Fellsway East, Malden, MA

Closed on August 08.1997 - Moved in on September 04.1997

It is a 78 year old Dutch Gambrel. The gambrel style refers to the 2 pitch sloping roof. Nice front porch! We spend a lot of time on it. Our plants just love living out there!

We have been diligently working on the garden since late March of 1998. There was very little in the way of landscaping at all except for one forsythia bush and some lily-of-the-valley along the garage. Please visit our garden pages by following the links at the bottom of this page.

(Image added 12.03.1997)

Well, here is the view of the first snowfall of the Winter of 1997/1998 as seen from the front porch overlooking Fellsmere Park, which was designed by the firm of the pre-eminent landscape architect Frederick Law Olmstead. The storm caught everyone by surprise and we didn't have have time to rake the leaves that fell from the very old oak tree.

In the middle is the view up Fellsway East looking to left from the front porch.

Here in the middle, Michael is working on the wall in what is now our library. We removed the old pine mantel you see and replaced it with a wood carved one from the living room (image on the right). That whole wall used to completely covered in ugly brick veneer. We painted the room sage green. We also ripped out the built in benches on both sides of the fireplace (Chimney Sweep came 11.01.1997) that really ruined the feel of the space in the room. Notice the lanterns on the old mantel, complete with "flickering" bulbs! And that colonial "chandelier" is now history! Robert took his grandfather's Seth Thomas mantel clock to be repaired by this very gracious Russian clock restorer and it has found it's proper home on the mantel.

In old houses, they used to put cheap wood, such as the pine we had, and then save the more expensive wood, oak, for the perimeter and then cover the center with a carpet. We ripped up the old pine and are replacing it with oak. As a matter of fact, as this was typed, the floor guy is installing it (10.22.1997). We just checked and the new floor looks great! Where's my camera?

Well, here it is early December and the library is nearing completion as you can see above. We've decided that the Christmas tree will go in the front window where the couch is, in the image on the right above. (Image updated 12.03.1997) In the center is the new Verdi Gris marble surround that was installed in January, 1998.

This is the guest room (2nd floor bay) after we removed the wallpaper. The previous owner's left some graffiti before they put up the wallpaper (Jan. 1. 1980...hope they didn't do it with a New Year's Hangover)! On the right you can see some of the refinished floor and the Hunter Green walls.

The 2 images above are of the dining room. We called it the "Red Room" because it had very busy floral red wallpaper and fire engine red wall-to-wall. It is now "Dusty Rose" with refinished wood floors. Much more sedate!

On the left in the picture above is the entrance to the living room. We have always wanted wood columns somewhere in my home. You can see the effects after we painted, the color is "plum granite" from Home Depot and is quite the lovely shade of lavender. On the right is my father, Art, and my step-mother, Marcia. Thanks to both of you for painting the dining room!!!

This is the "dressing room" above. It was swathed in blue contact paper. You can see where it ripped off the "corrections" on the wall where there was lots of water damage. This is the last room we have worked on and it is now a very pleasant shade of "French Vanilla"...as seen in the completed image in the middle. On the right is the computer room/home office before we painted it light grey.

This is the Master Bedroom which we painted "Warm Honey". The image in the middle is the best one of how great the floors came out. On the right is the somewhat furnished room. On the left is an old Philco radio that we picked up at an auction in Ossipee, New Hampshire for $40. We bought it just for the Art Deco cabinet.

This is our kitchen. (By the way, we did not hang those curtains: above left; the former owner left them). This room had a fairly large influence on our decision to buy this home. The kitchen in our condo was about 6' by 8', or 48 square feet. This new one is 12' by 18', or 216 square feet. The only thing we have done is replace the pulls on the doors, which were kind of "colonialish" and didn't really go with the very sleek contemporary design of the room . It was kind of amazing when we actually counted how many pulls we had to buy at Home Depot and we counted 51 of them!

A nice set of French Doors opens to a large deck. Below, (images finally added 07/16/1998) you can see that we have gotten to removing the floral wallpaper and painting the walls a shade called "Provence", inspired by our trip to the Greek Islands where typically you will see lots of blue and white. And actually, in the lower right hand corner, the three photographs on the wall are some of Robert's work taken on that trip.

We both would like to thank our friend Tom who has helped us out tremendously on many projects which intimidated us but not him!

That is Tiger on the left. She was a stray that we took in about a year ago, after her feral mother abandoned her on our back porch of our condo. It took her a very long time to trust us, but now she feels comfortable enough to sleep on our laps. On the right was Osiris, a purebred Abysinnian we had as our companion for almost sixteen years. Unfortunately we lost him on July 08, 2004. We loved him dearly and miss him terribly.

Last Update: Sunday, March 19, 2006 07:43 PM

Copyright 1998-2006 by: Robert Pavluvcik. All rights reserved.