Built-in Bliss

The built-in bookcase under our master bathroom window is now complete!

After much planning and many drawings, we finally (with the expert assistance of our neighbor Ken) cut all the pieces for the bookcase last weekend.

This weekend, Darwin nail-gunned it together and caulked it up nice and pretty, and then I primed and painted it. You can admit it - it's the prettiest bookcase you've ever seen, right?



We also painted a second and third coat on the bathroom floor:



And cut, primed and painted the baseboards (Benjamin Moore Glacier White, left, primer on the right):



We're getting so close I can taste it!

Recipe for Painted Walls

2 scrapers
1/2 can of Bondo
Palm sander
6 sheets green extra-strong sandpaper from 3M
9 tubes of caulk
2 3/4-inch nap rollers
2 cans of primer
1 can of paint, Benjamin Moore "Mauve Desert"

Use scrapers to remove loose paint. Bondo the many cracks and nail holes, taking breaks between each smelly, awful batch to gasp for fresh air in the hallway. After it's all dry and the scraping is all done (this will take approximately three eternities), sand with palm sander, using extra-strong green sandpaper.

Sweep floor and wipe down walls. Prime first coat with a worn-out old roller that you will later realize is wasting time and must be trashed. Now you will see the multitude of cracks between the beaded boards. When it dries, sand and half-heartedly wipe down again.

Apply 9 tubes of caulk to said cracks until finger gets a strawberry and/or gets stuck with a splinter and bleeds on the wall. This will take approximately one eternity.

Give the caulk time to dry - a day, a week, a year, whatever works for you. Apply second, much thicker coat of primer with new 3/4-inch nap roller. Rolling sideways helps get the paint in the grooves of the horizontal beadboard.

Forego the sanding because you are so tired of looking at and touching sandpaper and your fingers feel worn down to nubs. Realize that the one gallon of paint the paint store lady recommended will not make it through two coats of paint. Decide to paint the first coat on thick, so maybe you'll only have to touch up a few spots.

Hesitate before painting because the newly caulked and primed walls look so fresh and bright white it seems a shame to cover them. Paint anyway, while listening to Backtrax '90s on the busted-up radio/cassette player you've had since second grade. Argue with spouse over whether paint gets darker or lighter when dry. As the paint dries darker, smugly point out that you were right.

Paint your initials on the wall to make up.



When the painting is finished, stand back and see that it is darker than you expected and grayer and purpler. But it will do because you are tired of thinking about it, and it will look better once the baseboards are installed, and it will look better once the trim is painted Glacier White, and it will mostly be covered with massive times-three shower curtains and sinks and towel racks and medicine cabinets.

And the final step: Show off to neighbors and blog readers.



More painting photos

Primed and Ready

What a cliche, right? Forgive me - we just finished the February issue of the magazine I work for, and I'm creative-headlined out.

Also, it applies in a very literal way. We got so much stuff done this weekend that I feel like a different blogger! Where's that lazy girl and her lethargic husband?

Saturday we worked on Millie's fence, and with the help of our friends/neighbors, got all the posts set and the relevant part of the old fence taken down.

Sunday we holed up in the master bath and scraped until our hands were sore. Also, Darwin installed those two boards he cut a while back to fill the holes from a couple of old termitey spots in the beadboard.

Monday Darwin planned to leave for some manly wilderness time at 1:45, so we got started on the bathroom early. I quickly determined that it might-just-might be possible to prime the sink/toilet wall (the largest uninterrupted wall) that day. With that goal in mind, I scraped and sanded and Bondo'ed nail holes with an unusual vigor.

Oh yeah, and Darwin helped, too.

Actually, we both worked hard, though Darwin as usual tried to redo half the stuff I did. I finally said, "It doesn't have to be perfect. If you're going to redo everything I do, I'll just go sit on the couch. There's no point in me working my ass off if you're just going to redo everything."

For once, he didn't argue back with some snarky comment about the quality of my work. He just blinked at me and said, "Okay" and tried not to do it again.

Like I said, who WERE these people?

