In keeping with the theme..
.. started earlier this summer, I spent my holiday weekend once again painting, this time in the bedroom.
Before painting (all pictures are clickable thumbnails):
You may or may not have noticed that the walls in the room were actually two colors - not in an accent wall kind of way, but in a two walls are pale aqua and two walls are yellowish white kind of way. The ceiling is, of course, different from both former wall colors (the second picture shows all three the best), but fortunately it’s white so I opted not to paint it. I did, however, decide that it needed to be primed:
I loved that they tinted the primer to match the paint - it really made it a lot easier, especially because you could tell that a single coat of the paint wouldn’t have covered the lighter paint underneath - as you can see if you look closely at the primed walls. I still ended up doing two coats of paint because I must not have mixed as thoroughly as I should have at some point and the brushwork was noticeably different from the stuff done with the roller. In the end, though, it looks pretty good:
I still need to go back and do some touch up in spots where the tape pulled a little bit of the paint away, as well as some spots on the ceiling that I didn’t notice got smudged, but that is pretty quick work once I get around to it.
The reason for painting *right now* arrived today:
Evolution
From this..
(Clickable thumbnails, as always.)
..to this:
..to this:
And finally.. this:
Apologies for how blurry this one is..
I couldn’t match the original stain - partially because it’s a color that appears to no longer be made, but also because the original trim is no longer uniform, as you can see by looking at the right trim board. At some point, I will likely strip the original trim down to bare wood and stain it to match the top piece and doors - both of which are new wood - but for now, it’s at least no more mismatched than much of the rest of the house. *shrug*
Sometime tonight or tomorrow, I’ll patch the couple small chunks of wall that didn’t get covered (there’s a small one where you can see the grey of the original wall above the original door and another toward the bottom of the right side) with drywall compound so I can sand it and have it ready to paint Saturday. Everything I’ve read about painting walls read tells me that I need to first do a coat of dark primer, followed by at least two coats of paint and that I must wait at least 24 hours between coats. I’m not quite sure I trust that, but if it’s actually what’s needed, I at least have the long weekend in which to get it finished.
Victory is mine!
One of the reasons I fell in love with my house when we bought it is that it has hardwood floors throughout most of the rooms. Even though the upstairs bedrooms had carpeting pieced in and nailed down, we knew that the original floors were under the carpeting. The carpet in what’s now the master bedroom got ripped out before we even moved in - it didn’t even cover the whole floor and looked yucky, so it went. The carpet in the two smaller bedrooms, though, has stayed.
I was disheartened a few weeks ago to learn that the maroonish carpet in the guest bedroom is covering, at least in one spot in what is now the shelved half of the closet space, a place where someone at some point cut a rectangle of floor out and replaced it with plywood. I’m hoping that’s the only spot in that room where they did it because at some point I want to cut the carpet at the closet and pull it out of the rest of the room.
The discovery of the damage in the guest room made me a little nervous about ripping out the carpet in the den - we’ve found some pretty amazingly messed up “home repair” in this house, so it’s always a bit of a surprise when we uncover something new - but it seems the carpet in the den was just for comfort and not to cover some abomination:
(Clickable thumbnails, as usual.)
Don’t mind the bit of mess on the floor - I’d swept but not yet mopped when I took it; I assure you it’s much cleaner now! There is a bit of damage to the floor boards from what appears to have been a bed that sat in the same spot for quite some time:
But.. all things considered, I’m extraordinarily pleased to find the floor mostly intact - or at least as intact as the flooring in the rest of the upstairs!
Closets
Right then.. this post is mostly for my mother, who wanted to see pictures of the progress on the new closets in the bedrooms.
This is the main bedroom new closet:
(All pictures are clickable thumbnails.)
The doors still need to be stained, but I did the top trim board this morning. The stain is a smidge darker than the original varnish (and the trim board on the right is considerably lighter than the rest for some reason - will eventually have to strip it down and stain it to match), but I think once it’s dry and has a coat of poly on it, it will be close enough. The doors might get done this week, but more likely they’ll wait until later in August when I have another free weekend.
The guest bedroom closet, I have to admit, is sort of my favorite. Maybe because it makes that room really a bedroom now:
*
Not the greatest pictures - it’s a small room and we still need to figure out what to do with the bed and desk that were in there because we gave up some floor space to create the closet - and the trim wasn’t fully finished yet when I took them, but at the moment they’re the only ones I have with the doors on. Previously there was a truly horrid clearly slapped together for the sole purpose of being able to sell the house as a 3-bedroom box that was supposed to be a closet; it’s gone now:
Dad did the work to frame the closet and trim the wall out, but I still need to stain it all. He used reclaimed trim from the house - some from the bathroom (the uprights), which he had to sand down to remove all the nasty, icky, yucky green paint, and some from the other bedroom closet.
He also framed in a wall behind the center support - which we turned into a small bookshelf and is the perfect size for trade paperbacks:
And finally, I started staining the closet doors for this one last night:
I’m working on filling some gouges in the recovered trim, but hope to sand and get that trim stained this weekend so that at least the guest bedroom is finished. Except for the fact that we need to paint now since they apparently painted the room *after* putting in the excuse for a closet.. *sigh*
* Yes, that would be a home for my stash.. Exciting, no?!
PSA and more to come..
From The F-Word:
We are a team of researchers from the Counseling Psychology program at The University of Memphis who are studying the effects of client secret keeping on therapy… If you have used at least 1 session of psychotherapy/counseling services in the past we would appreciate your help with this project. We have placed the research questionnaire online. The survey should take no more than 10 minutes to complete. There is no identifying information on the survey and all responses are anonymous.
We are very excited about this project, are looking forward to the results of this study, and hope you will be part of it. Thank you for your assistance with our project.
Sincerely,
Frank Fedde, M.A., Dipl. Soz. Paed (FH)
Suzanne H. Lease, Ph.D.
Counseling Psychology homepage: http://cpsy.memphis.edu
In other news, dad finished the guest bedroom closets this week. They look *awesome*. I have pictures of them mostly complete and will post them tonight or tomorrow. This weekend, assuming the weather cooperates, I’ll be staining the trim and doors for all the new closets, so there may be more pictures of them finally done-done soon too.
And it’s a wrap..
If there’s one thing I’ve learned this week it’s that the new color in the dining room is rather difficult to capture correctly in a photo.. All the same, here’s everything more or less put back where it belongs.
(All photos are clickable thumbnails. Yes, that same corner seems to be perpetually in shadow.. it’s not really any darker than the others.)
I promise it really doesn’t look like pumpkin pie.. much.. except in some light.. *sigh* All the same.. I still like it, so even if it does sometimes, I’m okay with that.
Beautiful (and Busy) Saturday
(All photos are clickable thumbnails.)
The sky has been this amazing blue all day. Seemed like a good evening to take some pictures of the gardens..
A few weeks ago I was at a friend’s house and couldn’t come up with the name of this plant. Of course, now that my own are blooming, I remember that they’re Hollyhock. These bloom in the rose bushes by the garage…
..almost done for the year, but still lovely and fragrant. There’s been a slight breeze running all day so the whole yard smells of the roses.
We’ve wanted for awhile to clear out the old raspberry patch and Jack got motivated by our plans to have friends over Friday to get it taken care of. It’s created a really gorgeous spot in the backyard that has shade most of the day.. it’s where we spent a large part of yesterday afternoon with our guests.
And this, the tree behind the apple tree, is apparently a Mulberry Tree. Who knew?! *smile* Jack cleaned up some lower branches on both this and the apple tree and we’ll eventually seed grass in the dirt from the raspberry patch to finish things up.
The phlox are starting to bloom in the side garden, and the lilies - nearly as tall as I am - are out in force.
I love the combination of colors in the side garden, and how they stack up when you look up the walk toward the street.
