New Bench

Before

After

 I've had this bench for about six years.  I got it at a garage sale.  I think it's from Ikea.  It was okay.  It was functional.

Then, I had this paint in my fridge, leftover from the mudroom wall.  I didn't want to go through the trouble of pouring it back into the can.  You know, you have to open it with the thingy and then bang it shut again...so I decided that instead I would paint this bench.  Yes, to me, in my world, that's less work.  Or at the very least, more gratifying work.

What do you think?

Painting Wood Paneling

Laundry room Before painting:

During:

So I don't have "After" photos yet, because the room is still torn apart.  However, this is about the "how" and not so much the "Final Product."  I just want to say that I painted primer directly on the wood paneling without sanding.  Except for someone coming and scraping at the wall with a sharp object, it seems to be sticking just like paint on a regular wall.  And it looks sooo much more cheerful than before.  Like a place I might one day enjoy doing laundry in.  ;)

Work! Work! Work!

I've been busy, along with my friends, kids and wonderful mother-in-law, cleaning and painting.  I thought I would post a couple photos of the work we did yesterday last week.  We finished all the kids bedroom walls, and started peeling the border in the Reading Room (aka, the guest room and sometimes nursery).  Here is a taste of the deep, navy blue I chose for the boys' room.

My mother-in-law working away!

Removing Wallpaper!

So we have been working away.  My right shoulder is uber-sore.  We've painted 10 rooms and four closets, but the most laborious task is removing someone else's home fashion statement, in the form of wall paper and borders.  I remember when my mom put up the stripes and flowers in the kitchen and dining room in their old house.  As a teenager, I thought it was rather lovely and cheerful.  It was my favorite room in the house.  I never had the privilege of stripping it once my parents decided to sell their home, as I lived far far away. 

However, my mother-in-law gave me a taste of paper peeling through her business of painting and faux finishing.  Sometimes those jobs would include a difficult wall paper removal and she'd call me in to help pick at it.  With those memories I was dreading this room in particular:

The full bath on the main living floor.

By far, it would be one of the best rooms to finally transform from "previous owners" to "new owners."  However, I trembled at the thought of working on it.  Especially since working on the border in the Reading Room (aka "Nursery" and "Guest Bedroom") turned out to be so awful on the walls.  Here are some pictures of my six year old working hard at it:

Despite what you may think, she is a very meticulous worker.  Though she did gauge some of the drywall, she didn't gauge any more than the adults did.  The border is persistently clinging to the wall.  And to this day, we are still working on that border!  But mostly just the six-year-old.  :)

However, the bathroom proved to be much more accomodating.  Appartenly years of being in a bathroom really softened it up.  All we did was begin to peel the top layer away, spray hot water on it from a spray bottle, wipe up dripping water, wait a minute (spray some more water, wait a minute, etc) and then steadily peel and scrape at it with a wallpaper scraper thing.  It all came off in a little more than an hour I think.  And, though I have the paint picked out, I am just enjoying the new look "Sans Wallpaper."  (I wish I knew the latin for "wallpaper.")




Tah Dah!




A beautiful blank canvas.

 My brother-in-law lent us a thing that helps remove wallpaper and my six-year-old is making good progress in the Reading Room with it.  She is a super helpful six-year-old.  :)

A Great Mother-in-Law Does the Job

I've been constantly working on the house since we closed, and so has my mother in law.  I'm feeding the kids lunch now, but she's over at the house painting the master half-bath.  I'm so thankful!  She doesn't quit!  I will hopefully have lots of before and after pictures soon.  :) 

"Sold!"

We are now proud mortgage holders! And after walking through the house I have decided that yes, I am in fact, plumb crazy to think I would paint it all before we move in! However, the show must go on, and tomorrow it really begins!!

Meeting with a Mastermind

Yesterday I met with a friend who is an interior designer, to help me narrow my color choices.  It was totally awesome to have her help.  Even though she didn't tell me what to do, I was relived to have a professional either confirm my thoughts or gently lead me away from some colors I was on the fence about.  The greatest release was permission to not use Comfort Gray in my living room.

I originally found it at the Nesting Place.  The Nester's home is very tranquil, I think.  And Comfort Gray looks like a pretty gray in her photo, but I found it a little too blue when I painted my posterboard swatch.  sigh.  The problem is, even though it's blue-y, I still think it's a lovely color and I feel a pull to use it becuase so many others on the interweb have used it so successfully in their homes.  But Rachael just had to wrinkle her cute nose at me and say something like, "You'll always think you have a blue room" and I knew that it wasn't right for our living room.  (It might make an appearance somewhere else...?)

