table for the middle of the room I guess. Imagine that…a kitchen table!

I’d like to look into one of those greenhouse like additions that the sliding door would lead into. Something big enough to keep herbs and such going through the Winter. We’ve been reading magazines like The Family Handyman which is much better than the title suggests and not at all hokey.

I’d Like To…Pantry

The Kitchen as a whole is too big a topic to even go into at this point. Though I do know that I want an island someday and there’s enough room for a nice layout. Anyhow I’m looking forward to having the pantry. It’s a freaky mess right now and I’m wondering if a thorough cleanup will be enough or if we should dive right in and re-do the shelving. Maybe a nice Elfa system.

I’d Like To…Flooring, Built-Ins

Somewhere under all of this ceramic tile (it only looks like vinyl) is a wood floor…we think. Friends think they know a contractor who did a lot of the work on the place so we’ll be asking him. A real wood floor would be nice.

The built-in cabinets in the dining room are pretty cheesy. I might be able to live with them for a while if we cut off the scrolley bits on top and get rid of the mirror. We don’t have a sideboard or anything to keep dining room stuff in (hell, never had a dining room before) so we might as well us them. Then again if we’re going to paint we should probably get rid of them now. We’ll see.

Oh, have I mentioned we haven’t closed on the house yet? That’s a story I’ll tell later. This blog is all for fantasy at least for a few more weeks.

I’d Like To…Fireplace, Color

The Living Room fireplace is closed off. The furnace and hot water heaters are directly below so it looks like the chimney was repurposed to vent those. I’m told it can be rejiggered to handle both the ventilation and fire burning. Ron would like that a lot.

More immediately it’s all about Color. After living in rentals forever we’ve always had White walls. There’s something to be said for white walls but half the fun of owning a house is dressing it up. I’m big on shades of Teal in the dining room at the moment. I’ll have to go spend some time at ColourLovers and work up some palettes.

I'd Like To...Garage Wall

The heinous gazebo/Jacuzzi should be gone by now and the deck patched. I’d like to clean up the deck. It was wet when this was shot so it looks extra awful. It had been painted at some point but most of it has peeled off. I’d like to strip and restore it. Not that I know the right way to do that. I’d also like to do something interesting with the garage wall. The Blue on cinderblock isn’t doing it for me. I’m thinking of painting a mural (gradient, skyline, tumbledown cottage).

More recently I’m thinking about a really slick trellis system, backlit with color changing LED of course. There’s this beautiful scrolley high finish metal I’ve seen. Scaryily expensive. Something Moorish could be nice too…modern Alhambra.

Then there’s a few mirrored mosaic ideas bouncing around my head.

The House

After seeing a dozen properties or so we were liking a newly restored triplex townhouse condo in our neighborhood of choice. It was sweet but its best feature was the winding central staircase topped with a skylight. Unfortunately the floors and rooms it connected were all fairly small. At max. 14’ wide the place felt a bit close even without furniture. The place was already all it can be.

We put in an offer but kept looking around until Ron spotted a listing we couldn’t resist. “Renovated one family on large corner lot. Detached one car garage plus 2 additional spots in driveway. Private yard with deck and Jacuzzi. Five minute walk from Light Rail. 2 Blocks from park.” When we saw it, we just KNEW.

The Backstory – 3

Now, this whole concept of moving off the island is weighty indeed. Carrie from Sex and the City’s snobbish reaction to Miranda moving to Brooklyn is not uncommon. If Miranda had moved to Jersey...horrors! The fact of the matter is that you do get a little house-proud just by dint of living in Manhattan, even if you live in a hovel. I moved to New York City to live in Manhattan, not Brooklyn or Queens and certainly not New Jersey! I’m getting over it though.

I fully expect we’ll go through some degree of culture shock. You get very used to having all sorts of things at your fingertips and the idea of having to suffer the indignity of inconvenience is frightening. I’m getting over it though.

Being a Foodie I know I’m going to be freaked at first. I’m very used to the little circuit of specialty markets I have at hand here in HK. We scouted the neighborhood and were happy to see that Central Avenue, just 4 blocks away, is lined with several farmer’s markets, a few Italian markets, butchers and bakeries, and every sort of Latino shop. I still haven’t found any Asian markets but I’m sure there’s one. Then there’s a huge new ShopRite supermarket just down the elevator in Hoboken. I’ve just learned that most restaurants in the area don’t deliver, or there’s a charge if they do! I don’t know if I’ll get over that one.

The Backstory - 2

We called our old friend Sara, who got out of television and into real estate a few years ago to show us some things in her area which is centered in Hoboken NJ. Having not been over to Hoboken in well over 10 years I wasn’t expecting much but it’s come a long way and is now really cute. Again an area that’s too cute…translating to too expensive.

After looking at various multi families, single families and condos in the area Sara showed us a condo in Jersey City Heights. We liked the neighborhood immediately. It’s sort of a diamond in the rough in that it’s a middle classish neighborhood with its share of issues. However its proximity to Manhattan and the saturation and rising prices of Hoboken and downtown Jersey City coupled with a new Light Rail line have made it very appealing lately. Fortunately for us The Heights still seems to be something of a secret…at least to us Manhattanites.

The Backstory - 1

In March of this year we learned that the vacant commercial space on the ground floor of our building, directly below our apartment, may be slated to become a “Bar with light finger food”. That was the last sign we needed to show that our neighborhood has gotten too cute for our own good. So after some 13 years of living in Hell’s Kitchen, a neighborhood that’s gone from gritty to glossy, it’s time to move on and up.