Fresh white + crown molding for the dining room

We've been working hard on a last push of projects with the intention of either selling or being happier living here (leaning hard toward the former, though, much to everyone's surprise), and removing the grasscloth in the dining room was one project I'd been avoiding.

I partially thought it would be a lot harder than it was, and I also came to really like the grasscloth, despite my initial spouting about how it would be one of the first things to go. (This house has taught me to say less, because I have ended up eating a lot of my words about it.) 

 

 

So anyway, around the beginning of the year, Todd just decided to go for it and started taking down the wallpaper. It turned out to be a lot easier than either of us anticipated, and we had the whole room clean in two days or a little less. It was well worth investing in a wallpaper steamer all those years ago; it made the job as clean and easy as wallpaper removal can be.

(Anybody want to buy a china cabinet? I'm unloading it!)

I also used a drywall mudding knife to remove the paper and get a really clean swipe at the plaster beneath, which meant a lot less scrubbing to remove old glue before painting. The door to the paint closet still needs to be painted.

We discovered at one point that the trim was this color on the right in the photo below. GROSS. You can also see the vaguely mauve color of the trim next to the hinge, before we painted it 7 years ago. WHO PAINTS TRIM MAUVE? omg.

Just for fun, here are a couple of 8-year-old pictures from the first time we looked at this house. I have 36 pictures from that day in April 2008 and I look at them and seriously have no idea what I was thinking. Apparently I saw potential that I can't see anymore looking at them. Eek. Our realtor Linda is in the first one. She unwittingly named this blog when she declared the house to have "loads of potential" :)

 

Before we ripped out the wall to the kitchen, replaced the windows, finished the floor...

 

Just this week, the crown molding was finished. We still have to paint the ceiling (again) and replace the light fixture, but we couldn't believe what an enormous difference the white made in terms of how spacious the room felt. It felt like all the walls took a step back. We weren't expecting it to make that big of a difference.

But at least in some situations, that's what a nice bright coat of white will do for ya. For those wondering, our go-to white in this house has been Behr Swiss Coffee. It's slightly warm and slightly off-white, but not very much. 

 :)

Evolution of the Staircase: the Stair Skirt

Last Wednesday was an exciting day for our house. It finally got the stair skirt it's so desperately needed. In case you need a reminder, this was our dreadful, creepy upstairs.

I always like to note that there was a deadbolt on the outside of the door to the stairs. Meaning, someone downstairs could lock the door and nobody could open it from in the stairwell. Pretty sure there's no way that could possibly be compliant with fire code.

Because there was green muppet carpet, I guess the gaps just sort of disappeared. Once we ripped out the carpet and steamed the glued-on carpet pad off the floor and had the floors refinished, it became apparent that something was missing. Despite all the work, it still kind of looked like a mess.

Before

Enter stair skirt to save the day and finally make it look polished.

After

No doubt one of Trevor and team's funnest projects so far, it involved a lot of cardboard templates and measuring each step to make sure it was going to fit as snugly as possible.

Before

 

After

Before

 

After (though I still have to put the new riser faces on that I made. Another story for another post.)

After :)

Yes, I wear birks with socks in the winter, and yes, apparently my socks are different colors. Who cares? We now have a mostly finished staircase!

See more posts about the stairs here.

Office Closet Redo... Finally

I've always loved my office closet. It's big, has tons of storage space and has a cool window. The floor is distressed, which I kind of like. What I never liked about it was its bleh tan color. But that's gone now, and all the little cracks from settling are caulked up. It looks much neater now. Let's have some before and afters, shall we?

Before

 

After

 

Before

 

After

Before

After (obviously I still have to paint the built-in dresser, but isn't the contrast amazing between the old "white" and the new white?)

And one other thing I did was string the power for our modem around the door, because I got tired of tripping on it. We should probably have just had an outlet installed in the closet, but this is a decent second best choice.