Third Project: Bathroom Paint

I'm going to stop numbering these posts any time now.

Project #3 in the new house was to paint the bathroom.  Like the bedroom, it was painted a dirty yellow color with a darkish, dusty blue accent wall. The craft room is painted the same way, actually.  I guess someone at some point got some oops paint on sale.  The walls are also dirty and smudged and dinged, and there's this...thing...here, look:

When people don't know how to patch holes correctly. 

Here's the bathroom before:

bleh

And here it is after:

The new color is homemade.  I took some of the Silvermist from the bedroom project and added it to a bucket of white primer, to make this color.  I didn't care what color I came out with, as long as it was pale enough not to clash with our towels and things.  I'll be honest, it doesn't really blow my skirt up, but it's not yellow anymore, and that darker blue wall isn't looming over us anymore, and it's a nice, fresh, clean paint job, which I love to see.


The blob is a little better, too, after I sanded it down most of the way, filled the holes that appeared in it while I was sanding, and painted over it:

Still ugly.  Slightly less blobby.  

Yay.  The end.

Second Project: Gallery Wall

Whoops!  I thought I posted this a couple of weeks ago. 

The second project in the house was hanging art.  In the living room, there's a floor-to-ceiling fireplace, my china hutch, and several tall bookshelves - which doesn't leave a lot of wall space for artwork.  The solution?  A gallery wall!  Is the internet tired of gallery walls yet?  I don't care. 

TADA

I love it.  I especially love the plants on their little stands making this a whole wall scene.  They kind of ground the art, I think.  As for the art, most of it is just printed out, though the canvases are all originals by me and my roommate. Putting all this together makes me want to paint again.

Ye olde shtick of using paper templates to work out the arrangement: 

What's next? 

This holiday weekend, I'm going to paint the bathroom.  It's the same yellow-and-ugly-blue combo that my bedroom was painted - the craft room is actually done in the same colors.  Pics soon!

New House: First Project

Well, the move is finished and we're busy settling in.  After a few weeks of scurrying around unpacking and figuring out what to do with all of our stuff, everything is  mostly coming together.  We love the place so far: the floor plan is open and comfortable, there's plenty of storage, and there's a nice, big backyard for the dogs to play in.

The First Order of Business

So what's the first thing I did to the house?  I did what you've seen me do a thousand times on this blog: I painted something BLUE.

BEFORE

The walls of my bedroom were painted a dingy butter-yellow with a steel-blue accent wall. The paint job on the walls was old - filled with chips, smudges, dirty areas around light switches, and tons of nail holes. Plus, I despise yellow.  Thankfully, the landpeople said that since they weren't repainting the place before we moved in, that we could paint anything we wanted.  Woohoo!

How old-school-cool is it that there are sinks in the master bedroom?  I'm kind of loving it. 

AFTER

I love this color!!  It's Sherwin Williams' Silvermist, which is a soft, muted, dusky, greenish blue. Truth be told I was hoping to find something paler and grayer than this, but I opted for the right tone rather than the right depth, hoping it would work, and I LOVE the way it turned out.  My bedroom's been white for the last four years (by choice), and as much as I loved it, I'm really digging having color on my walls again.

CAT

I tell you what, as much as I love painting, it's no fun painting walls that go all the way up to the roofline.  I don't have a ladder that tall!  For the trim on the tallest wall, I stood at the very top of my 6' ladder with a 5' extension pole with a 2" foam brush taped to the end of it.  It took forever and it was SCARY.  Thankfully, I did not fall and die.

What's Next? 

1. Paint-wise, the bathroom and craft room are next - both are also painted in the yellow/blue color scheme that my bedroom was, the paint job equally old and battered.  The craft room will be painted with the left over Silvermist;  I'm not sure what color the bathroom will end up.    

2.  Sylvan and I have been hanging a lot of art, but we lack adequate wall space because of all of the large, tall furniture we have in the living room.  Solution?  Gallery wall! More on that very soon.  

3.  The landscaping at this place was seriously neglected for a very long time.  Technically, my first project in the house was a 6-hour landscaping bender in which I mowed the entire property (which is huge) and pruned back twelve bushes and a small tree which were all so overgrown that they were swallowing the back patio.  Next is the front "garden" under the windows, which is badly overgrown and full of weeds and anthills.  It's got a lovely little stone border, though, that's currently hidden under a battalion of dead Daylilies and "Monkey Grass" - once the dead plants are removed and the stones are washed off, it should be quite lovely.  

