Powder room

As I've mentioned, our first floor is very open. The living room, dining area, and kitchen all bleed together. It's great for entertaining — there is tons of space for people to hang out, and if we're keeping an eye on the stove during a party we're never really out of the action. We love it.

However, it is tough to figure out how to fill the space. I worry about strong statements in one part of the first floor that may clash or not carry over to the rest of it. As a result, we've been very conservative about adding pieces and statements to the first floor, and we tend to play it safe with a neutral couch or a fail-proof dining table.

But it's the dead of winter, people, and dammit, I want some color. And I want it cheap. Enter: Hot Lips.

Our powder room is its own little space, and it was sorely in need of some attention. It had one blue wall (our fav, colonial blue), a couple of afterthought photos on the wall (one of which had no glass in the frame because we are high class), and a junky wastebasket that left scratches on the wall.

No longer.

In progress:

Tai ceded this one to me, and I ran with it. The trick, Hot Lips lovers, is to make it so inconvenient to move the bathroom fixtures in and out that once it's done your husband's abhorrence of the color doesn't compare to the hassle of taking apart a sink and toilet.

I, on the other hand, genuinely love the color and selected it above other equally questionable options.

The camera phone doesn't really know what to make of it, though, as you can tell by the near-red to deep-magenta depictions here. And maybe my eyeballs don't know what to make of it either. While I was painting, I'd have to come out of the room every few minutes and blink hard for a while before I could see straight.

My favorite thing, though, is the combination of the pink against the blue, along with this Todd Chilton painting we have in that area. I think the jewel-tone pink fits perfectly with the grays and the blues.

My second favorite thing about this, though, is the story the paint store guy told me as he was mixing my quart. One of the store's clients, a "gentleman's club from somewhere along State Street, I think" came in and requested a few gallons of Hot Lips. The club owner painted the outside of his "establishment" in Hot Lips because "you know, it was, um, a gentleman's club. Then, the city came through and made them repaint in gray and black three days later."

Hot Lips is so hot that even a strip club isn't allowed to use it. I'm proud it found a home in our powder room.

Master suite paint

When we painted our giant wall blue, we extended the color into the north wall of our bedroom. My thinking at the time was that it was a nice statement of unbroken blue along one whole side of the house. My thinking since then is that it's boring.

(Sidenote: we were so out of our minds during the building process and we had to make so many snap decisions, that we might be undoing some of those last-minute picks for a few years to come. See also: kitchen, Ikea.)

So our master bedroom had one colonial blue wall with a few hastily placed paintings. As we've lived in the house a years, the bedroom just felt kind of thrown together — no deliberate decisions or direction. I wanted something calming and neutral so that the new paint color could match whatever we decide to do with new bedroom furniture in the future. We agreed on spring flowers. This is the second-girliest color in the house, but it works in the space because it's a shifter. Depending on the light, it can look like a barely-there gray, or a deeper blue. It almost never looks violet/lavender, something we discovered after having the chip on the wall for a couple of weeks before painting.

Eventually, we'd like to replace the bedroom set with something in a lighter shade of wood (maybe walnut-esque), and I think it will look better than our current espresso color scheme.

I also love this style from FLOR, and am looking forward a day when we have enough disposable income to put down squares of this under a new, lighter bedroom set.

The view from the top of the stairs:

You can see just a teensy bit of the new color, but what's important is that the colonial blue ends at some point. It's a pretty modest change but one that feels good as the first step in reworking the bedroom.

Our bathroom was totally white and also needed some help. Again, we had a lot of hasty decisions that added up to a thrown-together bathroom — a crappy Ikea towel rack with crappy Ikea towel hooks, a crappy Ikea TP holder, etc. I took out all of that. Tai mudded over the nasty gouges in our wall from all that Ikea shiz, and then I painted with sidewalk gray.

