upstate Archives | Jersey Ice Cream Co.

MAGIC EGG: THE BIG REVEAL

October 15, 2014 by Percy Bright 17 Comments

By the time you guys are reading this, Tara will be almost halfway into her month-long yoga training down in Costa Rica and I’ll be freshly arrived in Mexico, armed with a new GoPro, somewhere on Orizaba or Iztaccihuatl, two massive snow-capped volcanos that are taller than anything I’ve climbed before. And I can’t wait. It’s been a whirlwind past few weeks of nonstop work as we finished up the little guest house to the Magic Egg, had Country Living come shoot the main house (!!!), and got our eight months’ worth of stuff out of there and into storage at our next job, on the North Fork of Long Island.

To say it was difficult to leave this last job would be a huge understatement. We poured every ounce of energy and imagination we had into it from February through September of this year, and couldn’t have been prouder of the finished product.

We were thrilled to have it posted on Design*Sponge in two installments: first as a Before & After and then as a full Sneak Peek. You’ll definitely want to check out those before pics! Then come back here to peruse the unabridged photo tour below.

And stay tuned for the guest house! We’ve already posted a couple sneak peeks on our Instagram, but the full photo tour is a couple months off.

Huge thanks to Rachael and Gideon, the best clients we could have asked for.

Tons more after the jump! [Read more…]

ANTHRO-APOLOGIA

September 17, 2014 by Percy Bright 6 Comments

Sorry, this post has nothing to do with defending Anthropologie. Who would want to read that? I just needed a snappy title that tied together Anthropologie and ancient Greek because I majored in Greek and Latin. Oh and because one of our past jobs snuck into Anthropologie’s new home catalog!

Not only that. When asked what her favorite space she’s ever styled is, Anthro’s Kim Ficaro had this to say: “To be totally honest, after 10 years of doing this, my most favorite space was on this shoot! The first week we shot in a small house upstate. We made garlands of carnations—the most underrated flowers—and hung them in the attic rooms, which had beautiful peeling wallpaper. The downstairs room of the house was a pale grey and we created a living room that you could stay in all day, using lush plants and the carnation garlands.”

That’s the house we totally redid! We rescued that beautiful peeling wallpaper from layer upon layer of tacky grandma wallpaper (and plastered over the unsightly parts so the nice parts would appear beautifully peeling)! We plastered that living room pale grey. And we did a million other things, turning that grandma house into an Anthro-worthy backdrop.

We received zero credit, so forgive me for bragging here.

More photos after the jump. [Read more…]

Big Indian REVEAL Revealed

October 11, 2013 by Tara Mangini 5 Comments

Last week we had the honor of sharing our Big Indian project with the world. In case you missed the beautifully done feature on Remodelista, be sure to take a look. We owe a huge thanks to Justine Hand for putting so much care into entire piece, and for taking the time to so eloquently explain the insane amount of work that went into the project.

It’s always so exciting to have these big projects revealed. We spend so many months working in isolation, doubting ourselves, sweating, sanding, etc, that it’s so thrilling-and slightly nerve wracking!- to throw the cover off and say, here it is! This article in particular was a total stunner, and I found myself bragging to complete strangers about the feature, something I swear I never usually do. So really, be sure to take a peek at it.

Luckily for all of you die hard fans out there, I am a compulsive picture taker, which means that even though Remodelista filled their post with tons of pictures, there are still tons more to share! So now, for your viewing pleasure, a personal peek into our Big Indian project, with some never-before-seen final shots. Enjoy!

Tons more photos after the jump!

[Read more…]

Stay TUNED!

September 25, 2013 by Percy Bright 1 Comment

When we last left you, the little full-of-potential-but-currently-devoid-of-any-charm cabin in the Catskills we were working on looked something like this:

“Not great” doesn’t even begin to cover it. But now we’re done!

Actually, we’ve been done. We packed up and (begrudgingly) shipped out of the Catskills just before Labor Day, and we’ve been neglecting our blog ever since. As usual. And when I say neglecting, I mean neglecting so willfully I can’t believe I’m even doing this right now. Not that I haven’t wanted to! “I should really do a blog post” is a thought that has popped up in my mind every day and then sunk back under only to resurface just as surely the next day. But here we are! Sort of.

The entire house is going to be on Remodelista next week, so unfortunately you’re going to have to wait a few more days to see what we did with the place. It’s a shame we aren’t better about documenting the process, because I’m not even sure the before and after photos will do justice to the amount of work we did.

