Shelfy Nook

FINISHED!  Finally.  This was like four days' work, and it took me a month. Whew! Procrastination is hard. 

 

Back to the beginning:

I started working on this nook in December  (see this post):
I  removed rotted and sagging shelves and plastic shelf clips which were painted and caulked into the wall, repaired the resulting wall damage, primed the walls and gave it a first coat of paint. 

When I painted the living room over the holiday break, I also installed these supports (1x1/4" pre-primed trim molding) and painted them in with the wall color when this wall got a second coat of paint.

Like a billion years later, I finally got the wood for the shelves out of the back of my car where it had been since December, cut it to size, and attached more (untreated) trim molding to the fronts.

Wood conditioner ftw.  I've never used it before, but WOW it made a difference. The stain went on so smoothly, only took a single coat, and sanding was minimal.

The stain is Minwax's Deep Walnut.  I'm a Jacobean girl from way back; this time I was looking for something with a little less of a green undertone, but not so warm that it bordered on reddish. This was perfect.

P.S.: stainable wood filler my ass. SO much work covering the nail holes on the fronts and getting them to blend in. Sigh.

I am loving the way these turned out.  I should have used a wider trim facing on the fronts of the shelves, so that they would completely cover the struts on the walls, but, live and learn, right?

The last thing was to deal with this nasty 30yo+ a/c return air cover.  It turned out to be a lot less work than I'd anticipated.  I removed it, banged it back into shape with a hammer (from the back), cleaned the gook off of it with my bike cleaning spray (AWESOME) then hit the whole thing with a couple of coats of plain, white, hi-gloss spray paint.

Hilariously enough, there was no filter behind this cover, and nowhere to fit one - the edges of the wall behind the cover are all crumbled and corroded, and when I tried to wedge a filter in place, it just fell flat.  I ended up zip-tying the filter to the cover to keep it where it belongs. Thankfully, it doesn't show:

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 


I LOVE the way this all came out. :)

More Blue Things

I'd been sort of half-assedly keeping an eye out for an affordable, blue rug for my room for years, but never found one that really caught my eye (that wasn't also ridiculously expensive). 

I finally found the right one last weekend at Target, when I wasn't even looking for rugs (isn't that the way it always happens?)  Hooray!  It's this one, if you're curious.

At 5x7', it doesn't cover much of the floor under the bed, but that's fine by me - it covers exactly the areas that I walk on, which is all I needed. 

A worn-looking pattern on a brand-new, fluffy, soft rug is a bit silly, I think, but I love it anyway.  And I adore the colors. 

I don't know how much Daisy understands about cameras and photography, but she sure gets RIGHT in front of me every time I whip it out.  Today, she would like you to know that she has an itch.  Dork dog.

A New History of Fireplaces

For someone who almost never burns a fire, I sure talk about my fireplace a lot.  The one in the old house went through about 7 transformations over the 12 years that I lived there;  the new house's fireplace recently got it's first (and probably only, tbh) makeover.

New Year's resolution: guitars in every photo (not really)

I actually did the work early in November, while my roommate was out of town visiting her family. I primed and painted the wooden footer pieces to blend in with the brick (not that they're fooling anyone, but I like the way the focus is now on the posts, instead of the odd shapes on the hearth). 

I cleaned and re-painted the brick; and cleaned up the wooden mantel.  I debated whether to actually refinish it - it's not my favorite color, but it matches some of the other wood pieces in the room; and the few white paint splatters on the wood (leftover from its original white paint job) came out with a Magic Eraser.

Did you know the active ingredient in those things in paint stripper? Wear gloves when you use them, please.  Magic can burn your skin.

This is what it looked like before, complete with original floor and wall color.

The posts and the woodwork behind them were painted sort of an admiral-blue.  It was a nice color, but I wanted something a bit more serious. 

BONUS CAT

Blue Paint Makes Everything Better

Last weekend, while everyone else was doing the holiday thing, I painted the living room. And the dining room. And two hallways. And the entryway.

Technically, I did more than just paint.  In what ended up being almost exactly 24 hours of work, spread over three days, I...:

• filled nail holes and caulked in the new baseboards, which were installed by the tile guys but not finished (why? no clue)
• primed the baseboards 
• primed the walls, from floor to ceiling, including the 12' vault in the living room
• cut and installed cleats in the shelfy nook in the living room
• painted the walls in the aforementioned spaces
• built shelves for the shelfy nook

I think I must've moved nearly every piece of furniture I own.  Some of that stuff is HEAVY.  Also, I'm not finished yet.  While I built shelves for the nook, I still have to sand and stain them.  So I'll have a shelfy nook update for you soon.  In the meantime, here are a couple of random shots of the other areas I painted:

This is one end of the living room, and the little tiny "hallway" that leads to the master bedroom suite (aka Gigantic Craft Room of Doom).

As lovely as this morning sunlight is, it's fleeting, and barely penetrates the space beyond this corner.  There's a serious issue with light in this house.  Time to learn to embrace lamps.

The "back" of the living room, behind the couch.  That's a lot of wall to paint, especially from the top of a ladder.

You can see the difference here between the light coming in from the kitchen windows, and the near-black shadows in the center of the picture. The neat thing about that is that all of the walls, at times, look like they're all painted in different colors, depending on the time of day.

The wall color, by the way, is Sherwin Williams' Tradewinds, which is a soft, pale blue with a touch of green in it.  I heart it.

EDIT:  wait, no it isn't - Tradewinds was what we used in Sylvan's room, and on the test wall in the living room.  I ended up swapping it out for something with a wee bit more green in it - Behr's Urban Raincoat.  

(Also on my never-ending to-do list: that empty aquarium. It's a bit of a running joke - it's been empty for years.  But it made a great terrarium for fake spiders at my last Halloween party).  

This is the dining room, aka "Room of Lost Furniture" aka "Laura's Guitar Crap Storage & Bike Workshop" (sadly, this particular bike, which is my favorite, is down with a serious case of Bearings Crud. Don't worry, though, it isn't terminal).

I'll be honest with you, I have no idea what this room is going to end up looking like.  For now, there's just stuff in it that has no place else to go.

This room has crown molding for some bizarre reason, even though exactly zero other spaces in this building have any.  I painted them the same color as the walls, to help minimize the fact of their existence - they just looked weird in there all by themselves.


 There's a lot more to show you, but there's also a lot more work to be done before I can do that.   I need to finish those shelves, for one thing; and there are still a lot of bare walls in this house, since I was waiting to hang things until after the big painting was done.

Then there's the dining room.  Hm.  My roommate wants to put a writing desk in there, which is going to be cool.  Also, there's futon just to the right of what you see in the picture that I've been trying to sell on Craigslist, but it turns out that Craigslisters are a bunch of flaky, flaky people (seven offers, all ghosted at the last minute? The hell?) I'm sure this surprises no one. As soon as it's out of the way, though, this room is going to get some serious attention.

But first: I have shelves to stain. After that I think I'll turn my attention to The Purple Glitter Situation.  But more on that later.




.