the arrival of the doors.

bright and early this morning, our new front entry door, back entry door and interior shaker door were delivered! this post is really more of a sneak peak than anything..

james sizing up the delivery truck.

now we have to wait until our contractor has time in his schedule to come by and actually install them - he's busy at the moment, so it won't be for another month or two!! i am very upset about this, as this project has already been almost six months in the making, but that's another story entirely.

how gorgeous are these doors? laying horizontally is the interior door for a new interior wall we are going to put in. we will eventually be replacing every interior door in the house with one of these. the upright one with the sidelite is the back entry. behind it, that you can't see, is the front entry. which is a bigger door without a sidelite, and an additional dentil shelf. none of the doors are stained yet, so we still have to figure out what the stain will be. i'm thinking something dark, but not-too-dark, and warm, but not-too-warm. that's descriptive enough, right?

crystal knob for the interior door (doesn't it just make you swoon?!?!)

entry handle set for the front door (can you spot the craftsman-y details through the packaging?)

the doors are from simpson, the palomar ii (for front and back) and a five panel shaker. we found it a lovely coincedence that the name exterior door we fell in love with is the same name as the hotel we we stayed in when we got married (the palomar hotel, washington, dc).

the pretty hardware is from emtek. the old town crystal knob we ordered is as pictured above, but the arts and crafts full length entry set we got is in flat black, so the hammered look is more subtle. i just can't wait until all this work is done..!

the outside of the house gets a little love.

we replaced the light fixture on the side of the house, and we couldn't be more excited about it!

the existing light on the side of the house (visible from the kitchen and dining rooms) isn't inherently bad, but it looked really janky because it's broken and missing several pieces of glass (james turned it so that the two intact pieces face the street). it doesn't help that we essentially gave up on it, so didn't even bother to clean it, letting the spiderwebs and dead bugs just run rampant.

gross.

it's bothered us from the day we moved in, and we look in the outdoor lighting section of every home depot and lowe's that we go into, every single time. surprisingly, there just aren't that many options for a small, outdoor-rated ceiling mounted pendant light - especially in a style that makes sense with a hundred year old craftsman house! in the end, after a visit to rejuvenation in culver city, we ordered this jordan valley semi-flush mount (outdoor-rated!) in antique copper, with a six inch clear glass globe shade. guys, it is so pretty. it was more than we really wanted to spend on a side light, but the quality is palpable. and again, so so so so pretty. you'll see.

eeeee....! (so pretty!)

we thought getting the old fixture off would be a piece of cake - according to the instructions, just a screwdriver and pliers, right? maybe a vise grip. but of course, this fixture has been there for decades, and nothing is ever as easy as you'd hope.

there was so much rust, and stripping of the little bolts holding the mount in place, that we just could not get it off. it was basically spining freely inside the mount, so we had to resort to a dremel. i can't say how grateful i am that james has a pretty decent set of tools at his disposal, and we didn't have to make an additional trip to the store for such a relatively minor setback.

anyway, once we got the mount removed, it was relatively simple. phew! we didn't know what we would find (again, super old house). so finding a standard black/white power/neutral set of wires was quite a relief. 

we're not too pleased that the little junction mount sticks out about half an inch (and you'll see why in a second), but at least it cleaned up pretty nicely, and we were quickly able to wire up the new fixture to it.

even though we really don't get much rain in los angeles (especially this drought-y year), we still wanted to be safe, and by chance found these waterproof connectors. we didn't really get how they would work, until we used them. when you stick the wires into it, it breaks some seal inside it that is holding a silicone sealant, which coats the wires, waterproofing the connection. pretty nifty!

and voila! however, can you see what i see? there's a bit of a gap there between the mount and the beam..

we're going to leave it as is for the moment, but we'll need to find some way to make this look better. knowing the area, it will just become infested with more spiderwebs and bugs. we're thinking of making an additional wooden mount piece to go between the two.

With such a pretty fixture, we couldn't just use the old CFL in it. We ended up going with an edison bulb, which is less efficient, but gives off a much warmer and prettier light for the side porch.

a pretty little wine rack for under $40!

we've needed a wine storage solution for the house for awhile now. below is what it

was

. a non-functioning 12 bottle wine fridge, a six bottle wine rack stacked on top of it, and a bunch of other bottles just sitting on the floor. not very pretty or organize, or consistent. i've done quite a bit of research on wine fridges, and all that's really told me is that they are often expensive (for the size i want) as well as finicky. no fridge has consistently good reviews - always about a quarter of the reviews say they don't work out of the box. i take all that with a grain of salt, but nothing has made me confident enough to put the money down for it.

a few weekends ago, we stumbled upon the Omar Bottle Shelf from IKEA (only $30! to hold 24 bottles!). the only thing i didn't like about it is that it's so CHROME. which, you know, works great for storage shelves in the basement, but not so much for the corner of the dining room! so we threw in a bottle of Rust-Oleum's Champagne Mist metallic spray paint from home depot and ended up with a pretty little wine rack that holds a decent number of wines

plus, i think it really cleans up the space nicely. we still don't have a good solution for the growlers, but at least we no longer have wine bottles stored three different ways in our dining room (not including the whites in the actual fridge, of course). and it's much easier to see look at all the bottles now too, which makes picking one less of a chore, which means we've been more likely to have some wine with dinner.