THE END IS NIGH

For some reason I originally thought that the milestones of this project would arrive heralded by trumpets, confetti and fanfare. Instead, the finishing touches just kind of creep up on you a little at a time. I also thought that the house would be completed in stages wherein entire rooms would be finished out, roped off and vacuum sealed for consumption at a later date. And my hope was that there would come a point earlier than later where I could actually live in the house while finishing it. Alas, the reality is that everything kind of moved along at the same time- sort of like a painting where the artist applies little bits of ochre and azure here and there until the sky appears in the painting, then digs into the earthtones to do the landscape before going back to the sky again, etc. Little wisps of touch-ups here and there. And it just goes on and on and on... No major breakthroughs. No big milestones. Just a lot of things getting past the 90% completion point at the same time. Alas, I still sit here with a house that leaks, a warren full of bathrooms that look finished but are not functional, a gallery of dead electrical outlets, appliances that lack juice and floors that are still encrusted with months of accumulated goop.

HI INFIDELITY

As anyone who has ever undergone a building or remodeling project before can attest, your lead person/contractor/carpenter is your confidant/best friend/brother. Or maybe even somewhat like your lover. No, I don’t mean in the biblical sense, you silly geese! Not that there would be anything wrong with that if such a situation developed between two consenting adults, mind you... But one would like to think that the relationship one has with one’s lead contractor is a sacred, blessed thing, and that while you are both working on this project, you are wed in holy matrimony. For several months Carlos has been my husband in that regard. He has kept his eye on the place, looking out for any signs of trouble. He fixed things when they broke, had the house cleaned when it was dirty, received shipments of materials, gave me daily updates, etc. He took my tantrums and bitch sessions in stride. He reassured me when my lower lip was swollen and I looked dejected. There was no task too big or too small- he lunged at every opportunity that came his way. And I believed that there was as much at stake emotionally for him as it was for me in terms of the success of the project. He was there every day, seven days a week, and he gave it his all.

But then I started seeing the signs. His phone calls became more and more infrequent. He was at the house less and less. Accordingly, the pace of work started to slow down big time. This could mean only one thing:

He was cheating on me.

Was it me? Did I become less alluring? After suffering in silence for a while, I finally confronted him over the weekend after a week in which very little progressed.

“Are you working on another job?” I asked. After a pregnant pause he spilled the beans: he has been fooling around with a tape/spackling job in Hampton Bays. I knew it! Cheating on me with some low-rent floozy on the wrong side of the Shinnecock Canal! I was a bit taken aback by the news... but I kept my composure. In my usual fashion, I took the highroad

“Oh well, then... I wish you the best. But I need you to finish here ASAP...”

In a way, I knew the relationship had to come to an end eventually... but it is never fun being dumped!

“NOT A PROBLEM”

From Day 1 I liked my electrician. Not only was his initial proposal shockingly modest costwise, he never uttered a complaint or a discouraging word. Unintentionally I must have thrown him every curveball that would have sent any other electrician packing or, at the very least, reaching for his gun. But E (my electrician) only encouraged my eccentricity. There wasn’t a light fixture too bizarre or too difficult to install. If I flaked out and wanted to add a new light fixture or to move an existing one, he would just say “Not a problem.” Low voltage lighting. “Not a problem.” Too few recessed lights. “Not a problem” (he brought his own). If I didn’t know what kind of bulb a particular fixture used, he would just buy it, install it and hand me the empty box. The only thing that visibly fazed him a little was running the extra wires for the water heaters, which involved adding a new 180 amp circuit panel. Still, his pat answer was “Not a problem.” When I griped (to myself) that I had forgotten to buy bathroom fans, the next thing I knew he had bought and installed them for me. He then offered to knock out and install the clothes dryer vent too. When I lamented that I had neglected to specify an exterior light for the back yard, he recommended low voltage well lights which would have required installing a transformer plus lots of wiring and knockout work underground. Just on a whim I bought an extra powerful transformer along with some extra well lights and asked if he could possibly put some well lights in front of the house as well as the back. As before, “Not a problem.”

