Home is where…

Alright, I must admit, I ran out of steam for before and after photos. Also, I decided to spare you the fist-sized balls of hair I pulled out of each and every bathroom drain. I know photos are more fun, but just trust me – the house was dirty and needed new paint. That Spiced Latte color we chose for the downstairs dining and front room (and extended into the upstairs hall) turned out to be gorgeous. It reminds me of of the very palest coral-yellow tone of a colorful sunset; a bit less vivid.

It warms up the living area. I did not realize that the greenish-beige that was on the walls before was such a dull color until we started to repaint. Initially I thought it was a perfectly fine color and so much better than stark white. My goal is to repaint the whole upstairs common area with it by next year. It took us a long time to do downstairs because we have some precarious wall-ceiling features that made an extension ladder necessary.

Any minute now the movers should arrive. Living without my most of  house hold things for a year has made me appreciate one’s ability to live with less stuff. However, I sure am looking forward to my own bed! Even before our things arrive, I suppose this house is home now because:

I have so much to do…

So much has happened since I blogged last – home improvements tend to spiral out of control like that I’ve found. First I’d like to share with you our 3/4 finished master bedroom. It was tricky to take photos of but you can see the mustard-bamboo before and the solid blue after on top and bottom respectively:   I painted the trim a warm, sandy color,  called Sand Dollar, that came with the house.  It’s also the color of the family room, which is great. Speaking of the family room – remember how I pronounced the carpet salvageable? Well, upon inspection the next morning, not so much.  Big, yellow stains were back when everything dried. So we bit the bullet and decided to replace the carpet. Lowe’s was having a stain master sale with free installation so we picked out Stainmaster’s Milky Way, which is a medium beige with darker and lighter flecks in it. Apparently there is no picture of this particular carpet color/style to be found anywhere on the internet, so you’ll just have to imagine its goodness. We are still awaiting installation, it’s the slowest process to get carpet installed, even the in-stock variety.

First, you wait to have someone come to measure the room. Then you make that appointment. When that’s done you wait for that guy to call Lowe’s and then for Lowe’s to call you. Then, when Lowe’s calls you they give you the estimate and you have to go into Lowe’s, and wait in the inevitable four person deep line (complete with one employee who knows everything about the process and one who doesn’t and just stands there confused trying to ask the other person questions) at the flooring counter. Then they give you the packet with your info. Then you go stand in line at checkout to pay. Then you wait for Lowe’s to call you. Then Lowe’s calls you two days later to tell you that you’re now waiting for the instillation people to call you to set up an appointment and this should take eight days. This is where we are at. I assume after the instillation people call, we set and appointment and wait for that and then…maybe…we will have carpet. Between this and the paint guy refusing to tint Olympic paint in a Valspar color shade (which every other hardware store does with color matching technology) I’m not a big fan of Lowe’s right now.

At least said paint guy abruptly found his happy place by tinting Valspar paint with the Valspar color and then giving me a discount to the price of the Olympic paint. I suppose that works. Home Depot is more than willing to tint any paint any color…but their color matching is seriously flawed. We cut out a piece of the dining room wall to try and match, as we have no touch up paint, and the previous owners left the wall in pretty rough shape after taking down their pictures and art. Home Depot’s attempt to match got us a color in a whole different color family, and several shades darker than the piece of our wall. I will use it for an accent wall upstairs, but this leaves us having to repaint the entire downstairs (high walls included) as apparently their particular shade of beige is impossible to match. This time I went to Ace Harware, which is close to the house. Everyone was super friendly there, and they were happy to tint their Royal brand paint with a Valspar Color – Creamy Latte. Ace’s Royal paint is highly rated by Good Housekeeping, and it’s $20 less per gallon than Valspar, so fine by me!   It’s lighter than the current wall color, also brighter. The people at Ace were extremely knowledgeable and friendly and I was able to find  the HomeRight PaintStick there too. This tool apparently lets you draw paint directly from the can and paint tall walls quite quickly. I’ve heard much praise for this tool, so I’m hoping it will help us not implode from paint overload. 🙂   I think Ace Hardware will be our go-to from now on, and I will report back on our results with the PaintStick.

