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.

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!