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.

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas

We are not inherently religious people - in fact, quite the opposite - but I love Christmas. I don't identify as a Christian, and it's been a dog's age since I set foot in a church, but I am deeply enamored of the cultural and historical significance of the holiday. (Plus I get to redecorate and give presents, and who doesn't love that?)

I'd love to go all out, but we are still largely a construction zone, so there's less mistletoe and more sawdust. But at least we have our tree!

Jesse and I have a longstanding tradition of getting the absolute largest tree that will fit in the space. In the apartment, one had to squeeze around the tree to get to the couch. That suited us just fine. This year is no exception. We have nine-foot ceilings, and I had to saw a good 8 inches off the bottom of the tree to get it upright. And then, we had to run out and buy a bigger tree stand, because it wouldn't fit in our old one. Three stores later, we found a suitably large one at Home Depot, proving once again that even if you don't think Home Depot is the answer, Home Depot is always the answer. 

And then I put 1200 lights on it, and it still has dark spots. (Good thing I had help putting up the lights.)

I also put up a couple of garlands, but that's the extent of our decorating. 

****

There are 8 shopping days before Christmas, and while I'm usually way ahead of the game in my holiday preparations, this year I am falling behind. I usually start compiling a gift list in August or so, but I'd gotten completely absorbed in the kitchen remodel, and forgotten about the list until...last week. Thank god for Amazon Prime. So now I have all of my gifts purchased, but not assembled. I really should have done that yesterday on my day off, but the cabinet uppers were a much more exciting pressing project.

It took two days of materials gathering (mostly because I didn't realize I'd bought the wrong sawblade, and thus ended up back at Home Depot, and then I needed lunch, and then we went to the grocery store, etc etc) but after a full day of construction, the cabinet boxes are UP, and MOSTLY STURDY and I LOVE THEM.

Coincidentally, my table saw is perhaps the best $300 I've ever spent. (Thank you, Black Friday.) I could NEVER have gotten these done - not as fast, and certainly not as square - without it. Also, it's incredibly satisfying to suck up seventeen pounds of sawdust with the Shop Vac.

So the boxes are done. I thought maybe I'd get around to priming and painting last night, but that was nixed in favor of eating pizza and playing video games. I did pick up a gallon of Benjamin Moore Advance in Super White, which I'm very excited to use. It's a new formulation of paint known as alkyd - it has a lot of the durable, slow-drying properties of oil-based paints, but it's a water-based latex so it's much easier to clean up - and it's supposed to be excellent for cabinets. Normally I'd use whatever mis-mixed paint I'd gleaned from the clearance section, but since cabinets and kitchen cabinets especially are high-traffic and high-impact, I wasn't about to skimp on coating. We'll see how it turns out.

One roadblock I've been working through is the cabinet door design. In a perfect world, I'd have a single, flush-mount full-length vertical door for each section, with an old-fashioned latch.

via Pinterest

While I could have modified my cabinets this way, I feel like I've pushed the structural envelope of the original cabinets enough just by putting in the uppers. Would they be fine if I cut away some of the horizontal fronts? Probably. Do I feel like risking it? Nope, not really.

So that means I either give up latches or give up full-length doors (since the latches need the doors to be flush), or come up with a third solution. And since I hate compromising, I've been brainstorming like crazy, and I think I've finally found the answer:

Source: Pinterest

It's a little hard to see with this picture, but it looks like the doors are latched to each other (removing the need to be flush). This is totally doable in our kitchen; doors without "latch buddies" will get simple knob handles. 

The other thing I need to decide is which doors get glass fronts. Apparently you can just buy glass panes for $1-$5 a piece at (where else) Home Depot, which blew my mind. There's also a glass-cutting shop just up the road, which could also facilitate window-doors. Making the cabinet doors themselves is no problem - or at least, it won't be if I want them, because there's no way I'm buying custom-made windowed cabinet doors at $100 a pop. I just need to do some hard thinking about whether or not my spices stay organized enough to display. There's also the option of some DIY faux leaded or stained glass, which I'm also considering.

Something like this will suit me just fine:

The kitchen is THIS CLOSE to being done, which is both awesome and daunting. I am salivating at the prospect of well-organized cabinets, but will it be done in time for a massive batch of Christmas gingerbread? We'll see.

****

And if Santa is reading this, I really want a living footstool Great Pyrenees for Christmas. (Even though I need another giant furry animal in my life like a moose needs a hat rack...)

Source: Pinterest

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.

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. 

Gimme a little less talk and a lot more action

August has been incredibly busy, first with my cousin's wedding in Montana - which was very lovely and fantastically fun - and then our dear friends Erik and Alex tied the knot last weekend. With my sister and her lovely wife getting weddinged in two weeks, September promises to be just as exciting. Forget June - late summer is the real wedding season!

