And then there was paint

So I've gotten the living room painted and it's been forever and a day since I posted. February has been a crazy month.

I've made umpteen visits to the doctor lately. First it started with Tyler getting Thrush, then a week later Leah ends up at the doc with a double ear infection, that was last Saturday. Tuesday I woke up and thought I was going to die, Wednesday I finally got my butt to the doctor. Strep throat and a sinus infection with the beginnings of a possible ear infection. Then to make everything even more ridiculous Thursday I had to take Tyler back to the doctor which he was diagnosed with bronchiolitis and an ear infection. So that was oh so fun.

Back to the whole point of all of this. The paint!

As I mentioned last time I had to paint one side of my living room then move all the furniture and paint the other side, one of the reasons it took so long. I have now painted everything but the front door because I need to paint it when it's open and I wanted to wait till a warm day to get that done, I think I'm going to try and do it tomorrow it's supposed to be close to 70.

So pictures!

And my couch arrived today! Soooooo excited! 

Waiting on the chair and ottoman though, they're back ordered till the 12th. Boo. 

Those are not the curtains that are going to be in here. That's a bed sheet.
 I was waiting till the couch was in to get the curtains and I think I've found the perfect ones at Big Lots.

I'm annoyed at the inconsistency of the lighting for my pictures. I swear I can't get a picture that makes everything look right. 

Now I've got to finish that front door, get the curtains up, replace all the switch covers (I couldn't find any that worked well so I'm tediously painting them all right now) and re hang all my pictures and decor. More pictures to come :)

It's been a while

It's been a while since my last update. Sorry about that, my modem when kaput and I'm waiting on it's replacement to arrive. Yay for insurance!

So since my last update I have painted exactly half of my living room. I had to do two walls at once so now I have moved all the furniture to that side of the room and am working on removing wallpaper, sanding, spackling, more sanding and painting. The whole nine.

Those closet doors gave me a horrible time. I removed them so I could paint the entirety of the door frame so it wouldn't look silly when they were opened. It took me over two hours to get those stupid things rehung. Who ever invented the bi-fold door should be kicked. Though realistically it didn't take me the full two hours because I took a 20 minute break after I got to the point where I wanted to just throw them out the back door and be done with them. I also adjusted them because they never opened right and it's amazing how well they work now.

Also, I know they look kinda bland now but I have a secret plan for that evil closet that takes up the majority of that wall, but I can't do it until I'm done sanding the rest of the room. 

So there's a mini update of sorts as I continue to transformation of my living room. 

Post It Note Tuesday (PINT) - Wish List

*The Wish List*

I wish....

I found this idea courtesy of  Brandi. 

Living Room, an update

I swear I haven't given up. I have been spackling and sanding my little heart out.

Since my living room is the main room of the house and everyone and their mother is always in it, plus my house was built in 1976 so that means there have been tons of people in it for the last 35 years. Everywhere I sand I notice more dings and nicks that I'd never noticed before. Plus there is so much freaking trash in the paint in the living room it's not even funny.

Hopefully I'll be done soon.

Also let me note that that electric sander is the greatest thing ever invented. Once I'm done with the living room I want to find even more stuff to go sand just so I can play with it some more.

Look What I Got

Gotta save those nails, ya know.

Introducing...the living room

Now that I'm done with the hallway I'm moving on to the living room.

Leah wants to be in pretty much every picture I take for this

Everything I did to the walls in the hallway I'm going to do to the walls in the living room because it shares the same stupid chair rail that the hallway did.

Yet when I'm done with the living room it will look nothing like the above photo. I'm super excited about this because we're actually buying new living room furniture, it makes me feel all adult-like. I love the furniture we have right now, it was a hand me down from my parents and really is supposed to be multiple colors, it's not that we have a random green couch and a random red chair they're a set and also have two matching yellow chaises, one of which is in our guest room/play room and one of which is still at my parents house. As much as I do love the current furniture it's not going to go with the whole color scheme I'm going with now.

The new furniture, I looooooooove.

We're getting the couch, ottoman & the matching chair in the back. yay!

 I think it will fit better in the living room because I have the world's worst living room for furniture. It's got a big window on one wall with the front door next to it. Across from that is the oversize door to the kitchen, next to that my enormous ridiculous living room closet. In the corner of that area is where the hallway is, which means I don't have a full wall next to that and that becomes the only sensible wall for our TV. So I'm left with one wall (the one with the mirror in the picture) to play with furniture on and around. Way back in the day before we owned our house it did not have central heat or air, they used those little A/C's and baseboard heaters. The heater is on the one big wall, and you can't put furniture near those. I have yet to figure out how they put any furniture in the living room before the central heat & air was installed.

I'm all giddy about the furniture but we don't get it till we get our taxes back. Boo. Though that's good because I'd hate to paint around my new stuff and accidentally get some on the new stuff.

So now, on to the new venture!

Hallway: The Reveal

So I never make New Year's Resolutions, but this year I actually did. I have resolved to actually complete my  home make over or whatever it is you'd call this. This blog is my proof and it helps motivate me to keep my goal.


And now what you've been waiting for....

Here it is!

dun dun duh na!



That lighting makes the carpet look a thousand times grungier than it really is

I didn't want to show off the hallway till I completely finished it and now I have. It took way longer than expected but I added an aspect that was much more involved than I had anticipated.

As you saw I finished painting the walls a few weeks ago, I then moved on to the trim. I like the way it came out but being such a dark color I was afraid that if I painted the doors to match the trim it would make my hallway seem even smaller than it is since it would be on five doors in a very small amount of space and there are no windows in the area to let in any light if the doors are closed, which they often are.



