See that crap on the pipe? That's what we had pulled out of our supposedly new pipe on Saturday when the renter's tub started backing up again! Can you believe it. After running the snake, the high-pressured water blaster and a camera, our plumber assures us that we are good to go. After all this, we're going to insist on some kind of warranty before we write the final check.

Here's another piece of loot from the in-laws--a lovely sideboard who's only drawback is that it is a little too large for a brownstone scale...As a result, we're having to put it in the living room instead of the dining room where it barely fit between the fireplace and the wall.

Check out these crazy box springs that are part of the beds we got last weekend--they look like they are some kind of torture or s&m device. We drove a truckload of family heirlooms back from Virginia last week and these were among the booty. They are part of a pair of brass beds from Germany in th 1880s. We'll get a photo of the beds when they are assembled in the guest room asap.

Alright, so we're going to start putting up some more stuff now even though it feels like we have a long way to go before the interiors are "finished". First up: We've gotten most of our records put away though we still have some wiring issues to sort out--plus we have yet to unearth a couple of components from the depths of some unmarked box.

We also started to get some nasty mold popping up post-flooding which we had to nip in the bud.

Here's what the ceiling of the cellar looked like after the flooding caused by our collapsed waste line. Luckily insurance is picking up the tab on the interior damage--not so with the waste line itself.

After Two Days...

We finally got the tiling done on the half-walls on either side of the marble sink in the master bathroom.

The carpenter is in the process of concealing the ACs and building more shelving for the record collection in the "music room" in the center of the second floor.

This is how the partition came out in the front hall of the parlor floor. A necessary evil given how we are dividing the house, both to create separation from the garden floor rental and the private "studio" for our sister at the back of the parlor floor. Notice the pipe molding that we rescued from another part of the house to try to make the doorway look more at home. It is what it is though: Out of place. But what can you do.

The front room on the parlor floor has been the repository for most of our boxes since we moved. Only in the last few days have we been able to chip away at them to the point where we've restored some order. Ultimately the office/grown-up playroom, this will probably be the last room that gets set-up for use.

Okay, we promise we'll stop obsessing about our closet after this post. By tonight when we return home, we're hoping our clothes will have magically moved from our bedroom floor onto these shelves.

Here's a shot of the third floor hallway leading to the walk-in closet. When the closet is done, the door will be put back on and kept permanently closed. We'll access the closet through a doorway in our adjacent bedroom. Note the temporary Home Depot sconce being used as a placeholder while we figure out our sconce scheme.

The walk-in closet needs one more coat of paint and some hanging rods and we should be good to go. We've designed the built-in shelves to accommodate two stacks of wire baskets for socks, t-shirts, etc.

The doors that were on the house when we bought it were in such bad cosmetic shape that the only inexpensive way to pull them together was to paint them black--as probably two-thirds of the doors on our block are painted. At some point we'd love to buy original rounded-top doors that are natural wood, but in the meantime, this is a decent compromise in our opinion.