The Ridgewood Project: White Floors

The Ridgewood Project: Floor Sanding

Well, we sanded the floors of what is going to be our bedroom and the library. It wasn't much fun being that it was over 100 degrees Fahrenheit and humidity, and I really shouldn't take the credit because my husband did all the work while I continuously made him fresh watermelon juice.

We took out the pocket doors and the hardware on the floor. It seems that the floorboards run from one room into the other, meaning when they first built this house, they installed the floor first and then the walls. The flooring, which sits right on the wood beams, acts as the decking and the finished floor. That's not the only reason you can hear everything from one floor to the next, of course, but it's one of the reasons. There's also no insulation.

When we moved in, all the plank flooring in this house was covered in vinyl and floor to floor carpeting. We pulled up nine layers in total. I suppose basic wood planks weren't considered very tasteful, refined or fashionable throughout the years. Funny how tastes change. 

For now, it does look so beautiful, the planks running from one room to the next without interruption. And the room smells wonderfully like fresh pine. To think these planks were installed a century ago. 

Next, we've bought some Milk Paint to whitewash the floors with, and we're going to seal it with Safecoat's Polyureseal. We're going all organic.

Snodd Cabinetry Knobs

The Ridgewood Project: Door Hardware

The Ridgewood Project: The Airshaft

Imagine my delight when I discovered that the airshaft does work. That it does deliver buckets of cool air on a heated New York City day.

The Ridgewood Project: The Kitchen, No. 2

The Ridgewood Project: The Great Outdoors

The greenhouse in the back, and the gardens. You can see the laundry posts with wire running towards the houses. The gardens are lush and overflowing. We don't see the neighbors, but we alway hear them. There was a party going on last night, lots of laughing and talking. And when we woke up at six this morning, the participants were still going at it. Somewhere in the jungle, having a swell time.

The Ridgewood Project: Painting

The Ridgewood Project: Green Walls and Pocket Doors

This house is tugging at the romantic in me. Why would you want regular doors that flap around when you want the threshold to be open, when you can have pocket doors that simply slide into the wall and disappear?

I wasn't very keen on the green walls, but they, too, have grown on me. What to do?

The Ridgewood Project: Dumbwaiter

The Ridgewood Project: Horror Vacui

Someone was obviously very fond of botanical wallpaper.

The Ridgewood Project: Trim

In general, I enjoy wall trimmings, picture moldings and other such creatures. I like designing them and seeing how they define a room. But before we moved, I was going through a Barragan kick and was aiming to design all our spaces with straight, flat, uncluttered, boring walls. Now that we've been here for a bit, these elements are growing on me. 

The Ridgewood Project: The Grilles

There happen to be these rectangular panels on the walls; you can see one of them in the image above. The image is a bit cut off, but you can still see it on the far lower left(ish) corner. We first thought they might be something electrical related. They are not. When I first started to peel off the vinyl flooring and poke my head here and there, I also pried off one of these panels. Behold, there was a sheet metal lined shaft in the wall:

When I held the metal panel in the light, there seemed to be some kind of pattern embedded on it, behind the layers of paint. And on the underside of the panel was a bed of plaster. I started chipping away at it with my chisels. That stuff is hard! But suddenly, this emerged:

I suppose this was from when the house was heated by a coal or wood burning stove, and the heat traveled up through the walls and into the rooms via these grilles. 

The Ridgewood Project

I recently moved to Ridgewood, Queens. 

We found this old brick townhouse in a neighborhood on the border of Queens and Brooklyn. It was first settled by a German community in the early 20th century, during which time these houses were constructed. The facades are all made of yellow brick. There are ones with front porches and ones that are three to four family apartment buildings, but ours is a two family, bay window townhouse. It turns out the same family owned this house since it was built. And now that we've started cleaning and uncovering the floors, we've unearthed artifacts that point to an older, more mythic city. Inside the walls, under the floors, in the corners of the rooms.