The {Mostly} Finished Big Girl Room

Well here it is! The "Big Girl" room is finally done, save for a few small minor decorative details. OK, so yes that basically means it's only painted. But if you recall, that was my main goal for now. It may have taken a little longer than originally planned, but if you consider a handful of unforeseen snags in addition to working around a toddler who uses that room, I don't think I did half bad.

Just as a quick refresher, we started with plain walls. I added a board & batten wall treatment that I assembled myself, and then painted. I'll give basic tutorial info with each photo.

First things first, I went to Lowes and had them cut a 4'x8' sheet of MDF into strips. I asked for 8 strips 4" wide, and about 20 strips 2" wide x 39" tall. Lots of tutorials for this project that I've seen online were very reassuring that Lowes will do all of your cuts for you making your project a breeze. Ok, well as I was standing there after showing the kind gentlemen my diagram of how I wanted the 4'x8' sheet cut up, I noticed a sign that stated, "The first 2 cuts are free, for bigger jobs we sell saws in the Tool Department." Eeek! I felt horrible. The guys were super nice though and didn't even charge me. My advice though: don't go into Lowes assuming that they're happy to make 692 cuts for you because they're really not supposed to even if they will :-/  

I began by mitering the bottoms of my 2" vertical strips so that they weren't a blunt square edge where they met the baseboards. Then I went around the room and measured out where each one would go. This is when I did my leveling and just made a simple pencil mark on the wall so that when it was time to do the application it was pretty quick and easy (I did double check and re-level at that time though). Once that was done, I applied the strips to the walls with some adhesive (like Liquid Nails) and 3 brad nails each. Then I placed the 4" strips horizontally across the tops of the vertical strips to make a chair rail-like border around the room. After all the wood was applied I used wood putty and a molding caulk to fill in any gaps.

I used Lowes zero-VOC paint + primer in a semi-gloss white for the woodwork and below. I gave all the woodwork a first coat of paint since it was completely unfinished to start with. Then I did a second coat over everything with a roller.

Then of course, all that was left was to paint the top half of the walls in our mixed paint color. I also used the zero-VOC paint + primer for that and had Lowes color-match it to Sherwin Williams' Open Air. It looks plain blue in this photo, but it's actually quite turquoise.

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Here are some photos once the room was reassembled. You'll notice the lack of 'finished' details. Try to keep in mind that I'll be adding a bedskirt to hide the trundle, a coordinating quilt, and valence over the window. Since her absolute favorite color everything is PINK, I'll be doing all of those accents in varying shades of pink.

We're also still using an Ikea end table to pile some of her favorite bed time books on, for now. We'll be replacing that this week with the Ikea spice-rack book holders of Pinterest fame for a nice thin profile (as you can see, its a small space so maximizing is important). We'll also add a bean bag chair or other type of cozy seat to make that a perfect little reading corner for her.

Our girls' rooms, side-by-side!

So there we are! 

And the baby-prep to-do list continues :)

Moving Right Along

As the painting portion of the Great Kitchen Upgrade of 2012 comes to a close, it's time to start piecing the room back together at least enough to make it functional. It probably won't last long since our stove and dishwasher are due to be delivered this coming Thursday and our tile still has to be put down. Not to mention, I plan to start painting our cabinets as soon as I'm finished painting walls around here (whenever that might be ;)

So once we got the hutch moved out, we regained something like 20 square feet along that side of our kitchen. Our table had formerly been kind of floating out in the floor mostly because the hutch was on the wall. Without the hutch my original thought was to place the table's longer side on that wall with a bench against the wall instead of chairs. Since I had finally finished painting I was excited to see what this arrangement would look like. 

Please ignore the horrible lighting in all of these pictures :D

Sadly, it wasn't as perfect as I'd imagined. There were a couple of issues. One was the fact that this chair couldn't slide out. We use that mini fridge for beverages and we love it, but there's not really a better place in the kitchen for it than in that corner, which interferes with the chair when the table is placed there. We also have our pile-o-tile at the opposite end of the table, so once that's on the floor we'd also be able to move the table a foot or two in that direction. But for now, this arrangement isn't going to work.

The up side was that it left pretty much a dance floor in the middle of the kitchen! Also, the dog crate is officially gone. Fear not though, the little guy seems to be adjusting just fine :)  

In the long run that vast dance floor will be taken up by a peninsula so it's going to make sense for the table to be long-side-against-the-wall. We're planning to take out that skinny cabinet there beside the dishwasher and add 2-3 cabinets in its place. The new ones will be facing 90-degrees to the left to create the peninsula. With that in place, we'll want the table to mirror the length-wise orientation so things don't get too crowded.

