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.  

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 ❤

What's Going On

NO  DISASSEMBLE

Remember the Ikea FORHOJA kitchen cart that I was using as a sideboard type thing before  I built the apothecary unit?

This is it, all disassembled. It's already been sanded down fully, and given a first coat of stain. Judging by how the staining is going, it may need 25 coats. We'll see.

What else am I doing right now?

• Crocheting a blue shawl
• Crocheting a multi-colored sweater
• Painting the legs of a little nightstand-table I have sitting around in my bedroom (finished)
• Sewing 5 cushion covers for a friend's couch
• Working on a painting I'm making for a friend for Giftmas

What's Next After That? 

• Refinishing my bedroom nightstand
• Refinishing an old wooden plant stand
• Crocheting a rug for my roommate, as soon as we find the right yarn
• Crocheting some slippers, maybe 
• Sewing a skirt or top for myself out of the leftover fabric from a dress I made recently 

What's New? 

I finally bought myself a new sander!  My old one was a work horse, but it was too big, heavy, and high-powered for me to wield safely anymore - it shook me and hurt me so much my hands and arms would be unusable for days after, every time I used it.  I got myself a little $23 Porter & Cable in-line palm sander, and it's GREAT!  Much more easily controlled, and it does as much work as my big one ever did - surprising, for such a little, lightweight thing.  Yay!  

More news on the FORHOJA as it develops.  Meanwhile, here's a crocheted scarf I just finished yesterday: 

ooh, ahh

Whew!

I know, it's been a hot minute since I posted here, but that's because I haven't been working on any projects around the house.  I've been painting, sketching along with the Inktober drawing challenge, and crocheting all the things. I'm also prepping for a Halloween party, which I haven't thrown since 2014!

I started a fish tank, too. Right now, it's devoid of actual fish - I let it sit a couple of weeks to cycle, got a couple of plants (the leafy little Anubias nana and the Marimo moss ball (actually a beneficial algae) above), and have been contemplating getting a bunch more plants and a Betta but not actually doing it. Aside from a bit of mold on the wood (need some snails to eat it) it's coming along beautifully for, you know, not having any fish in it. Because it's a fish tank.  Let's be real: it's a box of water with a log in it. But it'll grow.

I do have several furniture projects planned:

• Refinishing the once-and-forever art table, which I've been "working on" refinishing for over a year now
• Refinishing my nightstand, an antique plant stand/hall table 
• Refinishing a little wooden chowki table that's seen better days
• Frosting the glass on the doors of my Ikea HEMNES pantry cabinet, and painting the rest of the unit. 
• Staining my Ikea FORHOJA kitchen cart, something I've been thinking about for three years and hadn't decided on until recently
• Possibly building a big honking sideboard for the living room from scratch. Sort of. 

Lots of projects to keep me in the garage this winter! 

But this month, I'm mostly focused on the Halloween party: 

• Buy all the spooky things
• Make all the other things spooky
• Don't have a heart attack over established friends base meeting new friends from work at the party
• Spray-paint the dog* 
• Finish crocheting the little pseudo-Victorian boot spats I'm making for my costume, block them, and sew buttons on 

* not really, but Daisy is getting a body paint costume, as soon as I order some dog-safe paint

I'm working on a painting right now, slowly, and I have no idea when I'll be finished.  But here's the last one I made, finished three weeks ago: 

I also painted this little papier-maché skull for Halloween.  It's not shaped much like an actual human skull, but I tried to get it as realistic-looking as I could anyway.  I'm kind of proud of poor Yoric here. As a friend said to me this morning, it's hard to paint dimension and shape onto something that has none.  Rewarding, when you get it right, but hard.  

Anyway, I'm off to Halloween all the things.  See you again soon! 

Time Out For A Shitload of Jewelry

In and amongst the various house projects, I've also been making a whole bunch of jewelry.  I don't know what's got into me lately - I haven't made jewelry in years, but now I can't stop doing it. I guess I caught the bug again while repairing some pieces. Here are some of the pieces I've made lately:

A "let's see if I can still do this" starter piece with metal leaves, and a wrap on a clay scarab. 

Necklace and earrings in Fluorite, amethyst, iolite, and emerald chips. 

The fluorite set (left) was inspired by this lampwork glass set
(right), which I made several years ago. 

Miscellaneous bracelets. From top right:  a silver-colored metal bangle with
stones glued on (don't know what kind of stones);  a "silver" and black faceted
bracelet and earrings, plastic;  and a bracelet with blue faceted glass
and plastic  "metal" beads. 

Faceted carnelian, graduated, with that scarab from the first picture. 

Faux-lapis (dyed howlite, I believe) which broke. I didn't have the right spacer
beads, so I improvised...

...I improvised in a way that left me with enough beads and spacers
to make a matching bracelet. Yay! 

I have two more necklace-and-bracelet/earrings sets going right now, and nothing planned after that.  Whew!  So many projects. 

I also painted this: 

"Atchafalaya", painted from photos I took the last time I was passing
through the Atchafalaya Basin in Louisiana.   

That's all for now!  I have a new rug I'll show you tomorrow. 

Peacocks, For Some Reason

The living room is finally *nearly* complete!  I didn't really set out to re-do the entire thing, but that's almost what ended up happening.  So far I've:

• repaired two broken chairs
• new couch from Ikea
• new "coffee table" trunk from an old trunk  I had in storage
• made over an Ikea cart as a rolling side table/art cart
• Recovered a side chair seat
• Added shelves to the tv console for DVD storage
• Stripped, cleaned, and spray painted Sylvan's Tablemate work table (not blogged) 

Over the weekend I use some peacock calico fabric to make 2 new throw pillows and recover a dining chair that I use as a backpack/purse landing pad in the hallway, and a coordinating wall hanging fabric to make a ...wall hanging.  

1                                2                                        3                                        4

1. Wall hanging over the fireplace
2. Hall chair, an Ikea KAUSTBY
3. Throw pillow and Cat of Approval
4. Peacock fabric and teal cotton backing, on a green towel that serves as an ironing board until I get a new one. 

The fabric isn't exactly upholstery quality - it's just a medium weight cotton calico.  So,  I reinforced it with heavy fusible interfacing and backed it with another medium-weight cotton, so it should be fine.  Not bad for like $40 at Fabric.com (including pillow forms and zippers!).  I started out looking for a botanical on a black ground, but I couldn't find one anywhere that I really loved;  meanwhile, this peacock fabric has all the colors I love and want in the room, and gives about the same look as the black botanical I'd had in mind would have. Score!  

I love the way the wall hanging works on the fireplace, and how the peacock pillows kind of bring everything together. The artwork on the fireplace is all pieces painted by me, by Sylvan, and one by her grandmother. 

While I was removing staples from the chair seat, my hand slipped and
I carved a pretty good chunk out of my knuckle on a broken staple. 
Done. For. The. Night. 

What's Next:

IS IT HERE YET?? IS IT HERE YET?? IS IT HERE YET?? 

Ikea RASKOG Cart Makeover

Making over the RASKOG is a pretty big deal. Google it, or search Pinterest, and you'll see a million different variations - lots of crib-side diaper carts, bathroom carts, bar carts, and an endless barrage of art supply carts.

As much as I love these things, and as many RASKOG carts as I have* I've managed to have never jumped on the RASKOG  re-do bandwagon...until now.

Do your index finger a favor and get a spray gun handle that attaches to a can.

I disassembled the cart and cleaned it thoroughly (dust, dog hair), then primed it with Krylon self-etching metal primer.  It eats into the original finish, giving the spray paint something serious to adhere to, so it doesn't peel or scratch.  The paint I used is Rustoleum's Chalky Finish spray paint, in "mink."

I LOVE THIS PAINT.

Chalk paint is another bandwagon I haven't yet taken a ride on, but man this paint is amazing! Soft and smooth looking, it really is soft and smooth to the touch.  The matte finish means no reflections, which I've always found makes a thing seem to recede into its surroundings (which is awesome, when you have a small house and too much stuff).  Plus, I'm really digging the color.