I’m just so curious to see if this guy actually has a breakpoint. The other day, while putting up the pendants over the kitchen peninsula, he dropped one on the floor. Of course it shattered into a gazllion pieces. I think any other contractor would have either blamed it on another contractor, or would have insisted that it was already broken in the box. But E was horrified and insisted on paying for a new one, whatever it cost. As it turns out, I got an exceptional bargain on these lights at the Pottery Barn/West Elm outlet a year ago. After multiple discounts, they ended up being something ridiculously cheap- like $11 each or so. However, now I was concerned that they stopped manufacturing the item. Fortunately, they still sold them on the West Elm website, but for the full $59 retail price plus shipping and tax. Not expensive but not cheap either. After all E has done for me, I wouldn’t even consider making him pay for this. If anything, he has earned a nice big tip above and beyond whatever I owe him.



Funnily enough, in a house packed with both high-end and bargain basement fixtures and fittings, those $11 West Elm glass cone pendants have earned the most rave reviews. When lit, the reaction from everyone has been, “Wow, that’s cool!” Go figure! If I could go back in time, I would have bought out the store’s entire stock of these lights and strung them everywhere! Er, maybe it is a good thing I can’t go back in time, after all...

COUNTER-INTUITIVE

If you haven’t done this before, I can guarantee that the hardest finishes to decide upon are tile and countertops. Although deciding upon flooring may seem to be the most daunting task, for me it was relatively simple. You either like carpet or you don’t like carpet. You either like tile flooring or you don’t like tile flooring. Hardwood flooring is always the universally most appealing choice, if not exactly the cheapest. And it’s then just a matter of which shade of brown you prefer.

Countertops are another story. A few years ago it was all about granite. And I have to admit that after living in houses and apartments for my entire life that had only laminate countertops, I had granite fever! For a while I would go to showrooms and caress the sample slabs and hold them up to see how they refracted light. The blue pearl slabs were my favorite because of their somber opalescent quality. Back in the day when I was househunting around the Hamptons I would measure the worthiness of a house based upon whether there were granite countertops in the kitchen. Formica actually killed the deal for me. So naturally back when I was orchestrating the genesis of my building project, granite countertops were foremost in my mind.

But, alas, my romance with granite was shortlived. Once considered to be exotic and unusual, granite suddenly became as ubiquitous as formica. The counter at the Chinese food takeouts are all now made of some slab of granite. The ugliest country kitchen displays all have granite tops on them. And for me, granite totally JUMPED THE SHARK when my parents finally hopped on the granite bandwagon and remodeled their kitchen with it. And to make matters worse, their profiles had this ugly ogee detailing on it. BLECCH! And you know when my parents have finally come around to the trend of the moment, it is over! It is sooo 2004! Next!

Still, even without granite, I had a bajillion other options in a quadrillion different colors. There’s marble, or rather “mawble,” as they would say in these parts. No thanks... I’m not a big fan of Atlantic City casinos. Then there are the fake stones- Caesarstone, Silestone, etc. But they mostly seemed to look like a bad glitter art project I made in kindergarten, or a suspension of wasabi peas in miso soup. Then there are the honed surfaces like Corian and Richlite... which I actually liked, but there was something rather Stepfordian about them; they seemed almost too perfect in a way. And they didn’t feel very substantial- almost as if the slightest ding could shatter them into a trillion pieces.

Ultimately it came back to concrete. There’s something so alluring about concrete- the way it looks, the way it feels... it’s beautiful but unpretentious. It’s tough, hard and heavy, but also sleek without being an attention grabber.

After going through the initial motions to order the concrete kitchen and master bath countertops from meldUSA, I wimped out at the last minute. Despite the fabulous pricing and the enthusiasm that meldUSA expressed for this project, I had my reservations about dealing with a company located so far away (NC), and it’s not like I had a crew of people who would know how to install this type of material. And when I started measuring dimensions in my embryonic kitchen, I realized that every dimension and cutout had to be accurate down to the micron. And then when I found out that the minimal lead time for completion was 7-8 weeks, that killed the deal for me.