We moved walls–lots of them. We spent days in a crawl space no taller than a foot in some places, redoing pretty much the entire house’s plumbing since we decided the bathroom had to move. We demo’d a big ugly kitchen worth of big ugly tiles, laid some new subfloor, and then we sanded, stained, cut, installed, and poly’d brand new hardwood floors. We built furniture, modified antique pieces from Brimfield to work as kitchen base cabinets, built open kitchen shelves, and tore out the sagging kitchen ceiling. We painted, painted, painted, and painted some more. And that’s probably doesn’t even cover half of it.

In the end, we took this place, with it’s oddly-shaped, barely functional rooms…

…and turned it into this place:

So stay tuned for the after photos! We can’t wait to share them with you all.

LITTLE JOYS & The Great Outdoor Shower

August 6, 2013 by Tara Mangini Leave a Comment

Today is the kind of day that makes you grateful. I’m not sure if it’s the blue skies, the unexpected warmth that means so much more now that an autumn chill has hit the air, or that it’s day two of the Oprah meditation thing I’m doing, but my guess is that it’s a perfect combination of all three.

The days here are filled with tiny joys and discoveries. Learning the name of a flower you’ve loved for years, bringing home boxes of fresh produce, finding a hike quite literally in your backyard. When you have such a simple backdrop, these details are easier to see. We now have an indoor toilet, a bathroom sink AND a bathroom door. That my friends, is happiness. Sure, there are still frustrating moments, there are still gloomy days, and I may never learn how to properly use commas, but when the sun shines and a hummingbird hovers in front of you for a moment, you can’t help but feel pretty darn lucky.

Whoa. I just swatted a daddy longlegs off my arm and it somehow shattered into a million pieces, or eight I guess. Did you know the little legs still wiggle around on their own, like a chicken with its head cut off? There’s your science lesson for the day. Also, powdered sugar is just regular sugar put through a tornado! Throw some sugar into a Vitamix and you’ll see what I mean. It’s pretty magical.

I digress, but perfectly. That’s what it’s all about these days. It feels like we’re building life from scratch sometimes, so little thing are something to be celebrated, or at the very least, noticed. Life doesn’t always feel this way, and so often it gets swarmed up into one big stress ball, so for now this change of pace is a blessing wrapped in a blessing, even though I still complain about it every three days. You can take the girl out of the crazy, but you can’t take the crazy out of the girl.

There are so many things to be grateful for. But you all need to SEE some beauty today. And I think you deserve to look at something a little more appealing than a bathroom door. And with that, I awkwardly transition into the second half of this post, which is an ode to the outdoor shower!

I’ve been swooning over the joy of showering outdoors since we waved goodbye to the confines of indoors a few months ago. There is no better way to wash off a long run or a hard day’s work. Fresh air, fresh water and naked bodies. I feel a little dirty writing that sentence, but it’s the perfect combination and it must be said. If you have the chance to get outside and lather up before the summer ends I strongly urge you to do so. Don’t let rain or a chill in the air stop you, they truly only add to the experience. And oh, what a glorious one it is.

So without future ado, an ode to the outdoor shower. I love you in the sun, I love you in the rain.
And if you don’t feel the same way after checking out these beauties, you’re just plain crazy.

More photos after the jump!

[Read more…]

BIG INDIAN, NY

July 8, 2013 by Tara Mangini 3 Comments

Try as we might to plan our lives these days, our job seems to be leading the way, introducing us to new people, plopping us down in parts of the country that are nowhere on our “Places We Should Maybe Live” list. For now, it’s really the most perfect thing for us, since as the aforementioned list title might suggest, we’re a little unsure which way to point the wagon at this point. You know, the covered wagon that we’ll take to travel west, with hammers and saws and paint brushes and old mason jars falling out of the back.

So where in the world are we? Thanks to some soon-to-be famous Brooklyn restauranteurs, we are spending the summer in Big Indian, NY. A tiny little enclave up in the Catskill mountains, bursting with green trees, wildflowers, rushing rivers, and mosquitos. The project? To bring some charm and authenticity to a Catskill cabin that currently feels a bit too much like a modern condo in the middle of the woods. Well, currently it feels like a house with it’s guts hanging out, but one thing at a time here.