Into the Blue

Yesterday I had a really down day. It was the smallest of things that really threw me off. I went to the house and attempted to clean the sliding glass door track. I used a tutorial from Pinterest that involved sprinkling baking soda in the crack and then adding white vinegar for the bubbling action. Well, it did bubble, and some grime came out but the track was still black with dirt and debris crusted on so thickly that even a second scrubbing with ammonia did very little. Suddenly, I was just overwhelmed by our many tasks ahead, so much cleaning, and such really intense cleaning, my fingers hurt and were cracked from all of the scrubbing over the last few days. Then I opened the dishwasher and found that it stank horribly. It’s a great Kitchenaid washer but it was crusted with food debris, grease and odor. That’s the thing I can’t get over – it’s this gorgeous house with top of the line everything, and yet everything is just grimy, months and months worth of grime.  Anyway, I ended up doing two heavy duty/sani-clean cycles with baking soda and vinegar and then one with dish-washing detergent and then it was better. And then I opened the freezer and found that it too, stank, so in the dishwasher the drawers and ice box went. I looked at the weed-infested yard and was just done. I was sick and tired of cleaning up someone else’s rotten food and debris, while really wanting to just get started on our actual home improvement projects. So I went back to my parents’ house and took the night off. I’ve always found when you get too frustrated, it’s best to walk away and start fresh later. Today I went back and had a better day. I felt ready to tackle what needed to be done again. I finished the main wall color on the master bathroom. I still have trim to do. Here’s the aforementioned before (this picture really doesn’t pick up the mustard-hue of the background, just trust me on that): Here’s the newly painted wall, serene and blue: We used Killz primer to cover up the bamboo stencil. The design still showed through the Killz, which concerned me, but it only needed one coat of paint after and that took care of that. I’m glad to be done with the Killz, as it’s oil-based and sticks to everything, including hands. Suzy came over in the afternoon (after much pleading on my part) and helped me paint the bathroom vanity. It had been stained red-brown, painted white, and then painted cream. The cream was thick and chunky and peeling and odd looking. I hadn’t intended on doing anything to it this soon but CT had hated the bathroom from the moment he laid eyes on it and would like us to have it totally redone in a year. I don’t hate it and think that with some work it could be fine for a good few years. I wanted to show him that, if done the right way, painted cabinets could really dress up the room. I took off the door before I took a photo, but you get the gist: Suzy has done cabinets before and brought her sanding machine and everything. According to her, visible brush strokes and a total lack of sanding is what made the vanity scream “DIY.”  Sanding is, in fact, one of the worst things ever. However, it’s necessary, and with the machine, not hard in the slightest. We also used a foam roller to avoid brush strokes. The foam roller was not my friend because it requires a very light touch and I was used to applying pressure as one does on walls. Suzy just took over for me, which worked plenty well. Also, the medicine cabinet had been stained the red-brown but never painted to match as the vanity was painted, we decided to have it match the vanity because…we don’t like ugly, badly done staining. 🙂 For color we used Valspar’s color “Hematite” which is a deep gray with a touch of blue in it. Suzy is the fastest painter I know, and she doesn’t make a mess, which is more than I can say for CT and myself. There will be complete pictures to share once I give the whole deal a second coat and then seal it with polyurethane.  The change is amazing, the walls and the vanity are turning out to be the perfect setting for the coastal feel we want in the room. I am freshly encouraged to keep at it, this will be one hell of a house when we are done!

Paint, paint, paint

Today we got a late start. We were both exhausted from our ten hour days for the last two days. So, even though we bought all the supplies to tile the dining room floor…

…we decided to leave that project to next weekend when CT has a full day to do it. I work in education and am off in the summer, but have zero knowledge of tiling, so I think that’s a wise plan.