Finally, the magic moment came. After washing down the very dusty walls, we applied primer to roller, roller to wall. Of course, it wasn't easy. Beadboard - especially old, imperfect beadboard - is a real pain to paint. Darwin showed me the technique he'd already learned on the practice section a few weeks ago - heavily load up the roller with primer, paint sideways, press hard to get the paint into the grooves.

Then he had to leave, and I finished the wall myself. I even cleaned everything up without his help.

Seeing that beautiful smooth white wall was reward enough for my stinging hands and hair full of lead paint dust. The best part was all the little imperfections in the beadboard - where I hadn't scraped quite thoroughly enough - didn't even show once it was all primed. I'm so freaking happy right now. The bathroom is halfway primed, and the other half just needs to be scraped a little more and sanded before it will be ready, too.



Oh, and I almost forgot the good news! We heard from the plumber about that estimate. Drumroll please .... $700 maximum, but probably more like $500-600! I'm fully anticipating $700, of course, but still - that's cheaper than I was imagining. I'm thrilled, Darwin's pleased, and they're hired!

They are busy until the end of January, but that's fine because that gives us time to get everything ready. All we have to do to prepare is finish priming and painting the walls, patch the ceiling, paint the ceiling, and paint another coat on the floor. That's all easy stuff. We've drywalled and painted plenty of times before. There's nothing scary looming over us anymore!

So life is good right now. Oh wait, except I still don't know what color to paint the walls. I spent yesterday afternoon playing around with the Benjamin Moore Color Viewer, but sometimes I hate that thing. Most colors show up looking nothing like their actual selves - red is always pink or pale orange, for example.

Then I went back and reread Fixer Upper's post about bathroom color scheming and noted Beth's comment, "we tend to paint the bathroom whichever color is most flattering to our skin tones so that we don’t spend the mornings depressed."

So I started thinking about what colors look best on me. What Not to Wear tells me "emerald" is a good color for people with coloring like mine (brown hair, green eyes, pinkish skin tone), so that was my first thought. Then I went a little crazy. I cut out a picture of my overly pink-cheeked head from a New Year's Eve photo and pasted it on top of a variety of colors. This is what happens when Photoshop falls into the hands of the untrained:



Purple and green were my favorites, which is unsurprising considering those are the colors I wear most often in makeup. Red also looked okay. Beige, yellow and orange were downright revolting on me.

I love "emerald" as a clothing option, but the thought of applying it to my bathroom walls kinda freaks me out. I'm used to decorating in earthier tones. Bold but subdued - grounded might be the right word.

I plan to paint our adjoining master bedroom a mauvey-gray color, so maybe a different shade of purple would look nice in the bathroom. Not too dark or bold.

I'm being more cautious than I would normally because this paint will need to last a long time. Painting behind clawfoot tubs and wall-hung sinks is no easy feat. I don't need to get the bathroom done and then hate it five minutes later.

So what do you think? Is emerald too scary? Is plum too ... purple? Or should I stick with the sage green I considered back in July?

I know I should follow Fixer Upper's example and choose a shower curtain first, then select a paint color from it. But I don't want to leap into that purchase either. I haven't found the exactly perfect shower curtain, and I have a clear liner that will do indefinitely.

And this is no time for indecision! We're almost there!

Happy Paint

The bathroom floor is officially painted. So I should be jumping for joy, right? Giddy with the heady feeling of accomplishment?

Okay, there's no twist - I am giddy! The color - a gray brown - is lighter than we expected, which is probably a good thing. But best of all, it's one uniform color, and it's smooth and shiny and wonderful!

We painted two coats of primer and one coat of paint so far. We're waiting on the final paint coats until after we finish some work on the drywall ceiling and beadboard walls. The drywall mud will fly, the ladders will scratch, etc.

I'm glad we went ahead and painted at least one coat of paint, though. Because seeing the color in the room ... now I'm not so sure about our planned wall color.

Now I'm debating sage green instead of off white, in spite of the cool name of the off white, "Treasure Map." I was already thinking about it when we went to our new favorite restaurant, Miss Melissa's in Moundville - a surprising gourmet restaurant in the middle of nowhere - and the back room where we sat was painted sage below the chairrail, off white above with a terra cotta chairrail. The color combo was so crisp yet earthy, and I fell absolutely in love with it.