We are insistent that we have some time to enjoy the glories of summer, so we’ve tried to build in some time for weekends and afternoons trips to the local watering hole. (And yes, I do mean that in the good old-fashioned watering hole kind of way.) Still, we’ve given ourselves 8 weeks to take this place from an empty house with little charm, to a perfect, fully furnished and decorated, cabin getaway. As of now we’ve been here for about two weeks, and the place looks VERY different than it does in these pictures. But to give you an idea of what we’re working with, let the grand tour begin!

View of the house! And our trusty Suburban.

More after the jump!

[Read more…]

The Master Bedroom : Creepy Dollhouse Make-Over

October 23, 2012 by Tara Mangini 1 Comment

Even though we’ll probably end up leaving no surface left unaltered by the end of this project, the upstairs was definitely a place that we knew needed some work. We’ve been trying to figure out the house’s story as we pull up rugs and knock down walls, but it seems that it’s undergone many changes since it was originally built.

The upstairs in general was a little gloomy, but the master bedroom looked like a haunted dollhouse where they used to lock up little kids.

The dark floral wallpaper and small windows were bad, but the ceilings and miniature doorway were the major problem. I’m 5’2″ and I still felt like I had to duck when I walked in there. Percy could literally touch the ceiling with his head. It was creep-town, and something had to be done. (ps. i realize these pictures make it seem almost charming. But still, hope you’re getting that haunted dollhouse because TRUST ME it was in there.)

We did the only thing we could do, aside from lowering the floors, and knocked into the ceiling. Best decision ever. Well, for me especially. Percy was buried in blown-in insulation for a few hours which didn’t look very fun, but it was undoubtedly worth it. There were still a few days of moving stuff around, re-insulating, rocking, and mudding ahead, but it was an instant relief to have that ceiling bumped up.

Plus, once we started ripping the wallpaper down, there were layers of past wallpaper underneath. We’ve got some plaster plans in the works for the walls, but definitely plan on keeping some glimpses or even walls of the old floral prints.

Check out our snowstorm of insulation and vintage wallpaper works of art below.

Paint Swatches & Things Hidden Under Carpets

October 22, 2012 by Tara Mangini 3 Comments

Things I hate:
Dingy wall-to-wall carpeting.

Things I love:
Paint swatches. (even though they drive me insane)
Finding out that original wide-plank flooring is hiding under said dingy carpeting.

(Above, the floors before a little sanding and varathane.)

And voila! After! (Note the shoe color change. Sanding perk.)

Our First Dream Job : Part II

October 22, 2012 by Tara Mangini 1 Comment

It’s funny, looking back now at Debby’s initial email, to wonder what she really had in mind when she hired us to work on her upstate home.

She wrote, “I have a fantasy of the family arriving upstate to a home without boxes and comfy places to sit. I don’t think anyone could face another set of boxes to unpack.” Somehow in that sentence we saw, “I have a fantasy of you completely renovating, designing and furnishing our new house into the perfect home.” If you can’t dress for it, dream for the job you want, right?

Shortly after we finished up in Brooklyn, we hopped in our fancy white van and headed upstate for Brimfield shopping and of course, to see the little house that would become our lives for the next few months. It felt like we were going to see our new baby for the first time. Not that I have any idea what that’s like but, that’s the best way I can put it.

We’ve been at our official post up there since late September, though the past week we’ve been back in NYC on another job, and can I tell you, I truly miss being up at that house.

Life up there is like a creative retreat. Wall after wall to experiment with. Hidden wood floors. Years of flowered wallpaper to uncover. Endless possibilities. Cookbooks and a fireplace. Leaves changing all around us.

I worried that I would go crazy with all the silence around me, and miss New York and all its spirit, but to be honest, I’ve never felt more content.

We work from sunrise to sunset, and still the days pass all too quickly. We make dinner as the deer tiptoe in the yard. We snuggle up to relax with an episode of Downton Abbey. It might not be for everyone. But for us, for now, it’s perfect.

Debby is an amazing client, and completely trusts us to create a home for her. She has shared her vision for each room, but aside from that, she has left us to our own devices. As any designer can tell you, this

is a gift in itself.

We have our own visions for the house, but living where you work creates an intimacy that is invaluable. The house was build in the 1800’s and it has a spirit of it’s own. We don’t hesitate to take our cues from the walls, the floors, the way the light hits, and the energy of each room.

This is where we spend our days. This is our dream job.

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