Instead we primed the master bedroom in preparation to paint. This project is just due to personal taste. Although there were chunks out of the wall here from when the previous owners moved out (just like the rest of the house), we really didn’t care for the paint color/stencils, so we knew all along that we wanted to change it. I will save the “before” picture until we have an “after” to share. However I will share the current color of the walls, which is very similar to the color “dandelion” in Crayola Crayons:

Too, mustardy for us in any case, but then there are bamboo leaves stenciled in olive green.

It’s a cool idea – a bamboo wall – but we both hate the colors. One room is a pretty lemon-yellow and we plan to paint another a light jade green, so it’s not yellow and green we dislike, just these two particular shades. And even though the idea is one we can appreciate, neither of us are totally awed by bamboo in general. So, we decided to paint our master bedroom and bath a color called “palisade blue” by Valspar.

We chose this color because I am planning on doing a nautical theme in our bedroom, CT didn’t hate it, as he hates many other colors, and we have such a pretty water view from our bedroom and we thought it would compliment the view.

 

I will update you when we’ve done two coats and it dries. Another, smaller, project that I did today was to spray paint our vent covers. I got the idea from http://fullofgreatideas.blogspot.com/. I decided to DIY update because while I originally wanted to buy these art deco style covers…

…but even on Amazon they are $13 a piece. With our ten vents, that’s $130, $130 we’d rather spend on…anything really.  So I bought some Rust-Olem oil-rubbed bronze spray paint:

I used to to spray out ugly, came-with-the-house-in-1990, brown vent covers. At first, after a wash with ammonia and Dawn dish-washing soap, they looked like this:

 

Now they look like this:

 

 

Total cost: $7 for spray paint. Next I’m going to try doing the brass door knobs in satin nickel spray paint, we’ll see how that goes!

 

“There is no substitute for hard work…”

A Thomas Edison quote there. My father-in-law would love it – he’s 86 and very into the wisdom of our founding fathers and other men of note. Today I spent nine hours cleaning and performing small tasks at the house, with help in the evening from the Husbeast and my crafty and handy friend Suzy. First I tackled the carpets. One of our biggest disappointments yesterday was the condition of the carpets in the house. The previous owners had carefully staged their furniture to cover stains and there were some new spots since the inspection. It looked pretty rough, the family room carpet looked like this:   When we first saw it we thought that we’d have to replace it. We priced carpet, laminate, and ceramic tile at Home Depot. We then felt despair and panic. But this morning I woke up feisty, so I loaded my parents’ carpet cleaner machine into the car, stopped at the Dollar Tree for ammonia, vinegar and various other cleaning supplies and off I went. I made my own carpet cleaning solution, because the commercial stuff is super expensive and smells funny (to me).

I used a quarter cup white vinegar, 1/4 cup orange-scented imitation Febreeze, a couple of drops of clear, scent-free All laundry detergent and filled up the rest of the tank with VERY hot water. I got this idea from the site The Dollar Stretcher.com. I also got the idea to spot treat with ammonia, which worked great. I did the whole area twice, which did a good job of removing stains that were just wear-pattern dirt. Then, the remaining stains I soaked with ammonia and sprinkled baking powder on and let sit an hour. The water from the dirty-water tank was black every time it needed to be emptied. The machine also sucked up and spit out lots of dog hairballs, here’s a picture of about half of them (yuck): Then after I re-shampooed the spots several times, I let the carpet dry and was amazed at the result:     It was salvageable! Now there were still marker stains (So, I learned my future kids will only use washable markers, and also if they mark up nearly as much carpet, wall, and interior refrigerator (?!) space as the previous owners’ kids did they won’t be using markers in the house at all thankyouverymuch). However, I think we can hide them with an area rug and our couches. The space looks generally clean. I repeated this process in our front room with the same results. The adjoining dining room though, not even going to attempt…it is so dirty, and has so many stains. Carpet in a dining room is just unwise anyway. Husbeast is going to tile the dining room with ceramic tiles, which are stain-proof when sealed. No pictures because taking pictures of filthy carpet gets old fast.

