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)!