Where all the magic happens

Or at the very least where all my stuff is...  My bedroom is closer and closer to being finished.  The lighting went in and I painted my ceiling but ran out of paint for one area... oops... so closer and closer.

This is taken from the front window - except I moved the book shelf to the triangle

Giant triangle where I moved the bookshelf and added another one as well as wall shelves 

 Pic of the other side of the room - the "sitting area" this is taken from sitting on my bed

The new lights!  There use to be a ceiling fan here ... but it's gone now and it's got 4 lights in the ceiling rather than hanging down.

UPDATED: Office Floors Sanded... stained

And poly put on:

Bring on the awesome floors.  Here's the thing about these floors - they're incredibly light.  So the stain that I mixed for the living room floors didn't work at all not a match - not even close.  So I tried to mix it darker that wasn't right, then mixed it again darker... still nothing.  But the darker can of stain was too dark.  So basically I ended up dipping my brush in the dark stain, then the light stain and then mixing the color each brush stroke at a time.  Hopefully this doesn't end up looking bad.

You can kind of see the lightest parts where it was dry.  You're supposed to wipe them down with water before you put the stain on.  I think it's supposed to "open the grain" er somethin...

My bedroom begins to take shape

Remember that one time I started taking wallpaper off the walls in my bedroom thinking it would be a weekend project?  Ha.. hahaha ... that's a funny one.  Turns out taking wallpaper off of sheetrock is impossible.  About two weeks later I finally got it done and painted.  The carpet was put in the next day and over that following weekend I started putting things into place.







Pulling off more wallpaper

painting book cases

I have a bed ... in my bedroom now... that I could reasonably sleep in if I really wanted to!

I'm going to put my Bette Paige painting above the bed and the blue Audry one is across the room but that area isn't clean and organized yet.  not that this one is really... but ya know... progress....

No idea how to organize this.  I have an old diner bar table and barstools from my kitchen when I lived in California.  What the hell do I do with them?  Plus this whole area is kinda difficult to navigate...

ideas?

Process of he Dinning Room Floors

Last week I began the adventure of the dinning room floors.  You guessed it... more paint all over them.  My guess is that during the 90's when my grandpa sent the house on fire (bless his heart) everything was painted, new carpet, etc... and in the process the people who were hired decided... they don't care they're going to put carpet over these floors so we'll just paint them.  So they did.  And now I want them to die. 











The next adventure was that I refuse to go to Lowe's to get the sander again.... ever...  So I went to Home Depot and got a drum sander.  Oh my god... best decision ever.  That thing sanded the hell outa the floor.  So this pic is the "let the games begin" pic.

Results!


















Paint ain't got nothin on me :)

being stained

Stained floors!!

2 layers of poly so far - but my friend Mark tells me I need like... six...  But OMG it looks so beautiful!!!

Looks like an actual dinning room now :)

New Kitchen Tile!

And AND if that isn't enough.... I hired someone to lay the tile in the kitchen, laundry room, and down the hall.   So here's the kitchen :)

OMG CARPET!

There are few spaces in the house that will have carpet.  In my bedroom when they built into the attic the floor that was put in was on top of plywood... so I have to cover that up.  My grandfather is an old fuddy duddy who doesn't like wood floors because it makes his feet cold.  So ... he's getting new carpet. 

Here's what we got!

Papa's Room:

I added some extra carpet along his bed to protect the carpet.  Think of it like adding plastic to furniture.  He's really that bad....

My Room - still under construction a little but hopefully will be finished this weekend or closer to finished this weekend.

Stupid mistake: not putting carpet in the closet.  It's cold in there and I jacked up the floor.. I should have just covered it up.... but I didn't...  Smart move: when I got the estimate on the carpet it was like $1700 just for two rooms and not even my whole room.  So I looked at the 99 cent per sq ft carpet in stock at the store ... it was fine.  So I went with that.  Saved me $800.  Seriously....

Design Dilemma Need Your Advice

I've got a design dilemma that I'm asking your advice on. I want a marble counter top. White with the gray veins. Consistent with the age of the house. When it comes to the cabinet underneath my mother and I are disagreeing on color. She thinks I should do a really dark cabinet to highlight the color of the marble. I want to do a white cabinet because all of the wood in the house is white - molding, baseboards, doors, plus I wanted to put white wainscoting on the walls.

