Refresh

My dining room chairs, purchased from Craigslist for $20 apiece last fall, have been many colors.  They were red when I bought them, and then I tested two different shades of gray before realizing that I needed to stop trying to make gray chairs happen.  Gray chairs are not going to happen, Gretchen!

So yesterday I picked up a few cans of Rustoleum in Heritage White.  After a quick sanding, my first chair got what I hoped would be a nice, flaw-hiding coat.  Except white spraypaint doesn't hide flaws:

 

Pardon the dizzying bird's-eye angle.

See all the splits in the wood there on the top rail?  Se how the reed-strapping is starting to unravel in spots?  I don't know how old these are or who manufactured them, but these babies are showing some mileage.  

I thought I'd do a little experiment, and before I sprayed the second chair, I sanded it thoroughly and used half a tube of wood filler on it.  I filled the unpaintable gaps around the rattan joints and forced putty into the splits and dings (the chairs are made of really soft wood).  It took, all told, a couple of hours.  I was kind of hoping it wouldn't make much of a difference so I wouldn't have to do it three more times.

Of course, it made a huge, visible-to-the-naked-eye difference.  The refurbished chair is (obviously) on the right:

Back detail, un-refurbished:

Back detail, refurbished:

Better.  Now please excuse me while I go buy more wood filler.

PS: Found a gorgeous cotton blanket in TJ Maxx that perfectly matches my nightstands.  I bought it:

I love you, TJ Maxx-- two x's and all.

Dork-knob

We've talked about my doorknobs before.  A few times.  Half of them are original brass, perfectly petite, and the other half are a random assortment of butt-ugly orange monstrosities.  One of my first projects upon move-in nearly a year ago was to clean years of paint off the pretty (little) brass rosettes of the original knobs, and one of my most recent was finding vintage knobs to replace the ugly ones.  I wasn't sure if it'd work, so I started small with two sets of knobs-- one half-brass and half-chrome for the bathroom door and one brass pair for the guest room door.  If it works, I thought, I'll get another passage set for the guest-room closet and one for the soon-to-be-reno'd third bedroom; I'll also need a locking set for the door between the kitchen and the laundry room.

I'm just going to stop you right here, because I know what you're thinking-- only a total weirdo would spend $30 per door to replace ugly-but-functional doorknobs in a 1350-square-foot house.  You're right-- it's hardly Versailles, and the next buyer probably won't be quite as doorknob-obsessed as I am.  So from an investment standpoint, it's pretty stupid.  But from a mental-health standpoint, this is an absolutely mandatory upgrade.  And in case you doubt how truly hideous some of these knobs are, I present Exhibit A:

Gooooooo!  And if that's not enough, allow me to introduce a side-by-side shot of the bathroom knob (left, obviously) next to the vintage one I bought to replace it:

See?  SEE?  Now if that's not worth $30 of vintage door hardware, I don't know what is.  

Unfortunately, my worst fears were confirmed when we got back to Oregon last week and discovered that the ugly doorknobs were, in fact, attached to new-style guts-- so of course my spindle knobs weren't going to work.  We spent a hilarious week with no bathroom doorknob while Ray's parents stayed in our house with us.  If you really want to get to know your family, share a knob-less bathroom with them.  It's an experience, I assure you.  Fortunately, my wonderful in-laws handled it with grace and never once complained that I'd seemingly removed the doorknob immediately before they arrived just to make their seven days in Oregon as uncomfortable as possible. 

Meanwhile, I started doing a little research on houseofantiquehardware.com, and I thought I'd found the piece I needed to make my knobs work.  Here's what it looks like.  I still wasn't sure it was the right thing, but I ordered one for the princely sum of $5.95.  I also ordered some 3" rosettes, since the hole that'd been bored in my door to make way for the HUGE modern knob was too large to permit me to screw in my pretty little (2.25") vintage rosettes. 

What I didn't know is that House of Antique Hardware is located in Portland (yay Rose City!) and I got my hardware the next day.  I think my mother-in-law was a bit bemused when the package came and I started jumping up and down like a maniac and interrupted our conversation to run to the tool closet for a Phillips head.  But she shared my excitement when, two screws and fifteen hot seconds later, my bathroom door had functional vintage knobs on it:

Love.

Unfortunately,  I don't love the look of the bigger rosette:

 I really prefer the smaller vintage one as seen ob my entry closet door:

 

And I think I know how to make it work, so I'm currently planning an ambitious door-retrofitting project that I'll report back on shortly.  And the big rosette doesn't bother me nearly as much on the chrome bathroom side:

But at this point, after tracking down the perfect doorknobs and rosettes (they're an exact match to the original knobs I already had) and traveling 3000 miles with them, I'm inclined to see this mini-project through as completely as possible.  So retrofitting it is!  And I also need to order about a million more Standard Back Set Tubular Conversion Latches (say THAT five times fast) from House of Antique Hardware so I can do all the other doors.  And I have to find more sets of matching vintage knobs.  One thing at a time, right?