Unfortunately, that was about all the time I got outside today because we were busy inside painting the dining room. Below is a set of before pictures - not terribly exciting, but nice for comparison:
The second corner was hard to get a shot of with decent light - the dining room, while it gets the most natural light of any room except the bedroom, is on the north side of the house, so the light is all indirect. It seems I only took a couple shots after we’d done the first coat..
.. but got the full set again while the second (and final) coat was drying..
The colors are true (enough) on my monitor, but on the camera’s little screen, some of the pictures looked frighteningly bright orange. In reality, it’s a deepish butterscotch color and neither really too orange nor too brown, nor does it really glow. I was afraid it might look more like mustard once we got it on the walls, but I’m very happy with how it turned out. Once it’s really fully dry (tomorrow) we’ll pull the painter’s tape and put the furniture and such back in, which will be the real test for how we like it. I also have plans to stain the doorway into the laundry room (finally) and if I’m going to have the stain out, I’ll also pr’bly do the two closet doors and the top trim from the closet in the bedroom.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch..
Whee! Destruction is fun (or so I’m told.. I missed all of it *pout*)!
First things first.. As I drove up after work last night, I found Jack and my dad (wielding a chainsaw) finishing up this:
(All photos are clickable thumbnails, as usual.)
That used to look something more like this:
.. but without the snow.. Guess I don’t have a picture of that tree/bush/overgrowntreantcreature from spring or summer.. We’ve been meaning to take it out for awhile, but it wasn’t quite on the list for this week, so it was a bit of a surprise.
Also somewhat of a surprise from last night, but not so much in the whether as the what, were these:
Window at the top of the stairs.
Upstairs bathroom window.
Window at the bottom of the stairs.
Those are essentially really big window clings. We’ve talked about getting them for awhile, especially for the bathroom window since there’s not a shade over that one, and the window at the bottom of the stairs because there was a really nasty, ugly curtain thing on a chintzy little curtain rod that would fall off you if walked by it wrong, but since I had to work I didn’t get to help pick out the pattern. When Jack called to tell me what he’d picked out (”bamboo stalk things”), I couldn’t quite picture it and was nervous, but I really like it. It looks very neat and adds some privacy that we didn’t have before in a prettier way than a blind and a less annoying way than a curtain.
We also put in a cabinet organizer bit in one of the really big and utterly pointless kitchen cabinets that we keep pots and pans in, but I didn’t get a picture of that.
Today they moved onto one of the things that was actually on the docket for this week (the other being the fence in the backyard, which doesn’t look like it will actually get done at this point):
Yeah, that’s about what it looks like. They took out the closet wall in our bedroom. You can see in the top left of the photo where the wood door trim was; everything to the left of that was a wall this morning. Said wall made it nearly impossible to actually use most of that really big closet (it goes back almost 4 feet at the bottom). So in order to get more closet space, we decided to take out the wall and put in sliding doors.
And while they’re in there, they’re going to clean up the last of the plumbing nightmare left from the do-it-yourself-er’s that put the shower in the upstairs bathroom:
Uh, yeah.. that would be the chunk of wall that they took out to run the plumbing for the shower; the plumbing we took out last year when we took out the shower. The chunk that they then never bothered to repair, or even to block off, so that this little guy:
Could let his babies into our house. Yeah.. not very happy about that part.. the squirrels chewed through the fascia behind the gutter and have been running around *inside* the roof. This happened last year, but we didn’t know how they were getting in, just that we had a baby squirrel in the house for a few days. We figure out how they were getting in sometime this spring and are having the fascia repaired, but they had to order the board and it’s not in yet, so they’re up there again.. So dad and Jack are going to block up the wall and cover the hole so they at least can’t get in the house again before they fix the fascia.
That’s all for tonight! I need to go clear the dust off my bed so I’m not washing it out of my hair in the morning..
It’s not Wednesday yet, is it?