Meanwhile, I decided to place the table short-side-against-the-wall. All chairs slide out.......

.....and we still pretty much have a dance floor at least fit for a toddler ;)

Moving right along, I've started on the stairway/upstairs hallway which is the last area of the house that I'm painting (for now). Since I can't reach the top of the wall on the lower end of the stairway (that'd be why the paint stops 3/4 of the way up the wall), we need to borrow a bigger ladder from a friend. Please also disregard the atrocity that is our 1987 light fixture. We have new ones waiting to go up :) 

And while the stairway is kind of one big wall, the hallway itself is full of doors and odd angles = lots of cutting in. 

I'm sure you can imagine I'm really excited to paint between these door frames-

I did buy a tiny paint brush with hopes of being able to get in those tiny spaces with it. I guess we'll see how it goes. Thankfully I was able to get all the cutting in finished in one shot, so my goal today is to knock out the rolling. I can't even express how ready I am for our walls to finally be finished ...and for paint supplies to be out of sight, but mostly for the walls to be finished :)

All It's Cracked Up to Be

Ah, home ownership :)

I've gotten the majority of the kitchen painted. Yay! The current speed bumps we're working around are some drywall cracks. There are three and they're all in corners. Two of them in fact are on either side of the semi-wall between our kitchen and dining(play) room. The third is along the same side of the house, in the back corner of the kitchen. We have similar cracks on our second level as well, but that's a different project!

I think the problem is really that the walls were just not done properly. We've long suspected some water damage on this side of the house (all along our far left wall). When we first bought the house one of the conditions in the contract we presented was repair to what was obviously water damage on that wall in the dining room. The upstairs bathrooms are right above the dining room and kitchen on that wall and whenever water is running upstairs you can hear what sounds like dripping if you're on the main level. We have yet to see any visible damage from said dripping and are honestly just too paranoid to open up the drywall and investigate. All of this is to say that I'm pretty confident that the walls along that side of the house have been repaired/replaced since the house was built. At that, they were not done very well. It's possible that the owner prior to us (we're not exactly sure how many there have been, but the house was built in 1999) repaired/replaced the drywall only when they were ready to sell. The entire house was spray painted - poorly - all one off-white color in a flat finish (which hides imperfections) and I kind of doubt anyone lived like that.

It appears to me that in some spots drywall tape may have been used without any drywall joint compound. In other places it looks like compound was used without tape. To be honest, it doesn't even look like drywall tape. I don't think I'd be at all surprised if it turned out to be blue painter's tape. Gah.

 Dining(play) room -- clearly some tape, but what kind?

 Corner just on the other side of the wall from the photo above. Also some visible tape (see that wavy spot?). This makes me wonder if it's painter's tape and not actual drywall tape which should have been scraped down onto joint compound then covered by joint compound. I think that's just tape with paint over it!

The back corner of the kitchen (so, damaged left wall of the house meets back wall of the house). I can't even tell if there is any tape here. The crack is directly in the corner with no visible tape edges.

So we're going to pick up some tape and compound and get those corners patched pronto so that the painting can finally be finished! I can't wait to put the kitchen back together. It's pretty much a nightmare. On the bright side of that, I have sold a bunch of stuff we don't use/need anymore and made about $100! I'm just using the cragslist-like board that my school district has and listing stuff on there. It's nice because I can meet people at the schools where they work and not have to worry about strangers coming to my house or going to their houses. Plus you have to pass a background check to work for a school system and that makes me feel better too (not saying there aren't any weirdos working in school systems, I've encountered a few of them myself).

Also, our appliance delivery has been pushed back to March 14. Apparently Best Buy didn't properly account for the number of appliances they would sell during their Presidents' Day sale. But we have a dinner meeting tonight with our architect and tile guy! Hopefully it's all good news and we'll have a tile layout and possible install date by the end of the night. Hooray for some progress :)

Living Room Paint

Since the transformation is mostly complete, and the kitchen is just a boring mess right now, I decided to go ahead and give you the before & after pics of our living room with the new paint color.