So last night I blew the dust off the old Benjamin Moore Color Viewer program and tried some combos.



Here's the real thing:


My favorites by the mile are the green versions (I crudely drew in the future bookcase under the window). But I have some reservations about green.

1. Our kitchen is mostly green already. Is there a limit to how much green a person can tolerate, even if it is at the moment her almost-favorite color? (I hesitate to displace pink as my favorite, but in decorating how much can you do with pink?)

2. The room is kinda small, about 12 x 7. Is lighter better for the walls?

3. This is the room where I'll get ready in the morning. Green can make a person look depressingly sallow.

4. What if I get sick of green? With the clawfoot tub and our unfitted vanity, this won't be the easiest room to repaint.

And yet, I also have misgivings about off white.

1. It's off white. Nothing exciting about that, even if it is cleverly named to disguise it's boringness.

2. The tub will be white/off white. We're going to all this effort to fix up and install a clawfoot tub, and it's going to blend right into the wall.

3. I like color, darnit! I am known for my general opposition to off white, and I'm already having to succumb to the off white for the kitchen walls (where at least I have the pleasure of colorful cabinets).

You know what? I think I just talked myself into the green. What do you think?

While you're thinking, some gratuitous cat pics:



Henry has a love/hate relationship with holes in the floor. He fears them, but his curiousity is too great, and he can't resist.

Tell Me a Story

In this month's issue of Old House Journal, an article cites six reasons why it's great to live in an old house. One of the reasons is that every time you undertake a project, you discover new things about your house.

It's amazing how many layers we've uncovered in one room, in one 104-year-old house.

On the beadboard there are at least three different colors of paint (it's hard to tell if there are three or four because some areas are discolored). The first layer was a cream color, then charcoal gray, then beige, then possibly a different shade of beige.

Present in the paint are shapes that tell a story of what the bathroom once looked like. The square of charcoal where the toilet was. One long horizontal line with two vertical lines underneath - a shelf?

The latest discovery is the beadboard under the little patch of slanted ceiling at the end of the room. You can also see the cedar shingles above it that once formed the roof.

I've always thought of this room as an addition to the house, but now I wonder if it is part of the original 5-room-plus-hall construction. The bathroom pokes out from the main house about 18 inches and has its own little gabled roof. But these two mysterious boards cutting into the beadboard had us confused.

Then Darwin came up with a solution that I think makes a lot of sense. Maybe at one time the bathroom was a lean-to porch with a ceiling that began at the top edge of the beadboard on the left wall and slanted up to meet the beadboard on the right wall somewhere above the point where the ceiling was lowered to.

That probably makes no sense in writing, but standing there in the bathroom it is the perfect explanation.

Now to figure out what they did with the window. We can't figure out if they somehow cut down and rebuilt the original window or if they replaced it with a shorter window of similar style. Also, we're trying to figure out whether we should try to restore it to a window of the proper size.

The window looks weird and misshapen now, but we figured out that's because the bottom piece of trim under the window sill is missing. If we added a piece of trim, the window would at least look complete.

But then I think about the outside - if we one day decide to remove the aluminum siding on that part of the house (which I hope to do), we'll have to make some kind of repair to the hole where the bottom part of the window once was.

So many decisions to make that affect so many other things.

The Seabiscuit of Paint Colors

No one thought he could do it, but he did it! He came from behind, beating out top-ranked contenders Empire Gold and Billiard Green! And who is this surprise high-achieving paint color?

DARK MUSTARD!



All lame horse racing jokes aside, we finally found a color we both (and our neighbor D, who I called in for a conference) liked. On my computer screen, the color is coming across more brown than it is in real life. Here on my dining room wall, it's a pumpkiny color, very nice and spicy and warm.

We determined that the Empire Gold was just too bland next to the red living room and was too matchy-matchy with the furniture, and the Billiard Green was too dark. But this Dark Mustard is just right! Uh-oh, I'm mixing metaphors. Is it horse racing or Goldilocks?

Oh well, the point is we love this color! The only trouble is we didn't know we loved it until I got home and tried the sample on the wall, so we still have no paint to work with tomorrow. Still, I feel joy knowing that the color is chosen.

And since I don't have a working digital camera at the moment, the next best thing (courtesy of the Benjamin Moore Color Viewer 2.0):



In other possibly good news, the guy at the paint store directed me to a company in town that may be able to order soapstone for our kitchen counters! Even if they do have it, we'll have to wait and see about the price. We may still go with the 3-inch or 1.5-inch hex tile on the counters if it's too expensive. By the way, I got a sample of the 3-inch hex in the mail, and I'm waiting on the 1.5-inch to compare.

OK, I'm off to enjoy my Friday night. Hmm, what to do on Saturday now?

Dining Room Dilemma

The time has come to decide on a dining room color. I want the dining room to be my weekend project. I warned you I'd need advice on this, and surprise surprise, I do.

Normally, I'm fairly decent at choosing colors. Some might even call me brave because I like 'em bold, and I usually don't hem and haw too much. I've even finally chosen a paint color for my master bedroom (a purpley mauvey grayish color ... clear as mud, right?) when we ever get the closet ripped out.

But this darned dining room is giving me fits. Adjoining the dining room with pocket doors is the lovely dark red living room. So naturally I'd like the dining room color to coordinate with that. But there are other factors to consider, too. Like the dragon green (that's what I call them anyway) fireplace tiles and the curtains that have olive green in them.



The curtains and the tiles don't make a puke-worthy combo because the green in the curtains is small bits, and they're all the way across the room from the tiles. But slap a lovely olive all over the walls, and you'd get some serious clashin' action.

The curtains also contain red (hence the red in the living room) and a lovely gold color that's also found in the upholstery of my new/old parlor set.



I'm considering this palette of colors from the Sherwin Williams Victorian collection:



The rusty red ("Cajun Red") is the color we painted the living room. The gold looks great with green and red, but would it be too much on the wall? The dark green would look fabulous with the fireplace tiles (maybe even tone down the poor things a bit), but would it be too dark and/or with the red look too much like Christmas at the Waltons?

As you can see, I'm quite conflicted. My plan is to buy a quart of Billiard Green and of Empire Gold this afternoon and see what happens when I douse the wall with them. Okay, I might try a little more precision than that.

Anybody got some pre-action predictions?

House of a Different Color

Ah, how I love three-day weekends. You can get so much more accomplished on your house, enough to rescue your blog from stagnation. Enough to make you feel less like a loser in comparison with your more hardworking blog associates.

On Saturday we had another work day with our crew of handy neighbors (who have found this site now, so we'll have to come up with some code for me to say if they make me mad ... how about "the bluebird is flying"). We helped S&B scrape and paint their beautiful, extremely tall 1850s house. Darwin volunteered for the high-up work, while I kept my feet planted firmly on the ground ... or at maximum three feet above it. S&B's house is white - like every other house in Eutaw - but they are bravely painting it sort of a subtle tan with cream-colored trim. It looks fabulous, and I am so proud of them for taking the color leap.

When our work day comes around, we are probably going to work on scraping/painting/conditioning our extremely weathered front porch floor. I've been working on color combinations for our white-house-with-green-shutters in the Benjamin Moore Color Viewer, which I'm proud to say I finally figured out how to use. It refuses to give me a proper red door, though, so I have to fix that in Photoshop.

I tried out combinations of browns, blues and greens (I like tone on tone stuff), but my favorite is the grays. Behold:



Of course, this is a very simplified view. The porch railings, for example, would probably all be the light gray with certain parts accented with darker gray. And we might paint the gingerbread in two or three shades of gray, changing with the different patterns of shingles (pointed, rounded, etc.)

So what do you think? Be honest. The blues, greens and browns are OK, too. Remember, we can't change the base color of the house, only the accents, and the roof isn't due for another painting for a good long while.

