finished painting!

Done painting the livingroom! we finished just in time for Mike’s birthday, and I framed and hung some of our posters and art for him as a birthday present. I’m glad we decided not to paint this room yellow, though I think the mint green is a little boring. Anyway it definitely looks better than before! And it will look even better when we replace those horrible ceiling tiles. And repaint the floors.

This is what the livingroom looked like in November 2010.

dining room (living room?) colors!

We’re trying to decide what color to paint the dining room, and we’re also trying to figure out what to call it because we’ve never used it as a dining room, and we probably never will, since our kitchen is enormous and has plenty of space for eating and we’re not really the formal, stuffy dining room types. We were using it as a workshop space for a while, and then it evolved into a sort of living room / lounge space where we hang out and watch movies and snuggle with the dog on the couch. Sounds kind of like a living room, but we already have a room that we call the living room, which we never use. (These are the problems you have when your house is TOO BIG!) We could call it the den, but that sounds so 1950′s and doesn’t really fit the personality of our house. I think we should call this the living room and that other room can become The Parlor when it is finished. Which sounds a little silly, but that was probably the original purpose/name of that room when the house was built. Back then folks usually had a front room with nice windows looking out towards the street, and it was kind of a fancy and formal parlor that was only used for entertaining visitors. It would’ve been one of the fanciest rooms in an otherwise spare and functional farmhouse. But anyway, back to this room. The former dining room which I’m going to try to call The Living Room from now on. It was painted dark red when we moved in. It’s kind of a pretty color, but it’s a little heavy and also whoever painted it did a horrible job, didn’t finish the edges of the walls, didn’t put on a second coat, and the walls just looked pretty awful.

this was how we had living room before.

In February we started prepping to re-paint the walls. There were A LOT of spots that needed spackling, and a bunch of areas that needed major repairs to the wallboard. It took about two weeks of spackling and sanding to get everything tidied up.

early stages of spackling

It took THREE COATS of primer to color up that crazy red! I think we’re finally ready for the color now.

primer

We had decided on Yarmouth Blue for the trim and Stuart Gold for the walls (from Benjamin Moore historical colors). We’ve looked lots of photos of Colonial through Victorian era interiors and they used to do some really saturated colors! This seemed like a pretty cool historical color combo. We did the windows in blue and I think they look great; we actually bought a gallon of the Stuart Gold for the walls and then at the very last minute, Mike got cold feet and said “it looks too YELLOW!”

Stuart Gold: do we really want this?

I rolled my eyes, but then I sat down and did some photoshop mockups with different color options. When we actually saw it mocked up, the gold does indeed look a little crazy?! So we decided on this Prescott Green instead. I think I’m going to paint it today!

Prescott Green

Now we’re wondering what to do with that gallon of gold paint. Maybe upstairs?

new wallboard and plaster repair

plaster buttons and mesh tape on the saggy ceiling above the stairs

fixed the wall by the stairs

We hired a guy to help us with replacing wallboard and patching plaster! It’s amazing how fast (and well) stuff gets done when we pay somebody else to do it. He replaced the wall going up the stairs, and fixed the sagging plaster above the stairs, and then replaced the missing piece of wall in the livingroom and replaced a defunct doorway in the livingroom with a nice smooth seamless wall. You wouldn’t even guess there was ever a door there!

livingroom repairs

finally fixed that hole in the bedroom floor

whoops!

Back in June we ripped up the bedroom carpet to discover this strange hole in the wood floor. We’ve since moved into the bedroom and I should have patched it long ago, but I’ve just been stepping over it for a few months now, putting off the job until later. Finally I fell right in, like my whole leg just went right down through the floor one night as I was heading to bed in the dark! I wish I could’ve been downstairs in the livingroom to see what that looked like. I think my whole leg came thru the livingroom ceiling. (I was fine, livingroom ceiling didn’t fare so well)

so then I finally “fixed” it