Listing pics I: Staging and more details, first floor edition

Time for the unveiling! Lots of nice pics here that show off the final product and a lot of stylish staging. (The importance of the latter is underlined by the fact that interested buyers have asked for information on stagers to talk about buying a few pieces.) Am using the large size for your drooling pleasure. Will post some direct before-and-after comparisons later this week.

This photo is familiar from my previous "they painted it!" excitement, but I also used it as the first photo in the listing so that it would be the face of the listing (rather than the typical full-front shot, which can run together in the context of Philadelphia townhouses). I think it makes a strong graphical statement, while conveying the relatively contemporary feel of the rehab.

In the event, I ended up replacing the house numbers, because (a) there was damage to the brick from the previous plaque, which looked unpleasant when revealed by free-standing numbers, (b) the numbers were hard to read against the brick, and (c) there was a kind of "snotty" residue around the base of each digit after my guys installed them, and it looked very gross up close. You can see the new number in the before-and-after photo later, but this is the photo that will stay on the listing. Heh, could be a lot of buyers wouldn't even notice.

Here are three photos that give you a sense of the main floor LR/DR space, staging, and features (floor inlay, stair railing, closet, etc.):

View toward the front of the house, with LR ensemble.

View toward back, including DR area and staircase.

View from DR, including cute bannister (and look at that floor!).

Next up, the fabulous new kitchen! (Cabinets are 42" tall, breakfast bar area completely new, glass cabinet a pure luxury.) Still in love with the concrete-look tile here, and with how it all came together.

View from LR/DR, showing the whole layout.

Turning left to show off the fancy appliance suite -- man, I want that stove!

Close-up of extra-large sink, high faucet, fancy glass tile and granite.

Direct view of glass cabinet, breakfast bar, spiffy lighting.

Last stop on our tour of the first floor is the patio, which has had a face-lift via a good sanding and some paint (which continued onto the rear of the house.

View from the kitchen door. (Flowers from a Speck school fundraiser!)

Back of house from patio. New A/C unit visible down side alley.

Ok, I'll end with this photo for today -- it's the last photo in the actual listing, but since I'm dividing this bunch of photos by floor, I might as well include it here instead. As you can see, there's not much landscaping with a townhouse, but the city did plant that cute little tree just after I bought the place, so it will probably be shading the front stoop in a few years. If the house had taken longer to generate offers, I would probably have surrounded it with bright little flowers, but now the paperwork stuff is keeping me busy instead.

You can also see that we're next to a similar house (actually a row of them) on one side and a pretty different, radically modern, house on the other. The older houses all use street parking, but the modern house has its own garage, a practice that is at the center of a lot of controversy over new development. Parking turned out to be a worry for many of the folks who visited this house, so I'll have to keep that in mind with future purchases. As much as one can, in a dense metropolitan area!

Unveiling of the floors (and closets)

Ok, the paper finally came up. The floors look pretty gorgeous, although my contractor did make everything a much darker shade than I had anticipated or wanted (to hide some ancient dog pee or something) -- luckily he made the downstairs lighter, so the inlays all around the edge of the room show up better there. Anyway, I realized I'd never shown how all these new closets and general paint/trim was looking, so these "empty room" photos are covering all of that ground too.

Here's the master bedroom, in a lovely shade of light grey, with shiny floors in all their glory. The bookcase in this room wasn't done until literally after the staging furniture was already installed, but you can at least see the look of the closet (from the outside), with french doors and graceful handles. This room has really turned out as all I envisioned.

Here's the other main bedroom, in lovely prairie grass green, with its matched pair of closets.

If you blow up this second shot, you can see that the inlay around the edges of the room still shows, despite the dark stain -- hooray for retaining some history!

It's hard to take a good picture of the middle bedroom, since the closet is just inside the door and there's not that much else to show (blue paint and white trim). So I'll beg your indulgence for another window seat picture, just to get the window and floor in there too.

I guess that means that all that's left is to unveil the staged listing photos, and then I'll finish up with some power before-and-after comparisons. But I'm taking a little vacation first, so you'll just have to wait!

Progress on other fronts

Lest you think that we're working only on the kitchen, there have been a bunch of developments in other parts of the house, some final facelift steps, recently too. For example, the patio has had a fresh coat of sanded external paint (below left), colors tying in with the interior color scheme and cleaning up a host of peeling and cracked sections. Also, we replaced a sort of goosenecked-lamp rear patio light with this funky modern fixture (at right).

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Around the same time, the bsement finally got its carpet -- a sort of berber-style nap, over a moisture-proofing layer and subfloor padding. It looks and feels great, exactly as I hoped!

So now the stairs and family room (and extra space/office) are carpeted. There's glass brick in the bathroom and laundry areas, letting natural light down in there, and the bathroom is sporting a masculine grey color scheme and a cute new pedestal sink.

Meanwhile, most of the big stuff is finished upstairs too. The new vanity, backsplash, and medicine cabinet make a pretty sharp combination.