  

What Do You Call A Guy Who Hangs Out Against The Wall?*

Pardon the spotty posting-- we've been on the road.  But I did squeeze in a few quick photos of some progress in the dining room before we skipped town, and I thought I'd save them for a rainy day.  And today's rainy, so here goes:

 From the fireplace hearth:

From the front door:

From the kitchen, a better shot of what's actually hanging in there:

 

Top left and bottom right: two pieces of wrapping paper I bought for $5 each in a Portland gift shop-- the top left is a reproduction of a vintage tourism poster for New York (a special place for us because we've spent a fair bit of time there, got engaged there, etc etc etc), and the bottom right is a map of Paris with drawings of all the monuments drawn on in their respective locations (we have no connection whatsoever to Paris, other than the fact that Ray got mugged in Montmartre and I once got stuck in De Gaulle airport for like 15 hours, but the poster is pretty and it cost $5).  They're in IKEA Ribba frames ($24.99 apiece, so the total investment for these two big pieces of art was $60).  Bottom left: a painting I painted of a lighthouse near our place on the Chesapeake Bay framed in wood my dad salvaged from the deck of an old Navy ship.  Top right: A funky vintage map of the Lewis and Clark trail, found pre-framed at the local antiques shop for $29.  

I'm not quite done yet-- under the Paris map I plan on putting a little bench we can use for extra seating and accessorizing it with a stack of books and perhaps a vintage oscillating fan since we don't have air conditioning.  On the hunt for the right bench even as we speak!

*Art.

One Step Forward

Remember the other day when I posted this photo of the new screen door?

 

As proud as I was of the door itself, I kept thinking that there was something (a few things) really sad about this photo.  Suddenly it hit me: ugly, washed-out-looking, unfinished, undefined-looking concrete stairs.  I decided to do something about them.

Behold:

 

Maybe we should do a side-by-side?

 

 It's Behr Semi-Transparent Concrete Stain in Loden-- it cost me about $25 for an entire gallon (of which I used, like, 1/4 cup on this project).  I brushed it on, first in one direction and then in the other to get a sort of crosshatch finish. Nice, right?

Next up: new (not ridiculously tiny) mailbox, bigger and brighter doormat, landscaping, window boxes, etc etc etc etc.

A Million Little Projects

Long time, no post-- we haven't done much of substance around here lately.  We've arrived-- much sooner than I thought-- at the point where all the things that need to be done are a) infinitesimally tiny and more or less invisible to the naked eye, or b) absolutely massive and impossible to do by ourselves.  Even still, in the couple of weeks since I posted, I've...

1.  acquired a new dining room rug which is totally the wrong color but I might keep it anyway
2.  painted one dining room chair a darker gray to see if I like it (I don't)
3.  finished the RASTs with hardware I painted to match (photos of all this in a minute)
4.  repainted the master bedroom ceiling
5.  lost out on a midcentury Baker console table I really liked via an eBay auction
6.  worked some more on the bathroom ceiling
7.  re-patched the master bedroom walls where the spackle I'd used had shrunk
8.  killed / vacuumed up about 367,721,003 flies
9.  finished half the rat-proofing around the foundation (more on that in a bit), and
10. weeded the front yard.

Obviously most of that stuff is tiny and inconsequential-- like, I know I shouldn't really list "killing flies" as a home-improvement project.  But when your house has dead rats (hey, at least we know the poison's working, and this time we couldn't smell it/them) and there are literally tens of huge furry flesh flies on the lamp in your laundry room, killing them feels like both a job and an accomplishment.  And losing an eBay auction is also not a project, but it did take up quite a bit of my time.  The table was gorgeous, but I plan to console myself by... well, we'll get to that in another post.

First things first: the dining room rug.  I have no distance photos, and between all these projects the dining room is way too messy to bother photographing now (from my current vantage point on the sofa, I can see two bags of grass seed, a tube of wood filler, tin snips, my shop vac, a gallon of ceiling paint, my yardwork shoes, two screwdrivers, etc. etc. in the dining room), so this is the best I can do:

Yeah, we'll talk about the pizza-box-with-primed-hardware-on-it in a minute.  For now, the rug.  It's an indoor/outdoor, which I thought was a really good idea for the Pacific Northwest, but the real reason I bought it was its shape: a 6'7" square was exactly what I needed.  I didn't find too many options in the 7' square arena, and this one promised to be a very inexpensive (like, less than $100) gray and ivory quatrefoil-patterned godsend.  It is, in fact, the right size, and I really like it.  It's one of those Safavieh ones and it looks and feels like a nice flatwoven rug.  However, as you may be able to tell from the photo, it's not really gray.  It's more of a French blue.  And that is pretty much the ONLY color not found in my living-room rug.  Ugh.

