Project of the week

My parents are coming to visit soon.  So the project of the week is to finish* decorate the guest bedroom--finally get a bedframe, hang some pictures, etc. 

To review, here's what the guest bedroom looked like in May, when our first guests arrived:

The walls, trim, and ceiling were all the same almond color that graced all the rooms of our house.  Plus lots of spackle on the walls where P was busy fixing nail pops.

And here's a peak of where we are today:

As with all the rooms, the ceiling is Behr's white ceiling paint, and the trim is done in Behr Ultra Pure White (satin).  We painted this room just after I figured out my cardinal rule of paint color selection--when in doubt, go with the Benjamin Moore historic colors line, so the walls are Benjamin Moore's Edgecomb gray.  A pretty misleading name--not a gray all all, but a nice taupe.  Perhaps with warm gray undertones.  Not too pink, but not at all yellow.  Just what we wanted.  (We also tested Elmira White.  Very similar, just a touch lighter and less gray--also a lovely color.)

The windows used to have IKEA Wilma curtains (in white) hanging on the rods and puddling nicely on the floor--but I liked them too much, and borrowed them for the master bedroom decorating project.  Since my parents live closer to an IKEA than I do, they're going to kindly bring another two sets for the guest bedroom.

Right now, the room is nice and neutral with crisp white accents and minimal furnishings, and P and I are really liking it that way.  My plan is to furnish it with various family mementos and hand-me down furniture pieces.  The trick will be to do that while still keeping the calm, uncluttered atmosphere.  We'll see if I can pull it off!

*I can't finish the guest room--to the extent that anything is ever finished--before my parents arrive because my parents are bringing a number of items for that room: curtains, dresser, nightstand, and chair.  There's a very real chance that I abuse my guests.

Surprise master bedroom decoration project!

P was away on a business trip Thursday-Saturday.  I decided it would be really great to complete a major house project on my own, and surprise him with it when he got home.

The short list included: 1. Really clean up and de-clutter the place, 2. Finish unpacking boxes and setting up the living room, and 3. Painting and decorating the master bedroom.  Painting definitely sounded more fun than cleaning, so it was on!

The master bedroom was never a priority.  The walls were a shade of just-off white.  Not offensive, but a little too reminiscent of all of our bland grad school rental apartments.  Plus, they were quite full of nailholes and scuffs from whatever items the previous owner had had there.

Frankly, choosing to paint the bedroom over of the of other possible jobs was a largely selfish choice.  I was pretty sure P would be more relieved to find that all of the boxes had magically unpacked themselves, rather than the bedroom had a new wall color.  But whatever.  I'm the laborer here.  But then, a few days before he left, P came to bed all dejected, and told me that he kind of wished we were sleeping in the guest room.  It was all nice and finished!  And not full of stuff!  And it had paint, baseboards, and even a floor! 

Um, yeah, a floor.  We were so eager to get rid of the carpeting in our house, that we went ahead and pulled it all up--fully knowing that the master bedroom only had OSB subfloor under the carpet.  (The rest of the house had hardwoods under there.)  We knew it would be 6 months to a year before we would be able to lay hardwoods in there, but a subfloor seemed way better than mauve (and occasionally stained) carpet.

In case you're interested:

Living on an OSB subfloor is pretty obnoxious.  It's nearly impossible to clean, and I get the occasional splinter in my foot.  But neither of us have any regrets about tearing out that carpet.  It was the right thing to do.

I'll start the redecoration narrative by mentioning that we still have a plain OSB floor.  It doesn't make sense to us to invest money and time into a temporary fix, and most of the options we can think of would make our lives more difficult when it comes time to lay those hardwoods.  So we're sticking it out.

Enough about the sad floor situation, and back to P's dreams.  Crisp white sheets!  Like in a hotel!  Wouldn't that be nice?

Well, yes, that would.

With this unexpected validation of my decision to do a surprise bedroom makeover, I busied myself with as much prep work as I could without raising P's suspicions.  I picked up new white sheets, picture frames and curtain rods, two gallons of paint, and got busy patching those holes in the wall.  (Yeah, that wasn't just a "I can't stand having a hole here anymore!" patch job.  And there was one smaller hole I didn't even tell you about.)  Even though I selected a paint color I had already tested in two other rooms, I obeyed my cardinal rule of painting a test swatch on the wall--behind my dresser.  Sneaky!

As soon as P was gone, I pushed all the furniture to the center of the room and threw some drop cloths over the pile.  (Hooray for large rooms and small furniture collections!)  Obviously, there was no need to put drop cloths on the floor.  After all, the last painters hadn't either.  (They sprayed painted the wall before the carpet went it!)

Then I painted and painted and painted. 

