Extreme detail follows. Feel free to skip ahead to the photos :)
The facade was really the exciting part. It also took FOREVER (about 5 months? I lost count!) I almost forgot what it was like not to have scaffold up in front of our building, blocking the light, shading the entryway, and killing the plants in the front planter boxes. It seemed strangely empty in front when they took it down, actually. But okay, it was worth it!
When it was time to start the facade, we had a long talk with Greg, the guy who owns the paint company, about some ideas he had to really restore and improve it. Running along the top of the facade, between the upstairs bay windows and the roof moldings, was a 2 foot tall strip of empty space. Originally, this space was intended for some kind of decorative molding, and these can be seen on Edwardians all over the city. Ours either were pulled off or perhaps had never been there in the first place, but Greg convinced us this would really enhance our facade, so we decided to go for it. The moldings we ended up with were cast from real period designs, and are a repeating pattern of braided leaf garlands, called swags, each curve topped with a little 'button' shaped like a flower. here's a photo of some very similar to ours:
The other addition Greg suggested was to duplicate a strip of decorative molding that already runs along the roof edge at the top of the facade. This decorative strip, called "egg and dart", can be seen all over SF Victorians and Edwardians, often with the little eggs painted a contrasting color or gold leafed. The photo below shows a building owned by the Academy of Art in SF, with a series of moldings very similar to our house. We also have the overhang with acanthus leaf brackets, called 'corbels', spaced at regular intervals, as well as the strip of egg and dart, and below that the little boxes, called 'dentils'. We don't have any of that other crusty stuff though.
Greg recommended that we extend part of this motif down the facade by adding a strip of egg and dart molding above the lower set of bay windows and painting it the same as the strip near the top of the roof. He suggested gold leafing the eggs, and I think I swooned. We asked for an estimate for all these plaster additions and gold leaf, and decided that it was worth ditching getting new front doors right now in favor of spending extra money for the facade (I didn't have to push TOO hard, but I was willing to ;) )
So after the facade was completely stripped and all areas of broken/rotten wood replaced, it was primed and then painted with our gorgeous sage and cream window trim. The new moldings were applied, and then all the moldings and details were also painted with cream, just to start with. The effect was very wedding-cake like, with big frosting garlands and beads adorning the top strip. I wish I'd gotten some in-progress shots!
Then it was time for the detail coloring. I'd stopped at Benjamin Moore multiple times and gathered samples of all sorts of colors, trying to zero in on colors that complemented sage and cream the best. I ended up with some gold-y yellows, ochres, olive greens, tans, and french greys (a warm taupe-y sort of grey.) We started applying little test samples of some of the colors I'd chosen, and learned that the sage and cream were pale enough that they called for colors much more subtle than what I'd originally selected, so I went back to the paint sample book and tried again. As flakey as he could be, Greg really cares about making a facade perfect, and was willing to try all sorts of different colors and color placement until we were both satisfied. The house looked pretty funny a couple of times, when he'd put different combinations of different colors around different windows and left them for the weekend for us to consider. At one point I got an anxious voice mail from one of our TIC owners, saying the house was looking way too pastel and how I'd really deviated from what we'd originally agreed on! I called him back and begged him to trust me, we weren't done! He admitted it was probably mostly lack of sleep influencing him since he and his wife had just had preemie twins the month before, and agreed to wait and see.
One of the things my housemate was a little freaked out about, perhaps rightly so, was the use of a sort of purple color right around the edges of the windows. Greg had a couple purples in his truck that he'd been using on another job, and was really keen on getting a little bit of purple into our facade for whatever reason. I REALLY didn't want our building to look like one of those garish purple/teal/green/etc. Victorians repainted in the 70s and 80s, so I was pretty reluctant, but I let him try it out. It turned out that actually a somewhat browny/mauve-y purple around the windows was quite striking, and I told Greg that if he paled it out by about 25% I thought I might like it. It actually turned out to be one of my favorite parts of the facade.
Although Greg really wanted to use some other color for the window
frames, I convinced him we needed to leave them white, because at some
point soon Todd and I are planning on getting double-paned windows for
one of the flats, and it would be worse if they all didn't match.
