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?

  

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!

New. And Improved?

I pulled the trigger on the RASTs I've been wanting.  Yesterday I made the endless one-and-a-half-hour trip to the IKEA in Portland all by myself (sigh-- when you live 3000 miles from most of your friends and all of your family, you have to go to IKEA by yourself sometimes), and I almost came home with three things: two RASTs and the perfect ceiling fixture for my guest room.  Flush-mounted so tall people can walk under it without whacking their heads, not boob-shaped, no weird glass, nice textured shade, etc.  And also, it costs $30.  I didn't leave with it, though, because they wouldn't sell it to me.  Apparently it's been recalled?  Which isn't mentioned on the website.  And it was on the shelf, available for sale, in the store.  Anyway.

RASTs!  Behold them in their pre-makeover state:

They look pretty sad, no?  But they will be beautiful when I finish with them.  And I think they make the room look bigger since they're so shallow-- there's much more floor space than there was with my previous mismatched nightstands.  Here's the view from the doorway:

 

So what will I do with them?  Here's my inspiration photo (from here):

 Mine are already the proper height for the bed, so they won't be getting legs like the one in the inspiration photo, and I'm probably not going to bother adding the false drawer front to the bottom-- though I may decide to put a faux-legs-looking panel across the front at the bottom.  I haven't yet decided how to apply the fretwork; that'll take a trip to the Home Depot to see what they've got and how much it will cost me to do the work myself versus ordering pre-cut fretwork from myoverlays.com.  As for the color, check out this detail shot of my rug:

 

Hey box fan!  Anyway, if you count the bands of color on the rug from the outside in, when you get to the fifth band, you'll see the bright chartreuse-y green I'm thinking I'll use.  I'm also attracted to the slightly-less-chartruese version in the second band.  Here's another view that might help you see both options more clearly:

Of course, this will mean finding a new home for my orange flame-stitched pillows.  Right now I'm totally feeling this fabric for their replacements:

Or similar.  Or not similar at all.  I love fabric-hunting and I can't wait to see what I can find.

After I left the IKEA yesterday I couldn't help wandering into the Home Goods that's conveniently located right next door to it.  I left with two things.  First, a dining room rug:

Please pardon the fact that it's currently sitting on top of the old dining room rug.  Right now we're in a trial-run type of situation.  I like the navy, and I think it makes the dining room feel a lot younger and brighter, but it's the same size as the old rug and I really think it's just too small.  I really need a 7' square.  What do you think?  Too small?

And then I couldn't resist a navy-and-white ikat flatweave for $14.99.  It's chilling in my bathroom, where it covers a significant chunk of the pink Marmoleum floor:

Yeah, just noticed that blue painter's tape stuck to the wall above the window.  I'm a mess.  

While we're in the bathroom, see that light-blue stripe painted under the window?  I was going to paint the bathroom this weekend.  Here's another shot that shows a few more patches of what will be the color:

But this morning I decided I'm going to do something just a little more drastic than paint.  I've been fighting with the orange-peel texture ever since we moved in.  I just don't like it.  And every time I have to do anything in there, it means buying a can of orange-peel spray and trying to blend the patch.  Which never works.  So why am I going out of my way to maintain it when I could just do this instead?

Yes, that's right.  I'm going to skim-coat the walls and ceiling using the squeegee method.  And then I'm going to paint them blue.  And then I'm going to order some flooring samples.  And then and then andthenandthenandthen!  [Name that movie?  Anyone?]

Cleanup on Aisle 9

No, despite its title, this isn't a post about shopping.  It's about doorknobs.  Specifically, cleaning paint off of them.  I know it's exciting, but you're just going to have to try to contain yourself. 

Our house was built in the 40's, and since then it's had its share of owners.  After a quick look around the house, one can clearly see that each of these past inhabitants must have decided to change just one doorknob in order to, I don't know, make the place seem more current or something?  This means that from my present vantage point on the sofa in the living room, I can see five different kinds of doorknobs.  And I can't stand it.  Some are shiny brass, some are "antique" brass, some are the original patinaed brass, and one is chrome (why?).  They're all different sizes and shapes.  But this is also not a post about replacing the mismatched not-original doorknobs with vintage ones, which is going to require some good luck and perseverance and a lot of Googling.

It's about the three doors in the house that still have their original forties hardware.  Over the course of the past sixty-some-odd years, everyone who painted the trim added his (or her!) own special paint color to the hardware.  It's like a bunch of kindergartners painted the place.  Is it really too time-consuming to a) paint carefully around the metal hardware or b) remove the doorknobs and tape the hinges before you do your very own Jackson-Pollock-and/or-Mark-Rothko-style paint job?

The hinges are so paint-covered it's a wonder they still work.  And being my mother's child, I cannot bear paint-covered hinges. (Side note / shout-out to my mom, thanks to whom my sister and I can paint anything quickly and neatly.  We did a lot of family interior paint projects in my childhood home, and Mom does not mess around where crappy paint jobs are concerned.  You prime when necessary, tape when it'll save you time, and buy quality supplies.  Or it will look like... all the paint jobs in this house looked when we moved in.  Shudder.)  And the knobs' brass backplates all looked like this:

I mean, seriously.  That is ridiculous.  It's been making me crazy since before we even bought the house.  

In a fit of madness this afternoon, I decided to do something about it.  Practice for the hinges, which I think will be a much bigger job since their backplates have actually been painted into the wood, like, fifty million times.  I wanted to see if a little scalding-water soak and some elbow grease would restore the brass to its pre-careless-paint-job appearance before I tried detaching all the hinges.

So I detached the knobs and the backplates, and off to the sink we went:

    Top backplate: one I'd scrubbed; bottom backplate: one that'd just gone into the bath.

And then I screwed them all back onto their respective doors, and this is the final result:

So much better!  I know it's a small thing, but at least I can sit on my sofa now without obsessing over the entry closet's sloppy appearance.  

Next up: hinges.  And buying vintage replacement knobs for the rest of the doors in the house.  And putting flooring in the bathroom, kitchen, and laundry area.  And renovating the third bedroom.  And gutting the kitchen.  And painting the guest room.  And putting up baseboard.  And tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow...