Ooh la la

The drywall is done; the walls are primed and we are on to the fun part now. Justin and I donned our painting outfits this weekend and broke out the old paintin' tools. Justin rolled and I cut-in and we were able to finish 1.5 rooms and a closet in one day. On the second day, we were a little less productive. Most of the day was spent chasing cracks in the concrete floor with a grinder so we can fill them in with an epoxy and hopefully get a smoother floor to paint. While Justin worked with the epoxy, I wired up all of the outlets in the tool room. Justin installed the trim for the recessed lights and wired up the light in the closet.

This room just needs some concrete patching, some paint on the floor and some baseboard trim and it will be done. The nice cozy gray that we have in our bedroom is on the walls in this room.

On Sunday afternoon, we knocked off some more wall painting: the stairwell and new pantry. We opted to paint the pantry and the wall adjacent to the kitchen the blue that is in the kitchen. Presumably, you'll be able to see this area from within the kitchen and painting it the same color gives a nice continuity.

A rare action shot: me painting.

Here's one tube worth of epoxy in the cracks in our storage room. It looks like we'll be using about 4-5 of these $30 tubes to get this job done.

We will be prepping the floors for paint this next week and hopefully installing base trim soon too. Once these 2 rooms are completed, we are going to be able to move all of our stuff back into the basement!

On to the fun part

Our heavily unused second bedroom on the second floor has undergone a bit of a makeover over the last few weeks. It started out as a playroom for the cats, complete with a shredded cat tree. Then, when Justin and I put the king-sized bed in our bedroom, we relocated our queen bed into this room and got rid of the mishmash of cat and craft and couch. But the room lacked trim and the closet was missing doors and an organization scheme. Now it has trim, new paint and a snazzy closet. We put the finishing touches on the paint this weekend and moved all of the furnishings back into the room today, freeing the hallway from the jumble.

Here is the closet, complete with our bargain bi-folds and a homemade closet system.

We have a table for sewing and crafts on the left side of the closet that I'm hoping to put to use soon for curtain and pillow making.

Here's a rare shot of me working. Seriously, I do stuff but I'm also the historian so I'm usually the one behind the camera capturing the moment.

I didn't get any action shots of us painting the walls but the room is small enough that the paint went on pretty quickly and we were done in a day. We've switched to Rodda paint from Valspar, mostly because I had a 2-for-1 coupon at Rodda. But after using it in the master bedroom, I was pleased enough with the coverage to go back. It's a little spendy (~$45/gal) without the coupon but very affordable at 1/2 price.

Here's the room all painted out and put back together:

From a different angle:

So, now we are onto the fun part of picking out some curtains and a duvet and some colorful accents. I think I am going to go with a dark blue and purple. The walls are a light gray that leans to the blue side of the spectrum. I had thought the walls would dry a little lighter but you get what you get. I like it though. I think it will make the room look brighter which is important since that window faces north. We're unlikely to have the blinds open much since the view is the house next door with its peeling paint and other maintenance issues.

And a belated happy New Year!

We rang in 2011 with barely a jingle, sorry to say. I was laid up on the couch with a truly unpleasant cold. But, our 2011 has been pretty productive nonetheless. We have been working on a bunch of odds and ends. Starting off the new year, we got back into our painting clothes and finished installing and painting all of the trim in our master bedroom. Now our closet is really complete, with a door and molding and everything. This weekend I worked on a chore that I have been postponing for more than a year: touching up the wall paint. When we installed the new baseboards and door frames, we ended up with caulk and white paint on the walls. I pulled out 3 different colors of paint today and touched it all up. Sad to say, but I think the upstairs hallway is going to need a total repaint since the touch-ups seem to dry just a smidgen off the color on the walls. We'll probably save that project for another year.

The other super exciting thing that we worked on was building shelves for the office nook. We had some really unfortunate dimensions to work with: 49" x 13.5". Every commercially available shelf was 48" so just a bit short of the full span and when you look at making shelves out of sheet goods, you get really annoyed because everything is just a little too small to get an optimal cut from a 4'x8' piece of plywood. Lucky for us, our trusty lumberyard, Compton's, happened to sell 5'x5' pieces of 1/2" plywood. Eureka! We needed 4 pieces of 49"x12.75" plywood cuts and this did the trick with hardly any waste which made it a cheaper project in the end. Justin fabricated the shelves on Saturday afternoon and I stained them up. I'll get some polyurethane on them over the next week and then hopefully we'll get them hung before next weekend. The true fun starts when I can start filling them up with all of the office supplies and storage.

Ahem...

What was that all about? Well, we've been busy redesigning the bedroom.

Check out our new paint color: Pussy Willow, by Rodda.

Justin rolled the field and I did all of the cutting in "by hand"...a true team effort. But wait, there's more: we built our own headboard too! I'll get a photo up in a few days once we have the darn thing mounted. Our new king-sized bed is coming on Tuesday.

Trimmed out

We added the final coat of the yellow this morning before it got too smokin' hot out. Just as the mercury was rising to unbearable levels, we got a coat or two on the windows and garage door. We'll have this project wrapped up by the week's end, I predict.

That old garage, she's lookin' pretty slick now...all matched up to the house.

Just a few more hits of white and blue and a little window box and she'll be looking good.

Color coordinated

We're pretty proud of ourselves...check this out:

The swamp man returneth and cleaned our garage.

All cleaned up and ready for her makeover:

Foundation coat, aka primer:

Top coat to match the house:

Now we're off to the store to see if we can find some inexpensive windows to replace the clunkers we have while the paint dries. More tomorrow...

Queuin' up

Mostly we've been painting railing parts for the past two weeks. Photos aren't too exciting. See:

We are queuing up for the weekend when we're going to try to assemble this bad boy of a railing.

In other less photogenic news...Justin wrapped up the plumbing on the north side of the walkway so now we have a spigot and hose on the garage. His plumbing skills have really improved since his first plumbing project when he took a whole day hooking up the ice maker in the new fridge at the last house.

Happy Holidays blog readers. We had a busy and productive weekend around the house. Mostly we got busy in the painting barn (aka the garage) but we had a few other items we were able to check off the list.

Justin and I put the fascia and trim around the deck this weekend which was a chore! Believe it or not, the deck isn't square and plumb :( Moreover, everywhere we wanted to install a fastener for the trim, Justin seemed to hit a fastener that was installed in the framing. So, it took twice as long as can be imagined. We are going to need some tips on how to make nail holes inconspicuous in the Trex material because we have quite a few.

Decked out!
Meanwhile, while Justin fiddled with installing the trim, I painted our future railing. We don't have enough staging space so I'll be painting the railing in batches. This will be a slow project since it needs 3 coats.

Everything's drying out.

Justin moved all of the scrap lumber that we've had piled up next to the garage and we graded and moved some of our new soil into the bed between the garage and the house. It's now a ~12x12 blank slate in partial shade. We made a stop at the nursery to take advantage of some coupons and pick up a few plants to fill in around the edges. I see a paperbark maple tree in our future, just not today. Mostly we still have a blank slate left.

We picked up a hose reel to take care of a little organization problem in the front of the house. Unfortunately, the connection leaked in the new reel so it's going back to the store.

Before: messy eyesore!

During: Reeling 'er in.

After: stay tuned. The saga continues...

Last weekend

I've been busy. So busy. Blogging's taken a back seat over laboring so we'll be catching up with a review of past weekends. Two weekends ago, I was a paintin' and sewing fool. I primed and painted some handrail posts.

No handrails yet... or balusters but we're ready for them now.

I dusted off the sewing machine to make these blue cushions for the benches. They needed custom cushions...no one was selling bench pads with the right dimensions. The pillows were picked up at Target for $13 each....couldn't make them that cheaply.

Meanwhile, during all this painting and sewing, Justin was off winning the National Offshore One-Design (NOOD) regatta as crew on J/24 Hot Pursuit.

Well, it's a start.

The plan this weekend was to go on a hike up Mt. Pilchuck, an all day affair, but our hike leader canceled the hike due to iffy weather. So, I had an extra day burning a hole in my pocket. I decided to maximize it. I was up at 8, painting the kitchen on Saturday morning. I wrapped up around 9:30 and changed into my spandex bike gear. My friends came over with their bikes at 10 and we cycled around Mercer Island and back. I had a quick lunch and pulled out the blue paint to do all the touch-up. Finished that, decided the iffy weather was going to turn out to just be sunny and cool so I got out my gardening tools and dug in (literally). I weeded one of the planting areas in the front of the house and trimmed up the lone shrub, a lanky euphorbia. The OCD started to kick in and I decided to go for some of the more obnoxious weeds in the backyard too (it's full of them). So, it's a start. Summer isn't the best time of year to plant a new garden so I will just be defending my fresh bed against weeds until fall when I can get to planting. My yard waste bin is full until Thursday when I can get started on the blackberry bramble behind the garage.

Painted and ready for service. Next up: a tile backsplash and crown moulding for the kitchen

My freshly weeded flower bed. This is where my witch hazel is going.

Odds and Ends

Justin is a perfectionist. Today it nearly killed him (psychologically). See, we had planned to have all this wood backing in the walls to make hanging cabinets in the kitchen easy. But, when we went to install the range hood, the backing was too low and there were no studs where we needed them. Ah, ha! Justin would just cut out a piece of drywall, install some plywood in its place and screw the plywood into the studs. And he did...but he over-engineered his solution with a bunch of pieces of wood cramed up beyond the hole in the drywall and screwed in and then he forgot to move the electrical line to the right so it would line up with the electric in the hood. And then he broke a screw in the contraption. So, when he decided to take it all apart to move the electrical wire, it didn't come apart nicely...the broken screw held some pieces in place and he had to bend the wood to get the wire rerouted. When he went to put the wood back in place, it didn't fit nicely like before...it kind of angled in. He had to shim the fastening brackets for the hood so that it would mount nicely. And this operation just killed his perfectionist spirit. But I offered no consolation. It was 7:28 pm and I was ready to go home.

Here's the kludge with the shims and Justin with a sassy attitude.

Oh, but the kludge was good enough because the hood hung nice and level and hid all the rough stuff behind it.
Satuday wasn't all about the hood--we did lots of other things too. Justin's dad, Jon, came over to help for the day and he patched all of the subfloor to prep it for the patching that the floor refinishers will do next week. Meanwhile, Justin installed our bathroom radiant floor heating system and the self-leveling compound that it lies in. I pulled out the rest of the staples in the wood floor, removed all of the tape from the rooms we were finished painting and finished painting the second coat in the living room.

Here's our new bathroom floor with the warming coil set into the cement.

Two more coats

This has been a rough week, mostly for Justin. Justin woke up at 3 am on Monday morning with a wicked case of food poisoning/stomach flu. He was up most of the rest of the early morning in an uncomfortable state and stayed home from work (an unusual occurrence). So, we didn't make any progress on Monday night as planned on our project--I was too busy nursing him back to health and baking zucchini bread. Tuesday morning, I met the countertop fabricator at the house for countertop templating. This has to be the most unscientific trade out there. The guy took 8' wood slats and laid them out on the cabinets and then hot glued them together to simulate the frame of our cabinet. Not a single measurement was taken to verify the location of anything. We shall see if we get the countertops for which we're paying.

Tonight, finally, we can see the finish line on the painting chore now. We've got two more coats to apply: one coat to the living room and one coat to the upstairs bedroom closets. Justin and I sacrificed an evening to the brush and roller and finished the painting in the bedroom downstairs, started the living room and both closets in the bedrooms upstairs.

Here's our finely painted closet in the spare room (maybe we'll call it the kitty room since I think we'll be putting the cat gym in here).

Our "shades of blue" living room. The color of the trim is a real clasher right now but getting the white on the molding isn't a priority...lots of other things to do!
And another surprise! Doug, our stair railing craftsman, dropped off our newel posts for the stair railing. The posts look a lot better in reality then they are depicted in the catalog--a pleasant surprise!

Narrowing the Gap

For those of you who don't know, I sold my house and the deal is closing at the end of March so we have our move-in date: March 28. I have the U-Haul rented and even a few boxes packed. This news made progress this weekend all the more important as we don't have much time left before we make this place our home.

On Tuesday last week, our cabinets were delivered and our top priority this weekend was to get them installed so that the countertop templating crew can get our countertops crafted. Justin spent most of his evenings last week setting and leveling the cabinets so we thought that we'd have loads of time to work on things like painting and pulling staples from the floor this weekend. Unfortunately, he must have picked the easiest cabinets to install last week because it took the entire day Saturday to install the rest of the kitchen cabinets. We were there until 8 pm finishing the job. But they look great:

Here's our newly painted kitchen with our white cabinetry.

Here's Justin installing a base for the tall cabinets. This is our new pantry.

On Sunday, we made our way over to the house bright and early, despite our long day on Saturday. On the agenda was painting and installing the cabinetry for the upstairs bathroom.

We spent the morning spraying on the tan paint for the hallways, stairway, bathroom and extra bedroom. There was a lot of surface area and with my faulty wrist it was going to be worth it to tape off the ceilings and spray on the tan paint. We had two coats on by noon and the sprayer cleaned up too. It was a huge time/joint saver. The only bummer was that the tape took off a bunch of the ceiling paint so I'll have to go back over the edges with more ceiling paint at a later date. We got nice clean lines between the ceiling and wall though.

Here's our nook upstairs for a desk with tan paint and white ceilings.

While Justin worked on the cabinets, I decided to edge the living room and downstairs bedroom with paint. I had some extra time and will so I rolled on the paint for the bedroom. It is sort of a light blue and is exactly the same color as I have in my current spare bedroom...no need to change all of the accessories just because we're moving!

The spare room with light blue paint. The masked off stuff is a picture rail that we'll paint white eventually along with all of the rest of the molding and trim throughout the house.

I also wrapped up the painting the dining room (imagine white molding).

And Justin finished up the cabinetry in the bathroom. Isn't it sleek? (And doesn't our camera lens need a good cleaning?) I'm not so sure I'm in love with the wall color. I'm thinking I should have gone with a lighter color but we'll be giving it a chance.