Sample patch:

Final product:

It's barely different from the bedroom, and it's light enough to not interfere with putting on makeup or stumbling around blurry-eyed in the middle of the night. I also really like that it's neutral enough to accommodate pretty much whatever color scheme of towels/shower curtain that we come up with in the future, making change an easy prospect.

Paint

When we renovated our two condos, our standard m.o. was to blitz the place white and add a few accent walls of color here and there. Tai had a great color palette in his first place that pre-dated me, and we generally stuck to it — a pretty yellow, a good blue, a nice red, a pleasant green, etc. When we moved from Wasatch Towers to Center Street, we basically used the same set of colors, but just shuffled the rooms around. I felt kind of lame about this, so when it was time to build the house and pick interior colors, rather than do the same thing again, we sort of just didn't do much. 

We have a giant wall in our dining area and upstairs hallway that is a mellow shade of blue. But because our first floor is so open, we didn't really do anything else. Then, we added a new couch and a giant painting. Then, a new table came along. We filled in with a few counter stools, and all of a sudden it felt like we actually lived in the place. It's been a slow process, but it finally felt like it was time to paint. 

We have two small bedrooms and our master bedroom upstairs; all needed some attention. The first bedroom is what is informally known as the guest room. (We have had house guests exactly twice.) I saw this photo in a recent Dwell and really loved the pop of dark blue with white all around. 

With our light bamboo flooring upstairs, it seemed like a good inspiration. So this is the current state of the guest room:

I wonder if all those unhung frames are what's keeping the Dwell editors from calling. Or maybe it's the exposed box spring and lack of bed comforter? So picky. (Also, I moved my husband's rifles to be out of the frame. But, Dwell, we can always put them back in for the magazine shoot.)

Whatever. Work in progress, right? 

As it turns out, the color I ended up using in the guest room is the darkest hue on the same palette as colonial blue — something called Hudson Bay. So waspy. I love it.

Then, we had the issue of the other small bedroom. I have a hard time with this one. This room was always intended to be our nursery. We have now lost two babies and don't know if/when we'll be able to have a child. It's been in limbo before we even finished the house, and it has stayed that way for the last two years. For my own sanity, I needed to pick a color and move on with the room so that it wasn't a white box waiting for something.

This room gets strong southern sun (our first choice of color — a bright orange — made the place look like a bag of Cheetos). I wanted a warm color, but had to balance that with the retinal ZOWIE factor from afternoon sun in the winter. So I went back to a tried and true yellow called morning sunshine.

And that room is even filthier than the other one, so that's all you get to see of it until I get my act together and figure out what to do with yarn and sewing supplies. (Also, I spy the makings of yet another project there on the floor. More on that later.) Overall, though, I'm really happy with the combination of the strong indigo in the guest room and this gentle yellow in the sewing room. It feels like a nice balance on the second floor.

Next up, bedroom and bathroom color. It's an exciting life, folks.

Changes

The home improvement bug sunk its fangs into me HARD at the beginning of the year, so we have changes afoot. Here's a sneak peek:

We've been quite busy, and I'll post some documentation soon.

Barter

What do you do when you're flat broke but have an enormous living room wall that cries for art?

You barter away an old red couch...


...call your friends over for an evening of watching you bicker over leveling a huge sheet of painted Tyvek...


...watch your husband do death-defying stunts 13 feet off the ground...


...and replace the old couch with one you've spent two years saving for! (Found here.)


Many, many thanks to our generous friend and artist Benjamin Wiemeyer for taking pity on us and doing the barter. We love the painting and the view from the sidewalk:


(And so does the neighbor kid who just rode past and shouted, "I love your painting!")

Glut of Photos

We've been in the house for a few weeks now and are still working on getting things put away and completely finished, but we are loving it and it instantly felt like home. We haven't really taken any photos since we moved in, but here are a bunch of photos taken from mid November to mid December that shows the process.

...

