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.

For queen and country!

How many crown-related titles can I come up with? Not many, apparently - I blame my heathen colonial roots on that. The only crowns we have in this country are the ones that come from the dentist. (Not that I have any of those. Anyway.)

I could blame the long radio silence on a great many things - namely, my lovely baby sister getting weddinged to her equally lovely wife - but to be perfectly honest, I've been avoiding the crown molding because it looks hard. I've probably watched two hours of Youtube videos of distinguished craftsmen earnestly explaining to their patient camera operators how to properly set a miter. I've slowly chopped about eight feet of crown into six-inch sections trying to get it right, but it's a complicated formula of bevel-miter-fence-crown, and while an infinite number of monkeys may eventually bang out the complete works of Shakespeare, this particular monkey doesn't have the finances for an infinite amount of crown. (Even as cheap as it is at my favorite store.)

So...I've been avoiding it. Until tonight, when Incredible Builder Mom sent me a link on Pinterest that is probably the best tutorial I've ever seen in my life. 

 

Source: The ever-fabulous Sawdust Girl. I could kiss her dusty boots right now.

So I followed her directions, and made my own templates:

And once I got the bevel-miter-fence-crown combos ironed out, it was - dare I say - easy. I only stopped tonight once my project manager (aka Jesse) gently pointed out that it was getting late, and we like our neighbors and want them to continue liking us and our noisy pneumatic nailer. 

Yes, there are gaps large enough to drive a truck through, but that's what caulk is for, right? Right. It's part of the, erm, charm of discount trim. Or possible the innate charm of our house. Definitely not the fault of my miter saw Dad's miter saw. 

And yes, the ceiling paint does stop right in the kitchen. That's another project for another paycheck.

 

LOOK AT THAT! It looks like an actual almost-finished house. (And feminism be damned, that horrible boob light has got to go.)

And speaking of looking, I fully recognize that this blog is a vanity project. I am awesome. The things I do are awesome. Occasionally I even finish an awesome thing:

This is the built-in bookshelf in the dining room - painted and done! (Please ignore the monster plant. I rescued it from a dumpster right around the time we moved, but neither it nor I have been happy with any of the places I've put it in so far. It's a work in progress.) There are additional shelves drying in the garage, which hopefully I'll be able to put up tomorrow, provided I remember where all the hardware is. 

 

There is no before. There is only during. 

Construction can be very existential.

  
The bookshelves started out life as laminate IKEA BILLY units. I primed them with Zinsser water-based primer, which is my new favorite thing ever, because I didn't even have to sand the laminate before priming. This stuff adheres like crazy to EVERYTHING.(Including, um, the metal bits of the paintbrush, should one inadvertently allow it to dry. Oops) Once the bookcases were primed, I made a base out of 2x4s to raise them enough so our wide baseboard could comfortably wrap around, anchored the units to studs and added trim, caulked around the edges and painted. 

Yeah, I'm pretty pleased with how it's turned out so far.

In related news, I have finished five gallons of paint. This should be a triumphant story, but it's not. After relying almost exclusively on recycled or mismixed paint for my color needs, having to actually buy new white paint was annoying, and also having to pay $80 for a giant tub of Glidden Ceiling and Trim was even more annoying. I was certainly not going to pay twice that for the higher-quality Behr stuff, and the biggest tragedy of all is that Metro has been sold out of their Mountain Snow all freaking summer. It's a problem. The other problem? The coverage. I put four coats of the Glidden on the above bookshelf in the dining room IN ADDITION to the primer, and I swear there are still spots I can see the dark laminate lurking underneath. (I have been informed by my beloved that I may in fact be crazy. We do try to exemplify romance.)

So. It may be time to buy a brand of paint that doesn't suck. I can already feel my bank account crying. My paintbrush hand, however, is crying right now from overuse, so it may in fact be worth it.