Do you love R. Kelly like I love R. Kelly? Okay, well, I don't really love R. Kelly (though I do have some very fond Remix-To-Ignition memories circa 2002-2003) but this was the first post title that popped into my head so I went with it.
We are finally home from our long trip, and we're so happy to be back in our sweet little house. We really, really missed it. And we were also pleasantly surprised when we walked in and realized that the bathroom wall patch actually looks MUCH better than we remembered it looking-- over the past three weeks, it had morphed in my head from not-100%-perfect to absolutely horrible, and when I saw it again in person, I paused to literally pat myself on the back. Okay, so there are a few places where I'm going to have to sand the enormous chunks of rogue orange-peel texture off, but all in all I'm really proud of what I did. It required like 37 pieces of drywall and nothing was level, and I had NO factory drywall edges to work with, and given all that the end result looks pretty professional if I do say so myself. And all my fears about the slate hearth looking awful were allayed. I'm stupid. Nobody else would ever in a million years see the tiny flaw that's been keeping me up all night. So I guess sometimes you need to get away to realize that you're actually doing a good job and all your hard work is paying off. Phew.
When I walked through the front door (for the first time in nearly a month!) on Friday, I had already half-formulated a plan for a nice little side project: the entry closet. It's getting an interior paint job as part of The Year Of Living Colorfully-- I'll never commit to bright colors on the walls (I've seen a few too many episodes of House Hunters to fall into THAT trap) but I thought maybe I could handle one bright closet. And the entry closet was in sad shape.
All the trim inside every closet in this house was the same color when we moved in. I don't know exactly how to describe it, but I'd like to think the paint chip was probably labeled BABY VOMIT. For your viewing pleasure:
Anyhow, you can see it has some good features-- it's a decent size and it has two very handy shelves resting on ledger boards; I'd already removed the closet bar when I took this photo but it's nice and sturdy-- but it is also utterly filthy and hideous. The drywall was unpainted and had sixty-odd years of stains from muddy boots and God-knows-what. The trim was a lovely shade of barf, the shelves are half-painted white, one of the ledger boards was yellow (why?). And this leads us to yet another one of my neuroses / weird fantasies, which is that someone really important is going to come over (like the university President or the actual President, who has some family in our town, or maybe the Queen of England because I don't know why) and I'm going to have to open the entry closet in front of this person ("Your Majesty! May I hang up your jaunty Phillip Treacy hat?") and he/she is going to be horrified.
That's the kind of thing that keeps me awake at night, no lie.
So I decided to paint the woodwork in there to match the rest of the trim in the house (off-the-shelf Behr Ultra Pure White) and then I went crazy and bought some peacock blue for the walls. I thought it might complement the pops of peacock in the rug:
At present there's one coat of primer and one coat of trim paint on everything, and I've cut in with the blue. Not too shabby considering today was the first day of a new term and I'm teaching four classes. Next up: staining the natural-wood closet bar dark (saw this on someone's design blog ages ago and it really looked sharp), rolling the walls with peacock blue, second-coating the trim and shelves with glossy white, buying some nice matching wooden hangers, and photographing the closet for the big reveal!
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