Just about ready to settle on one of the fake stones, Peg, my kitchen designer at HamptonDesign called me out of the blue to ask me what I was doing about kitchen countertops. When I told her I had no idea, she told me about a vendor that was working on a large custom concrete sink/basin for her. That sounded pretty neat, but whenever I think of Peg, I think of her stylish little studio/showroom in East Hampton Village packed with $100sf Ann Sacks tiles and all of her uber-rich clientele and the Hamptons-scale pricing that goes with it. But before I could ask, she said that they were only charging her $900, which is actually not too bad for a custom-made... anything! When I told her that this sounded great, she told me that this firm is (unfortunately) business-to-business; they don’t deal with the general public. As such, I would have to work with them through Peg. After a pregnant pause on my end, she quipped, “Don’t worry, I’m not going to kill you.” Ah... Peg... there’s no mincing words with that one.

Soon thereafter, Tom from WSO Creative Concrete was at the house taking measurements and templating. Despite all of the cutouts, the slabs in the kitchen were pretty straightforward. However, the master bathroom slab would be a bit of an engineering project. Seeing that it would be difficult to have the weight of a 300lb slab of concrete plus two large, heavy porcelain basins, supported by a couple of wall-hanging cabinets, Tom decided that they would have to custom-weld a steel cantilever structure that would be largely hidden by the cabinets. Of course, as usual, everything is thirty times more difficult than it has to be... it’s just par for the course for this house.

Colorwise, Tom said that I could pretty much do anything with concrete. I could even have other materials mixed in with the concrete- stones, marbles, pieces of wood... even metal. Then he showed me some trippy looking acid stained samples. I was getting a headache thinking about the possibilities. Ultimately he fed-exed to me a Benjamin Moore color wheel and told me to pick something out. I was literally paralyzed with choices. I suppose I could have gone all fancy with additives, but I decided to keep it simple and sober. Toby Rapson had recommended black countertops to make the green cabinets “pop.” However, my main concern with that was black would show all kinds of flaws over time. Ultimately I settled on the Benjamin Moore color “trout grey,” which is a very deep, steely grey for the kitchen and “morning dew,” which is essentially like raw concrete, for the master bath slab. The turnaround time would be three weeks.

Three weeks later we had a date scheduled to have the countertops installed. I was extremely excited. At long last the kitchen would be complete, and the plumber would be able to finish all of the hook-ups. Of course, as before, my luck turned southward. The large peninsula slab is now just a pile of steel rebar and dust. Apparently it was so heavy that it was dropped on the ground as it was being lifted onto the truck. The good news however is that the slab against the wall, where the sink is located, survived, and was ready to be installed along with the master bath slab. Needless to say, I was bummed due to the delay, but it was just one more snafu in a sea of snafus. The WSO guys were so amazed that I didn’t freak out at all; if they only knew how comparatively minor this was relative to everything else...

THE VISUALS...

The following pics are a bit out of date. To be honest, I've been either too angst-ridden or too busy to take pictures on my last few visits to the house, but things are coming together...

Starck X-elicious! Obviously that is not the matching Starck X waterfall faucet since I was not about to spend $700 on a faucet! Still, I'm kinda digging the number with the yellow resin ball on it.

Here's another shot of the upstairs hall bath:



Believe it or not, I had originally intended to go way colorful in the master bath. However, after some consideration, I wanted it to be a relaxing, cozy retreat, rather than something loud and campy. As it turns out, it's all about the greys...



The first floor bath has turned out a bit, hmmm..., how do you say... space-age? In addition to a backlit mirror and recessed circline light fixtures, it's got a metallic machine-like vibe. Who knows... maybe I'm ahead of my time... or maybe this will all look terribly dated next month.


Can you tell that I really like those Nelson lamps?


The rear bedroom.


Okay... yea or nay on the dark accent wall? I was considering putting up toile wallpaper on that wall (since it is so trendy these days), but I just wonder how it will fare over time. In general, wallpaper never ages well.

NEXT...

The real end? Or is it neverending...