Forgive us the posting drought. By way of brief announcement, I was pregnant this fall, and over Thanksgiving I went into pre-term labor and gave birth to our stillborn son. We will be mourning for quite some time, but we have been so grateful for the love and support of our family and friends through it all. Pouring ourselves into finishing this house has been a great comfort to both of us — we are clinging to the happy anticipation of a finished house as a way to soothe the grieving process.

We are close. Yesterday our staircase and landing rail system arrived and was installed in a matter of hours (you can also see our finished, exposed duct work):


You can see the blue that we settled on for the large north wall, too. Many, MANY thanks to the our weekend volunteer crew: Judy, Greg, Nancy, Laura, and especially my father-in-law Tainui who couldn't be dragged from helping by wild horses. Tainui: we owe you our baseboard, our painted walls, our light fixtures, our tile floors, our sanity and our love.

Davido's crew has been hard at work on our garage. Over the weekend that meant putting up particle-board sheeting in sub-freezing temperatures. Today, it meant installing a garage door in the biggest blizzard of the year:



In the "insult upon injury" category, last Saturday night we discovered water damage in our kitchen ceiling. Turns out that a part of our master bath shower fixture had a slow leak that had been dripping onto our ceiling since it was installed. A late-Saturday-night visit from Davido, the plumber and my in-laws helped us pinpoint the location of the leak. The plumber repaired it yesterday, and today the drywaller was redoing the kitchen ceiling.


Part of the stairs delivery included the frame for our front door canopy, which will eventually have 2"x4" cedar planks to form the "roof" for our front door and approach:


So, we're getting there.

Am I Bad at Blogging or What?

After the sheetrock was done, things on the inside were turned over to me for the most part. Originally we had planned on doing all the painting ourselves. I hadn't really thought through sealing the windows and doors and after looking into a few products we determined that it would be best to have them spray lacquered. We had a couple of painters that Davido has worked with give us a bid on it. Dave Miller and Dave Burleigh at Allstar Painting gave us such a good bid for that that we decided to also have them spray the primer and a finish coat of white on all the walls and ceilings as well. This saved us a ton of time. In the course of one week we had all the doors and windows sealed and all the walls painted. We still have some walls that we will paint an accent color on but I can't tell you how relieving it was to have the paint 90% done in one week. The painters were great to work with and let me do some of the prep to help keep costs down. They also did an absolutely great job. The combination of a really good paint job with an excellent sheet rock job make the walls look like a million bucks.

We went with a Kwal-Howell product called Envirocoat which is a no-voc paint and it turned out to be a really great product. The walls were given an eggshell sheen and the ceiling got a flat paint. With so much ceiling and no texture anywhere, a flat paint up there will keep light from glaring and make any irregularities in the ceiling less noticeable.

Between helping us prep for paint, Davido and his guys finished up the cedar siding. It looks really great. The mitered corners are a really nice touch. We just hope that they don't shrink up too much. Each board has two coats of sealer on all sides and all cut edges were sealed and all joints were glued, so we think it will do okay.

The painting was done last Friday around noon and as soon as they were done I got working on the tile work. Friday and Saturday morning I got the backer board down and then Saturday afternoon Kersten showed up and helped me start laying the tile down in the bathrooms and laundry room. She was actually really good at it. She's really a good baker and she said that spreading the mortar reminded her a lot of frosting a cake. Saturday we got all the laundry and second bathroom and about half of the master bathroom finished. I was back at it Monday night after work and finished the master bathroom. Then Tuesday night and Wednesday night my Dad came and helped me get the walls around the bath tub in the second bathroom finished. He was a huge help and once we settled on a plan of attack we were able to move pretty quickly. Friday I spent figuring out the rest of the shower pan for the master bathroom shower. Our plumber did the base slope and water proof membrane which had to be inspected by the city a couple of weeks ago but it still needed a mortar layer over top of the membrane for the tile to go on. I used a sand/portland cement mixture that goes in as a dry-pack application. Enough water is added so that it feels a bit like wet sand. It was pretty tedious getting the perimeter edges level and then sloping it towards the drain, but it's done now and I'll start working on the tile for the floor in the shower next.