Some highlights from Montana:

I am stubborn. Just ask this ceramic buffalo.

Being happy tourists with the fam at the Lewis and Clark museum in Great Falls.

See? Wipe the sawdust off and we look pretty darn good.

As such, I've been working on various projects in fits and spurts, but it doesn't feel like I've accomplished anything. (Although that's probably because I have about a million things going at once, so even if I do manage to finish something, it's right onto the next.) I do have a few awesome things to report.

You've got mail

The mailbox that came with the house was huge and didn't close very well, and only came with one key. I found a cute little one in the scratch-and-dent section at Home Depot, spray-painted it red because we obviously needed a red mailbox, and voila! It's less "hey you crazy people don't steal my mail" and more "welcome, nice postal carrier!" 

Before and after.

I used a matte Rustoleum spraypaint called "Paprika", which is slightly on the orange side of red. It'll work well for both fall and winter decorations. However, I didn't really think through the overall color scheme, and a red mailbox may preclude the red door I was thinking about. (Oops.) When we get around to painting the house at some point, I'd love to have dark gray walls with sharp white trim and colorful accents, and having two red things on the front porch might be too much red. (I may also be overthinking something we won't be able to afford for quite a while.) At some point, I want to replace the boring metal door with something with more character (and maybe a window). 

Moving up in the world

Even though we bought trim for the downstairs a few weeks ago, I've been putting it off because I still needed to paint the stairs, which could only be done on a day when I'm home alone and the cats are locked in the basement, to minimize feet and grubby little paws making a mess of the stain. I finally had that day a couple of weeks ago, and stained the treads and painted the risers. It looks about a thousand percent better! I still need to caulk along the edges and touch up a few spots where the painter's tape pulled off some of the polycrylic (my fault for taping when it wasn't quite dry - so impatient) but it's done enough to make me happy. 

Before, during and (mostly) after

 
Bringing dressy back

This is easily my favorite project I've finished, and I am SO FREAKING GLAD it's done. The next time I suggest stripping the paint from something, someone please hit me with a shovel, because DEAR GOD this was a real pain in the neck. SO MANY TINY CORNERS.

Sadly, I apparently didn't take any before shots, which I deeply regret because oh lordy it was ugly. Someone had abandoned this dresser on the sidewalk after coating it top-to-bottom in drippy gold spraypaint and then decoupaging heavy blue paper to the top. I stripped the paint with my trusty heat gun (probably 15 hours of stripping over the last three months) and then sanded and stained it with my favorite Minwax Red Oak. (I've used red oak on everything, from the shelves at the apartment to the stair treads to this dresser. It makes everything glow.) On a splurge, I added fancy little white drop pulls from Anthropologie. (Despite being ridiculously expensive for everything else, I've found Anthro to be pretty reasonable for hardware, especially since they have unique things you can't find elsewhere.)

Look, here it is lurking in the back of the picture 

of another project! Too embarrassed to show its face.

Ta da! All dressed up. (Please ignore my messy kitchen.)

I haven't decided if it's going to stay there in the kitchen, but it's nice having a little extra counter space, and I get to moon over my hard work every time I get a drink of water. Maybe I'm a snob, but I don't understand why people paint perfectly gorgeous wood. Guh, so gorgeous.

But it was free!

I love stuff. The only thing better than stuff is free stuff. Like...this goofy overbuilt entertainment center. 

So fantastic! So giant! So heavy! So...something!

The scene: a happy couple driving home from...somewhere.
Me: "STOP STOP STOP STOP I WANT THAT!" 
Jesse: "Wait, do you actually want that?" 
Me: "YES IT'S PERFECT AND I NEED IT."
Jesse (resigned): "Well, okay, let me go back around the block."
Me: [presses nose to window fervently praying no one else snatches it before we get there.]

And no, there was never any danger of anyone else snatching it. Even I know that. It was spraypainted a glossy black that was drippy and chipping. The black was actually very much okay - so much okay that I decided this crazy piece needed to stay black - but it needed a better paint job and a little TLC.

Enter my new toy, the Critter: 

Via Amazon. 

It's a tiny sprayer that hooks up to an air compressor and uses pint mason jars to hold the paint. I bought it because I've wanted a paint sprayer, and other bloggers absolutely rave about it. The mason jars are particularly handy, especially since I bought a bunch of resealable plastic lids at Fred Meyer, and can store the thinned paint in the mason jar until I need it again. (Like, say, for the second coat...if I need one.) Some paint I've used so far hasn't needed thinning, but the black definitely did, and I just added a bit of distilled water until it flowed freely. It makes painting SO FAST AND EASY. 

Repainted with Behr Marquee Black Basalt in eggshell. 

