Video: Inside the Gates Renovation Blog

Awww! I don’t know which sister that was, so if they’re smart they’ll both take the credit. Thanks!

To answer some questions, if anyone’s still reading this:

The idea for the ceiling in the kitchen was totally Ms. Architect’s. We wanted the garden floor to be one big room with no dividing walls, so she came up with a couple of ways to define the kitchen space: the lower, extremely cool ceiling, and four sheetrock “pillars” that kind of frame the space on the four corners.

Way back in the beginning, before we even bought the house, our contractor estimated that the garden floor itself would take about six months, so we figured a year for everything. But between his guys getting backed up last fall with other jobs, us taking forever to make decisions, and things being on hold right now for various reasons, we’re hoping to have the garden floor done by spring and move into the whole house. I think if work had been done straight through a year for those three floors would have been about right. But I have no idea when the parlour floor is going to happen. I’m buying lottery tickets in an effort to speed it up.

Budget twice what your contractor thinks it will cost. And that’s not a dig at the contractor (at least not ours). In the beginning we said things like “Oh, we don’t care so much about that bathroom, we can do it cheap.” That turned into “Well, we don’t want to have problems, it just makes sense to pay for the good fixtures.” And then you have “Well, we bought the good fixtures, now we have to buy the matching accessories – it just won’t look good otherwise.” (The fact those “good” accessories are largely unusable at this point deserves its own post.)

So, a bathroom that should have cost x costs 2x. Unless you’re really disciplined, costs balloon in a hurry. And then there are the ceilings that fall down as they’re being prepped for painting, 160-year-old pipes that disintegrate during a heavy rain, chimneys that need to be rebuilt…it’s all worth it, in my opinion, to live in a brownstone. But just know what you’re getting into and understand that a lot of the costs aren’t controllable, no matter how disciplined you are.

Amy your house looks great and I am envious about the home theater. Contrary to Greenpointer, I thought you were very entertaining to watch. That music still makes me want to hurl and I think the videos are better when Mr. B is just in the background.

All husbands want their porn to be bigger. lol

My husband just read my long-winded response about why we want a home theater, and he says it’s bs. He says the real reason is that he wants his porn to be bigger.

Amy