I'm not climbing the walls, I'm painting them

It's Sunday. I'm up early. It's raining, that thick Oregon drizzle we've been so severely lacking for the last few months. Our house is one social-worker-visit away from being declared unfit for human habitation. You know, the usual.

Anyway. What have we been up to?

The craft room

Ever have one of those moments where you say to yourself, "I have twelve projects to finish - obviously I need to start another one"? No? Just me? In my defense, I really, really love peeling things.

Like, really.

And the heavy puff-paint wallpaper in the craft room was just begging to be peeled.

Look at those poor 80s pastel birds. They want so badly to fly away.

So a bottle of vinegar water and four hours later, the craft room was successfully wallpaper-free. Everyone says removing wallpaper is a nightmare, but this stuff practically sloughed off the walls. I guess the room was just as eager to be rid of it as I was.

Ta da! Clean and washed.

I still have ~4 gallons of mustard yellow from the apartment lurking in the garage - I'm really never allowed to go to the Habitat For Humanity Restore by myself, I end up with $10 five-gallon buckets of paint - so I went ahead and made the room a mustard paradise. Add crisp white to the ceiling and other walls, and a schoolhouse ceiling fixture to replace the horrible 80s-faux-Victorian tulip monstrosity, and the room feels about 100000% better.

Now badly in need of molding and organization. Also, some curtains. 

Ahhh, much better. (Obviously, organization will come later.)

The living room

Further in the category of "ahhh, much better", the sage green paint downstairs has been slowly wearing down my sanity for months now. It's been almost a year, and I promised myself I would try to like it, but I don't like it. I really fucking hate it. There's just something about it that saps the room of energy and makes me itch. Uncool, sage, really uncool.

Everyone else seems to like it, but it's just not right.

I was all prepared to shell out mucho dinero for some decent gray, since that was always the plan, but in a desperate, last-ditch attempt to rid the house of the sage scourge, I threw some of Metro Storm Gray together with Metro Misty, and...it actually looked okay. More than okay. So one night after work I shoved all the furniture to the middle of the room, and painted everything.

It turns out that the bluish-gray I was so hellbent on avoiding when I originally painted was exactly what the space needed. The fir floors are a very warm color, and combined with the warm sage on the walls, the room was just getting washed out. The cool gray makes both the floors and the trim pop (or at least, the trim will pop when I paint it not-beige) and brings the energy of the room down to a manageable level.

I actually want to spend time in the living room now. It doesn't set my teeth on edge anymore.

I got all the crown molding up last week, and this weekend's project is to fix up the stair bannister.

In other words, de-log-cabinifying the place. Suh-weet!

Random

Also, this happened:

Jesse made that cake entirely from scratch. Like, flour, eggs, sugar, etc. I have never made a cake in my life that wasn't from a box. This was maybe the best cake in the whole world. I might have had cake for breakfast three days in a row. 

Also, further proof that my husband is perfect:

Yeah, he knows what's up.

Blinded

We're in the throes of Snowpocalypse 2014 here in Portland - and by that, I mean at least three snowflakes were seen somewhere in the northern half of the state in the last twenty-four hours - and predictably, all the projects I suddenly have a hankering to do involve things in the garage, and there are four very icy deck steps between here and there, so...here I am, indoors.  (I'm not keen for a repeat of February's ice-related knee injury, which laid me up for three days, although being confined to the couch and playing video games certainly isn't the worst way to spend a long weekend.)

It's probably a good thing I'm kept indoors tonight, because there are a million indoors-related projects that need finishing. Case in point, I organized part of the craft room, unpacked a couple of boxes, rescued all our winter jackets from the basement, and did a bit of arranging in the guest room. 

It can be argued that paying the mortgage on a home is one of the most grown-up things you can do, but mostly, I've been vacillating between feeling like I'm just playing house and the guilty exhilaration that comes from demolishing and then building something permanent in a structure. (An emotional holdover from all the years of renting? Maybe. It's a bit of a paradigm shift to go from "Oh shit, we're never getting our deposit back" to "These improvements build equity!") It doesn't really help that there isn't a single room in the house that feels done yet, at least not to the point where I can sit back and be relatively satisfied with the layout and decor. 

One thing that has helped immensely are the blinds. Typically, they were a complete hassle to obtain - they were backordered for a month, and then when they finally arrived, I discovered I'd ordered the wrong length because I'm an idiot who only measures width, so back they went - but oh, how they make things feel a little more grown-up.

Yeah, the window trim hasn't been painted, and I haven't put up any curtains yet, but it's still SO MUCH BETTER.

When we moved in six months ago (wait, what???) one of our very first Home Depot purchases was a pack of fold-up paper shades, which we've been grudgingly living with ever since. Like with everything else, I have strong opinions on window treatments (surprise) and I knew we absolutely had to have the 2-inch blinds. After living with cheap plastic blinds for years and hating them, the 2-inch ones feel much more sophisticated (and will probably be easier to vacuum cat hair off of). I finally scored the blinds I wanted from JC Penney, which despite my measuring mishap has been absolutely the best place to shop. The blinds in question seem to be perennially 50% off, and when I ordered then, I scored an extra 20% off from a random weekend sale, making them significantly cheaper than Home Depot or online retailers. They're also decently well-made for the price, with metal gears and the movements feel very solid. Plus, when I realized my measuring mishap, I took them back to the store and discovered they have free direct-to-home shipping for returns. Awesome! Now we have light, privacy, and fancy blinds.

 It's very weird, though, how one's definition of "reasonable" changes upon signing the closing papers. If you'd told me I'd spend $180 on blinds for eight windows, I'd have laughed like crazy, but now it seems like a total steal. In the apartment, if I'd gone to Home Depot for a $5 can of spray paint or something, that's what I'd get, and I'd be done. Now, if we get out under $100, it's a cheap trip. (And I've probably forgotten like four things, at least one of which will necessitate a return trip later in the day.)

But it's worth it. Every strange bruise and mysterious cut, the constant layer of grime and the fact that I basically sign my paycheck over to Home Depot every two weeks - it's totally worth it. I love this house. I love working on it. I love figuring out how to get what we want without spending a million dollars. Some of it has definitely been annoying - plumbing, I'm looking directly at you - but it's a huge learning experience, and I love it, and every so often, I'll catch a glimpse of what it's going to look like when it's all done, and it looks amazing. 

For now, we're still covered in sawdust and eating pizza more nights than not, but at least we've got fancy new blinds.