It's not fully outfitted with all the stuff that's going to be on it yet, but I'll post another pic when it is.  The idea here is that it'll basically be a rolling coffee table that also holds my colored pencil cases and a tablet, so I can have it next to me while sitting on the couch.  I love to watch movies while I work. Especially Moana.  :)

*So, how many RASKOG  carts do I have?  Four: 

1. A turquoise cart which holds my small hand tools in the garage
2. A dark blue cart which holds my art supplies
3. A black cart which holds my bike tools and accessories
4. A newly-painted taupe cart, see above ;) 

Oops, five:  it's not a RASKOG, but I also have a similar cart from Michael's in a mint green, which currently holds all of my music books and doodads.  The mesh on the floor of the trays is finer than the Ikea cart, and not as thick.  It's kind of weak and flimsy, so I don't put a whole lot of weight in it. Originally I used it as my art cart, but the bottoms bent so much they made my cups of brushes and pens fall over.  This cart is the next one I'll be refinishing. 

What's Next?

There's a LOT happening in the living room right now, and it won't be over til about the 13th - that would be Bulk Trash Day, when my giant, ugly, smelly, broken couch goes to live on a farm.  I'll have another living room project for you after the weekend, and then a big update on the living room the second week of August.  I hope!

Meanwhile, please enjoy this little vase of goofy poppies I drew on the inside cover of my 6" Moleskine sketchbook.  Man, I love drawing on black paper. I need to get a lot of it.

The Craft Room, and Another Big Change

I started this post two months ago, when I began working on the craft room.  I got a little distracted along the way, but we'll deal with why in a minute.   As you can see below, this room is red as fuck.  It's a gorgeous color, but very dark, and there's a whole lot of it in this big master bedroom-turned-craft room.

I started by finishing out all the baseboards, as in the rest of the house, and by cleaning, priming, and re-painting all the doors and trim.  The walls themselves are taking 2 coats of primer to cover up the red enough that it can be painted over. 

One wall of the room is textured with sand mixed into the red paint, just like the walls in the master bathroom walls ; except that on this wall, a sort of strié technique has been used to shape the sand texture into vertical  ridges. Just like in the bathroom, I wondered why??

While priming around one of the windows on this wall, I figured it out:  this wall is covered in wallpaper!  At some point, it was painted over (and over, and over - there are at least three different colors on top of it), and textured with the sand and dragging technique.

Hunter Green and burgundy, with gold.  Oh yeah! I thought. This house was built in 1984! Of course it's got plaid wallpaper. LOL.

I found wallpaper under the vanity in the master bath, too (blue with gold fleurs-de-lis)  - I bet it's all over the bathroom, under that sand texture. I can't believe I didn't put two and two together before.












So, I continue to chug along on this room.  It's about half primed now, and all of the trim and doors are finished;  It just needs a wall primed, and then paint on the whole thing. And while I've been working on repainting, I've also been  PACKING.

The Frost Is Off the Ground 

We're moving again.  My landlady-friend is selling the house.  Sylvan and I were supposed to spend 2017 preparing for a move to Oregon, but we both had a horrible year full of injuries and medical issues, and didn't get our shit together.  So we're looking for another rental house here in Austin. that isn't scary and that will accept 2 dogs and 5 cats.  And, of course, we're packing, and getting rid of as much as we can to facilitate a move into a smaller space, and eventually, a long move across the country.


I'm not going to lie, I'm kind of terrified.   But I'm pretty big on the idea of focusing on the tasks and items you can control, instead of worrying about the ones you can't.  We'll find a place; and in the meantime, I'm looking forward to not being anyone's live-in-handywoman anymore.  Projects are fun, right up until they're jobs.  Also, if I never have to repair any plumbing again, it'll be too soon.

So I'll keep you all updated on the usual house projects, the house search, and eventually, the new place!

BONUS CAT:  not supposed to be napping in houseplants

.

A Small Kitchen Project, and An Art

Q:  What do you do when your oven mitts are falling apart?

A:  Buy new ones.



Q: What do you do when your oven mitts are falling apart and you've been binge-watching Good Eats with your roommate all weekend?