Rachael agreed that I should go for something grayer.  So today I got two gray samples at Lowes.  I didn't love their color matching this time.  Conservative Gray turned out a little too green compared to the fan deck.  Aloof Gray, however, was right on.  Here are the old swatches with the new gray swatches.  The lighting is incandescent bulbs, and they give everything a strange hue, but you get the general idea. 

I would like to find a Gray somewhere between Aloof Gray and Conservative Gray, I think.  But then again, maybe I like the greenness of Conservative.  They are all happy, warm, soothing colors, and way more muted than the ones I started with.  (Except for Aloof Gray.  It definitely feels cooler.)

I'll be using Rice Grain for my dining room and kitchen.  I was honestly surprised that I liked it, but I had to give it a try because it's supposed to be a neutral, with yellow undertones.  Originally I wanted to paint my dining room yellow, but decided it would be too much color after painting my cabinets and a mudroom wall, which are all in the same line of sight.  A yellowish neutral seemed like a good compromise, but the color seemed sickly to me in the fan deck.  It turns out that Layla Palmer at The Lettered Cottage was absolutely right in her description.  And I do love it.  It's one of the only two colors I am 100% sure of!  (The other is my custom mix for my bedroom, but more on that later.)

More on Rachael's great help sometime soon.  I am beat.  Not even going to make it 'til 10 tonight.

Buying Paint Samples, Valspar VS. Sherwin Williams

So, I'll be buying Sherwin Williams paint for our new house.  I prefer Benjamin Moore, but my discount is with SW.  As I plan to paint 14 different rooms, and preferably all different colors, before I move in, I thought I should go the safe route and buy samples of the colors I'm considering. Some of those colors are bright and I know from experience that bright colors don't usually work out the way I think they will.  So, I went to SW and could only afford to buy four samples, and then I was told that the samples are not actually paint and would require a topcoat (says the same on the label).  So I spent a little over $20 on four quarts of paint that isn't technically paint according to the manufacturer.  I don't know about you but I thought that was a bit of a rip off.  I don't need a quart of non-paint to figure out if I like a color. 

SO, a few days later I went to Lowes with my SW fan deck and bought eight samples of Valspar paint tinted in SW colors (well, one was a Valspar color: Leaf Bud) for $3 each.  Lowes assured me that I could paint with their samples.  So 4 quarts of sample non-paint for $20 or eight 8oz samples of paint for $24.  I think the better value is obvious. 

So, I will still paint with the samples I bought from SW, but with the knowledge that something might not work out right with them.  No worries.  Of course, I intend to update with the results.        

Here are the "boards" I painted with some of my sample colors.  I prefer to paint poster board because you can move them around the house and just tape them to the wall without making your walls look like they're *waiting for a paint job*.  Also, practically speaking, I can't paint the walls of a house that doesn't yet belong to me even if my agent is super nice and let's us walk through it whenever we call him.  But when I walk through the house, I can tape the colors here or there, and ponder.     

Yes, I like blue and green and aqua.  These are actually the toned down colors in my imaginary color scheme.    I'll detail the colors in a later post.

Decoratoritis

I have an irritating, inflamed case of Decoratoritis.  I noticed the first symptoms when J and I decided that we should try to paint the entire house before we moved in.  My darling MIL and I convinced J that paint would really change the feel of the house and would be a relatively inexpensive facelift. 

That's green glass in those cupboard doors...

Yes, that's orange carpet.

(J's really not fond of the older styling of our 1966 home.) 

This house is over two times bigger than our current home.  So that's a lot of paint.  And I'm not a white paint kind of girl.  I L-O-V-E color.  I look at a fan deck and longingly wish I had a house with four wings and 100 rooms, so I could paint them all different colors.  There are soo many beautiful colors!

I may not have 100 rooms, but I will have more than twice as many than I have now, and I get to do whatever I want with them.  How do you choose colors for all those rooms?  Certainly not by starting with a fan deck.  No, you start with things that will go in the rooms, and coordinate the colors so the room is all cohesive and comfortable together.  But what if you don't have furniture or art or curtains yet?  Then what? 

This is where my Decoratoritis has really kicked in.  And when I said it was irritating, I meant it's irritating J.  (Buying this house is only less expensive than renting if we don't go crazy filling it up and changing it.  I have to keep reminding myself...)  I have purchased about four sets of curtains, new bedding (we are getting a new bed, a CA King so my tall love doesn't have to sleep diagonally to fit on the bed), accent pillows, art and art supplies.  I've purchased paint samples, which I'll get to in a later blog post, and so much posterboard.  I know there are more things...I've spent a lot of time shopping online and in store. 