I'll start by telling you about the color choice. As I type those words I can feel my stomach start knotting up again. Boy, am I glad that is over with. So after all the agony of millions of samples, we ultimately chose (drumroll).... Halo by Benjamin Moore. Sound familiar? Yes, that was the original color I had picked and loved and posted about before all the second-guessing began. I know, I could slap my own self. But there's no point in that now. The color is on the walls and we are happy! J and I both realized that amidst all the other samples we had all over the place, that one proved to be the balance between gray and beige that we were looking for without being too dark, too drab, too warm or too cool. When I finally went back to the Benjamin Moore store to pick up the sample strip of it I had another moment of palpitations. Halo was the lightest color on the strip, but the darker two were distinctly green. We were not going for green whatsoever and I definitely didn't want to get the paint on the walls and have it read green. I really gave it a harder look and studied it in its various splashes on our walls. I couldn't get any green from the swatches we'd painted, even against our blue walls (which would certainly highlight any yellow undertones as we discovered with all the warmer tans we tried out). With that, I bit the bullet and bought three gallons of paint. I'm thrilled to report that I haven't had a millisecond of regret since then. Whew.

It took me just over a week of working through C's naps and after she went to bed at night to finish the entry way, living room and play room. There are still things we intend to change so I wouldn't call these rooms a finished product just yet. We will be replacing our switch and outlet covers, door knobs, lighting fixtures, and most definitely the vomit-covered living room rug (a result of babysitting a little one with an undiagnosed milk allergy). And as you know, the kitchen is still a work in progress.

Living room before...

Play room before

And the new and improved living room...

This is to show contrast with our trim/interior doors (neither of which is a true white). Also that's the edge of a soffit on the left of this photo, not a crack in our wall :)

A matted black & white photo to also show the color next to some true neutrals.

So there it is! It's probably so much less dramatic and interesting to any of you than it is to me, haha. The space is definitely warmer though, even though the paint itself isn't super warm. I actually love that it can look so different in different parts of the house or different lighting. Sometimes it looks ivory, sometimes it looks gray, sometimes it looks beige. My main goal was a soft, neutral back drop to highlight our furniture and decor, and I feel like we achieved that. I'm still undecided if we're going to go with brushed nickel or oil-rubbed bronze for the outlet and switch covers, door knobs and lighting fixtures. It's a big commitment for all of those things. We have some satin nickel and some elements of oil-rubbed bronze in the room now. We also have primarily black picture frames, shelves, coffee table and credenza. That decision is a different post for a different day though. I'm also undecided on the material for a new area rug. I can't decide if I want the simplicity of wool, or the real coastal charm of sisal. I just worry that sisal will not be comfy for future crawling babies and toddlers/preschoolers rolling around playing. Also another post for another day!

For now it's time to hit the road for Sunday dinner at mom's :)  Tonight is my night to cook. We're having teriyaki chicken and I'm pretty excited. I hope it's been a great weekend for everyone else. We have another fun week ahead of us including story time at the library, another play date with our friends from P&B, and more kitchen prep/painting!

Truant = Me

Yeesh, have I been absent or what? My apologies! It's just that the painting is going so swimmingly (really). I have the entry way, living room, and play room complete and I have cut in most of the kitchen (that takes forever, you know with the cabinets and all). Everything is just kind of a mess though so I haven't done any "after" pictures of the completed rooms because I haven't had time to straighten them up into photo-readiness!

Then there's the kitchen- which I'll be honest, it's not much of a transformation in terms of color. The new color is similar enough to the old one that when looking from the living/play room into the kitchen you could probably mistakenly think the rooms are the same color. You can definitely tell the difference when you look at where I've cut in compared to the color on the walls and luckily I do like the new color better.

However the kitchen is a complete nightmare right now. We have a hutch on one wall that houses some random stuff, cook books, a few small appliances, and the liquor. I hate the hutch. It's beyond Ikea cheap. The fake-wood paper is peeling off of it. It's that cheap. Someone generously gave it to us when we were first moving into our house and at that point we felt like we could use the extra storage. Well... I'm over it. So, in addition to our counters and table being covered in all things that were displaced due to painting, I am also clearing out some rarely/never used items to donate so I can make space for things from the hutch in order to get rid of the hutch. All this shuffling and rearranging has the kitchen looking like a serious disaster area, but I see no point in moving the hutch to paint behind it and then putting it right back. Once it's out of the kitchen it's staying out. So I must find homes for the items that we want to keep so that I can finish painting and send it on it's way. I truly can't wait to be done with all of this simply so things can be back in order!

