"A stone is ingrained with geological and historical memories." - Andy Goldsworthy

We made what will probably be the most dramatic house change that we will ever make.  It looks like a whole new house, and most importantly, it looks like "us."

It's official, this house is ours, and we belong to it too.

After much deliberation, we decided to sandblast our house.  Sandblasting is a process that uses an abrasive material (recycled copper in our case) to remove the paint from a surface and open the pores of concrete block bringing it back to its most basic and natural form.  Our house had two layers of paint, the off-white that we started with, and then the original, very 60s (but not in a good way) orange-beige.  Once sandblasted, our house revealed gray concrete full of beautiful and varied little pebbles.  If it is possible to be both modern and organic at the same time, that is exactly what our house is.

This is what we started with:

This is how our house looks now:

All that's left to do is patch a couple little blow-outs in the grouting (expected with 60 year old grout) and put a sealant on the block to prevent moisture from getting in. 

An unexpected benefit of sandblasting was that it exposed some very attractive metal that had been covered in paint.  Who would have known that our electrial boxes and faucets could be so handsome?!?!

A quick thanks to Baja Sandblasting for their attention to detail, professionalism, and just general awesomeness.

"If opportunity doesn't knock, build a door." - Milton Berle

One of the first changes that we wanted to make to the house was the front door.  We started with a very black, very ugly, and very suburban looking door.  When we came across an ad for Crestview Doors in an issue of Atomic Ranch magazine, we knew that we were headed in the right direction.  Within a couple days we had selected a design, and soon we were on our way to the door of our dreams!  The door was the first step to take our house in the modern direction that we had in mind.

We selected Crestview's Allendale design with single panes of reeded glass.  We chose new hardware (goodbye faux bronze!) and selected a crisp white paint.

Now our door oozes cool!

Before:

(Sweet glue job...)

During:

After:

So I have this really old chair...

Midcentury modern furniture has the potential to be very expensive.  For the average homebuyer, this can present quite the challenge.  So the trick is, rather than to buy it new, buy old.  Recently we purchased four Erik Buck dining chairs for $50 a piece.  You can see one of the chairs below:

Pretty inexpensive when compared to some other chairs from Design (Not) Within Reach at $700 a piece.  You can see how similar it looks to the one we bought for less than 10% of the price:

After buying the chairs we also decided to get a new fabric which we will use to reopholster the chairs we bought with.  We'll show you the finished product in a future post.

Family can also be a great resource for midcentury modern furniture.  Below you can see a contour chair that we got from a family member:

Other places to get affordable midcentury modern furniture and or decorations are from companies like CB2 (http://www.cb2.com/) or Chiasso (http://www.chiasso.com/).  Our clock from Chiasso (about $50):

By being smart and looking for deals, you can make your house swing, without draining your bank account.