It's That Time Again

It's been a year since we moved into our little duplex, and now it's time to move back out.  For the second year in a row, the place where we live is being sold, so out we go. 

The new place is a single-unit house (yay!!) a little bit north of where we live now. The house is much larger than the duplex we're leaving (yay!!), with two bathrooms instead of one (yay!!) and three bedrooms, which means we get our craft room back (yay!!) 

The move isn't until May 4th, so for the time being we're packing and cleaning and packing and cleaning.  Moving has catharsis built-in: after all the stress of looking for a place, filling out applications, and figuring out the money for the deposits and first rent, at the end of the day there's good, hard work to burn off all that stress.  Yes, I'm one of those crazy people who enjoys the physical aspect of moving.  The best part, of course, is setting up house after it's all over. 

No, actually, I think the best part is sitting around with your tired, dusty friends at the end of moving day with pizza and cold beers, laughing about all the work.  Yes. 

So the garage is full of boxes already packed; and the house is torn apart and upside down.  There's a mountain of cleaning I want to do now that it would make no sense for me to do until the duplex is empty.  Somehow in the midst of it all I need to lay down fresh sod in the backyard (it's delivered, I just have to find time to do it before it dies), wash two dogs at least once each, and figure out where all the boxes are going to go once the garage is full. 

Obviously, there won't be much in the way of projects here for a little while longer,  but I'll have pics of the new place to share in a few weeks. 

Onward!  Work now, collapse on the floor later. 

CAT TAX

FÖRHÖJA Cart For Art: Another Ikea Hack

The new MOPPE sideboard that I built replaced this Ikea FÖRHÖJA"kitchen cart," previously used as a kitchen island and more recently as a storage piece in the living room.  It was home to a 10g fishtank (recently updated to a 20g), a potted Benjamina Ficus, four Ikea SNALIS plastic storage bins filled with aquarium supplies and other random items, and a cat scratcher nobody was using anymore.

I loved my FÖRHÖJA, I just wanted to change the color and repurpose it.

So I Did! 

Meet my new art cart/table!  Many, many coats of stain and sanding sessions went into this. People, there were problems with staining this thing.  All told I went through four different stains, who knows how many coats of each, and sanded it all down and started over THREE TIMES.  The end result of all that abuse is a cart that's a bit rustic looking, which I did not want, but it's FINE the way it IS because it's DONE.  HMPH!

Anyway. I actually do love it now that it's finished. :)

This thing has 30+ pieces.  That was a lot of staining and sanding and staining.

So! Much! Storage! 

So many drawers!  Baskets! Stuff!!

I added a two-prong hook to the front for aprons and towels; and a hanging Ikea basket (BYGEL, spray painted gold) to the side to hold large tools and bottles and brushes.


I got the water hyacinth baskets on Amazon, and lemmetellya, they're my favorite thing about this whole piece.  I looooove the way these things smell. 

The MOPPE drawer boxes on top are the ones I made in August.

I also added a 6" board to the top, on a pair of long tension hinges, so that I could extend the table top for a larger work surface, and also have some storage space behind/under the unit for large canvases and boards...but it doesn't work!

Turns out the long hinges aren't strong enough to hold up the extension when you put any weight on it (I think they're made more for holding trunk/chest lids open); so eventually I'll need to get a better holdy-uppy solution so I can use the extension.














As much trouble as the stain and the hinges have been, I LOVE it now that it's finally done!  It's taller than my old art table, which is fantastic - I'm 5'9, I have a tall easel, and I like BIG canvases.  It also takes up significantly less floor space than my old table, which opens up the "art room" behind the couch.  The extra floor space also helps with getting Shelly in and out of the back door - she's weird about her walking clearance, and won't go through anything too narrow, and won't step over, like, a SHOE that's in her path. Weird dog. (She's really old). 

More space in a tiny duplex is always welcome! 

Now I have a great new space to do more stuff like this:

Volcanic Seascape, November 2018, after a USGS photo of Hawaii's coastline back in July when Kileauea erupted

[Funko Pop] Bob Ross, patron saint of aspiring artists ❤