House #s, Stair Carpet and Roller Shades

It seems like every night, I’m researching and debating another choice for the house. It’s been fun, but also a lot of work. This week I made a few decisions on a variety of items.


House Numbers
A small, but important item is house numbers. It's part of that whole first impression thing. We saw a couple of nice options on sale on the Design Within Reach website, including the orange numbers above. For $9.99, these options seemed like a great idea. However,we need a number 2 and it must be the most popular number, as there were no more 2s for any of the sale options. The Neutra letters shown below are great, but at 75 bucks a pop, they are not as within our reach as we’d like.

I then went back to my original idea of ordering them thru WestOn Letters. They have a great number of options of fonts, sizes and finishes. I decided to go with 5” aluminum letters in the Roffe font. I love the clean simple lines- no serifs, no fuss. The price for 4 letters- $136.

Stair Carpet.
If we were designing this house from scratch, we would have likely had an open stair, or made the stair a design element. Unfortunately, the existing stair has bearing walls on either side, so we were left with few options to change it. We added a light, but beyond that, I was a little worried about the blandness of this stair. The existing stair runner needs to be replaced, so I went in search of a great runner- something that could add some life to the stair. What I found is not really a carpet runner, but individual stair rugs for each tread. Liza Phillips Design carries these Alto Step designs that have some great colors and modern designs. They are high quality rugs- either hand-knotted in Nepal, or a tufted option from New Zealand wool. There were a few unique sets on sale and I wanted this one called “Spring Bubbles”. The only issue I was concerned about was the existing treads on our house might be a bit to narrow. When I called Liza, she was great to work with, she measured the rugs for me and was willing to put together some other options on how to make them work. I was really excited to find this option and placed my order.

Window Treatments
Architects hate to think about window treatments. We lived in our current house for years before we bit the bullet and decided we needed a bit more privacy at times. We used 2” wood blinds and have been fairly happy with them. For the new house, we’ll likely go thru the same deliberations and delays. However, for Kerstin’s room the large window wall on the south side will have to be addressed sooner rather than later. During the summer, the maple tree in the front of the house will provide some privacy, but we’ll be cutting this back, as it seems to be taking over the front corner of the house.

The shades in this room will need to look good from not only the inside, but the outside of the house. I first got a tip from my friend, Fiona from Scotland on these new type of panels. They work like a vertical blind, but are in larger panels. I love the look of these, but was concerned about the stacking space blocking the window. I wanted to be able to have the window treatment disappear and be able to be totally open.

Because the windows are wall to wall, the only way to have a wide-open window would be to have shade mounted on top. I found these great patterned roller shades from The Shade Store. They come in a variety of patterns, from bold to subtle. I am still debating the pattern- whether it should be bold like this:

Which looks like this when putting multiple shades together:

or more subtle like this: