bedroom upgrade: step two

Last week we finally changed our mindsets about our upstairs, bungalow style bedroom and decided that it should be just as "finished" as the rest of the house. Our first step in that process was getting some new bedding - a simple change that made a nice amount of difference while we were still living in a very large, very white room.

Step Two: Painting the angled ceiling

This past weekend we resolved to getting some color up on the walls / ceiling of the bedroom. Now, it's not as simple as picking a color and simply painting the four straight walls because as you can see in the "original" image above, the shape of the room is not typical. The angled shape creates an overbearing amount of white ceiling when left white. Merely painting the limited wall space isn't a strong enough contrast in a room of this size. In light of this, we decided to switch things up a bit. 

We chose to use the same color that we used in the dining room: Benjamin Moore White Water which I snagged for $10/gallon. When we painted the dining room, the color read a little more blue that we would have hoped but we still ended up loving the contrast it created. We thought having that nice "light blue" feel on the ceiling of the bedroom would be nice and cozy without feeling too heavy. 

After edging in along 22 edges and around 2 light fixtures, not only once but twice (gotta have good coverage!), I was feeling the ceiling painting pain. There is a lot of ladder standing when there are that many edges!! 

When I was ready to start rolling, I made sure to tarp below where I was working. It's amazing that the tiny little paint drops get all over everything - myself included! I channeled Dexter (the tarping not the stabbing) at some points during the process, but all in all got the impression that it would be very hard for him to do all that tarping and wrapping on his own - always a critic. 

After two coats of paint and some death defying balancing over the stairwell shown above, the ceiling was painted and the room was looking cozier than ever! 

   

The color, which read blue downstairs, now reads completely grey up in the bedroom. Crazy how paint can trick you! We weren't disappointed though; the white pinstripes of molding along the middle panel add depth and character that would have been lacking had we been able to just paint the whole ceiling as one smooth surface. So far, we are pleased! 

We have more plans for the bedroom but they are constantly changing and morphing with every task we take on. For now, we are loving the warmth of the colored ceiling and our new bedding! You'll just have to wait and see what is next. 

Until next time, 

Lindsey 

***It's always so fun when I am painting to have Rob come into the room I am working on and express his thoughts, usually along the lines of "Wow!" or "Looks great!" Since he promises that he is a terrible painter, he hold the dogs at bay to keep them from becoming my next paint project and comes to see me with moral support and an occasional Diet Coke! Gotta love that team work! 

looking up

Painting the ceiling is a task, let me tell you! It's not easy being upside down and edging in (even with my favorite paint brush).

 

We thought painting the ceiling would be a nice way to break up the monotony of all the white in the hallway. We didn't want to paint the whole hallway, not because it would have been hard but it would have looked heavy. The way the walls are, with lots of corners, doors, and molding, we were unable to hang much art in the hallway to add interest. Enter a beautiful, lush color that makes a definite impact: Phantom Mist by PPG. 

 

This Manor Hall Timeless PPG paint was the $10 gallon that I scored on New Year's Eve! It's so nice to work with high quality paint, especially in this dark of a color. Coverage was great - only two coats with the paintbrush on the edges and three with the roller. This is great considering that I didn't prime and was applying to a pure white ceiling! 

 

After edging in, it was clear that this small and inexpensive change was going to make a beautiful difference! The color offset the white walls perfectly. 

I used a foam roller brush to apply the paint to the majority of the ceiling. Because of the type of application it took three coats to get full coverage with no streaks. 

  

 

Top left: foam roller and paint - that was all the paint I needed for the whole ceiling. Top right: first coat. Bottom left: second coat. Bottom right: third coat / final product!

We are so happy with the result! It makes the hallway, which connects each room of our house, cozy and keeps all the rooms feeling connected!

  

It's fun to see the pop of color from the adjoining rooms!

Thanks for following along -
Until next time,
Lindsey

a painter paints a wall for free... "it's on the house!"

Sorry for the terrible pun but I just couldn't help myself!

At the end of our last post we conveyed that we were painting the living room but might not like the color. Well we were right and then wrong. When I first edged in, the color looked reddish and really dark. Hoping that it was just the first layer, I went back around the room (all 29 edges!) to paint a second coat and unfortunately was still unsure when I went to sleep that night. You can see the first layer closely in the picture on the right and the second layer in the middle - much creamier but it still dried with a reddish tint. 

 

When I got up to roller the room the next morning, I was still disappointed that the color was darker than I had wanted. It was hard for me not to like the color since the whole gallon of paint cost us $5, but there is always a "feeling" I get about paint color; it either works or it doesn't at all. 

After painting all the walls with two nice smooth coats, we were beginning to like the color. After moving all the furniture back into place and doing a little rearranging (yet again) we decided that the color was comfortable and made the room feel complete instead of just looking like furniture placed in a room. 