A marathon

Those of you who know me know that I've given up television...I've been off the tube for 6+ years, not owning one to watch. But I'm not too proud to take in a show or two when a TV happens to be on and I'm in its proximity. Back when I went to the gym regularly, I'd watch an episode or two on HGTV (that's Home & Garden Television for all of you sports fans) on the elliptical machine to make the time pass. I was over at a friend's house a few weeks ago and somehow convinced them to put on HGTV and we tuned into a marathon of "Renovation Realities". Well, it is really one of the worst DIY shows but not having a TV, broadcasting is now more than just a novelty, it's mesmerizing. So, we all watched the marathon and laughed to ourselves about how silly or stupid or down-right mean the folks on the show came across.

This weekend we had a marathon of our own, paint the whole house in 72 hours or less. We're into hour 48 now and while we are finding our pace, there's still a lot of area to cover. Luckily though, our troop of friends are coming through for us this holiday weekend yet again. Justin's dad loaned us his paint sprayer which applies a lot of paint really fast but requires a lot of prep. That's how we spent much of Saturday. Jill and Scott came over for the day and helped us tape & paper all of the trim and windows and put up about 10 gallons of primer. It was essential work. On Sunday, we had an even larger crew, Jill, Amy, Heidi and Scott to help us finish the priming and spray on the ceiling paint throughout the house. While that took most of the day, the gang did have time to get into the colored paint and put the first coat of the brown on for the master bedroom.

The day left us tired and sore and ready to get back to our day jobs for some much needed R&R. However, only Justin gets that perk. My employer is observing the holiday so I'll be recognizing Lincoln and Obama with another day of painting on Monday. It's a mixed blessing...we need to get the paint up but three days in a row is tough to endure. I have a fresh crew coming on Monday to help out so hopefully we'll make good progress. The cabinets arrive on Tuesday so we have our challenge!

The paint sprayer puts a million droplets of paint in the air. This photo shows Justin applying some ceiling paint and you can get a real feel for what its like in the room.

Here's our work crew on Sunday, all smiles priming the living room. Amy wins the contest for best painting clothes with her lovely pink housecoat.

Scott was so smitten with the housecoat, he insisted on wearing it for the afternoon--in honor of St. Valentine.Here's our new bedroom color, a nice chocolate milk, cake batter color. We'll be accenting the room with purple accessories.

Big Work Week

Wow, things are moving ahead swimmingly--so much so that I'm now talking to a realtor about listing my 'old' home. We're holding our schedule well and we think we might be moving in around mid to late March.

We have the electricians in the house now and yesterday they roughed in most of the lights and outlets in the top floor and started in on the main floor. I'm pretty happy with their professionalism and flexibility so far. Our windows have been delivered and window/siding guy Glen and his school bus-driving buddy were at the house all afternoon after the bus-driving shift on Thursday putting in the new windows. Of all of our subcontractors, we have been most concerned about this link just because we had no referrals from friends and found this guy through Service Magic which I wouldn't recommend using in general. But so far, he's shown up promptly and he seems to be doing the work we hired him for so I have no complaints. In fact, all of our subcontractors so far have been great. After we pass inspections, maybe I'll do a post with referrals and put a little plug in for them.

In other news, our friend Jill Z. came over to the house on Thursday evening to help us choose some paint colors. Jill's worked in color consultation in her professional life and has a great eye for this stuff. She brought a fan deck of paint colors and we narrowed the field down to a few key ones: a grey-blue, a creamy tan, an accent red and a white for our casework and trim. I'll post some swatches when I get them in the right format.

We ordered our kitchen cabinets last week and I thought I post a sample of the style: a shaker door style. Our deeper drawers will have a detail similar to the door style. Our shallower drawers will just have a plain front. For our kitchen, the maple will be painted white. We think this style is consistent with the period of the house and we are attempting to established an updated craftsman style for the main floor. I say 'establish' because while we didn't buy the house in an updated condition, there was some unfortunate updating that occured in the mid-to-late century including a fiberglass tub insert and cheap particle-board kitchen and bath cabinets.

For our upstairs bathroom, we are keep less with the style of the house and we opted for a more contemporary style vanity cabinet. It will be a slab door (no panels) and will be a darkly stained birch with a whitish countertop. The house will be classic/period on the main floor and more contemporary on the second floor style-wise.

This photo I found online is similar to the look we are trying to achieve in the upstairs bathroom. Our bathroom is much smaller than this and will have a simpler layout.

In the downstairs bathroom, we have opted for a more period-specific look with a pedestal sink, matching cast iron tub (not a claw-foot though), subway tile for the wall and built-in medicine cabinet/mirror. We'll be installing those small hex-tiles on the floor and this combination should give us a very classic look albeit brand new.