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!