Yes, I'm watching Alias!  

We love the way the new paint color makes the charming cove ceiling pop! The cove is such a fun touch and one of the things we initially loved about the house - we are happy to have it be a little more noticeable! 

Also, we changed some things around: we added the lamp behind the chair (Target Threshold), put a table between the wall and couch for the lamp, switched the table in the "collage corner" and moved the leather ottoman to be a side table for the over-sized chair. All we need now is a perfect tray for the ottoman and we will be in business! 

Living Room: CHECK!

Keep posted for our next projects, we've got lots of fun ones coming up!

Until next time,
Lindsey

p.s. LOOK AT ALL THAT SNOW and it just keeps coming!

picking out paint and saving some dough

We hope you all had a wonderful celebration with family or friends and you were able to take a look back at 2013 while looking forward to 2014 and a whole new year of opportunities! From Rob and I (and Oswin and Harlee) to you and yours, HAPPY NEW YEAR!

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Over the summer, before we even bought the house, my aunt told me (when discussing home renovation and painting) to "never settle or get your heart set on a color until you see what the local paint stores have in stock as "mis-tints."" I'm so glad she told us about this option because it has already saved us hundreds on paint!

Listening to her advice is how we first settled on Benjamin Moore "White Water" for the dining room. I went into a local paint shop before we even moved into the house for some inspiration. I remembered to ask if they had any mistints and just like magic by asking this question I was able to get two gallons of a color that I immediately loved for $10/each. It wasn't the color I was looking for but because I hadn't spent too much time committing to a specific color, we only spent $20 where we should have probably spent $130 or more!

Now that the dining room is all painted and looking lovely, we are in full paint mode to complete the other rooms that we have goals to paint. For most of the rooms we didn't even have an idea of what color we wanted when we set those goals; we wanted to get all the furniture and art we liked in place before picking a color. It's much easier for us to work backwards and finish with paint than to paint a room and try and match everything to that scheme.

On New Years Eve, on my way home from work, I stopped at another local paint shop right as they were closing. They were nice enough to stay open for a couple extra minutes to allow me to get what I needed. My first stop was - yes, you guessed it - the mistint section. I dug through gallons of paint with help from one of their associates and found a color that would look perfect in the living room. The best part? It was only $5/gallon down from $65!!! Success, another room painted for under $10!! After looking through all the colors in the mistint area, I didn't find anything else that I liked and resolved to paying full price for a nice rich color for the ceiling in the hallway, after all I had already secured quite a bargain. I picked my color and told the associate that I only needed a quart, his partner quickly turned and said "why don't you give her one of the gallons that are on sale in the front, it will only cost $10." Again, CHA CHING! Even the paint that I was willing and expecting to pay full price for only came in at $10/gallon down from $65!!

I scored two gallons of their highest quality paints for a grand total of $15.90 and saved over $115.00!! Talk about a great price!

For a general look at our color scheme I found these swatches online. Winter White is our dining room color, Phantom Mist is for the hallway ceiling, and I would say that the mistint for the living room is somewhere between Arabian Sands and Covered Wagon.

New house paint savings so far:

Dining Room - Winter White: $130 $20
Living Room - Mistint Tan: $65 $5
Hallway Ceiling - Phantom Mist: $65 $10
Kitchen - Mermaid Green: $11 (the only paint we've paid full price for yet!)

GRAND TOTAL: $271 $46

Not only has buying high quality paint for cheap become a very fun game to us, we are so happy to save we've saved hundreds doing it!

Happy New Year once again and happy paint hunting to those of you in the market!

Until next time, Lindsey

*** Do any of you have success stories when it comes to bargain hunting for home renovation materials!? We'd love to hear from you!

adding a kitchen shelf

When we retiled the kitchen to make way for the hood, we were left with a big open space between the counter and the newly installed hood. It looked much nicer than it had before we took the giant microwave out, but it was still missing a little character (and storage space). Lindsey keeps the oils, salt and pepper, etc. in a wooden box behind the cooktop but it has to be moved every time we cook so it doesn't burn... not a great situation. So she came up with a solution: since the inside of the cupboards had to be painted white anyway, she wanted to make a little addition of a shelf between the cupboards. Now, when she first suggested this to me I was worried about a full shelf over the cooktop, thinking that the heat wouldn't be a good idea under the shelf... understandable right!? (Lindsey says: "He often acts as my common sense, ha!") Once she made it clear that it was only to be about 4 inches deep I was on board!

It's fun to make something out of nothing even if it's a really simple project like this one. We felt somewhat more proud of this project than others because it was an idea that started in our minds and came out exactly as we wanted!