I've decided to keep it while casually looking for another 7' square to replace it-- when I find something, this one will go outside to our covered patio, where it will someday be joined by two comfy armchairs and some kind of cocktail table.  

Anyway, the French blue leads us to our next conundrum: what to do with the dining room chairs?  As you can see in the above photo, the light gray I chose when I first bought them looks like primer, but the Home Depot didn't have any other appealing gray options.  So the last time I was in Salem I stopped by Lowe's (yes, the closest Lowe's is forty-five minutes away) to check out their spraypaint selection and I came home with something that promised to be a little darker.  After patiently waiting months for the weather to warm up, I finally took one chair outside and sprayed it on Friday.  Results:

You're right, it is not gray.  It is teal.  This is obviously a no-go. 

At the moment I'm thinking I sand the hell out of them, beef up their joints a bit, and go semi-gloss white.  I'm kind of feeling the Hollywood Regency thing these days, and if the question is WWJAD (What Would Jonathan Adler Do?) then the answer is always glossy white.  Thoughts?

Let's go back to that first photo for a minute:

Yes, you are absolutely looking at a pizza box with a bunch of hardware on it-- I needed something into which to screw the hardware for my RASTs while I painted it.  This pizza box happened to be handy, which is strange because we order pizza about once in NEVER out here.  

Tangent: the pizza in Oregon is absolute shit.  Shit, shit, shit.  Yes, I was a bit spoiled by New Haven (before you even say anything, Modern is the best apizza, and I miss it ALL. THE. DAMN. TIME, like sometimes I have dreams where I'm eating it), but even if I hadn't lived in the land of pizza perfection, I still wouldn't like the super doughy, yeasty, extra-sweet-saucy, limp-dishraggy disaster that passes for pizza in the Pacific Northwest. 

Anyway, we ordered pizza last week because we are stupidly optimistic people and we always think that just this one time the pizza's going to be okay.  Spoiler alert: it never is.  But anyway I had the pizza box so I screwed in my faux-bamboo hardware:

A short handle for the top and bottom drawers of each RAST and a long handle for the less-adorned middle drawers.  These came from coolknobsandpulls.com, which had the least-expensive faux-bamboo pulls, and since I planned to paint them it didn't matter that the 5in. ones were nickel and the 7in. ones were bronze.

I primed 'em with some metal-bonding spray primer:

Painted 'em with an artist's brush:

Drilled holes in my drawerfronts, and screwed 'em in:

  

Oof, horrible photo quality.  Let's try that again:

 

Even worse.  Well, I tried.  

Anyhow, I think the RASTS look pretty boss now.  No guarantees that I won't decide to do a little something with the awkward space under the bottom drawer, but that'll have to wait til I get a jigsaw.  And my birthday is coming up in just four short months (Dad)!

[Feint]

Check it:

Yeah, I couldn't live with the chartreuse.  So I decided to find a different color in the rug.  Here's a different shot for color-comparison purposes:  

 

See it there in the fourth band in from the outside?  

And yes, I did attach the fretwork this weekend!  Thanks for noticing.  I really like it.  Here's what it looked like sans fretwork:

So much better with the fretwork, no?  Here's a little breakdown of the my RASTS went from here:

Through here:

 

To here:

My fretwork came from myoverlays.com (highly recommend, by the way) in the mail on Monday, so I painted it chartreuse.  I was still planning on going ahead with the whole chartreuse thing, but over the course of the week it became clear to me that it was the wrong direction.   I mean, I want to be a chartreuse kind of person, but I guess I'm just not.  So I picked out the new color (this one's Black Pepper by Benjamin Moore).  I filled the pre-drilled hardware holes on the drawer fronts with wood filler, sanded them down, and painted everything.  I waited for all the components to dry thoroughly, and this afternoon I attached the fretwork with some gel superglue (SO MUCH BETTER than the regular runny kind, seriously).

On Friday I popped by T.J. Maxx because you just never know, right?  And I picked up two down-filled zippered ikat pillows for $16 each-- I figured I couldn't make 'em too much cheaper than that, so it seemed like a good deal.  Then today while I was in my office on campus this morning (yes, I was totally working in my office on a Sunday morning) I grabbed a pair of lamps I've been keeping in there-- I think matching nightstands necessitate matching lamps, and I only have one useable outlet in my office so I had no need of a matching pair there.  I bought these at Target last year, and I really like them.  I used some of our excess hardcover books (we have a lot of those floating around) to make the lamps a bit taller.

