Found the chairs

I found the chairs that I was talking about in this post.


Sadly, in finding them I still don't know what their name is, who designed them or anything. The ebay auction I found them in is titled "Mid Century Outdoor Bertoia Style Arm Chairs Restored". Bertoia is the name of the Knoll Diamond chair that looks like this chair but isn't this chair. I would buy this set off of ebay, but there is one too many digits in the starting bid price.

Nothing new but the year

There probably won't any new house news till the New Year, unless something major breaks. So let's hope there's nothing new till the New Year.

Our house itself can't have resolutions (being a house and all), but I have resolutions for it.

1) Only bring in beautiful things.
This mainly applies to the furniture and the like. We're at the point in our lives/home ownership where we don't need to buy more items, we have everything we need, some things just aren't the right style or aren't built to last. Any new or replacement items should be both.

That being said, my definition of beautiful might be a bit different than most. For example, this piece of art was shipped our way today. And for my birthday I asked for a glass jellyfish – Rachel vetoed it (I didn't know you could veto birthday presents).

2) Be a good place for a dinner party.
I want to give a go at being dinner party people. This is totally against my introvert nature and, honestly, I'm a pretty terrible host. And a pretty terrible cook. But I want to make sure that we stay connected to friends, ex-coworkers, etc and I think the best way to go about that would be to become awesome dinner party people.

3) Become more handy.
Admittedly this is more for me than the house. I plan on being handier in the New Year. Home Depot gift cards has been my standard reply when asked about holiday gifts and I plan to buy a miter saw and drill (and maybe a nail gun). I've got a few ideas that I was going to have our contractor do, but I think I'll be able to handle them myself with the right tools.

Done: Weatherproof the cat door

Weatherproofing the cat door wasn't on my original to do list, but it's been cold here in Austin and I realized just how much we needed to. The entire study felt like we were running the AC. It was probably 5-10 degrees cooler than the rest of the house.

The last owner put the cat door in and left some pretty big gaps between it and the rest of the door. But the addition of some weather stripping and expandable insulating foam have sealed things up nicely; we're no longer heating our backyard through the cat door.

Neighborhood news

This isn't about our house specifically, but it's not too far from us. University Park will be getting a movie theater, which is great in my mind because it means we'll be walking distance from the movies. It's just too bad it's not an Alamo.

Around the table

We still don't have chairs around the patio table and now that it's cold in Austin there's no rush. But Rachel and I saw some really pretty chairs on someone's porch when we were walking around the neighborhood. If this chair and this chair had a baby, that would be the chair we saw. I don't think it was the Bertoia side chair or diamond chair, but it was getting dark when we saw them. Anyone have any idea of what chair it might be?