Up a steep and very narrow stairway...

Ten points if you get the lyric reference, a tribute to the late Marvin Hamlisch.

Well, with school about to start and me back to working full-time, home renovation has been relegated to weekend projects.  No more painting every day...cue the trumpets. (Wah waaahhh...)

This past weekend, we chose something we thought would be quick and easy to tackle in two days: the stairway/upstairs hallway.

A reminder as to what the hallway looked like when we moved in:

There's that hideous, purple-y taupe again that we just covered up in the living room.  Unfortunately, the color extended into the stairway and all the way upstairs to the hallway there.  The picture on the right is a little more accurate on the color; I think I screwed up the white balance in the picture on the left (amateur photographer here) so it's not accurate.  It really was a very purple taupe.

We thought that painting the living room was going to do it, and it certainly helped a lot, but what we then realized is that you can see that stairway/hallway color from every single room in the house.  Every.  Single.  Room.  So we couldn't escape from it...and suddenly painting over it became a much higher priority.

Here's our new color:

Kilim Beige by Sherwin-Williams

I know, totally a cliched color (it's their most popular beige) but it's simple and goes with just about everything.  We had it in our bedroom at the last house and liked it.  Since you can see the hallway from everywhere in the house, we wanted to pick a neutral that would go with all of our other colors.  Plus, the hallway is pretty small, so we wanted to lighten it up to help make it feel larger.  The taupe was dark and made the hall feel small and cramped.

This color is also one shade lighter than the living room, so it goes well with the largest room in the house but adds some depth so everything isn't all one shade...like purple-taupe.

Look...even just priming it made it so much bigger!

I mentioned that we thought we could do this in one weekend.  It turned out to be a much more time-consuming job than we thought, because it was difficult to prep (check out Sean's tarp job on the stairway) and there was a lot of edging to do.  

Sean and I have a system now for painting.  I start with the edging, and then once I've gotten sufficiently ahead, he follows behind me with the roller.  It works well.  I don't like using the roller (it hurts my hands) and Sean doesn't like edging.  We make a good team, what can I say.

There's my favorite laundry chute again.

This hallway had a few tricky small areas, too, like that narrow strip to the left of the laundry chute.

You'll see that we also caved and already swapped out the knob on the laundry chute door.  Much better, n'est-ce pas?

We ended up having to do the final coat of paint on Monday night, because we were just too exhausted after two times working our way up and down the stairs this weekend.

We liked the tarp on the stairs so much, we decided to keep it...just kidding.

Sean didn't think that joke was funny.

Voila...new hallway!

It definitely looks better and makes the house brighter.  Not too exciting, but a huge upgrade in our opinion.

What it made me realize is just how beat up the white trim is.  I'm looking forward to repainting it...in time.

As you can see, we also still need to replace the light switch covers.  Another story for the next post...

Shower Update

I forgot the most important thing!

I figured out how the shower works.

So did our friend Susan, and apparently Sean and I are not the only ones who have been stumped by this stupid faucet.  If you missed it in our comments, here's the video she found:


Dino, I feel your pain.

Moving Day

For starters, I have to apologize for neglecting the blog for the last week.  We've been a little busy with trying to get the final painting done, and then packing for the big move.  The great news is that we are now all moved in to the new house and out of our old rental.

The bad news is that most of the house now looks like this:

...but we're working to slowly fix that.

Let's back track a little...

Our goal was to get the living room, master bedroom, and Sean's office painted before we moved in.  We knew that those rooms would be getting the most use right away, and would be the hardest to paint once our stuff arrived.  Sean and I were power painters for about a week straight, doing three coats on each room (primer and two color coats)...but we pushed through and we got it all done just in time.

Our living room color, Nomadic Desert by Sherwin-Williams.  This is just a shade darker than what will go in the adjacent hallway and entryway.

Finished living room...voila!  I can't believe I took the photo before we removed the tape.  Whoops.

We had a bit more fun with Sean's office.  In our last house, we wanted to paint it a light, mossy green.  I picked out a color that looked great on the paint chip, but somehow ended up looking like seafoam green once it hit the walls.  It wasn't totally hideous, but it wasn't what we were going for.

This time, I think we found a good color: it's a bit darker, and definitely more brown undertones than blue.  It looked like pea soup in the can:

Ryegrass by Sherwin-Williams

...but it went on the walls a much nicer shade:

Ignore the wet patches. I took this while we were mid-room.

As Sean pointed out, it's Kermit colored.  Which is pretty perfect for him.

We've set up the essential furniture so far, but things are still looking pretty messy.  As things look more finished, I will post better pictures.  Here's one sneak peak I did snap, though.  Our bed sheets really do look lovely with the bedroom wall color.  Again, the iPhone photo doesn't do it justice, but it's a little hint at how great it will look once we put the finishing touches on:

An awesome headboard is on our shopping list.

In the meantime, I've had to take a little break from home improvements to do some "real" work and get ready for the new semester starting in less than two weeks (gulp).  We haven't been all work and no play, though.  Sean and I managed to get away from the house work a few times to check out the local county fair.  Free, farm animals, and fried food.  I even made a couple of cute friends:

Paint, paint everywhere...

We've made some huge strides forward over the last few days.  I think the best thing was finally getting the kitchen cabinets painted...all two coats DONE.  We still need to put the hardware on the doors and hang everything back up, but it feels very good to have gotten through all that sanding and painting.