It took me a few weeks but I came up with a solution, we have flat doors in our hall whereas the two doors in our living room, the closet and front door, are six paneled doors. By using paint and a few how to websites I mimicked the visual aspect of the panels on the flat doors.

I love the way it came out.



The picture of this door was taken before the others were finished,
which is why the squares on the other door are still white.



By doing it this way I was able to use both the dark and light colors plus a little pop of white, it doesn't close in the hallway at all and it makes my doors a thousand times less ugly.

So just for fun I'm gonna show you the process of my lovely doors.

Step one: Google like a mofo till you figure out the correct terminology for what you're trying to do.
*Hint. the technical name for the doors I was mimicking is "six paneled door"*
Step two: Read more how to's than you can shake a stick at, or just read this one. Then choose your paint colors and lots and lots of painters tape

Step three: Measure out your desired panel sizes. *Note. I totally cheated, our bedroom door (pictured above) is the exact same width as one side of the closet doors I was going off of so I just used the exact measurements of that door on three of the doors*

Step four: Tape & Paint stuff.
This is where my process got a little stranger than the how to sites. Their step four is to paint your door the desired, and preferably lighter color. My step four was taping off my panels and painting the panels themselves the lightest color because I wanted a white trim around my darkest color, I didn't want to have to primer over my painted door and then paint white or make the white dull by painting straight over my door color.

I didn't think to take a picture of the taping till after I started to paint

Step five: Let paint dry and remove tape.




Oooooh Ahhhhh

 Step six: More tape!
To do it my way you now get to tape inside the now painted panels to paint the main color of the door. It kinda sorta sucked and was tedious on the first door but after that that it was quite quick to do. I also reused my tape from the previous step.

Step seven: Paint the main color of the door and the edges.
According to the interwebz when painting a door that separates rooms with two different trim colors you should paint the edge the hinges are connected to match the first room (in this instance the hallway) and the edge with the door knob mechanism should be the color of the room it opens into (in this instance my bedroom)



Step eight: Even more tape!
To do it my way with a border I had to decide what size border I wanted. I tried a half inch at first (noted by the two pieces of blue tape in the above picture) but felt it was too much. I settled on 1/8". Measure out desired size and tape.

 



Step nine: Paint the inner panel, let dry and remove tape. Viola!

Next I'm moving on to the living room. Pretty much the same process for the hallway will be done, minus the faux paneling on the doors because those doors are already paneled.

For starters we have to take the TV off the wall so I can start removing the chair rail and painting. I'm hoping this will go quicker than the hallway did because I won't be dealing with my learning how to do certain things, the fact that I'm going to have to move my furniture in circles around the room will probably make it go a bit slow though.

That's why I started with the hallway, no furniture to move.

Almost there

Right now Blogger seems to be having a photo uploading issue. I've been working on the post for the hallway reveal for about a week now, all it lacks is the pictures which are a main component to the post.

So I figured I'd give you a little light reading and a reasoning as to why on earth it has taken me nearly three weeks to paint the trim and five doors in a hallway that's only about 25-30 feet long.

First of all there was Christmas in there, that took up a lot of my spare time, between holiday stuff with other people, to finding time to Christmas shop when Leah wouldn't be around, and covertly wrapping presents. Shopping, because I despise shopping, took up a lot of time that I could have been using to paint on weekends. Of course the fact that I only really get to paint after 9pm most days  or else get hand prints in my wet paint also leads things to take a while.

Within all this there was also the fun of dealing with my dryer hose. While waiting for some paint to dry I decided 'Hey this would be a great time to clean under the dryer for some random reason. It was done quickly and I even patched a teeny tiny hole in my dryer vent hose. Then I went to put the hose back, I heard a crinkle and a smush, pulled the dryer back out and saw that I had put no less than 40 new holes in my dryer hose. It may have been a good thing I smashed the hose because now they only sell ones that look like they're made of tin foil whereas mine was some version of papery plastic. It was probably a fire hazard and like 95% of everything else recently was probably recalled 30 days after I bought it nearly 5 years ago. I set about replacing it then realized I threw away the old clamp with the old hose, it took me two days to remember to get one. Finally I got to put the hose on and rewash the clothes that had been in the washing machine the whole time.

Also within this time we had a new resident move into our house. It's small and brownish and looks a whole lot like this:

I am not happy about this.

We have a cat for a reason, and that reason is not to destroy christmas trees. I first found my foe when I was so innocently making a breakfast hot pocket a few weeks ago, it peeped it's little head out from under my microwave. I screamed and it dove behind our refrigerator. I tried to shove the cat back there but he wasn't too gung ho on that idea. I have not seen him catch the mouse yet, though he did leave us a dead bird on the front porch the other day. I though the mouse was gone after that but I was wrong. On Monday while getting ready to paint I heard a ticking noise. I couldn't figure it out. I knew it was coming from somewhere in the cabinet I keep my pots. I couldn't find anything...until I decided to open the drawer I keep things like spatulas in. I know you know where this is going.... I opened it up and there on top of the flat part of my biggest spatula was my foe. Again I screamed and slammed the drawer shut, he ran off. I've stocked up on traps and spent two days bleaching every surface in my kitchen and washing everything we cook and eat with 4 times before use.

Hopefully tomorrow I will be able to load my pictures and can post the final reveal of my hallway. I know you're super excited. Right?