I started by measuring and using my awesome miter saw to cut the pieces that the shelf would rest on. Because it isn't a very wide space and the wood we were using was good quality we didn't need to anchor the middle of the shelf. The shelf is 3 3/8 inches deep (quite a random number but it was half of an existing scrap of wood) and about 34 inches long. 

         

I used a drill bit to make pilot holes in the wood blocks as well as the adjoining cupboards in order to make screwing in the screw a bit easier. My first block install went fine until I put the screw in - the wood split, proof that even "easy" projects can be a bit frustrating. I was thankful that this happened on my first go-round because I could start fresh! 

       

After I got the blocks flush to the bottom of the cabinets and attached with no splitting, it was smooth sailing. We had planned to just attach the shelf with liquid nails (our favorite adhesive so far) and start painting. The plan would have worked brilliantly had we not run into a slight leveling problem. It wasn't any measuring or installing on our part, the cabinets are actually about 1/4 inch off from one another and when you are looking at a long "straight" shelf that isn't straight - it's quite noticeable.

All we had to do was add a scrap of wood with the liquid nails, wait for that to dry and then putty in the gaps! Not really a whole lot of extra work, just some unexpected problem solving! 

  

 

Far left: liquid nails to hold left side of shelf, Middle left: liquid nails with added piece of scrap,

Middle right: caulking the gaps, Far right: the side with the added scrap has been filled and caulked

Once everything dried and the shelf was set into place, it was time for the first layer of paint. As you can see, Lindsey does all the "make it pretty" work as she is a bit better at it than I! We used Glidden eggshell white paint which matched the kitchen cabinets. After one layer of paint, it was very clear that more than one layer of paint was required and the "unfinished" edge of the shelf needed to be sealed between the first and second coats of paint. 

Once the putty sealed fully we were able to finish off the painting and "set up shop" with our new shelf; so far so good! 

We have had a busy weekend - just wait and see what we have coming up next. 

Thanks, as always, for reading and following along with Lindsey and I as we refinish and set up our home! 

Until next time, Rob

I just had to add on this picture that Lindsey took while I was cleaning some duct tape off our front window. Our dogs are so fun!

It's hard to see, but that is Oswin's silhouette and Harlee is down in the darkened left corner. 

it's the most wonderful time of the year

Christmas is one of the most charming times of the year. It was so fun decorating our new home to make it reflect the holiday cheer that we love being a part of. We put the tree up the Saturday after Thanksgiving, the earliest we've ever decorated, but we were so eager we just couldn't wait! It was fun to find a full sized tree this year, we've never had one before - it was cold and we weren't prepared for the wait outside but we had fun while we waited!

We picked a Frasier Fur, a type of tree we have grown up with, and while they were trimming our tree to fit into the stand I was able to get some extra branches for our front porch pot. If your Christmas tree spot lets you take the extras it's a great way to save about 30$ on front porch decorations! 

After we rearranged the furniture a bit to make room for the tree, we were able to light her up and decorate with our eclectic bunch of ornaments that remind us of very fun memories of the past! For fillers on the tree I always shop the after Christmas sales, that way we can have a fully decorated tree without paying an exorbitant amount of money for the ornaments, garlands and lights (Target is usually my go-to for Christmas sales!)

I found a nice looking fake wreath for only 8$ and was able to decorate it for "nothing" with purchases I had made in the past (woo hoo sales!) I didn't have to use anything to secure the garland (it is just tucked between pieces of the wreath) and the two "love birds" are just sitting atop with their toes for balance. 

We don't have any type of a mantel so we hang our stockings with care on the buffet we use as a tv stand! The stockings are cute pottery barn stockings that we received as a christmas present the year we were engaged - thank you New Jersey Brands! 

I was able to change the table scape just by adjusting the arrangement and adding a filler to some of the vases. Everything was either purchased at salvation army or was at a huge discount (I think I got the two candle sticks for $12 each from Anthropologie!) I always just try and move things around with my dining room table so that I don't have to find storage for the pieces I'm not using and so I don't have to buy more decorations! The pheasant feathers are actually from pheasants when we went out hunting a while back! 

The dogs don't mind the tree one bit and haven't tried to eat any of the ornaments - thank goodness! They even have their own stockings that hang over their food bowls! Maybe they will wake up on Christmas morning to find a special treat! 

The littlest things can add to the holiday cheer around a home. We don't have the ability or space in our pocketbooks to change our whole home decor when Christmas comes around, so I make little additions and changes that can easily be manipulated into the scheme of our home! The little Santa was a housewarming present (thank you Aunt Mary!), the bells were $2 last year at Target's after Christmas sale, and the metal trees were a hand me down from Rob's mom (thank you Kristin!) Decorating for the Holidays doesn't have to break the bank, you just have to think ahead in order to save some green!! 

Well that's all for now! Merry Christmas everyone! 

Until next time, Lindsey