We decided to leave more of the details near the roof cream colored than I'd originally planned on -- the wedding cake look was really working for us, and made the house look so subtle and elegant. In the end we left the corbels and garlands, and dentils the same cream as the windows. To give the garlands a little something extra, one of Greg's painters put flecks of gold leaf here and there on the leaves, and at the center of each flower button. The eggs were all gold-leafed as well, and so shiny and big and round I just want to eat them! They are surrounded by an olive green color, the most saturated color on the whole facade, which makes them even more striking. Other colors used are: a pale ochre-y yellow on the roof overhang above and around the corbels and above the doorway and windows, a french grey for the steps, and the final, last minute addition, a tan for the bases and capitals of the decorative columns around the windows. These columns were kind of a pain, as they just aren't that attractively done -- they probably should have had Corinthian capitals to match the corbels, but they don't. Greg recommended that we actually not draw attention to them, to kind of let them fade into the window frames by painting them the same cream color. I felt like they needed something, and these little bits of tan were just the accent they needed, and although he'd recommended against it, he was impressed with the result, and I was happy!
In the end, I still can't even believe how gorgeous our facade is. Greg wants to put it in his portfolio, and it makes me feel like I should put up a sign in the front yard that says "Tammy Stellanova, color consultant". Apparently while they were taking down the scaffold someone already stopped and asked for the color names... Greg was like, you'll have to ask Tammy. ;)
EDIT 7/10/07: I realized I forgot to mention one of the colors we used, so I thought I'd add it now, since I was already so thorough! The concrete foundation of the building (up to the first horizontal cream molding) and the retaining walls are painted in a 200% mix of the sage body color, basically the same color with much less white in it. It's a fairly subtle, but it gives the building a kind of grounding, like a firm base to sit on. I originally wanted it to sit on something much more obvious (like an olive green) but once again Greg convinced me that subtle was best, and I'm glad he did!
Some of you may already know that starting last fall we embarked on a massive re-paint-our building-project. Not only is our building pretty large (4 units, probably more than 6000 square feet inside), but the facade gets a ton of southern light, wind, fog, and car exhaust, so the paint and wood beneath it was pretty trashed. We refinanced and took out a home equity loan in order to have it done RIGHT (as opposed to the shoddy job that had been done 6 months before we bought the building in 2000.) It took about 5 months to complete the whole thing, which included replacing any wood that needed replacing all the way around the building, and entirely stripping the facade of paint and doing extensive repairs.
We will start with a BEFORE photo:
Now, I already loved the facade, but it needed help desperately. One of the problems with the facade is it gets so much sun, and the main green paint is relatively dark, so it just sucks up heat -- we were fighting a losing battle against cracking and peeling paint. So the first thing we decided was that the base color of the building had to be paler. Fine by me -- I already knew what color I envisioned repainting the building as soon as we moved in, so I swiftly took over the whole colors aspect of the job, which I got really into and was totally fun and rewarding!
I spent a few months before the painting started (while they were stripping the facade, etc.) driving and walking around the city, looking at other Edwardian buildings with similar facades to ours and noticing how people had painted them. I knew I wanted our building to be a pale olive/sage kind of color, with cream colored trim, but there were so many creams and so many sages! I was given a brand to start with -- Benjamin Moore paints is what our painting company used, so I found a store that carried their paint and grabbed a bunch of samples. I knew I wanted more of a yellowy, cactus kind of sage than a more blue-y sage -- I saw some houses that used a slightly more blue sage color and it really sort of starts to stray towards sea foam -- NOT what I was after!
I settled on three colors, and the painters applied each of them to the back of the house, and to really get an idea of what it was going to look like, they painted the window frames around the swatch areas with the cream color I'd selected. Us five building owners voted, and one of the colors was just unanimous. So we were set to have three of the four sides of the house painted, which took about 3 months, leaving me plenty of time to deliberate about how to deal with the facade, where I could use up to 8 more colors and make LOTS of choices about trim and detailing!
Here's what the main body of the house looks like now:
Next week I will post part two, the facade!
Inspired by Heidi's weekly set lists, I thought I'd post the workout mix I most recently put on my iPod (with notes.) I like it a lot -- sometimes it's the only thing that will keep me running! This mix is also great for dishes, housepainting, etc.
