On Monday we submitted our application to renovate the RBB to the city's Inspectional Services Department. That gets the ball rolling and clock ticking down the path to a rejection of our plans, neighborhood hearings, an appeal date and - hopefully - approval to build! It's such a relief to be out of the stage of eternally hounding the architects for drawings and answers to various building code questions, even if this next part of the process is sure to come with pitfalls of its own. Fingers crossed that we can get the rejection letter from the City soon, since we have our first presentation to a neighborhood association (there are two such groups on our neighborhood) at the end of December and are supposed to bring that letter to the meeting.
In other news, I bought the mantel for our fireplace today. In a sense it's not what I expected it to be, but in another sense it is. I wish I had photos for you, but we stopped by an architectural salvage place on a whim and of course I didn't have my camera. I had in mind something like the ones in the images above: marble, intricately but above all delicately carved, with an arched opening, and quite large. Instead, we ended up with a wood mantel, regular rectangular opening. It's stripped oak and we might leave it stripped, or else possibly paint it white. What sold me on it were the carvings...they are absolutely stunning. They're not chunky at all like so many mantels, with leaves and swirls, rather than overly feminine roses/flowers. My bf is pleased with the absence of flowers and also by the fact that the mantel is wood, which he far prefers to marble. I can't say I wasn't swayed by the price, either, which was fabulous, even for an wood number, never mind the saving over marble. I'd rather economize here so we hopefully can go big with the budget elsewhere. My only concern is with the size of the mantel. It's a bit smaller than what I had pictured. But our RBB is pretty small, so I'm hoping the proportions are right when we install it.
