As Wendy briefly touched on in yesterday's "We're not dead" post, rather than working on our house we've been galavanting around the UK having a grand ole time. Sure we've been a bit absent since last week, but boy, do we have a great excuse as to why. Before I get ahead of myself, this is obviously hardly a DIY or home related post, but we hope you'll enjoy it (and honestly, if we're excited about something off topic, we can't help but blab on and on about it). Though I'm sure we'd love to report that we completed a major project, there's been no time for DIY of late. Last week Wendy made a very brief mention that we had a potential opportunity of a lifetime later in the week. We weren't sure it would happen, but we didn't want to talk about it and jinx it. So instead we crossed our fingers and kept a bit quiet.

Well, during that quiet time, we were feverishly planning our last minute trip to London, England. Yes, that's right, a last minute and hastily planned trip across the pond to visit one of the most amazing cities in the world right in the middle of their time hosting the Olympics. As a high school friend pointed out, this is apparently a luxury that is afforded to people of a certain age who happen to not have any children. I guess that's us.

A month before this trip, Wendy and I had requested a few vacation days for Friday, August 3rd with the intention of spending the weekend working on the house and maybe spending a day on the Eastern Shore. If we had time, we'd probably have ended up watching the Olympics too. Little did we know we'd have an opportunity to actually be there to see the games live. It all actually started with a very innocent Facebook message from a friend... "You want to go to London this weekend?" From this simple question we booked plane tickets, hotel nights, packed our bags, arranged for friends to care for Lulu and Mel, another friend to water our plants, and we headed out on a Thursday flight bound for Heathrow Airport! What followed was a true whirlwind adventure that we are so happy to have thrown ourselves into.

We arrived early morning on Friday tired from an overnight flight with very little sleep, but we could immediately feel the Olympic buzz. The pink, red, and purple that have dominated the broadcasts this Olympic games were immediately seen on signage all around the terminal. (Sorry for the blurry photo, we were excited to be there.)


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Tuesday, August 7, 2012
Hello?-lo?-lo?-lo?
Posted by Wendy

For the very first time since we started Old Town Home back in April 2011, we missed a daily post. Well, make that two in fact. For anyone that noticed, things have been dark here since last Thursday but we think we have a pretty good explanation - we were in London for the Olympics.

Yep, you read that right. Despite our my Type A personality and my insane desire to control, plan, organize and make check lists, we've done something we've never done before. On the fly we decided to take an international trip to check out all the excitement. 

It was a whirlwind experience, and unexpected flight delays put us back into DC one day later than planned. So we hope you'll be patient while we figure out what time zone we're in, sort through the hundreds of pictures, and put together a play-by-play of the action. We hope to have more to share with you tomorrow.

Does it make more sense now why I was so freaked out about discovering the leak in our guest room a few mere hours before leaving the country? 


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Thursday, August 2, 2012
You've Got to Be Freakin' Kidding Me
Posted by Wendy

As in most humid climates, the Washington, DC area is subject to rather unexpected but severe summer thunderstorms, and this week was no exception. Over the last few days we've had thunder, lightening, and driving rain pop up out of nowhere (well, nowhere if you're not checking the weather anyway). Last night Alex was working late, and I was puttering around the house putting a few last things away from my business trip to Boston.

The wicker storage cubes next to the bed in our guest bedroom are the home to our travel toiletries, including the little shampoos and lotions I've gladly accepted from hotels over the years, along with my travel sized makeup bags. 

When I walked between the bed and the window to return these items to their storage location, I had the unfortunate realization that the wood floor was wet. Thanks to my bare feet, something I may not have noticed in the dim light had it not been made blatantly apparent.

My first thought was that Mel had started peeing on the floor, either in protest of my trip or Lulu's permanent resident status in our home, or that at his ripe old age of 12 was no longer able to hold it. Upon further inspection, I realized the water was dripping in from the top of our bay window, had soaked our throw pillows, saturated the bamboo blinds and rug, and most destructively, had seeped into the heart pine floors.


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A few weeks back we received a question submitted through Facebook from Anita K. She asked:

This fireplace needs updating....would love some suggestions on what to replace the tile with. 

Additionally, Anita points out that they plan on using this space as a family room, and would like to mount a television above the fireplace as the focal point in the room.

Anita's house is a 1915 craftsman style home, and the tile on the fireplace surround as well as the wood appears to be original to the home, which does complicate the situation a bit. I'm typically inclined to say "keep the original stuff original," but I know that doesn't always jive with the home's owners and their aesthetic. 

In the case of this surround, I don't think removal or covering of the tile, or at least some of the tile, is the worst thing in the world. The scale of the firebox versus that of the tile and height of the mantel just feels a bit off. 

Craftsman, or arts and crafts, style mantels tend to be stained oak, and are often integrated right into the wall, rather than placed right on the front and applied to the fireplace. They also often make use of the colored glazed ceramic tiles you see in the photo above. Unfortunately, these tiles (especially those on the floor) have seen better days. In the case of Anita's house, the floor tiles are badly cracked and damaged.

In our opinion, Anita has a couple of options here, and each involves slightly varying degrees of effort.


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A few weeks ago in order to participate in the Summer Pinterest Challenge, we scraped together a few items we had laying around the basement to create a project for almost no cost and little effort. For our modest investment of a little time (most of it spent watching paint dry), we now have a hidden chalkboard message center on the back of two of our kitchen cabinet doors.

As much as I love a "free" project, the fat sticks of sidewalk chalk we had purchased from Target several months ago, though great for hopscotch games, left something to be desired in the way of penmanship chalkmanship.

Alex knows my penchant for neat handwriting, as well as my love of things that are not covered in chalk dust, so he made a noble attempt to remedy our dillemma and purchased "chalk pencils." In reality, he had purchased pastel chalk pencils, for chalk artists. Though they write on the chalkboard paint we had applied to the backs of our cabinet doors, I wouldn't particularly say they do it well.


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