So... questions:

1. Which color cabinet in the bathroom (see image options below)
2. If you go with a darker wood cabinet do you nix the wainscoting?
3. What color do you then paint the bathroom (see options below)

Vote at the poll to the right after viewing the photo examples below:

extra facts - the bathroom is the master bath that connects to the Tiffany's bedroom that is below.



Cabinet options
marble with white


Marble Counter with dark cabinets

Upstairs Bathroom Befores and After

I keep adding and updating paint but here's where I am now - almost totally finished except for the medicine cabinet I need to build but have no idea how to... so feel free to send ideas
BEFORE (with my BFF James about to take out the wall)



AFTER:

My Grandmother's Wallpaper

In the past year I've heard several women - always women of course - use the phrase "Wall paper is back." One was my mother who said that wall paper was back in and that there are so many neat patters and it was totally affordable now.

Here's the thing. Wall paper is not back in. It's only back in for people who are annoyed with what they've got and they want to cover it up. It's back in to wall paper manufacturers. I call bullshit - wall paper is not back in. I'm not saying that it can't be beautiful or amazing - but I'm sorry... I've got a bedroom with walls that follow the roofline. Do you honestly want to try and hang wall paper on that? I didn't think so.

I've never posted photos of my bedroom on here - but it so far has been the only room I haven't touched... until now. I was going to hold off and do it last. It's an amazing bedroom. Huge - probably 600-700 sq ft. Larger than my first apartment. It was a regular old bedroom, but in the 80's my grandparents knocked out the walls to the attic and built into it. It's amazing.

There is this wallpaper on it that is a sky blue with these little pink flowers with white leaves and stems. It makes me think of the movie Tootsie with Dustin Hoffman and Jessica Lang... There is this scene where Dustin Hoffman - dressed as Dorothy - is at the country house with Jessica Lang and her father and Jessica Lang is talking about the wallpaper she picked out with her mother for her bedroom when she was a kid. Her mother told her that the wallpaper was going to be up there for a long long time so to chose something she liked a whole lot. Every night when she went to sleep and every morning when she woke up it would be there.

She asked her mom which wallpaper she would chose and her mom said that she'd chose the ones with the little daises and rosebuds on them because rosebuds are so cheerful and always waiting to bloom. Jessica Lang's character says she made so many plans looking at that wallpaper - she was always waiting for those rosebuds to bloom.

Of all of the things that I've done to this house - this was my grandmother's last stamp on the house. In 1989 when my grandfather set the house on fire everything got replaced, repainted, redone. Everything except the walls upstairs. In their bedroom there was this awful wallpaper she always wanted to get rid of but never did. In my room, it was paper she picked out and had put up.

Today I started pealing it off.

I'll keep it on two smaller walls - just because it's the last thing of her that's in the house. I know that she'd be happy with what I'm doing - the fact that I'm cleaning it and saving it and making it better, but it makes me sad that she's not here to see it when I'm finished.


So - here's the thing about old wallpaper. It often covers up even older wallpaper. . . and even older than that so on until you get to the plaster.

Such is the case with the blue sky and the little rosebuds. They cover up an awful kitchen looking grid paper that covers up some kind of palmtrees that I am going to guess is actually from the 1930's or 1940's. This paper is the same paper that we had under the three layers of paper downstairs I took off early on in the process.

I've done wallpaper before. I've gotten good at it. What I learned is that the super expensive solution that you buy and squirt on the walls to loosen the paper .... is crap.... and it's expensive. The best bet is a 1/3 solution of fabric softener and warm water. I can't remember who told me about this - but it's 100% dead on and genius. Always use warm water. The hotter the better. Also chose a fragrance that you don't mind smelling for several weeks.

If you're dealing with plaster - get a knife style scraper that looks like a giant razor blade. If you're dealing with sheetrock... use a putty knife. If you're on plaster you can scrape - but if you've got sheetrock when you scrape will peal off the first layer of the paper covering the sheetrock. I learned this the hard way. I assumed because it was old walls they were all plaster... not so much. The new attic walls are sheetrock from the early 80's - the room is plaster.

Some is going to scrape off the first layer of wallpaper but if you squirt it and soak it enough the first two layers will come off because its so thick and softened ... what with the fabric softener and all :). That bottom later the only solution is to soak it and scrape and then you get disintegrated brown sludge. Yummy.

Here is some inspiration for what I want my bedroom to look like when I'm done - think Hollywood Glamor - gray, black, white, and Tiffany's Blue:




I really want to figure out how I can put this chandelier in the apex of where the front roof meets the back roof - no idea how I'll do it