The Blue Room

Here are some truly horrible befores of our master bedroom with their current counterparts. I removed several layers of wallpaper while the downstairs bathroom was being renovated in 2008/January 2009. While I was steaming wallpaper off the wall with the headboard, I noticed a big wet patch on the closet wall. At first, I didn't think anything of it, but then realized...hey...I haven't been working on that wall. That can't be good.

It wasn't, but not as bad as it could be. The upstairs shower was dripping, the shower pan leaked and (naturally) the drain was clogged, so it had finally collected enough water to leak through the ceiling and into the closet below. I emptied the pan with my shop vac and asked the convenient present plumber to cap the leaky pipes upstairs. Problem solved. Plus it made wallpaper removal just a bit easier on that wall.

This room went through a few iterations before I settled on the blue with black and white and pink. I intended to include a few more punches of fuchsia with some art but never got around to it. The vent above the bed made it tricky to figure out where to hang anything.

(Like any self-respecting man, Todd insists that I keep a vase of fresh hot pink flowers on his nightstand. Obviously.)

All photos (except the awful befores) are Rachel Southmayd's work: find her at Pixy Prints Photography.

Want to see the rest of the house? Check out the other rooms on the house tour tag:
Bedroom
Kitchen and entry
Jo's office
Upstairs and upstairs bathroom
Downstairs bathroom
Outside and the "we sold the house" story
Dining room
Living room

Bedroom crown molding

This project was actually knocked out in March (I think) but I've just been enjoying the results and failed to report on them. Years ago, shortly after we moved in, I told Todd I needed his help for 15 minutes to hang crown molding in our bedroom. He was wary, but I swore up and down all I'd already made the cuts, and all he needed to do was just hold it while I tacked it in place.

Six hours later, we called Trevor. It took him plenty of time to hang it, due to none of the right angles in the room (or house, for that matter) actually being 90 degrees. Also, the cheap molding I bought at Builder's Bargain, despite being marked the same size, was in fact a sixteenth to an eighth of an inch varied in size. So it was fun times all around.

And then even after it was up, it still looked like this, because I had some brilliant idea to double it into the wall and touch up the paint. Considering that this plan was hatched in January of 2009, and this picture below was taken in March of 2016, you can reach your own conclusion on how well that went.

AARRRGH. Seeing this falling asleep every night really made me twitch. Just seeing the picture STILL makes me twitch.

But, now... check it out!!

One more annoying before...

And after.

 SO MUCH BETTER!!!

Landscaping and the Front Walkway!

Sheesh, been a while... but we've been tirelessly (and tired-ly) working toward the goal of having the house ready to list end of August/September. I'll save all my emotionally conflicted ramblings about this for some other time and instead catalog all the new stuff.

Anyway, off topic to start with, my brother David and SIL Kendra visited in the beginning of May for a week. By the numbers: at least 8 hours of The Office and 3 Bourne movies watched, 3 trips to Buttercloud, 2 In N Out, 2 beers and 2 desserts at Schoolhaus Brewhaus, 1 enormous breakfast at Morning Glory, 1 Bella pizza, 1 trip to Crater Lake (pretty snowy, which made us happy, though the lake is not as blue on cloudy days) and 1 exceptional bottle of Gnarlyhead ancient vine zinfandel paired with steaks.

It was a fun time. Then Memorial Day Weekend, I gardened. I haven't really stopped gardening, actually. The back 40 was tilled, weeded and landscape-fabric-ed.

 And now looks like this, with things more grown in. We need to lay just a bit more pea gravel (in the foreground) to meet the driveway on the right, and then this will be pretty much finished. This year, I'm growing:

• pumpkins
• cateloupe
• cucumbers
• tomatoes (obviously)
• dahlias
• 5 kinds of squash
• onions
• potatoes (the organic ones sprout super fast in the pantry)

I just picked my first yellow squash today and have eaten a few yellow cherry tomatoes already. 

Sorry about the funky lighting on this, but this is how the back looks now (minus canoe, which we sold and replaced with kayaks). Few rough edges still, but looks really good mostly.

Finally, I got to fill these giant pots for either side of the garage. I bought them three years ago and they've been shuffled around the garage ever since. They're 23 inches wide, for scale. I made little carts for them to wheel around on and strung up sprinklers around the garage door so they're watered automatically. Insert heart eyes here. Sprinkler drip lines and whatnot were a SERIOUS PAIN to install but I'm looking forward to sipping my beer and watching all my plants get watered.

 Not bad, huh?

We need to mulch most of the beds next to the pool still. I planted blackeyed susans of various types to fill in where it's still blank. Hopefully the bed in the background finishes filling in. It's a bit spotty still, but eventually the plants will entirely fill the whole bed.

The best flower in the garden right now is this hot pink dahlia. When the sun hits the petals, they almost glitter. 

And out front, we have two trees full of peaches and (super excitingly) my Macintosh apple finally has apples. I have been waiting for six years to enjoy fruit off that tree. Two of the peach branches broke from all the fruit and an unfortunate miscommunication about pruning this spring, but we'll still have way more than we can eat. 

And lastly, here's a before (over eight years ago, when we were just looking at the house)...

And an after, now that we have our shutters up and Todd finished the brick walkway, which turned into a much bigger project than he expected. It makes me smile every time I drive past the house because it looks so dang cute. We're going to put window boxes up under the two big windows and fill them with begonias or something. It's going to be unbelievably charming.

Oh, wait...one more. I just loved how the kitchen looked one morning a few weeks ago with a kind of crazy bouquet of flowers and the filtered light. Hard to believe it was so dreadful three years ago.

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.

Another pretty little tray

A few weeks ago, I made a little tray out of scrap wood. Then I decided to go poke around the flooring section of Home Depot and discovered they had 4x12 carrara marble tile, so I bought a bunch of that. I picked my favorite one and used the remaining mahogany I had to make this little tray for the kitchen. I LOVE carrara marble, but it's so fragile that it would have driven me batty having it in the kitchen as countertops. So I compromise and use it as an accent wherever I can.

I went with a darker stain, so it wasn't quite so orangey as the first one (though I love the vibrancy of a natural orange-toned wood.) I thought the dark would complement the color of the marble more. 

I also used spray lacquer on the marble and the wood, so any olive oil drips wouldn't discolor the marble. So far, so good.

It's so pretty; it makes me happy every time I look at it.