A: 

MAKE YEAST PUPPETS!   If you're not familiar with these things from Alton Brown's show, here's a clip: 

Those things are just the best EVER. They're little gray socks with googly eyes, pipe cleaner "antlers", and big, red mouths - they pop up, belching and farting all over the kitchen, every time Alton talks about yeast producing gas to make your bread dough rise.  Yes, the pipe cleaner "antlers" on my mitts are a fire hazard when reaching into a hot oven, and they don't fit in the drawer where the hot mitts and towels are kept without being smashed.  These things are just for fun, for "whimsy" in the kitchen.  I bought a second set of mitts for actual use.  

They do crack me and my roommate up, though, and that's what's important. 

*GIGGLE*

Meanwhile, though work on the craft room continues, I don't have anything to show you yet, and I'm still busy with the little, dirty details - and with finding the right size doors to replace the missing ones.  Ever take your car seats apart to fit a pair of doors into the car, and drive home with them literally pressed up against your face (ow), only to get home and realize you bought the wrong size?  Yeah.  *sad trombone*  

I did also manage to finish this drawing over the weekend, of a tulip I bought to decorate my new office at work: 

Anyway.  More actual house stuff soon, including, hopefully, some big craft room updates, and a BIG whole-house update.  Stay tuned.  You know, I mean, if you want to. You don't have to. It's your life. But I'll be sad if you don't. 

.

Windowz & An Art

I'm hard at work sprucing up baseboards, doors, door trim, and doorknobs, all around the house.  I have no pics for you, because...baseboards, really?  Not exactly newsworthy. 

However, I took a moment over the weekend to finally get my sand collection together, which sounds like a weird euphemism, but is, in fact, about an actual sand collection: 

Lighting in here is terrible, sorry for the picture quality.  There's not much to decorate in the master bathroom's Poop Cave, but there was enough wall space for a couple of favorite Impressionists (Monet's Impression Sunrise; Van Gogh's Seascape near les Saintes Maries de la Mer;  as well as a small oil painting of a lighthouse on a cliff painted by none other than my roommate, back when she was in high school).  

The plants hanging up there are a Senecio ("String of Bananas") and some sort of weird fern I found at Blowe's with no label.  Both puny-looking and in desperate need of more water and less cold (like me in the winter).  

I don't know why I collect sand, that's just the way it is.  Initially I collected it every-sandy-where I went, to fill my incense burners;  but somewhere along the way I developed a love of just collecting sand in general.  Sort of an, "I buried my feet in this stuff, remember?"  (except for the sand people bring to me. I'm that friend who answers, "I'm going to Tahiti, want any souvenirs?" with BRING ME SAND!!!)  

Left to right:  

1. Hawaii, brought to me by a friend from her vacation.

2.  Costa Rica, also friend/vacation

3.  Cannon Beach, Oregon, from my trip there last August.

4.  Black sand from Hawaii, which is illegal to collect but is sold in these tiny bottles there. Friend/ vacation.

5.  Cozumel, Mexico, from my Caribbean cruise in 2012.   

# 1 and 5 need better jars, but, I like having them all displayed, finally.  There are two more around here somewhere, I think, I just don't know where.  

It's not much, but it pleases me. 

Bonus stuff: I made an art! 

I like to draw and paint, as you may have noticed in my last post when I made a little laptop table to draw on. I mostly just diddle around with coloring or sketching flowers and things, but I also like to copy some of my favorite paintings for practice and to explore translating images from one medium to another.  

This is a colored pencil version I did of Van Gogh's The Olive Trees  It was SO much fun. 

I measured completely wrong and had to tack on an extra page to get the paper sized right - it was either that or erase a LOT of work, which I wasn't willing to do, hehe.  Fun times. 

When next we meet, I hope to have some actual progress on the craft room to show you.  Let's see if I actually do. 

.

A Small Project With a Huge Impact

an Ikea Hack in the making

About a billion years ago (2015?) I purchased a SVARTÅSEN laptop table from Ikea.  It was awesome!  A little personal workspace - for my laptop, or my art, my nails, whatever I needed.

Problem is, moving into the house was so hectic, that this little thing got left outside, forgotten for several weeks, in the rain.  No big deal, though, right?  The top is plastic.

Except it turns out it wasn't plastic - it was laminated fiberboard, as I discovered upon turning this thing over to find a big, rotten mess.  Oops.