And ran around decoration at the last minute before P came home.  Except everything didn't come together quite as well.  Wow!  Who would have thought hanging curtain rods was this hard?  Why aren't they straight?  I measured the holes!  Why did I buy full size sheets for a queen bed?  Oh no!  Last minute trip to the store!  Wash the sheets!  Put them on the bed!  Wait a minute--that's a king sheet!  But the package says queen, and everything else in it is queen.  Manufacturing defect!  But P is in the driveway by now.  Oh well. Sheets will have to come later. 

And I didn't get around to hanging photos.  Which is probably just as well, after the hash I made of hanging curtains.  P can help with that one.

So, what you've all been waiting for.  Before:

After:

Before:

After:

Before:

After:

And, for the coup de grace:

Before:

After:

Painted faux headboard!  Cheaper than the real thing, and much easier to fit in the car.  Only took about an hour of planning with graph paper, and two and a half hours of measuring, leveling, taping, realizing a critical mistake, retaping....  But it was totally worth it--I'm thrilled with the results.

P and I are both pleased with the paint color--Benjamin Moore Quiet Moments.  We had tested it in two other rooms, so I knew that he liked it.  I didn't want to do all of that work of painting and then have him disappointed with the results.  Interestingly, it's the darkest paint color we've used in the house (though I certainly wouldn't call it a dark color--we just tend toward light ones), and this is the darkest room--and it works well.  I went with eggshell paint, thinking it might help brighten up the place a little.  Maybe it does, but I rather wish I had gone with my trusty flat paint--I'm not as good a spackler as P, and my wall patches could use all the disguising they can get.

So there it is.  Surprise!  Stay tuned for the finishing touches to the decor in a week or two.

Reflections on 13 months as a housewife

Tuesday evening I patched my first drywall hole. 

Our master bedroom used to have a shelf on the wall for a TV. 

We didn't want this shelf.  And it was just at the perfect height for us to hit our heads.  (Yeah, we're not always the most graceful or attentive people.)

In the name of safety--well, actually in the name of destroying nemeses--one of the first things P did when we bought the house was to take the shelf down.  Like, a month before we actually moved in.

The shelf had cable and electrical outlets built right in.  When we took it down, we discovered a surprisingly large hole had been cut into the wall to feed these cables.  For four months now, we've been looking at this lovely hole over our TV each evening.

I decided that enough was enough, and if I wanted this situation changed, I had better take care of it myself.  P's to-do list was far too long already. 

For context, I had done one spackle job before this, repairing a hole about the size of a 50-cent piece.  P had taken over halfway through, after I had gotten myself in over my head and made a number of mistakes he labeled "amateur."

P found me out right at the beginning of this process, but exercised remarkable restraint and did not take the job over.  He went out to the garage and busied himself building a ramp to get the coal stove (and whatever large items we dispose of in the future) out of the house.  I had the house to myself to blunder along and make whatever mistakes I needed to in order to get the job done.

Digression: Irony of the Day: We used to have a ramp on our house, to allow easier access for elderly residents.  It covered the stairs you see in the picture--coming out toward the photographer.  I loved the ramp, especially when we were moving in our fridge and when the washing machine delivery men arrived.  P hated the ramp with a passion.  I went away one weekend to attend a friend's wedding, and while P was left unsupervised, he demolished the ramp.  But he saved the components, and here they are a month later--built into an entirely new ramp. 

Sidenote to the digression: I have to admit, that this ramp is a significant improvement on the old one.  P can come out the kitchen door and push the handtruck straight down the ramp.  With the old ramp, the handtruck had to come out the door, execute a 90 degree turn to the right on our relatively small landing, and then continue down.  With a large, heavy item on the handtruck, this was a particularly delicate steering maneuver.  The new ramp location is significantly safer.

Back to the main story: Before P bowed out of involvement with the project, he convinced me that I should enlarge the hold just an inch to the right to include one more stud, so I could anchor the patch more firmly.  I got out a razor blade and started cutting.  And then started prying, and wondering why I was so inept and couldn't just get a small piece of drywall out?

Turns out the drywall was glued to the stud.  WTF?  Not standard construction practice in any book we've read.  Knowing that there was a good reason I was having a hard time here, I pulled P out of the garage to ponder the glue with me, and get the offending bit of drywall out for me.

Then I cut my new piece of drywall, grabbed some drywall screws, the drill, and P's magic drill bit that prevents me from drilling the screws too deeply into the drywall, and went at it.

Not too shabby, right?  (Well, other than the embarrassing empty screw holes where I confused the marks I had made for myself denoting the stud locations with the marks that the shelf installer had made many years ago signifying the center of the hole.  This was one of those moments where I was glad P was in the garage.)