Want me to burn you a copy? Just ask!
The Way You Move -- Outkast (this one gets you started)
Monkeywrench -- Foo Fighters (this song is a special reference to my first workout mix tape I made when I first started really running, in 1998)
House of Jealous Lovers -- The Rapture
Black Tongue -- Yeah Yeah Yeahs
So What'cha Want? -- Beastie Boys (great for pacing, if you're running!)
Sexx Laws -- Beck
Banquet -- Bloc Party
Fiction Romance -- Buzzcocks
Brendan #1/Merchandise -- Fugazi (it's okay to chant along "YOU ARE NOT WHAT YOU OWN!" if you want)
Mistakes and Regrets -- ...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of the Dead
Ivanka -- Imperial Teen
Ocean Size -- Jane's Addiction (this one's great for when you've started to lose it...)
Aerodynamic -- Kraftwerk (... and for when you get it back!)
Setting Sun -- The Chemical Brothers (the big finale)
I Believe in a Thing Called Love -- The Darkness (for the walk back to the shower)
Just thought I'd check in and see what my favorite icelandic fashion designers are up to....
*SIGH*!!
There are actually a few places like netflix that rent books on cd, and I ended up choosing Booksfree.com because they offer an unabridged version of every book! (I am a stickler for unabridged readings -- I don't want to miss anything.) I signed up for two cd books at a time for $24.99 a month, and have added a bunch of books to my queue, just like netflix. How cool is that?
The first book that arrived was Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys, which I've really been wanting to read. I'm on cd 6 of 8, and I've been thinking about it all weekend, anxious to get back to the studio and find out what happens. It is also just the greatest thing to sit and listen and work away -- I'm trying to get the inks on my comic done right now, and I get lost in the story while a part of my brain does the inks and everyone is happy. :)
Have you seen this movie? I haven't heard anyone talk about it, but I saw a preview for it before another movie I watched, and decided I had to rent it.
Everything is Illuminated stars the darling Elijah Wood as an obsessive collector of family relics who decides to travel to the Ukraine to track down a woman in a photograph who may have saved his father from the nazis. Most of the film takes place in the Ukraine, where our hero is taken around the country by a Ukranian guy named Alex (who dresses in full-on kangol/gold chains/track suits and breakdances), his grandfather, and his grandfather's 'seeing-eye bitch' (a border collie.) For me, this quirky movie was that perfect mix of funny and powerful, with beautiful cinematography and Ukranian music... I just loved it! You might too!
I found a photo Jen took of me trying on the AWESOME DRESS...
I WANT! SIGH...
Ok, I have been compelled to write my own fashion post since people have been posting such interesting fashion stuff lately, and Matokie's most recent post reminded me of my own (only?) interesting fashion discovery. When a group of us were in Iceland together last summer, a number of were TOTALLY drawn to a fashion boutique on the main drag in Reykjavik our first night walking around (it was closed). A few days later we went back in to ooh and ahh over the gorgeous clothing and try some on. I tried on the most expensive garment that I have ever worn (except my wedding dress) and the second most beautiful dress I have ever worn (second to my wedding dress, of course!)
It was SILVER satin with gunmetal grey tulle sticking out. And it fit me off the rack like it was MADE for me. This awesome boutique provided heels for you to try on dresses with, and even THEY fit perfectly... it was like I was meant to have it, except, uh, like I'd EVER spend that much on an article of clothing. So, sadly, I let it go. But I left determined to keep an eye on this designer, so now I will share them with you!
http://www.spaksmannsspjarir.is
Dig the GORGEOUS gothy icelandic-y photos! *DROOL* And they totally have their finger on the pulse for 07, it looks like...
Someday, when my art career makes me wealthy beyond belief, I WILL ONLY DRESS IN SPAKSMANNSPJARIR...
Tammy: I'm chatting with someone who I was doing tech support with who works in our sydney office
Tammy: suddenly the conversation disintegrated into a comparison of scuba in australia vs here
Tammy: and much pasting of google image urls ensued
Tammy: resulting in my exclamation 'I'm a sucker for cephalopods!'
Tammy: HAW! HAW!
Tammy: I have obviously been at work too long