Not to worry:  I had a couple of small, wide boards left over from the built-in bookshelf project, and one of them just happened to be exactly as wide and deep as the Ikea Svartasen top.  I didn't even bother with copying the shape, I just used the entire board, in the hopes that the extra weight wouldn't unbalance the table (it doesn't) and that the new corners would give me more room to work (they do). 

(pay no attention to the hideous denim couch)

Here's the "new table", after I sanded, stained, and sealed the board, and screwed it onto the existing base.

I swapped the coffee table for a smaller one, too, and between these two tables taking up far less space than before, there's plenty of room for my elderly doggo, Shelly, to walk around, and lay down next to me on the floor.

The big rectangle is SO much better to work on than the little roundy-triangle shape the table came with!  It feels humongous, and it's nice to be able to spread out while I'm working. 

The little clip-on LED task light from Ikea  that's clamped to the table is REALLY BRIGHT, so I made a little lampshade out of a scrap of printer paper, to keep the light on my work and not in my eyes. It looks silly, but it works!

Cyclamen, 1-28-18

Just in case anyone's curious, this is the drawing on the table in the sketchbook on the table.  The little wonky leaf cracks me up - I was trying to remember how the patterns go without looking at the actual plant, and failed miserably.  I love mistakes like this, though; I love seeing them in old sketchbooks, and seeing how far I've come from those old drawings.

I have a weird urge to paint something cool on the surface of my "new" table.  I'll let you know if I do.

More soon!

Bedroom: Accomplished

My weekend was extremely busy.  I was off work on Friday; I basically woke up, had some coffee, and got to work - and didn't stop until Sunday night.  I painted walls and fixtures, moved furniture, repaired furniture, worked in the yard, cut pieces of wood into smaller pieces, worked on my bicycle, rearranged rooms, hung curtains, knocked out a bunch of boring, regular ol' housework - so many things!  I'm actually sore all over, I worked so hard. 

My biggest (and favorite) accomplishment from the weekend was this:

At last, a bedroom that looks like my actual bedroom!  Literally, actually - like 90% of the things in here came from my room at the old house;  even the paint color is similar (this is Glidden "White Bucks," a very, very pale gray;  the old room was Behr's "White Clay", which was a warm white with yellowy-green undertones). 

All of my old bedroom furniture is here.  I didn't exactly want to throw it all into the same corner, but, that's the way the room works.  Believe me, I'm perfectly willing to sacrifice options for that huge, glorious box window. 

It ends up functioning like a little "work triangle", like you hear about in kitchen design - it definitely makes getting ready for work in the morning fairly hassle-free.

Interior With Woman Reading,
Carl Holsoe, 1863-1935

In case you're wondering - and I'm not sure if I ever mentioned it before - my inspiration in this room (and its predecessor) comes largely from Carl Villhelm Holsøe's paintings of his home.  I like Victorian interior paintings in general; but there's a contented tranquility in Holsøe's work that I really love. 

 I cannot get enough of this amazing, 16"-deep box window. 

 Rabi likes it, too. 

In case you missed it in the pictures above, this is my Aardvarkadile.  It's a crocodile with enormous, floppy, lopsided ears, because...well, why the hell not, right?
Hee.

Just in case you forgot, here's what the room looked like before I moved in - not a terrible blue on the walls; teal and gold inside the window box and all over a decorative shelf that spanned one wall of the room; linoleum tile on the floors. 

There's also a hand-painted ceiling fan;  it's still there, but I flipped the blades so that the plain, pale-wood-look side shows. 

The pink duct tape on the window was actually holding one of the panes in place - about a week ago I removed the tape, the pane, and all the old caulking, and re-set the pane into the frame. 

Things left to do in this room:  

• baseboards will be installed soon by the tilers, who removed the old ones when they installed the new (gray, ceramic, wood-look) tile throughout the house
• there's no door on the closet.  If I catch that curtain on my face and pull it down onto my own head one. more. time...
• what was left of my bedframe finally collapsed!  Time for a new bed. 
• The windows desperately need blinds, or some other privacy-protecting covering, underneath the sheer, white curtains.  That window film, though lovely - even though it's mismatched - is practically transparent at night when the lights are on indoors. No bueno.