In Da Hood

We don't have a headboard so this painting seconds as one.

Not much to say, I just like this nook.

This cabinet is huge. I found it at an antique store on the Eastern Shore. It was over 9ft tall when we bought it but we had to take it down to 9' so that it would fit in the dining room. I still need to re-finish it.

Anywhere I could replace a light with a chandelier, I did.

I love this heavy, gold guilt mirror in my kitchen. I was given it by a friend when they were re-decorating their living room. My house is pretty neutral and spare but I like putting in a little "bling" here and there to catch your eye.

A good kitchen faucet can make all the difference! I wanted substantial-looking one that I could pull out and spray across the room if I wanted to, without it looking tacky.

They're fake but I still have a soft spot for these flowering magnolia branches.

I am rather proud of how organized my closet is. You can't tell from these pictures but it is color-coded as well as arranged by item-type.

As Caitlin explained in the trailer to this week’s posts, my house is a work in progress.  

 When we bought it, our home was a basically a vacant, unlivable space in a transitional part of DC’s historic Capitol Hill neighborhood, a 1910 row-home that had probably been lovely at one time but had lived through rioting and looting of 1968 following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the crack wars of the 1980′s. We moved in right after the stain had dried on our newly re-finished wood floors, brought to life after being buried for years underneath layers of tile, plywood and liquid nails. We gutted the bathrooms, replaced broken tile with marble, hung chandeliers, ripped down the letters declaring our guest room to be “Mikey’s” room, scrubbed, bleached and painted every surface, and cleaned the bugs out of the freezer. For months I was still doing dishes in the bathtub, but eventually it all started to take shape.

I think we are a mild breed of what they call “urban pioneers”, and I was reminded of why I like this life when our African-American neighbor yelled out her second-story window at a man peeing on the side of our house “Ain’t no one gonna disrespect Tim and Erin while I live here!” All this pioneering tends to foster a neighborliness I’ve never experienced anywhere else, and nothing beats the satisfaction of taking a sledgehammer to a rotting Formica counter-top and replacing it with whatever you like.

Our nighborhood has it’s own e-mail listserve, blog site, even a wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H_Street_(Washington,_D.C.)  It has also been featured in several articles by the Washington Post highlighting the revitalization of DC:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A34449-2004Jun11_2.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/24/AR2008062400483.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/17/AR2007031700699.html