And that brings me to my Goodwill haul today.  We stopped at Goodwill because we had a long grocery shopping trip ahead of us, and I wanted to get the kids some new books to read while we wound our way through the supermarket aisles.  (By the way, Goodwill, I do not think 99 cents is a good deal for a used kids' chapter book, even though it is better than paying full price.)  But I can't go into Goodwill without browsing the homegoods section.  That's where I found these:

Three 2-foot long crown molding ledges from Pottery Barn, a cool corner shelf for O's room, a mirror with shelf for S1 and S2's room and a silver platter for me somewhere.  Maybe I'll return that silver platter.  All of it for a mere $17, plus some tax.

The ledges were the best part, because they were the "best" deal.  I paid $4 each for them.  Regular price:

SCORE!

I'm not really sure where I'm going to use these, but there are so many possibilities.  I could use them in the kids' den for their toys, books and art, any of the kids' bedrooms for the same, the dining room to display cookbooks (which I don't actually have), living room for art, etc.

O and I sanded the cool corner shelf tonight.  We're going to prime and paint it in the next few days.  I plan to do that to the mirror shelf and possibly the ledges as well.  It depends on what rooms I decide they'll go in and what colors I decide to paint those rooms.  I can't wait to paint!!!!  I had to buy these things just so I could paint something!!! 

Decoratoritis is deep in my bones.  It has taken over my mind.  I can't go an hour without thinking about paint and accents and furniture...and it's soooooo much FUN...

Why We're Buying a House in This Market

My husband, J, is a small business owner.  We thought he was on a rocket straight to financial success about five years ago.  After struggling along for about two years we had to downsize considerably.  Eight months pregnant with our fifth child, we moved into a thousand-square foot apartment in town. 

The apartment gets amazing light all day long.  It's a charming old place in a great neighborhood.  The location is tops.  The price is very good.  However, it would fit half as many people a little a lot more comfortably. 

We gave birth to our sixth child last year.  We had a few rounds of visitors including my cousin and parents.  After my cousin left we started turning down friends who wanted to visit.  We couldn't imagine hosting anyone again, while we were so cramped, no matter how much we wanted to hang out with the people we love.  I kept thinking about the packed tenements of the early 1900s.  Even J, whose will had
been iron strong and single-purposed in paying off debt, was beginning to break down.  It's tough to homeschool five kids, nurse and change a baby, and live in a six room home.

So we started looking for different, larger homes to rent.  Lo and behold, no one else seemed to want to rent to a family of eight, not even with two months rent upfront and an additional deposit.  It was disheartening to say the least.  I think I got a little crazy. 

Then...we talked about buying.  We have been in the staunch camp of NO BUYING for a long time.  (Well, mostly J has.  I've wanted a house since the first time I opened a BHG magazine in my mom's living room.)  When the market was skyrocketing back when we were first married with our two little babies, people were all around us telling us it would be a good idea to buy.  The funny thing is, that's been the mantra for the past 8-10 years, even when the bubble began to deflate.  Thank my lucky stars, I've been married to a man who despite my puppy-dog eyed appeals, knew when he was being fed an over-valued pile of construction.

I know my friends who bought houses when the prices were really really inflated all say that they're glad they've had their home over the years.  And I totally understand that.  I really really do.  I would be saying the same thing if we were in the same house, because can you really put a price on "established" or "secure" or "settled"?  I don't know. 

I do know we've had to a do a lot of debating with people who've implied or said that it's "always best to buy" or that buying a house is always a good "investment."  So J made a spreadsheet.  Spreadsheets are pretty good at laying the numerical truth out there.  The cost of buying and maintaining an overpriced house, and paying all the interest on it, was not a good investment for us.  We could rent for less, and assuming we had extra money, actually investing it would gives us a better return than home-mortgageship.

Yet, what happens when the cost of buying and maintaining a house is less than renting a house of the same size and ammenities?  Then what?  Then you BUY! 

Obviously there are good, better and best circumstances under which a person may assume a mortgage.  (The bestest situation of all would be being able to buy a home outright with cold, hard cash!) It just so happens that at this point in our lives, we are falling under the good category of mortgage-ship.       

We would really really like more room for our family.  We are committed to our church family.  We love our little city.  We want to settle down right here.  And the house we found costs less to buy and care for than it would to rent the same sized house, even when it loses a certain amount of value.  That's why we're buying.

Why I Am Starting This Blog

We are ten days to closing on our first home.  (Chills went right down my spine there.)  I plan to paint before I move my six kids and our apartment full of furniture and other belongings over there.  My friend sent me a link to a blog that detailed some paint colors she really liked.  I hadn't really ever surfed through blogs before, but suddenly in my quest to figure out good wall colors, blogs were becoming a great resource. 

So, as I was helped by others' blogs, I hope to help.  I'd like to document the things I do for my home and family to give others ideas and let them know if the quick, cheap and easy way I choose to do things turn out to be good enough or not.  (Like, can I just paint those kitchen cabinets without sanding them?) 

This blog may last three entries, but I hope not.  Wish me luck!