I also cleaned the blinds which were encrusted with dust and grime. That was a job, I used a sponge and 409 cleaner. Suzy later told me I should have taken them off the wall and cleaned them in the bathtub. Did I mention that she is practical as well  as artistic? You should check out her furniture restoration blog, A Treasure Redefined. Guess who’s revamping my dining room set soon? Anyway,  here’s my sponge after swiping one slat: While I was at it I washed the walls and windows – the walls need paint touch up and we have a great water view, so the windows just need to be clean. By this time CT and Suzy had arrived. Suzy caulked the multitude of small holes in the wall and CT cleaned out the refrigerator with vinegar and baking soda – the whole thing smelled like rotten vegetables and regular soap and hot water wouldn’t remove the smell. I cleaned the kitchen, an lo and behold, under the crumbs, hand prints, and smears of food, we have a lovely marble kitchen island.   I finished up the day feeling like our home-improvement tasks were doable. It’s a true shame that the previous owners cared so little as to leave it this dirty, but it’s ours now, and it’s going to sparkle soon.

First Day

Today was the first day we had possession of our new house. We are so excited to start customizing it, but it was disheartening to discover that the previous owners left it filthy. Surprising too as it was clean when the inspection was done three weeks ago – that’s a lot of dirty living for three weeks!

One of the bathroom toilets was clogged, the yard was full of dog poo, there were food smears all over the counters, in the drawers, the fridge reeked of rotten vegetables, there were new stains all over the carpet, and huge gouges out of the wall where they took off pictures that they had glued on with some type of putty.And the garage door doesn’t work now (it did on inspection day). Oh and a giant hole in the deck. 

 

Nice, huh? We asked them to take out the hot tub on the deck because it didn’t look well maintained. And they did. And left us this:

 

Yep, they never treated the wood underneath the hot tub. What you can’t really see is that the dampness from the hot tub around the edges made the boards rotten, so those need to be replaced. Plus…even if we just wanted to paint over it we don’t have the matching paint color so the whole deck now needs to be repainted. And, you get to see a little piece of an old, rusty, broken table they left us. 

Personally, I’ve never left a place less than sparkling when I’ve left it to new people. I do understand the “not my problem” feeling of moving, and this family was likely annoyed with us because our lender couldn’t get it together and close on the schedule they would have preferred (although they did sign the contract agreeing to a later closing time before randomly changing their mind). Still, I’d be ashamed to leave a place I lived in that kind of condition, especially because it’s a beautiful home on a beautiful piece of property. 

Not the best welcome to our first home but we’ll put some elbow grease in and in a month or so it will likely look better than it has in years. Let the madness begin! 

A House of Stone

The title of this blog “Shelter the Heart,”  is taken from one of my favorite poems, House of Stone by Carmen Bugan, a poem that a long-time friend read at my wedding.

In the village where I was born, we wish A house of stone to shelter the heart of a marriage So here too, I wish you Obstinate, strong love, unyielding and unending. May you be in reach of each other when all seems lost, May your tears and your smiles happen always face to face. When you imagine that you have shared everything May you know that you still have the rest of your lives To do it all again and again. But now listen to the hurry of bells and Look how the petals of roses about the vineyard Bring you words of husband and wife: First words in your house of stone.

In the poem, a “house of stone” seems to be an intangible thing, the building of strength and care in a partnership named aloud. My husband and I have had ample chance to build or own house of stone to shelter the heart of our marriage. In our first two years of marriage I experienced a life-threatening and debilitating car accident,  I left my job, we moved across country, my husband experienced a painful and permanent injury, and I moved back to live with my parents and resumed working while he deployed to Afghanistan  for seven months.

It was not easy, but we came through it with one hell of a house of stone. Now, CT (nickname for mah husband) has exited the military and is working in the civilian sector, and we were able to buy our first home. We are currently waiting for the military to get around to shipping our furniture (at our cost – did you know that they only pay for active duty or retirement moves? Once you choose to leave you’re either stuck at your last PCS location or pay our of pocket to move), moving out of my parents house (Yasssss!) and engaging in many, many home improvement projects.

I hope you’ll join us through these blog posts as I share our improvements to our new house of brick and mortar as well as the every day challenges that help build our house of stone.