Living Room Paint Job

The latest installment in our effort to make our house not as dark!

More Trees

The wonderful people from our church decided that they could help us with some tree removal.  On a day of service we had a huge group of people help to clean up our yard.  The kids helped pull plants and remove rocks while the men pulled out their chainsaws and knocked down 5 trees.  With only a little structural damage to the house and only one near-fatality, I'd say the day turned out pretty well a success.  Only about 7 more trees to go!  Oh, and all those stumps....

wait out of the way as the tree falls

A Tale of Two Walls

It was the best of walls, it was the worst of walls.  The best because we got some walls fixed, the worst because we had to damage another.

Reese's room finally got the makeover she wanted.  She chose a dark purple to paint her walls, but I refuse to put any dark wall colors in my low-ceiling home, so we painted two walls a light lavender, and then used the dark purple to put different hue stripes on one wall.  The last wall was left white.

But the best news is that her walls were gross, with unidentified substances crumbling out of painted-over lumps in the wall and icky smells, to much more uniform, clean-looking walls.

Before:

Holes

bumps

Kenzie sanding all over the place.  Because it needed to be sanded all over the place

smoothed, textured and primed!

Purple waves

The second wall.  

This is a story of the day we tried to get rid of a dumpster load of tree and vine branches in our yard.  Ahem, I mean a second dumpster load.  This time we actually got down through the piles to the ground, and found some mice running around.  At first we brought Liam over to see them and then felt grateful we were getting rid of hundreds of potential nests.

But then when we came in and heard the SOUNDS IN THE WALL!!!

 a We couldn't figure out how a mouse got into a wall on the upper floor.  Will vowed never to leave the door open again and I kept putting my ear to the wall to figure out where the mouse was.  Turns out the sounds kept coming from the same spot.  The mouse sounded like he was trying to jump up and get out.  He was trapped.

What to do?  We debated about calling an exterminator, but then determined that if we did, he would end up cutting a hole in the wall, and we can do that ourselves.

Will told me that rodents give him the willies, and capturing our unwelcome guest was up to me.  That's the deal.  He gets the spiders, I get the mice.  Fair enough, I guess.

After drilling a little hold in the wall, we discovered where the mouse was. It even tried to escape while Will was pulling out the saw, and then I was up.

After some searching I made a discovery.  No mouse!  It was a bird!  A bird?  How the heck did a bird get into an interior wall?  Will reminded me that that particular wall connected with the attic.  Now the search is on to figure out the hole in the house.

But I'm gonna admit that I was relieved to find a bird, because if it had been a mouse then I would be worries about little mousy babies.  A bird you can just let fly away and he won't want to come back.

And now to patch up that hole in the wall...

Kitchen Wall

New home project!  We have a wall in our kitchen that's right by the door we use to go in and out all the time.  It always had our shoes stacked on the floor in front of it, ugly, dirty switches and outlets, it had dents and uneven paint and a huge eyesore of an out of service intercom.

I needed to fix this space for my own personal sanity. (It's not the only place in my house like that, either)

Here are the pictures!

Before.  Blah.

Close up of the awesome intercom

I tried to rip that thing out numerous times but in the end the hubby had to be called in.  I don't know how he did it, but I'm glad it's gone!

Patching the wall

Mudding the patch

Spackle all over and sand and spackle and sand and repeat.

Texture and Primer.  It looks like a whole new wall!  I would walk into the kitchen during the days of priming (I let dry almost 24 hours between coats) and just say, "Good morning, beautiful wall." Oh, and smile.

The first (and, surprisingly, only major)  mistake was this color.  Ick.  What was I thinking?  You look at those swatches of color at the paint store and you don't realize how dark and small it will make your room feel when you paint a whole wall that color.  Maybe it would be fine if we had 12 foot ceilings instead of 8.

Ahhh.  Much better!

And now, so that the shoes don't go back to piles on the floor, we got these beautiful cabinets that fit perfectly in the space and my kids love putting their shoes away!  We'll see how long that lasts. But until the novelty wears off: Hello, beautiful wall!  (Link will take you to a similar product from ikea.  They don't have ours listed online.)

Door After

Hey, remember these pictures from a few posts ago?  

Well, we chose a bluish turquoise and here's what it looks like now: 

We tried to add some character with glazing

Door before glazing

detail after glazing with a little white to make it look weathered.

Here's the side-by-side:

Do I love it? Frankly, I wasn't thrilled when I stepped back to look.  I love the color if all you see is the door, but I wasn't sold on the entire look of the house.  We were debating between a bluish and a redish and I wished a little that we would have gone with the red look.  But it's growing on me.  (I think what tipped the scales was that red doors is super popular right now and we didn't just want to copycat everyone else.)  I like it more and more over time.

Looking at these pictures I noticed that a new light fixture would update the look, too.  And I'm going stick planters on either side.  I'll try to update as we go!