We went with a 2x2 inch tile mosaic on the floor by American Olean in Ice White with a matte finish. The walls are 3x6 subway tile in the same finish.

Wednesday we got most of our finish electrical work done and even got some lights working. This makes working at night so much easier. We are just waiting for all of our accent lighting to come in and that will be installed. We've got some cool fixtures that we are excited about. Thursday they started installing the ductwork for our air conditioning system. We have radiant heat but really hate the heat, so we are going to have an exposed spiral duct running down the hallway on the first floor that will have registers to cool the first floor and trunks that feed registers in the floor for the up-stairs. We also put an exposed duct in the hallway upstairs to pull all the hot air that will gather at the top of the vaulted space out of the house and cool the house more efficiently. They should be all done on Monday.

Goodbye, Orange

After a little more than a year of living with it, we decided that the orange in our living room was just a bit too strong. It seemed to suck all the light out of the space while caving in on us.

So, on a whim, we bought some paint, pulled our furniture back and in less than 24 hours did a little more home improvement.

It took a couple of coats of primer to make sure that the orange wouldn't be peeking through.

We decided to paint the south wall a kind of gray color, found a color chip that we liked and went to Benjamin Moore to get the paint. We used their Aura line, which is really nice, if not extremely expensive. We would have used their new Natura, no VOC line, but it didn't come in a satin sheen, which we really wanted.
The east wall we decided to paint white, hoping that it would make the space feel more expansive and clash less with the piano.
Paint always looks different on the wall than it does on the paint chip. The color we chose ended up looking a little more blue than we intended, but overall, we think it's a big improvement. Feels like we have a brand new room and all it took was a couple of trips to the paint store and part of a weekend.

Countdown

I'm putting this out there to hold myself to it: we want to move in on Dec. 15. That's two weeks from tomorrow.

In those two weeks, we need to do the following:

Install and paint baseboards, paint door trim, install kitchen cabinet doors, install kitchen trim pieces to match cabinet doors, build and install a concrete kitchen countertop, install a kitchen sink, install a kitchen sink disposal, install a kitchen tile backsplash, reseal the tile, build living room bookshelves and fireplace cover, install window coverings, find a plumber and get a washer drain line hooked up to finish the washer-dryer nook, purchase and install a refrigerator, install a bathroom sink and cabinet, install a bathroom mirror, find and install a bathroom light, paint interior of hall linen closet, install hall linen closet doors, install closet shelving systems in two rooms, touch up living room paint, paint inside of living room coat closet, rehang remaining doors, install new doorknobs, find and install kitchen lights, put up a shower rod, install a bathroom fan cover, saw off and cover the toilet floor bolts, caulk baseboard, install threshold pieces between bamboo and tile flooring, replace the bedroom ceiling fan with something better looking, and clean everything.

Oh my.

Colors

Here's a song for you to accompany this post, from Interpol's "Turn on the Bright Lights," because I did a search for songs with "color" or "green" or "orange," and finally just searched for "bright." The song has nothing to do with the colors — it's just a long-time favorite by a long-time favorite band.


Above, the entryway green — "peppermint leaf" — and living room orange — "orange parrot." Below, the office blue — "blue nose."


The bedroom green — "meadow view."


All the colors are Benjamin Moore Aura base. I didn't put up pictures of the kitchen because it's a boring white — the color in that room will come from red kitchen cabinets.

Childhood snack

One of the few green things that we've been able to do with this remodel — we're hoping it's a lot easier to build green rather than remodel green — is use low VOC paint. The low VOC paint — VOC is short for volatile organic compounds — puts fewer pollutants into the air, specifically into the air that we will be breathing once we move into this place.

You know that fresh paint smell? Low-VOC paint doesn't have one. Really, none at all.


It smells like pears and cottage cheese to me.

