settling in

We have been living in the apartment portion of the house for about a month now and it's hard to put into words how it feels.  All the decisions and details have come together and the apartment lives very comfortably.  The diagonal views out the windows look out to our garden as well as the neighboring garden.  The light is Vita Lighting Cuna Pendant Light.   After a couple intense days of adjustment,  Chessie finally settled in and found her go to spot...of course in the sun.

Eventually, we will have a way of covering the TV whether it's a blind or a pair of doors.

We were a little short on our layout for the backsplash, so we added glass tiles between the 4x12 white tiles.  I am really happy with how it turned out.  A simple way to dress up $2 / SF tile.  The countertops are Wilsonart laminate over Apple Ply.  Custom maple cabinets with a light white tint added to the finish.  Stove is Blomberg and the fridge is LG, both 24" wide and deep. 

 The lights are Astron from Rejuvenation.

The apartment is 530 SF with one bedroom.  The extra deep drawers below take advantage of the space under the stairs leading up to the rest of the house.  The sliding door hardware came from Home Depot.

main kitchen pendants

I am slowly going mad trying to find the right lighting for the house.  I think I've easily browsed 5,000 lights...probably more.  I have also gone to lighting stores to see options.  Out of all the finishes and design decisions, this is probably the one I like the least.  I have, though, enjoyed using Pinterest to keep track of possibilities. Gathering the top picks in one location that also keeps track of the webpage I found them on is really invaluable.  Another tool is Photoshop.  I needed a break from selecting the apartment fixtures, so I looked at our top 3 fixtures for our pendant lights in our main kitchen.  I used a screen grab of the model as the base, but one could also use a photo of the actual space.  Then I just added images of the different lights that I had grabbed from the internet.  The first image is top contender right now.

Click here to go directly to my Pinterest light fixture board.

lighting

One of the design challenges of a house, is creating an electrical layout.  Some things are obvious, like outlets for appliances and general outlets throughout.  Switch locations also are typically easy.  You place them in locations that you enter a room.  One of the things that is not so obvious is how best to light the space.  I designed all the spaces to maximize natural daylight and while there are places for special pendant lights, I wanted most of the lighting to not be so obvious.

Design Criteria
1. The majority of fixtures to utilize LED bulbs if not specifically LED fixtures.
2. Minimize cans.  We are paying extra special attention to our air sealing.  After doing extensive research online, we decided to forgo the use of cans in our ceilings where there is also insulation.  This means most of our upstairs.
3. Low cost.  It is very very easy to spend lots of money on electrical fixtures.  Not so easy to find aesthetically pleasing inexpensive fixtures.  I will do more posts on this later.
4. Providing enough light, but not over doing it.  In our current home, which is very similar space to our new main room space, we over did the lighting.  There are 4 cans in the kitchen we never use and a track light at the ceiling we never use and 2 cans over our sofa, that Neil dislikes when I use to read...so I now have a reading lamp.

Even after creating this lighting plan, it is important to do multiple walk throughs with the electrical contractor.  We made a few changes to lamp locations after seeing either conflicting framing or just rethinking what we want while in the space.  Ideally all the fixtures are chosen ahead of time so they can be placed in right spot, but the reality is, I know generally what the fixtures will be (sconce, pendant, light strip, track) just haven't selected and bought them yet.

bedroom lighting

I'm not a fan of a central overhead light fixture in rooms...especially the bedroom. We have 3 switches in each upstairs bedroom. One to the outlets on either side of the bed; one to the wall sconce and the third to an outlet above the walk-in-closet. I have a string of Christmas lights up there and love the way they bounce light off the ceiling. The other thing this shelf above the closet does is make the room appear a larger. If the wall went straight up to meet the ceiling the room would have felt more closed in.

The walk-in-closet goes the whole length of the room and is quite large. Large closets are key these days. In the middle of the wall, we placed an outlet and on the other side we have a cable outlet, so a flat screen can be placed here with hidden controls. Or a nice painting.
It gives off such a nice glow. My mom made the lamp pictured here. She also made the afghan on the bed. That was one of our wedding presents. It's very warm and the cats love it when it's on my lap. I just read the Pillars of the Earth which has been on my bookshelf for a few years. What a treat. I was completely absorbed for 2 weeks in the 12th century.

pendants

The light over the dining room table was our last fixture purchase. It was bought at Seattle Lighting. I had my eye on it for awhile, but was still looking around, just in case. We had debated whether or not to do a pendant or a track with pendants as we did over the bar. I'm glad we did just the pendant. Over the bar the track allows flexibility to add another pendant or a spot pointing into the kitchen if needed.

morning light

What a beautiful day it is here. Waking up in this home fills me with happiness...especially when the sun is streaming in like this morning. I had bought this orchid at the Northwest Flower and Garden show this year and it's perfect in this window. It gives off a slight fragrance which to my sensitive nose is just subtle enough.

I added this bathroom window specifically to catch the eastern light and it's fun to see the shadows and reflections bouncing off the shower glass.

We are to have a sunny spring weekend which is what I need to finish planting the 8 flats of ground covers I had bought.

it's all about the light

Good morning! What a beautiful day we had yesterday. The light was just streaming in the windows and filled the house. It was hard not to walk around with a huge smile on my face. The character of this house is traditional but the amount of light that comes in, makes it stand out from older homes. (well that and it's energy efficiency.)


Siting the long side of the house to face south was the first step in bringing the light in. I chose to modify this plan (originally the GoodFit Kaleah) because of how much it opened up this way with the tall windows facing south. In our gray Seattle weather one needs to bring in as much light as possible.




This counter was a remnant from our tiler. Supposedly it is a very expensive slab...I need to find out the name of it, because it's beautiful. Love all the texture in it.

We looked at the numbers here and out on the post. I liked them under the light and going horizontally versus vertically.

aia seattle january open house - part two

Here is the continuation of the house tour. We liked the exterior. It is just hardi assembled in a brick pattern with a wider gap between them. It also appears they attached hardi in a similar pattern to the garage door. Very clean, simple look.


Next up on our house is the landscaping. I'll be posting more on that later, but have been keeping my eye open to how others have done it. It always looks so bare at the beginning, but I know it only takes one good season for it to take off and 2 to fill in.


This is just a wood door with a nice paint texture. The door hardware is Emtek - Mode lever".

The Karina - bathrooms

It's so exciting to stop by the house these days. There is always something else that is completed.

I can't wait to use this shower! I love the rain head. Neil insisted on the hand held as well...much easier to clean the shower with that.

This is also the main bathroom...I had originally put 2 of the above lights in on either side of the sink to match the other 2 in the bath, but since they use only 60 watt candelabra bulbs, there wasn't enough light. So back to the light store...this time Lamps Plus. I then chose the light in the bottom left corner.
But when Neil went to install it, the back of the light did not give enough room for the wiring because we used pancake electrical boxes. Those are used when there is a stud in the way. Soon there will be a recessed medicine cabinet in the middle so the studs are where the lights will go. So back to the lighting store I went and ended up with these.