As for the RASTS, I'm done save for the hardware.  In keeping with the Hollywood Regency theme I was going for, I've ordered some faux-bamboo drawer handles which I'll paint to match the dresser.  Lots of texture for the win!

Let's go back to August 2012 for a minute:

Oof.  Now May 2013:

Much better, non?

Half-RAST

I think my RAST makeover is about 40% done, and I need some advice.  

This is when I really, really hate living so far away from my friends and family-- especially my mom and sister.  They'd be able to tell me if I'm on the right track.  My husband, while being a truly wonderful person, is profoundly design-challenged (ask me about the time, perhaps a month into our relationship, that he picked out a black plastic TV stand from Wal-Mart and tried to convince me that it was "kind of Bauhaus.") and I think my friends here might be too kind to tell me when my taste level is what Zac Posen might politely call "questionable."

I started keeping this blog (and continue to maintain it) so our East Coast and Midwest loved ones could occasionally drop in on our West Coast life, but more and more I'm aware of the blog's limitations.  My photography skills are almost as terrible as my photography equipment, and I know the pictures I take and post aren't at all representative of what I see when I look around our little house.  And while I love having my own home to renovate and decorate as I please, sometimes it really makes me miss my family.

I texted my mom the following iPhone photo of an in-progress RAST to get her opinion, only later realizing that the color in the photo is CRAZY off:

I mean, it is SO CHARTREUSE in these photos.  It looks positively neon.  And the truth is, it's really nowhere near as bright as it looks in the above photo, or in this one (taken at the same time): 

It is, like, glowing in these pictures.  It looks like it just stepped off a spaceship.  And after I texted my mom and asked for her opinion, she said, "I like the color, but I'm not sure I could live with it."  I thought, "It's not THAT bright, is it?"  And then I looked at the photos and realized that the color she saw is totally radioactive.    

I wish I could explain this, but I know less than nothing about photography.  The horrible photo that follows is somehow a much more accurate depiction of the RAST color, but everything else looks much darker than it really is, and I really need to remember to turn off my lamps before taking pictures in my bedroom:

And you don't have to tell me how awful the orange flame-stitched pillows look.  I know.  I'm on it.

Even crazier are the photos I took with our actual (ancient, crappy) camera.  Here's one:

In the iPhone photos it appears neon yellow; in the camera photos it's grasshopper green.  I took both sets at the same time, by the way.  Here's a side-by-side of the birds' eye views:

In reality it is neither this yellow nor this green.  

So this is just a long way of telling you that I need someone's opinion on the color (is it too bright?  Too light?  Not brown enough?), but I can't get it.  Because the only way to show anyone the color is via photograph.  And I can't photograph the color.

Since I'm pretty much stuck floating out here in this cold design wasteland all by myself, I guess I'll go ahead and order the fretwork.  After doing some research, I realized that it'll be much cheaper for me to order two kits from myoverlays.com than to buy all the tools I'd need to cut my own fretwork, so I'm going to admit DIY defeat and go with the premade option.  I'm debating between these two designs:

 

I'm leaning towards the second one, which means it's probably hideous because every time I offer anyone an option like this she always picks the one I wasn't favoring.  Sigh.

Me: 1; Orange Peel: 0

I have battled the orange peel texture on my bathroom walls, and I have won.  I WIN I WIN I WIN!  It wasn't as hard as I thought, either.  I'll show you some photos of the process.  We started here:

  

Do you see it?  Look at the texture of the walls over the vanity.  It's pretty aggressive.  I thought I could live with it, but the more I lived with it, the more I hated it-- it made wall repairs difficult and muddied up the wall color.  Plus it looked dated.  Like, majorly dated.

I did some research and I thought I'd wind up skim-coating via the squeegee method, in which you roll slightly thinned drywall mud onto the walls with a 3/4 nap roller and then smooth it with a squeegee (hence the name).  But I kept thinking about a conversation I'd had with my mom when I first moved in.  She'd wondered if maybe I could just apply mud to the walls and then scrape it with a taping knife, thereby filling in the gaps in the orange peel without having to really resurface the walls.  And I started thinking, why not?  I decided to try a little patch just to see how it worked.  

And it worked great.

Here's a close-up of the original texture:

Oof, that shit is UGLY.  This is what we were working with after one coat of mud:

And after the second coat:

And a wide shot of the second coat:

I sanded between the first and second coats.  It was awful.  But when I finished, I primed and applied two coats of very pale blue-gray paint, and I'm so happy with the results:

 

And your close-up:

Nothin' but roller texture.  

SUCCESS!

Side-by-sides for ya:

August 2012 to April 2013:

Boo-yah.

And also, the antique nightstand that got bounced from my bedroom in favor of a RAST has found a new home in my hallway.  How darling is this?

 

I'm going to hang King Charles above it.

This weekend I tackle the RASTs-- updates to come!