I have a love/hate relationship with this week. I love that the semester is finally over, that things are actually *slow* (or what counts for it around here), that campus is nearly deserted and very quiet. I hate that I lose just about all motivation to do anything in my office (there’s some twisted logic in there related to finally feeling like I don’t have to be running all the time, so I just want to stop altogether or something), that once I clean up the few things of interest all that’s left are the things that got put off because I needed more than two minutes in a row to figure them out, that I can’t really stop running because I’ll be out again all next week at a conference.
This year I also hate that my dad and Jack are ripping out a wall in our house and I don’t get to help. I mean.. remodeling sucks, really, I get that.. but they’re doing the fun part today and all I’ll get to see is the rubble and the dust once it’s done. (We’re making the (actually rather large) closet in our bedroom more accessible; it’s currently accessed by a standard door, but runs the length of the wall (10 feet?) so we’re ripping out the wall and putting in sliding doors and a shelving system to make it a real, functional closet.)
Even Celtic Stompgrass on Pandora is not helping much today, largely because it seems that they don’t really have all that much that fits that description in their catalogue so I’m to the point where I’ve heard all the songs they’re coming up with several times in the last couple days. Don’t get me wrong, I still like them (most of them anyway), but I want to find more new stuff. (And I’m really trying not to be too upset that I’ll miss the Paperboys by a little over a week..)
Life’s been.. interesting lately, but most of it is not really suitable for here, so you’ll have to take my word for it. *shrug*
Random Monday.
Would that it were really Wednesday already, but that would be very bad as Monday has gone by far too fast already for everything I have to do this week.
Right then.. bit of a brain dump, and no pictures, but I will talk about some knitting I have going and some recent yarn acquisitions.
I had an eye appointment a few weeks ago and my new eye doctor doesn’t like the 30-day extended wear contacts I have worn for the last three years. He’d prefer that I take them out more frequently than every 30 days (he’d prefer I take them out every night, but I *hate* taking soft contacts out), so he suggested I go to a 2-week extended wear one. I like the 2-week ones less, but they’re rather significantly less expensive (the 30-day ones aren’t covered by my insurance and are around $350 a year, all of which I’d pay out of pocket; the 2-week ones are about 2/5ths covered by my insurance and around $160 a year, of which I pay about $100). The things I don’t like are related to the fact that I think they’re a slightly thicker lens, so they get gummy more frequently and shift out of place more frequently. It’s just an annoyance, and I’ll get over it, but since I never had to worry about the gumminess with the old ones, I’m not sure which eye drops I could use to make it go away when it happens in the middle of the day. Thoughts or suggestions are welcome.
A few weeks ago, we went to visit friends in Green Bay and in addition to playing lots and lots of games and eating many very good meals, P and I went visiting a couple of her local yarn shops. I was mostly good - I only enabled her into some sock yarn so she could learn socks and only bought 4 skeins of Takhi Classic Cotton to use to make a Baby Surprise Jacket for some friends’ new addition and a skein of the new Austermann Step with the aloe and jojoba in it. I I also started a new pair of socks in the car on that trip and worked a bit on Jack’s black socks. I will honestly try to remember to take pictures and get them loaded either here or in Ravelry soon - the Baby Surprise Jacket is nearly done!
It’s spring, at least by the calendar, so we’re starting to gear up for some more work on the house. First on the to-do list is getting the squirrel’s out of the attic and making it so they can’t get back in. That will happen tomorrow, and while Dad’s up in the attic fixing that, he’ll also figure out if the wall separating the two upstairs bedrooms is load-bearing so that we can make the right plans for removing it. This will make our house only 2 bedrooms, but as none of the existing bedrooms is actually large enough to be considered a master bedroom (you can’t get a king-sized bed into any of the bedrooms and still be able to open doors and/or walk around) we think this will be an improvement overall. The two smaller bedrooms will become one larger room (which we’ll likely keep as a den, but which will get counted as a master bedroom if/when we sell the house) and we’ll create some better closet space for both bedrooms. It’s a big-ish project, so here’s hoping it all goes well!