The window seat has gone from a group of boards to a cozy little perch (just waiting for the room to be clean enough to unwrap its custom cushion).

And the nice master closet, with its french doors, now has a nice set of hardware to add to its appeal (including a double rod and a bunch of shoe shelves).

Next up, a glimpse of the uncovered floors and finished bedrooms just before they get staged for showing.

Just a quick out-take

We're continuing to close in on the finish line, with (extended) punch lists hanging in every room, chunks of things getting marked off each day. Stopped by on Wednesday to discover that at last the front door was sporting its new paint and hardware -- what a pleasant shock!

The steps are still a bit messy from cement work being done overhead, and we still need to replace the elderly house number plaque with the individual modern numbers waiting in a closet, but man, what a transformation! No awnings, no maroon paint, no frilly white ironwork! (I'll take credit for that last, having spent most of one Sunday afternoon sanding and painting the rails in this new "stainless steel" color, chosen as a compromise between classic black and the white that continues to be standard down the street. One of my neighbors liked the look so much she might redo her rails the same!)

Anyway, compare that picture with how the front looked before:

I think you'll agree we've sent Granny packing! Hopefully it will seem like just the right place for a young urban couple who want to be in this trendy part of town and have just a little bit of history (see: original floors) in the bargain. More photos soon.

Quest for granite

Most of my design for the kitchen was built around the white cabinets that it started with and a coordinating granite sample (from my friendly local kitchen designer). Once I realized I had to start over, I got some new cabinet samples to work with, and my "design board" looked a bit like the image at right (with some allowances for bad lighting -- that sample on the left there should be pure white!), based pretty much on the same idea. The granite is a mix of large grey and white patches with some tan. The cabinet samples are white and light grey, and the backsplash tile is a matte glass in a bottle brown color (to add a little warmth to the room).

I sat on this collection for a while before we got around to time for templating the cabinets for counter, and then I was told to head out to the "stone warehouse" to pick out my actual piece of granite! So off I went.

Here's the immense warehouse -- a little reminiscent of that giant government storage facility at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Aisles of stone from around the world, mostly for countertops, in all colors and patterns. Slabs are probably 6 feet tall and 12 feet wide, so it's quite a walk!

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Here's the slab I actually chose (left). Looks a bit darker in the photo than in person -- the close-up at right is probably the better approximation. A little finer-grained than my sample from three months before, but definitely the same general color mix.

So, one templater, several weeks of cutting, and an afternoon's installation later (plus some work by my guys around the house), how's it look? Like a kitchen has been born!!! Closing in on civilization here!

I have to say that between the countertop and the light fixtures (and some other recent developments inside and outside the house), it's starting to look like we might actually get this place done soon! And I'm pretty excited to see it all finished and with the construction equipment (and dust!) out of there. Not to mention with a little furniture and daylight to lighten things up.

As for granite, another time I'd make visits to the warehouse earlier in the process, to be sure I got to look at more than one cut -- that is, this time I was looking at slabs that all came from the same slice of stone, so there wasn't much variation, but I imagine something new must come in every few weeks. I like the look of what I ended up with, but I'd be curious to see whether additional options would catch my eye when looking at the actual stones rather than just representative chips.

So, just waiting for some pulls to finish up this room, some flooring for under the washer and drier in the basement, and some cement work on the front where the awnings came down (yay!). Patio has been painted, basement carpeted, and bathrooms mostly done. More pictures to come! And hopefully a listing not far behind.

Kitchen taking shape!

Well, at last the cabinets have been installed, and I can start to see the outlines of a pretty spiffy modern kitchen. The scale of 42-inch cabinets is a little hard to convey in photos, but it's very striking in person! I want these in my kitchen at home!!

You can see the nice built-in compartment for the fridge at left and a gap for the stove and microwave. (Also, some glimpses into the interior machinery of the cabinets, which includes a bunch of nice roll-outs and so forth that got thrown in with my order as freebies.)

Next up, the new sink base (gonna get a nice big one in there!) and dishwasher (the absence of which was part of why I had to gut the kitchen to begin with).

Continuing around, we come to the grey section of cabinetry, including a spiffy aluminum-and-glass wall cabinet (an extravegence I'm unlikely to repeat, but will definitely enjoy), and where there will be a breakfast bar once the countertops arrive.

These photos are a couple of weeks old already, so there's paint on the walls and other things falling into place. Next to show here: adventures with granite!!

Kitchen developments

Well, the guys are finally turning their attention to the kitchen, where so much of my imaginative energy has been invested. I thought the house was a bit crazy when it had this many appliances in it:

Of course, that was before the pile-up had added some cabinets and grown to look like this:

But luckily, just this week the kitchen floor started to look like this:

and then like this:

The addition of the light gray grout to my concrete-looking grey tiles has absolutely made me salivate. Painting this room is up next. Can't wait to see all the rest of the components coming in there to match! Not to mention the granite that inspired it all!