Almost Took One in the EPA

On October 1, 2010 the Environmental Protection Agency will require all contractors to have 10 hours of training to achieve a lead-paint safety certificate. On Monday, just before submitting all our final paperwork to the co-op for one last final sign off before starting renovations, we found out that our co-op will start requiring this certification NOW, even though the EPA does not require it until later this year. Of course this ruling from the EPA is so new that our contractor had never even heard of it before. YIKES! Another delay we feared.

Thankfully, today we found out that our contractor will be able to take the necessary course tomorrow and should have his certificate in hand by the end of the day. WHEW! With this in mind, we already are happy with our contractor before he's even done a speck of work.

Although this little curve ball from the EPA threw us off track slightly, it looks like we'll be able to submit the final paperwork on Monday. Hopefully the co-op won't take so long with a final approval. Keeping our fingers and paws crossed.

Updated Kitchen Rendering

As I tweaked the blog design today (yes, it changed, but it's subtle) I noticed that we had neglected to post the updated kitchen rendering. This is essentially what you have already seen, but with some changes to the kitchen cabinetry and (most importantly) the floor updated to reflect our final selection. In this rendering you can also see a bit of the sliding office doors (to the far right), which will be milk glass to match the kitchen backsplash. I hope you like it as much as we do. And if not, well, we've already put down the deposits so...

Furnishings

As usual, it has been terribly long between posts. Too long. I like to think that this is mainly due to a lack of inactivity on the renovation itself (as opposed to our own laziness). We're hoping that as the renovation starts we will be posting more frequently. At least then we should have no lack of things to share.

THE UPDATE: We have DOB approval for our renovation, and have a contractor that we plan on working with. So right now the last step before we start breaking down walls is the permit(s) that need to be passed by the co-op board for a final approval. That and some checks that need to be written (of course). We are HOPING HOPING HOPING that we can actually start the demolition this month. This whole process has been agonizingly slow—especially seeing that we were hoping to be in the apartment, renovated, by September. It's now looking closer to November. So sad, but I guess we can look forward to New Years Eve on our new place!

So while we wait for these final things to be resolved, I thought you might want to see some of the items we are starting to gather for the new apartment. The first was a set of matching "oui" and "non" pillows that will go on our couch. For now they sit on our Eames chairs. We bought them from Hazel and Hunter on Etsy and I love them. They are screen printed on natural linen. They remind me (us) how much we would really like to be in Paris. Or really, anywhere in France (we're really not so picky when it comes to that). The second item is a small cabinet that is reminiscent of an old-school medicine chest. We found this in Cold Spring, NY when we took a drive up there over Memorial Day weekend. We're thinking it could be nice in the bathroom to store toilet paper and all sorts of exciting things like that. Renovation Hardware has some similar things for much much much more money, so we were happy to find this.