Thisclose

Please pardon the lack of a weekend post-- I've found, as it happens, that I'm a terrible blogger.  I can really only post once or twice a week, as:

1) this blog is about our house projects and in order to write a post I must first complete a project, 

2) I have a full-time job that requires a considerable amount of my energy, 

3) blogger.com doesn't work with my iPad for some reason so I have to use my husband's laptop to post, 

4) we live in a place where it's generally pretty dark (hence its attractiveness to roving bands of sparkly-skinned vampires), and there's rarely good natural light to photograph completed projects, 

5) our camera is old and crappy and takes HIDEOUS yellow flash photos, and its shutter speed is too slow to go flash-less unless there is glaring natural sunlight flooding the space (see number four), and

6) a lot of the projects we do aren't cool or glamorous enough to warrant an entire post.

But this week's lack of a post wasn't due to any of those reasons.  It's because we actually took a quick, desperately-needed vacation to Northern California's redwoods with some friends this weekend.  It was great-- we stayed in a cute bed and breakfast and hiked miles and miles through old-growth redwood forests.  We walked along a herd of grazing elk (it was the only way to get back to the car) and, post-hike, ate an awesome alfresco feast of bread and cheese.  Epic two-day vacation if I do say so myself.

And now we're home, a little sunburned and pretty tired, to enjoy a week "off" between semesters (it's not really a week off when you have to grade finals and make syllabi for the next term's courses, is it?).  And I was really, really happy to walk into the new, fresh, white-ceilinged, fully-baseboarded, Groban-walled guest bedroom.

As always, please pardon the shitty quality of these photos:

Which brings us to the next set of decisions: what the hell are we going to put in this room?  As I may have mentioned once or thirty-seven times, this furniture is beat.  My mom and I were discussing the other day that we have a tendency to keep furniture we hate, and we decided it's time to make some changes on that front.  Mom stepped up to the plate by getting rid of an enormous armoire that had been hogging all the real estate in one of her guest rooms, and now it's my turn.  Presently in the guest room and soon to possibly make their debut appearances on Craigslist are:

1) The dresser you see in the top photo above.

It has three big drawers that make it entirely impossible to be organized-- who only has three categories of clothing?  Other than that, there's nothing wrong with it, and I really don't dislike it but I can't make it work in that room, so I think it's going to get the boot in favor of a low, six-to-eight drawer midcentury modern piece to go on the long wall.

2) The little side table in the second photo.

I use it as a desk and vanity, and it's just too damned small to be of any use.  Its tiny drawer is crammed with crap, and the basket underneath it (which holds my blowdryer, makeup bag, and a tangle of cords and phone chargers) looks sloppy.  I'm hoping to find something cool to use in its stead.  Ideas?

3) The futon you can't see in any of those photos, but it looks identical to this:

It's not horrible, and really, it has to stay for now because we're not on the market for another queen-sized bed.  But just for the record, I don't like it.  It came with my husband.

4) The rug that's in there.  

I actually really like this rug, but I don't like it in this room.  So it's off to the third bedroom too.   Eventually.

I'm kind of attached to the little bookshelf sitting under the window-- it used to hold my grandmother's Encyclopedia Brittanicas, and now it holds all some of my Spanish literature books from grad school.  It's kind of nice to see Pepita Jiménez every morning while getting ready for work.

Several months ago, I went to turn off the overhead light in the guest room, and the switch broke-- meaning that the light was still on even though the switch was in the off position.  Normally I'd totally try and fix that myself, but not in this old house-- we have an electrician coming on Wednesday to take care of a whole host of electrical issues / ugly lights.  So anyhow, new ceiling fixture going in there this week.  

And the hunt for new furniture is on!

Be Our Guest

I've got to admit that the guest bedroom has been bothering me for a long time.  When we moved in, both the ceilings and walls were badly damaged and painted a shiny, yellow-brownish white.  There were no baseboards, and the quarter-round that was there in their stead had been abused by countless sloppy paint jobs.  But I thought that once I painted the walls, I'd stop getting that sad, icky feeling when I walked in there.  It didn't happen.  I tried rearranging the furniture (all of which I hate), thinking that might change the vibe.  No dice.  I tried the big jute rug I bought in October, hoping that maybe a nice neutral ground was all it needed.  Nope.  

But this weekend I figured out what was so awful in there.  I'll provide the following photo and see if you're smarter than I am:

I'd tried all my tricks: new wall color (which I like), fresh white trim, new blinds, you name it.  But if you look at the picture above you'll see what I now know was the root of all the evil in there:  the ceiling color.  Here's another view, this time over the entry door, so you can see the contrast between the trim color and the ceiling color:

I knew it was bad, but I didn't know HOW bad until Friday, when I second-coated the walls (just one month after finishing the first coat-- whatever, I don't have a lot of free time).  Then I moved all the furniture into the center of the room and began to cut in around the vents and the walls.  Here's a view in which I've cut in with the new white ceiling paint.  I think you'll agree the difference is drastic:

Please forgive if the paint has a bit of a pink tinge-- it goes on pink so you can see where you've painted, then dries white (brilliant!), and I was too excited to wait for total drying before I took the picture.  I mean, it is a HUGE difference.  

Yesterday I cut in again (the ceiling clearly hadn't been painted in a long time and it was pretty thirsty) and first-coated it.  Again, once I realized what a major change it was, I couldn't stand to wait for it to dry completely before I photographed-- but I think the following photo, pink-tinged and all, shows how much more light the room seems to get with its new matte white ceiling:

[And don't worry-- that boob light is on its way out.  The light switch in that bedroom died, and we don't want to mess around with the electrical in this old house (last time we tried to change a fixture, we found ELEVEN WIRES stuffed into a junction box, and I'm not trying to burn this place down) so this week we're calling the electrician to 1) hang our new dining room fixture, 2) fix the guest bedroom light switch, 3) hang the guest bedroom fixture I bought months ago, and 4) uncouple the electrical outlets from the sconces in the bathroom so we can change them out for something slightly less hideous.]

Today, I second-coated the ceiling and here it is drying in all of its pepto-pink glory:

  

Oh, notice anything else new in that photo?  BASEBOARDS!  We're half-done with the install at the moment-- we sprayed some Great Stuff (jury's out on whether or not it is actually great) in some HUGE gaps between the wall and floor on the south wall, and now we have to wait for it to fully cure before we can install baseboard over it.  Here's a picture so you can see what I'm talking about:

 

See it there at the base of the right-hand wall?  When we sprayed it we didn't realize it needed eight hours to cure-- we just got all excited after we pried off the ugly quarter-round and started spraying it in there-- and you can't sand it flat until after it cures.

So I was hoping to have a completed guest bedroom to show you tonight, but I think we'll be baseboard-ing that wall tomorrow.  After that, curtains, rug, maybe cute slipper chair, maybe I sell the old furniture on Craigslist and buy myself a cool midcentury dresser or a nice antique writing table.  Slow and steady wins the race. 

Gettin' Busy in the Bedrooms; or, Groban

I've accomplished a lot decor-wise in the master bedroom over the course of the past seven days.  I think at this point we're going to call it done reno-wise, even though I still want a new duvet cover.  Want want want want want.  Anyhow, this photo-- a view from the hallway-- shows some of the progress:

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!