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    tara-and-percy

    Jersey Ice Cream Co was founded in the summer of 2010. Two kids in love found an old embossing stamp at a flea market, dreamed up a design empire, and then set to work trying to create it. Today Tara Mangini and Percy Bright spend their time moving house to house, job to job, leaving beautiful homes in their wake. They believe in craftsmanship, timelessness, and leaving things better than they found them. They do not make ice cream, but will happily have some if you’re offering.

    Jerseyicecreamco@gmail.com

A TURKEY was HERE.

December 7, 2012 by Tara Mangini 3 Comments

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How shall we start this off. Perhaps, forgive me I’m a huge blogging failure?

I meant to post pictures of how we left the house before Thanksgiving. Each room waiting anxiously to be seen. A new table preparing to hold its first turkey. Fresh paint drying all over and beds made and couches and everything! But instead I ate a lot of food and watched lots of movies and stayed far away from my computer. The moment for the grand tour seems to have passed, or at least been postponed until things are finished! Which is in a few weeks, which just gave me a heart attack. But that doesn’t mean I don’t have something beautiful to share with you. To be honest, there is SO much I want to show you. But we’ll get there, we’ll get there.

For now…the dining room! Or at least the front half. From start to (near) finish.

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This is how the dining room looked when we walked in the door for the first time. We instantly knew we wanted to change every single thing about it. Green trim. Lace curtains. Hand stenciling. Those things could look beautiful if done right, but they sure didn’t look beautiful here.

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One of the first things we decided was that this little dividing wall had to come down. It created two tiny unusable rooms instead of one grand dining room. Which is exactly what our food and company loving clients needed.

So with one swift blow of his mighty hammer…

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…Percy knocked the wall down. At least that’s how he tells it.

With the wall down, we realized that under about 5 layers of cheap wood flooring, the original wide plank floors were still in tact. We couldn’t just leave them buried under there! Many many days of demo and sanding and sanding and staining and finishing followed.

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We knew we wanted to plaster in the dining room, and loved the idea of having a blue sky like ceiling and slightly darker walls. I read somewhere that people used to paint their ceilings because it was cheaper than painting the entire room, and for some reason loved that thought. Even though we didn’t paint, and covered the walls as well, it still makes me feel like there’s a story hidden in there.

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It’s no easy task, but plaster going up is a beautiful sight to see. The bottom half of the room was so rich in color we almost wanted it to stay that dark. But once the dry white clouds started forming we fell in love with the new color too.

Plus, some wood from an old barn door came together to make a perfect long dining room table.

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This is what the dining room looked like around 7am the day before Thanksgiving.

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And this is what it looked like when we walked out the door a few hours later. (We thought we’d give the green trim one final meal.)

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A little lot of turkey and rest did us good, and we were so excited to get back up to the house after a much needed Thanksgiving weekend.

It was magical walking back into the house. The plaster had dried to the perfect colors. The sun was shining. The kitchen was incredible. Everything was simply dazzling to the eyes. Such a dramatic change from that first day, months ago, when we curiously opened the front door.

A little paint mixing and a few tedious trim painting hours later, voila. The oh-so-stunning dining room was officially born. There are still some final touches to be done, but we’re totally in love already. And hope you are too.

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Filed Under: design, dining room, farmhouse, holiday, home, plaster, renovation, vintage

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.

Filed Under: bedroom, design, farmhouse, new york, renovation, upstate

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