Unhung

I have been in door purgatory for the past two weeks. We have 11 doors (excluding the front door, which I kept on its hinges for painting), and I've put a coat of primer and two coats of white paint on 22 door sides in the past two weeks. I'm so tired of it, but all the work is making the difference between 1970s non-descript wood and clean, white thresholds.


A couple of the doors needed some serious patch work. On one of them, it looked like the previous owners had locked up an angry cat inside and waited for it to claw its way out (same cat or cats, by the way, that were responsible for the odor in the condo, no doubt).


A handy friend of ours, Kyle, suggested that we check out paint spray guns. Thrilled at the prospect of including firearms in our remodeling project, we purchased a $200-or-so model from Lowe's. I set up all the doors, taped off the walls and windows in the office and planned for easy, breezy painting.

I won't lie — using the spray gun was a blast. Unfortunately, it blasted out a bit too much paint, as in, a gallon of primer for 14 door sides, when normally a gallon would cover at least three times as much. Clean-up was another problem, since the thing broke when we followed directions. Our whirlwind romance with the spray gun was over (note: Lowe's has an AWESOME return policy).

The spray gun created far more problems than it solved. It got so much extra primer on the plastic sheeting hanging on the walls that the sheeting bloused up and stuck to the doors, leaving not-so-lovely patterns on three of the doors. Sanding didn't really take out the patterns, so when you come over, don't look too closely.

Post spray-gun adventure, we borrowed a few sets of sawhorses from my father-in-law, and I got to work. For four days straight, I did nothing except prime, flip, paint, flip and paint doors. A low point was thinking the second (and final) coat of paint was dry on a side of a door, putting it *damp* side down and accidentally scraping off two layers of paint down to the 1970s wood. That's what patch jobs are for, I suppose.

We're now ready to rehang them.


Thanks to some help from my father and sister, who merrily primed the inside of the front door last Saturday, I was able to fully paint that side the same day. This was a minor coup for me since we were in our last condo for a year and a half before we (Tai) painted the front door. That primer was...nice, but not quite the same as a bright red door, so I was determined to not have the same situation in this place. I stuck with white on this one, though, because we have big, bright plans for color in the entryway, and we don't want to overwhelm anyone.


If you're going to try any portion of this process at home, make sure you get yourself the fattest, pimpin'est brush you can find. I loved every single one of those wide four inches that saved me countless back-and-forth strokes...of paint, you gutter minds.

Also, if you're trying this at home, don't bother painting two coats on the inside of sliding closet doors. Unfortunately, I didn't think of this until I had done two coats on the inside of three of the four closet doors.

Another thing not to look for when I invite you to tea is the running border of dried paint on the edges from when I painted the narrow edges sloppily and didn't catch on until they were dry. Also, not to look for? The messy bits around the hinges. I'm banking on most of these being closed.

The last lesson for today is this: when the love of your life/remodel mastermind says something like, "These are pretty hashed — why don't we just buy new doors?", for heaven's sake, don't say, "Oh, they're not that bad. We'll save some money by patching and painting these ourselves — I'll even take care of it."

The loo

Things are finally moving (FINALLY, people, FINALLY), with paint on pretty much every surface by now. The long road to a functional bathroom has looked like this, so far:

1. Removing the tile. (We lost the toilet's functionality several weeks ago.)


2. Pulling up the rotten, uneven subfloor.


3. Installing hardibacker, the same water-proof, even layer that we used in the kitchen.


4. Patching, sanding, dusting and painting the walls. We were pleased to receive a gallon of very nice, expensive paint from my mother-in-law in roughly the same color we were planning to use anyway. Hooray for hand-me-downs! The color is a very faint blue that evidently doesn't show up when your only light source is an on-camera flash.


We still have a few steps to go, including a Miracle Method appointment in two weeks for refinishing the bathtub and tile surround, tiling the floor in a dark slate, figuring out the bathroom cabinet, vanity and mirror situation and installing all that good stuff. Progress, though, feels sweet.