Check out our new baseboards! Aren't they pretty?
Also, I moved my great-grandmother's painting and hung up a painting I did several years ago-- it's that top one there. That's the house we lived in in New Haven. The painting itself isn't exactly amazing, but I like the colors and it goes with our stuff-we-love-for-sentimental-reasons theme in the bedroom. Like that Windsor-y chair that my grandmother found somewhere and refinished (well, she stripped and refinished the top rail and painted the rest black)-- the only other place I've ever seen chairs like that was at Greenfield Village in Detroit, where Henry Ford exactly recreated the Thomas Edison's lab with help from former Edison employees. It's full of those chairs. So as far as I'm concerned that is DEFINITIVE PROOF that my chair is from the original Edison lab. Don't even try to convince me otherwise.
And you're also seeing one of my four new charcoal-gray velvet curtains. I went to World Market-- which is a totally boss source for inexpensive, long-wearing, light-blocking velvet curtains-- and picked them up today. When I got home, I moved the brackets so they're now about 11" out from the window on either side as opposed to about 4" before-- I didn't want the curtains to block any light during the day, and this way they're completely off the windows when open. Then I switched out the curtain rods for some more substantial ones I already had and reattached the finials from the old rods. The finials' screws were a little too small for the new rods, so I wrapped the screws with some Teflon pipe tape (the magic of owning a home with old crappy plumbing = you always have random plumbing supplies that are useful for other projects) to make them fit. Next I gave the curtains a once-over with my handy steamer (I quickly learned while working in retail that if you don't have a steamer you don't have jack-- seriously, they're not expensive and they are LIFE-ALTERINGLY convenient) to knock off the wrinkles, and voila. The above photo makes them look sort of purpley-black, and all the other photos I took are too blurry to use, so I'll have to add something later. But really, it's an improvement.
I've also been busy in the guest room, which I've been studiously ignoring since we moved in-- I just haven't been able to decide what to do in there. I finally picked a paint color that isn't exactly greige-- instead, it's a blue-greige that my friends have nicknamed "Groban" because that's a good combination of "gray" and "brown," and it's also the last name of a famous person. The color is really Behr's Pensive Sky, but I'm going to go with Groban.
In order to apply the Groban (I first-coated last night), though, I had to do a lot of prep work. For the past week, I've been painting the trim and trying to make some sense out of what's happened to the walls in there. Here's a picture of what the west wall looked like after two applications (and subsequent sandings) of drywall mud-- spackle wasn't man enough for the divots in these walls:
All that white is joint compound. And the color you see in the corner and on the walls is my main man Groban. You see, someone had filled some of the enormous divots, but s/he applied the spackle with some sort of notched trowel and then failed to sand the patches. So basically it looked like the walls were covered with little Ruffles potato chips. And also tons of other divots that weren't filled. And whoever drywalled this room evidently didn't know that you have to tape the joints, so you can see a horizontal line where I had to re-fill the seams between two pieces of sheetrock. Yesterday morning I made a final sanding push (which was HORRIBLE because I hate sanding). Here's what I looked like when I finished. Check out my dusty hands and jeans and slippers and gross ponytail and all the sand-dust on the floors:
Photos of Groban coming tomorrow!
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