that brown house

Today’s milestone was receiving our first mortgage bill, although it’s not actually due for more than a month.

We went out shopping for bathroom sink faucets this morning. I am making the process much more difficult than it needs to be by rejecting anything that is trying to look old but ruins the attempt by using an anachronistic font. The worst offender in this regard was one that spelled out “circa 1897″ twice on every piece, but in Palatino. We also went to Baldwin Brass to look at drawer pulls and door locks, and discovered that it would be easy to spend $800 on the front door if we weren’t careful.

We went window shade shopping and are faced with the dilemma that the mom-and-pop Alcatraz Shade Shop is charging 50% more for the same products as Home Depot Expo. Where do you draw the line?

At the bookstore across the street from the shade shop, I found a copy of Rehab Right, the Oakland Planning Department’s 1978 guide to restoring old houses, which looks like it should be interesting reading.

Back at the house, we unscrewed a bunch of painted-over door and cabinet hardware and are trying to get the paint off by boiling it in a pot of baking soda, as Steph read on somebody else’s houseblog, and it looks like it might be working.

It is really cold there today without heat. Heat will be nice. We will have heat soon.