hello house

Our bathroom redo is now rolling along nicely after being dormant for nearly a year. It is fitting that on the anniversary of the original demolition of the walls, we should pick up steam again and, uh, actually finish it. One of the small jobs i have been working on is finding a place that does metal plating in Chicago. There are tons of shops, but most of them are only B2B. So far i have found 2 places that will do small runs / retail sales. We haven’t used either place, so it isn’t an endorsement yet, but one of these places will be getting a Hello House seal of approval (we hope).

Al Bar Wilmette
These folks seem to specialize in restoration of antique home hardware and have many finishes to choose from. They also do powder-coating (many bike frames have this coating now) which is a less environmentally offensive alternative (ie. not chemicals) to plating. These people might be a good choice if you are not in Chicago since it sounds like they do business via the webpipetubes / real mail. They specialize in this sort of work and even specify on their site to include the mounting screws so they can give you new plated screws to match. My guess is, their attention to detail is worth paying for. I was quoted $40 for 1 knob and $35 for a backplate.

Griffin Plating
They will do retail sales but have a $75 minimum which is fair. The price is affordable: i was quoted (and keep in mind this is very rough, over the phone estimate) about $10 a doorknob or escutcheon plate. I think this may be the more economical option if you have multiple pieces you need redone.

Even with these prices, it is still 1/2 the price of buying new vintage-styled hardware from Rejuvenation. Stucco House and Petch House have both recently had quality and sticker shock, respectively, about plating.

We have been doing research on multiple rooms, and as posted before, there aren’t too many photos of “working class” rooms. Typically you see photos from magazines or advertisements that are a little fancier that Jane + Joe Steelworker could afford (Hey! Just like now-times!). I am personally obsessed with minimal, functional, and average simplicity-type fixtures, woodwork, decoration etc. but as with most average and common things of the past, they generally go undocumented.

Thanks to 1912 Bungalow, we (the House Blogs nation) have a nice little collection of period kitchens. Here is the original post: Historic Kitchens and their Flickr page with the whole series of Historic Kitchens.

Glory be, it’s gardening time! You know, we’ve been working on our gardens here at Hello House for 2.5 years now, and there’s still so much work to do. Which I think is great. How sad would it be if all our planting was done in the first year?

One of the reasons we aren’t done planting is we lost a few astilbe and two pieris japonica to drought last year. And by drought, I mean we didn’t water them enough.

Everything’s gonna be different this year, because this week I’m installing our new Dripworks irrigation system. Keep reading →