I grabbed my mesh tape and spackle tools, and two coats of spackle later, I had this:

In total, it took me four coats of spackle to get things reasonably covered and smooth.  (Standard recommendation is for three coats.)  It would certainly look better if P had done it.  But if P had done it, it would still be a hole in the wall right now.  And I think this looks a lot better than that.

Later that evening, while the first coat of spackle was drying, I headed into the kitchen to do some baking.  Pioneer Woman Ree had posted a blueberry crumb cake recipe that morning, just as I was fretting about the blueberries in my fridge that needed to be used before they spoiled (as I had let the blackberries do just a week earlier).  (Spoiler alert: The cake turned out well, but rather too sweet for my taste.  I should know better than to deviate from the blueberry crumb cake recipe that my mother bequeathed to me, the one that calibrated my palate.)

I got well into the cake baking process when I discovered that there was no baking powder in the house.  No disaster.  We did have baking soda, and I had been planning to add some lemon zest to the cake, because I believe almost every blueberry recipe will be improved by the addition of lemon.  I just squeezed in half the lemon juice as well so there would be enough acidity to activate the baking soda, and all was well.

But the whole incident got me thinking.  We have no baking powder in the kitchen not because we ran out, but because I threw away all but the most valuable kitchen ingredients when we moved in February.  Spices, balsamic vinegar, good wine and chocolate made the cut; nearly everything else was trashed.  No baking powder in the kitchen signified that I hadn't baked a cake from scratch in over six months.

I've been unemployed since getting married last June.  Certainly the terrible economy has had something to do with this, but it's been more about a whole host of personal reasons and choices: taking some time to catch my breath after finishing school, a long and unsuccessful job search in one field, the choice to change careers, the choice to move for P's career and wait until we were settled to commence my own job search, taking some time to get the house set up rather than jumping right into the job market, etc etc.

I never pictured myself as a housewife.  I've adjusted to the situation much better than I expected.  It's been nice to have some time to work on other things.  If you had asked me a few years back to speculate on my life as a housewife, I would have imagined myself bored and isolated and bitter (which I almost never am).  I'm sure I also would have imagined all of the extraordinary culinary concoctions I could make with the new-found time on my hands. 

The events of Tuesday night provided an interesting opportunity to reflect on how unexpected my current life is, and how surprised I am to find myself largely content in it.  There's no baking soda in the kitchen, and not only am I failing to create lovely desserts, but I generally panic at 5:30 most days because I have no clue what we're going to eat for dinner, and there are few ingredients in the fridge or pantry to work with.  But I am managing to patch large, unsightly holes in the wall.  I never imagined myself taking on that, or any of the host of other things I've been working on lately. 

I'm good with this life.  I'll take it.

That said, this is actually my last week of "full-time" unemployment.  I've registered as a temp worker with P's employer, and will be eligible for assignments beginning Monday.  I'm not sure what this will bring--how often I'll be working, or on what projects.  I tend to like structure and predictability in my daily life, so exercising this kind of flexibility will be an interesting growing experience.  We'll see how it goes!

Preview

Here's a hint of what I've been working on lately.  I'm hoping I'll have it ready for a full reveal in a week or two.

Surprises

Yesterday evening, I left to run a few errands, and was gone approximately an hour and fifteen minutes.  When I left, P was happily spackling the bathroom ceiling.  (More on that another time....)  And the dining room looked something like this:

(Except I painted the shelves a few months back, but you get the idea.)

I got back to find P in the driveway, looking like the cat who had eaten the canary.  And the dining room looked like this:

P followed me into the house, asking, "Are you mad?"  "Are you kidding?"  I replied.  "I've been begging you to take that stove out for months!"

Okay, the stove isn't quite out.  It's now stalled in the kitchen, as P designs and builds a ramp to get it out the door, because it is cast iron and heavy.  Sometimes I think he does jobs just so he can build all the associated equipment--rather than building the equipment to get the job done.  He does love this sort of work. 

But I digress.  Back to that fireplace.  P did take the cover off so we could take a look around in there for the first time.  We do indeed have a fireplace back there!  There's a stove pipe inserted into the chimney, which is every bit as full of ash and creosote as I had feared.  It's truly amazing that the house didn't burn down the last time the stove was lit.  It's technically a coal-burning stove, but the previous owners had been using it to burn wood--perhaps part of the problem.  We won't be lighting any fires until the stovepipe is removed and we've called out a chimney sweep.  He's the first person we'll be hiring to work on the house--quite a milestone!

That ugly cover will be staying over the fireplace for the foreseeable future.  There's no damper in the chimney, so leaving the fireplace uncovered would be akin to leaving a window open day and night, year-round.  We're going to look into installing a damper, but that's quite far down on the to-do list.  But in the meantime, I'm quite glad that stove is gone--one more item off the list, and several square feet of space freed up.

Maybe I should go to the store more often.