We have had a few opportunities to explore our new town a little more, including eating at the one "fancy" restaurant in town last night (delicious and not that fancy) and finding an absolutely adorable little local produce/garden store.  They have locally raised meats, which we love:

Yup...all local.

After getting the cabinets painted, I needed something a little more exciting than painting white...over white...over more white.  So I treated myself and tried out the kitchen wall paint we picked out.  We haven't done the main wall yet, but here's a little before and after of the cabinets and the strip above the sink:

Before: primed and ready to paint

Solaria by Sherwin-Williams

After!

I have to say that I LOVE how the color carries over to the inside of the cabinets that we're going to leave open.  The jury is still out for me on this color, though.  The actual color turned out to be a way more intense yellow than it looked on the paint chip. However, the only light we have in the kitchen currently is a fluorescent, and that's making everything look awful.  We're going to be changing that out as soon as we can, so I'll reserve my judgment until then.  In the meantime, I'll do a second coat later this week--I think that will also help, as the old ugly teal is STILL showing through the paint a little even after two coats of primer and one coat of the yellow.

And it looks awful with the forest green counters.  We've pretty much trashed those with all of the painting (the kitchen has been our main paint hub for the last few weeks), so they'll be getting swapped out ASAP.

Now, just priming and painting a room seems almost easy.  So much that we've been working on two rooms at once.  First, priming the living room:

Before, with ugly purple-y taupe walls (this picture doesn't do their ugliness justice)

Primed!

The best part, though, is getting to finally put some of the colors on the walls.  I'll have to do another blog post sometime about the color palette Sean and I chose and how we went about choosing the colors we did.  Unfortunately these iPhone pictures don't really do the colors justice, since they're not totally accurate.  I will take good pictures with the good Canon SLR later so I can post more accurate "after" shots.  In the meantime, here's a tease of our bedroom:

A reminder of what it looked like "before"...

...sans wallpaper...

...getting primed (this is Sean's "meerkat caught in headlights" look)...

...and ready for paint!

Remember how I sort of half-joked that we liked the bare plaster walls so much that we were going to leave it that way?  Well, we almost did...here's the color we chose:

Versatile Gray by Sherwin-Williams

"Gray" is a bit of a misnomer because it has enough brown in it that it's much more of a taupe than a straight-out gray.  But it doesn't have that awful purple undertone like our living room formerly did.  I panicked a little when we first opened the can, because it looked much, much lighter in the can...and when we started putting it on the walls...but once it dried, it was perfect and absolutely gorgeous.  

I shouldn't even post this photo because it really doesn't do the color justice, but here it is as a tease and I'll post a better photo later:

It's a very soothing, calm, restful color.  We wanted to do something neutral so that we can change out the color scheme of our bedroom easily with the bed linens and accessories.  I think this will look really fabulous with our current sheets and furniture, which look something like this:

Now the scary part: the movers come on Monday, so we are in the home stretch before all of our stuff gets dumped into the house.  We're taking a day today to finish packing, and then our goal is to get the second coat on the bedroom and the two coats in the living room done before moving day.  We've been working pretty quickly, so fingers crossed.

It would go a lot more quickly if Brody would get off his lazy butt and help us, but all he does is this:

Silly dog.

For the record.

So close...

I think I hit something of a low point a few days ago.  It felt like we were working so hard on these (*&)#%^&(@)! kitchen cabinets and they were still so far from being done.  Plus, working outdoors in 90+ degree heat isn't really fun.

The cabinet doors got moved inside and that helped a lot.

Much better idea.

And I think we've had a breakthrough now and things are looking up.  We are so close to finishing!  The doors are just awaiting their final coat of paint today.

I didn't get a picture of the drawers, but they are primed and ready for their first coat of paint today.

And the cabinet bases are totally primed and ready for paint.

They look so pretty, even with just primer!

Sean had a little bit of an adventure trying to paint the insides of the bottom cabinets, which basically involved him being inside the cabinet:

Where's Sean's head?

I see you!

Achievement Unlocked: Painting the Far Back Corner

Brody found an old rug that was left behind in the house, so he just sits there and watches us all.  One can only imagine what must be going through his head.

You guys are crazy.

When we get sick of painting, we've been picking away at the wallpaper in the dining room and entryway, slowly making some progress so it'll go a little quicker once we get to taking it down for real.

Die, wallpaper, die!

Finally, we learned something new about the house this week.  I've had a show running at school, so I've been working at the house during the day and then going to campus at night.  It's pretty sweaty, dirty work, so I brought my toiletries and a towel down to the house and figured I'd just take a shower and change before I went to the theatre.

I got upstairs, turned on the water, waited until it was a good temperature, and then went to turn on the shower.

There's no way to turn on the shower.

There is a shower head on the wall, clearly functional, but I could not for the life of me figure out how to turn it on.  I even called Sean up to the bathroom so that he could try, and he couldn't figure it out either.  There's no little knobby thing on the faucet to pull.  The handle doesn't pull out or do anything that would start the shower going.  We even tried adjusting the shower head to see if there was something on it that would start the shower.  Nope.  

So please, my dear three readers of this blog...tell me, am I absolutely stupid and missing the obvious or did the crazy people that lived in this house before us really have a shower with NO WAY TO TURN IT ON?!?

Check out the faucet...there's NO KNOB!

The conclusion of the story is that I've been taking showers in the basement.

Guess what just got bumped up to the top of our list of repairs to do?