(Yes, I BOUGHT fancy black paint and it was really freaking expensive.) 

I still need to attach wheel casters to the bottom (because seriously, this thing weighs twice as much as I do) but when it's done I think it'll be good for the media room/den/video game cave, because the shelves we've got in there right now aren't really wide enough for the Xbox, and I'd like to be able to close off the TV and all its associated cords and accessories if needed. (Ostensibly, my goal is for the video game cave to be a potential second guest room if needed, and as such, it should be as pleasant as possible. 

 Not just a one-night stand

...actually two nightstands. I had two of the little RAST dressers left over from the master bedroom built-ins (which are still not done, pending arrival of the knobs at some point) so I painted and stained them, and dressed them up with some fancy new pulls from Home Depot.

Painting! (Ignore the legs on the dressers...I added them for height and decided later they didn't match the overall aesthetic, so I took them off again. What can I say - I'm mercurial.)

And done! And blurry. Oh, phone camera.

When Jesse and I moved in together in 2009, our one-bedroom apartment had room for a bed and one night stand, which we've been sharing ever since. It is the height of luxury to finally be in a place where I don't have to roll over him to get a drink of water in the middle of the night. As an added bonus, I picked up two RANARP lights from IKEA and installed those on either side of the bed. Now we each have our own nightstand and light! 

It's like living in a hotel, only with more cats. 

A sinking feeling

Remember how I love free stuff? Our lovely friends Faith and Janet remembered, too, and gifted us their castoff sink from their long-overdue bathroom remodel. 

Now they have TWO fancy new bathrooms, and we have one fancy old sink to replace one of the two monstrosities that live in the upstairs bathrooms. The bathroom remodels are well down the line (I'm crossing my fingers that the kitchen is first) but this sink is cool and old, and, as Faith pointed out, even comes with a caked-on chip of soap. It's ready to go! Thanks, ladies!

The Doors

Remember also how I was wrestling with what color to paint the door so it coordinated-with-but-didn't-match our pretty paprika mailbox?

Eventually, all these problems mostly solve themselves. 

In my defense, I DIDN'T MEAN TO. I went to the Habitat for Humanity ReStore to get a couple of new $0.50 paint scrapers, since I irreparably gummed up my other one scraping the paint off the gold dresser, and while I was there, I had to check out the door selection, since I still haven't found any solid core five-panel interior doors like I want, and these matching beauties were 50% off. TWO GIANT DOORS WITH GIANT WINDOWS AND LOVELY WOOD BITS THAT MATCH THE WOOD BITS ON MY SCREEN DOORS, FOR ONLY $100?? I spent about an hour staring at them, trying to justify the purchase in my head, but in the end, they're EXACTLY the right dimensions for both the front and back doors, so of course they came home with me. I'm sure they were originally for a double entrance, but I'm content to split them up and have two gorgeous entries. The varnish is pretty much gone on the side that faced all the weather, so I'm going to (gently) sand and refinish, but other than that, they're in great shape. Also, I would like to point out, heavy as hell. 

I love them. I love them so much I want to pet them and coo at them. Doors!

This weekend

It's a three-day weekend! And in celebration of Labor Day, I plan to labor heavily for its entirety. My goal is to get at least SOME of the trim painted and maybe maybe maybe even up - I know, it's good to dream big - so we'll see how much happens. It's sprinkling rain right now and there's absolutely no room in my garage to set up a painting center, soooo....more indoor projects may take precedence. (Like vacuuming. This place is so furry you have no idea.)

Take My Breath Away

(Does the title give you a good Friday earworm? You're welcome.)

We've been moving stuff one truck-load at a time over the last few weeks, and we were SO EXCITED to go see the progress on the floors last night. 

The good news: our contractors had finished filling and sanding, and had applied at least one coat of the Swedish finish. (what is it, Swedish or Finnish?)

 Fir changes color when exposed to light, so I don't expect these colors to be as vibrant forever, 

but they're still gorgeous.

I'd forgotten we'd asked them to refinish the upstairs hall closet, so that was a nice surprise.

 The bad news: we'd of course done our research on what finish we wanted, but in the excitement, had forgotten there's a reason that Swedish finish (what is it...oh never mind) is banned in at least one state. We'd brought a load of stuff over with the intent to put it in the basement...but you could smell the fumes from outside the house. We braved them long enough to pop in and take pictures, but there was no way we could stay in for more than a minute or so. We ended up putting everything in the garage. According to the internet, the fumes are worst during the first 24 hours, but can linger for up to six weeks after, depending on the ventilation. We've got all the windows open, and will probably hang out (outside, of course) over the weekend with the doors open and fans going, but hopefully it will dissipate quickly enough that we can get moved in soon!