3 sheets to the wind

A while back I did a post about my three sets of bed sheets (here it is for reference).
All of a sudden I found myself with all sets being incomplete.
How? Sheer stupidity.
I have a washer/dryer in my apartment (a blessing for sure), but I tend to wash the sheets and duvets in the bigger machines down in the basement of my building. Careless fool that I am, I've lost a couple of pillow cases in the last few weeks by forgetting them in the machines downstairs. I guess I don't check well enough after I do a load. Therefore, two sets of linens were missing pieces.
As if that weren't enough, I woke up last week to find the fitted sheet I was sleeping on had a big rip down the center. Either I had a very bad nightmare or I was tossing and turning something fierce that night...or both. In any event, that was now three sets of incomplete sheets. Ugh.
I texted my friend Doris to see if she wanted to drive out to IKEA this week. She's got a car and she loves company on her shopping sojourns out to Paramus. There's a BJ's, a Home Goods, and a Target too.
Off we went.
I got 3 new sets of pillow cases to coordinate with the duvets and fitted sheets I already had AND a new fitted sheet to replace the torn one. All for a very affordable price.

New sheets & pillow cases

For the record, the cotton IKEA sheets are pretty good, nice and thick. They've improved the quality of their white goods considerably.
Here's the new pillow cases that coordinate with the IKEA duvet and fitted sheet I already had, they're a dark charcoal gray.

New dark gray pillow cases

Here's the new black pillowcases to coordinate with the small Chines print duvet I bought in Hong Kong.

New black pillow cases

The eyesore pt. 2

Happy day: a couple of workmen came today to fix the problem of the exposed pipe in the kitchen. My contractor felt the best solution was to build another box to enclose the pipe but instead of MDF, it's now been made of concrete so that it will withstand the extreme heat of the pipe. They then re-tiled the outside with some extra pieces that were leftover from the remodel. At first they were a few tiles short so they had to run back to their other job to grab a few more. Thankfully it's a very common tile, that's why I chose it to begin with. All in all, they were done in just over two hours and I think it looks great. I'm very happy with the way it looks, much better than the original gray box. You'd never know this problem happened at all.

The eyesore

This goes under the heading of "It's Always Something".
I've had one last problem with the renovation, something that has turned into an eyesore yet it wasn't anything I nor the architect or contractor could have foreseen.
In one corner of the kitchen, the one right next to the kitchen sink there was a wooden covering that was designed to hide the metal heating pipe. This is a very common way of heating certain rooms in Pre-War buildings, they're used sometimes instead of radiators which are larger and take up more room. The steam heat runs through the pipe (which I think runs vertically up and down through the building), and the heat that emanates from it warms the room. These pipes can get VERY hot. Woe unto the person who brushes up against one, you can burn yourself...believe me, I know, it's happened to me.
So in my building this pipe gets not just very hot, but EXTREMELY hot. I can't complain about getting enough heat in my building. The problem is that the heat warped and destroyed the wooden box that enclosed it! The box was made of MDF and it simply disintegrated along with the outer paint which got chipped and very ugly.

Here's the box BEFORE it got too unsightly:



Here's the bottom where the paint started chipping and getting warped:



And here's the top of it where it meets the cabinet:



Here's the back of the box, you can see the damage to the MDF:



So now what to do?
We could build another box out of better wood but who's to say the same thing wouldn't happen again?
The other thought I had was to leave the pipe exposed and just paint it the same color gray as the cabinets and just accept it as the heating pipe. The problem with this is that there is naked wall behind the pipe that would need to be tiled AND there's a hole behind the pipe where the marble countertop didn't wrap around perfectly enough. This hole was once concealed by the wooden box.
Here's the pipe exposed:



Here's the naked wall behind it:



And here's the 'hole' left by the countertop:



I've got a messages into my architect Steve and the contractor to get their opinion on the best way to proceed. To be fair, no one could have known that the heating pipe would do this kind of damage and my contractor was willing to tile the box when I first told him about the problem. But things have progressed into a new bad place. Watch this space for how it all turns out...