Paintapalooza!

I'll let the pictures do the talking:

I can't believe I lived with the ugly for so long.  Obviously, I am not quite done.  I'm still painting the balusters on the stairwell, hence the blue tape.  I'm working on putting in missing moldings. I also have a stencil for the risers.  My hand needs a few weeks to recover before tackling those jobs.

It feels so much cleaner and fresher.  Looking back, it amazes me that we could see any potential in that hideousness.

The color is Valspar Granite Dust and I really love it.  It's a very green grey that changes color drastically through the day, sometimes a deeper grey, others very green.  I love how color does that.

What do you think?  Not bad for two years worth of work.


I've linked up to Remodelaholic's Friday Link Party

Insulate it!

ARGH!  Blogger ate my post.  And of course, like a dummy, I didn't save it anywhere before I posted it.  So, now I'll have to recreate it.

Over spring break, we did manage to cross one thing off our list and that we can call "done done."  Most things around here fall into the "done but..." category.

The powder room we put in a year and a half ago is lovely and the house sorely needed a bath on the main floor.  The only problem with it was how frigidly cold it was.  We put in a marble floor and if you went in there in stocking feet, it would make your bones brittle.  We had insulated the walls before we closed them up, but the floor was over the old scary bathroom, which was nearly outside.  We had gone ahead and insulated the ceiling in the old scary bathroom but thought we could do more.

You see, originally half the sun room was a screen porch and half was a maid's room.  The maid's room had two doorways; one into the kitchen and one to the back porch off the kitchen.  Whenever it was converted into the sun room, that door was simply covered over and then paneled over thusly:

So, when we built the powder room, we simply drywalled over this door.  On the porch, was an busted up old screen door that had been nailed closed.  So, to take care of the cold issue, we decided to insulate that doorway and see if that helps to keep that room from being so frigid.

We pried the screen door open, cut out all the old screen. Nailed a piece of beadboard paneling to the inside and stuffed the cavity between the screen and door with insulation.  We nailed it back shut and painted the whole thing white again.

So, that job is DONE DONE!

The ice box, well that's still a work in progress.  I'll save updates for a later time.

Back Door Project

Sorry for the bloggy hiatus.  We are back on track now.

Well, I got damn little of my list accomplished over spring break.  Why is it I always think I'm going to get more done than I do?  Am I that slow? ambitious? disconnected from reality?  all of the above?  Something like that.

I didn't touch the staircase and it mocks me every time I climb the stairs, which is far too frequently.  I didn't pick up the paint deck, caulk the terrace, measure for wallpaper, or price out shelving.

So, what sucked out time so much?  Stripping the paint off the back door trim.  This is what it looked like when we moved in.  Thousands and thousands of layers of ugly paint.  All the detail on the trim was obscured and that hideous nicotine-mustard yellow color.  The wall area below the window was covered in plastic tiles (who thought that was a good idea?) that bulged out so that the drawers just out of the right side of the frame wouldn't open all the way.  It was pretty damned ugly.

Last fall we stripped and painted the back door.

 As you can see in the pic above, P had started to strip the trim and the plastic tiles had started to pop off.  Lovely to look at, no?

This is pretty much how things stayed for a very long time.

Then, the neighbor put her house on the market (sold in 6 days!) and posted pics of her house.  Behind all that plastic tile lay the old ice box.  We knew it was there, but the neighbor had all of hers all in tact and restored and gorgeous.  I forgot to save the pic, I'm a lousy blogger.  So, we decided to start banging off all those tiles and see if the bulgy wall hid perfect doors awaiting our restoration:

 Oh, the anticipation is like waiting for Heraldo to open Al Capone's vault!

 Just like Heraldo, disappointment awaits.

So, now we had a huge hole, no doors to restore, and a mess to clean up.  What are we going to do with said hole?

A beverage fridge!  It honors the old while incorporating the new, exactly what we wanted!

Lowes

So, after some stripping and cutting out of the middle bar, the hole looked about like this:

So, in lieu of more interesting progress, I started working on the transom.  It's a three light transom and I knew I wanted some art glass in there.  We pulled out the transom and I took it to the basement and started stripping it, breaking all three panes in the process.  This makes me wonder if I'll be able to rehab the rest of the windows any more successfully.  

Anyway, P suggested a fleur de lis motif that sort of corresponds to the dining room stenciling.  So this is what I ended up with:

Installing it was quite a bugger and there was a lot of swearing involved.  Mostly cause we are both short and the ladders weren't making us tall enough.  

So, this is where we are now.  I've still got to do one more coat of paint and the door trim is FINALLY done.  Please don't ask me when the hole will be done.  That's to be determined.  We have a handyman friend coming tomorrow, so we shall see what he says.

I've also made a discovery, I'm a very good list maker but not a list follower.  I make great lists to then turn around and ignore.  Some people make lists in order to cross off items.  I just make lists and then find other things to do.  So much for organization.  

Keep checking back, I've got several more posts in the queue planned.