I also played with color for our master bedroom. The best by far was this:



On my computer at work the navy (Hale Navy, by Benjamin Moore) has a hint of green that it didn't have at home. But in general, I think the navy walls look great. The room has three tall windows that let in lots of light, so I don't think it would be TOO terribly dark.

But we won't be able to paint the master bedroom until we rip out the closets, which we won't be able to do until we build the new closet outside the bathroom, which we won't be able to do until we remove the tub and install the clawfoot, which we won't be able to do until next year.

If you can't tell, I like to obsess plan ahead.

The Work Day Club

Our neighbors this weekend initiated the first convening of the Work Day Club of Eutaw. OK, this gathering actually has no official name - I am just the official dork.

Seven of us gathered Saturday to work on extending D&K's picket fence. The work went quickly and smoothly with so many people - heck, even I worked hard - and it was lots of fun. A delicious lunch was provided by neighbor J.

Now we all want a picket fence because D&K's looks so good, but that project is just a distant glimmer in our house's future.

Next on the schedule is S&B's house, maybe working on their ongoing exterior painting project. When it's our turn, we may work on our front porch.

The whole membership strolled over to our house after the work at D&K's was done to survey what we need to do to our garden and porch. It was decided that we should liven up our house with paint. Right now everything is white. White clapboards, white porch, white trim, white door ... even white roof (painted metal). Oh, and dark green shutters.



I had planned to paint the door a different color to make it stand out - maybe a dark red - but I had only briefly entertained ideas of enlivening the trim.

The body of the house must stay white - at least for the next several years - because we aren't ready to deal with the white aluminum siding on the back of the house. The trouble is that the earthy tones popular in the Victorian era look positively horrid with stark white. I have two books for inspiration (and I wouldn't mind owning this one), but not a one of the houses in the books has a speck of white on it.

In a previous era, our house was grey, which an interior designer neighbor tells us was popular during the time of coal heat because the smoke and dust from the coal would make white houses look dirty. Using that bit of inspiration, we're thinking of accenting the white with shades of gray and black ... plus that red door I wanted.

I downloaded the personal Benjamin Moore Color Viewer, which allows you to paint on photos of your own house, but I haven't quite figured it out yet. I might've been better off sticking with Photoshop. UPDATE: I actually read the software tutorial last night, and now I've got the hang of it. Some of the colors still show up like a faded version of themselves, but so far I'm liking it.

I painted a photo of another Victorian house on the free version of the Personal Color Viewer and decided I liked the colors Duxbury Gray and Boothbay Gray from the Historical Collection.

But it's a hard thing to think about painting my precious house. When I stand out in my front yard and look admiringly at my house, I swell up with pride. While I know the house could look even better, I love the way it looks now - white bread though it is.



So, what do you think? Play it safe or take the leap - and the Work Day Club's advice?

Mental Projects

It's Christmastime, and we're not doing much work on the house. We don't want to get the dust flying just as the in-laws are about to descend. My parents-in-law have been here a few times, but Darwin's brother and sister (and their spouses and kids) haven't seen the house. So I want it to look somewhat presentable when they come over for Christmas dinner.

That said, I can't manage to sit still and relax for any period of time. Even if the hands aren't busy, the mind must be whirring. My mental project for the week has been figuring out paint colors for the house. I spent a long lunch Friday at the paint store contemplating colors and talking with a very helpful salesperson about the challenges of painting in a house with 12-foot ceilings. I bought two little Benjamin Moore paint samples, another blue for the master bedroom and a brick red from the Historical Collection for the living room.

The blue for the bedroom was too dark, but we've decided we like the one for the living room. It's called Georgian brick, and it goes nicely with the curtains and other decor stuff we already have. And it's purty.



Those paint chips are the colors we're considering for the adjacent dining room. I like warm colors (guess that's why I'm having such a tough time with the blue bedroom), and this palette of goldy browns and rusty reds really appeals to me.

Anyway, it's nice to have that one decision out of the way. But I'm still terrified of tackling this paint job, even after talking to the encouraging Helpful Salesperson. The ceilings in particular seem a daunting task. And how on earth do you paint around the crown molding?