In other fun news, we are in the process of selecting our new appliances! The Maryland appliance tax holiday is coming up next weekend (Feb. 18-20) and we'd love to take advantage of it. We can only get a refrigerator tax-free, but hey, as the most expensive by a long shot of our three appliances, we're happy to take any break we can get! We've done some online research and feel like we have our brands narrowed down. We also feel like we have a good idea of what we're looking for in each appliance- stainless, mid-grade features, and the whole shebang totaling less than $3k. So far, we seem to be in luck. We've even found free delivery deals so we shouldn't have to pay any extra for that.

Long story short, we have been busy busy busy around here. The main nap time goal continues to be getting the hutch cleared/kitchen painted. Then we'll be setting up our tile installation with some peeps we know who have tile-laying experience but won't charge us more than some beer and pizza to get the job done :)  Also on the radar we have our close and dear friends coming to town on Wednesday for a 2 week visit! That whole family truly is my other family. I'll give you more deets on how we got so close when I blog about our sure-to-be-outrageously-fun time together :) I'm fairly certain there will be play dates galore and there is already a night of partying planned for us and a few other mutual friend/relative couples. I'm so excited I can't stand it! Why did they ever move to Texas anyway?!? Some things we'll never know.

Well, it's getting late here and tomorrow brings a morning of appliance hunting! Try not to be too jealous ;)  I'll try to get back here before long to let you know how that goes!

As they say in Texas, "Adios, y'all!"  (Did I get that right? ;)

Decision Made

It's mixed. No turning back now!

How. Is. This. Possible?!?

I'm really here today, blogging on a Sunday, just an hour before an incredibly important Ravens game, because I need some confirmation that I'm not plain crazy (or blind, but that's actually debatable). Here's what happened...

Remember how I linked to Decor Chick's blog in my last post to show you that she too had paint-selection issues and I wasn't the only one? So I decided that I liked the color she chose (SW Balanced Beige) so much that I'd just go buy a sample can of it. I was pretty confident that I'd love either that one or the other one she was looking at seriously, SW Windsor Greige.

Here are her swatches to remind you what those colors look like:

Especially note in this photo how they look next to her white trim to give you a truer sense of their shades and values since her walls are a very warm color already.

You can see that they are nice, cool, neutral colors. They're that delicate mix of beige and gray that I'm trying to pinpoint. This is why I was so certain that one of those two colors would be "The ONE."

Furthermore, here is here finished living room and entry hallway that she painted Balanced Beige.

Lovely, right? Almost precisely the look I'd love to achieve. So finally, I've found these two colors that are actual serious contenders and I really really like them. I ran out to the Sherwin Williams store on Friday night and just grabbed sample cans of each because I was that confident. I wish I would have known that Sherwin Williams sample cans are much bigger than Lowe's or Home Depot, and cost about $3 more as well :/ Lesson learned.

So I rush home and can. not. wait. to put this paint on my walls and begin an agonizing debate over which PERFECT color I'm going to choose since both are just so close to what I want. And here's how they looked...

Balanced Beige (same color as Decor Chick's living room above) on top, Windsor Greige on bottom.

Is it me, or do they not look at all like her swatches? I mean, I know lighting and my God-forsaken blue walls do play a part, but I was stunned and instantly disappointed. So-called "Balanced Beige" looks exactly like a brown paper bag. How is it so light, and mid, and so much grayer/more soothing on her walls?

I really thought the samples she painted looked a lot like the samples I had been pouring over. But as a comparison, here are my samples with Balanced Beige and Windsor Greige at the bottom.

 You can see that those two colors are drastically darker than the ones I've been considering and seriously make me afraid that if my whole house was that color it would look like we were in a cardboard box/paper bag. If you haven't noticed, I'm really really trying to avoid that effect.

Here they are on a wall by themselves away from the other samples.

And one more time in a different spot near the other samples.

And for good measure, in the kitchen on an already neutral-colored wall.

So am I nuts? Or do they look dramatically different in my house than in her pictures? I really started to think maybe I was losing my mind. They do admittedly look a little better in the kitchen without the blue around them. These pictures were all taken in daylight though, and I'm really afraid that on a cloudy day, or in the evening, or in artificial light they're really going to look like cardboard. It's possible that they'll be nice and cozy but right now they just look dark and scary to me. I will try painting a bigger swatch, but I also don't want to have to prime over the swatches if we go with a lighter color.

This morning I went back to my paint chips and started reconsidering them now that I'm leaning more in the direction of a cooler neutral. 

I narrowed those down to about 10 that I think are honest contenders. I guess we'll see though. For now, it's game time. Good luck, boys!!

And Happy Birthday to the best (and most adorable) running back in the NFL, Ray Rice!