The unfinisher strikes again

It rained all weekend here which is so frustrating when there is so much to be done in the garden. The hostas, however, seem to be loving it as a I swear they've all grown 3 inches overnight. If and when the sun ever comes out I imagine everything will take off.

Given the lack of garden time this weekend, I thought it might be a good time to take a break from outdoor topics and head inside where I show you what a slacker I am. Although we finished the house renovation over a year ago, there are several unfinished projects that are starting to drive me a little crazy.

You've seen the master bedroom before from this angle:

… but have you noticed that you've never seen the wall that is opposite the windows? Well, there's a good reason for that. Here is it:


That's the closet door on the left (and can you believe that I took this photo at 2 p.m.? That's how dark and dreary it was Sunday).  When we were building this room I was so excited about that big empty spot on the wall because I saw it as the perfect place to hang a huge piece of art. It still is, but I am so fussy about art (not to mention I don't have the budget for the art I really want) that I've yet to find the right thing in the budget. Complicating the issue, I don't like placeholders in almost any situation. I like to wait for the right thing to come along. But the lack of art and color is making me a bit mad.
There is one spot where I've made some progress in the bedroom though. Take a look at the first picture. Now check out this:


Do you see that? I have a real, live window seat cushion. And here's the best part: I made it myself! When we had the banquette made for the kitchen, the cushions were the most expensive part, even thought I found fabric at a steal. My mom is pretty handy with a sewing machine and frankly I was starting to feel a little bad about asking her to sew pillows for me all the time, so I thought it was high time I learned. So my very patient mother walked me through the steps to sew the cushion cover myself. Originally I was going to do a tutorial on how to do it, but honestly, I think I better learn a lot more about sewing before I start telling other people how to do it. It took a lot of Saturday afternoons, but it was fun and I'm thrilled with the results. It's a pretty big accomplishment for a person who actually sewed her finger in summer school sewing class. That's a true story: I sewed the damn needle straight through the top of my finger. My poor dad had to come to pull out the needle because the office people couldn't touch it since it had broken the skin. I'm not sure if I felt worse for my dad or for the sewing teacher who had to remove the needle from the machine with my finger attached to it.


And I did get another little project that's been bugging me finished in the other bedroom. I finally painted and mounted the little mini closet doors. Our contractor thought we were nuts that we wanted this mini closet that is only accessible with the help of a ladder, but I believe that in a small house you have to make the most of every bit of storage space available and I couldn't stand the idea of a giant dust-collecting ledge up there.


But then we go downstairs to the kitchen. This is probably the worst unfinishing offense because I actually finished the eating area of the kitchen almost three years ago now. This is an old picture of the kitchen but sadly, it still works for this post because that's exactly how it looks now (on a clean day). Again there's a huge wall screaming for huge art and I'm paralyzed by my inability to put something there for fear that it won't be the right thing. You wouldn't believe how many people walk in our house and ask what I'll be putting there. I wish I knew!

So what unfinished projects do you have staring you in the face?

House tour: Guest bedroom and hallway

We're finally at the end of this rather prolonged house tour. `There are a couple rooms not worth sharing at this point, but maybe in the future if they get a little sprucing up I'll share them with you.
You've already seen the new bathroom, the kitchen, the living room and the master bedroom. Today we'll finish up the upstairs and show the hallway and the guest bedroom. Although the hallway got a bit smaller to allow for room for the bathroom on one end and the master bedroom closet on the other, it was important to us to preserve the character of it. We had several pieces of paneling custom made to match the existing panel so we could fill in the areas that were taller due to raising the roof.
It is open to the living room which helps the whole house feel bigger as well as allows the light streaming through all the new windows on the east wall of the bedrooms into the living room.
Here's what it looks like now (looking at the bathroom).


And here's what it looked like before:


And the new view of other end of the hallway:

The gallery wall probably deserves a post of its own because in typical form, I made it far more complicated than necessary. But for now here is a close-up that shows some of the different blue colors I used to paint the frames.


From here we move into the guest bedroom, which is admittedly a bit sparse these days. I can't seem to get the furniture placement right in this room, so for now I've sort of plunk the bed under the windows. At a minimum, it needs a headboard (do I see a DIY project in my future?) and some art to cover the large expanses of gray walls, but it needs more than that too. But, I'll get there when I get there.


Many of the features are the same from the master bedroom. Same floors and plank wood ceiling. The nightstand and matching dresser (not shown) were custom made for my the girls' room in my grandparents' house. Four girls, two beds. It was a good thing they had cool furniture.
Anyway, onto the details. Let me know if I miss anything that you have questions about.
Paint

• Trim, ceilings, staircase: Benjamin Moore Mascarpone
• Hallway paneling: Benjamin Moore Gray Huskie (and yes, it is spelled like that, but if you try to buy it as Gray Husky, they won't find it)
• Guest bedroom walls: Benjamin Moore Stonington Gray

Floors

• Hallway: Original red oak floors (bleached)
• Guest bedroom: Teragren bamboo Synergy Porfolio Brown Sugar

Bedding: Pottery Barn

• Throw pillow: Target (but you knew that because everyone has that pillow, right?)

Lighting

• Guest bedroom: Lamp here; fan existing, fan light kit: Lamps Plus
• Gallery wall: Barn Light Electric

House tour: Master bedroom

We'll finish up the rest of the house tour this week (it's a small house and I'm probably going to cheat and not show you the ugly rooms) now that I found the battery charger for the camera (whoops). So far we've toured the new upstairs bathroom, the kitchen and the living room.

Today we move up to the master bedroom, which is not the room that was the master bedroom when we bought the house. There is actually a room downstairs that was a bedroom when we bought the house and we preferred to have our bedroom upstairs so we took the south-facing bedroom.

As you can see, the before was, um, "modest." The ceiling was low in the middle of the room and really low on the east side. I actually took that side of the bed because Mr. Much More Patient couldn't get over there without hitting his head on the ceiling. There is no light fixture on the light because everyone would have hit their head on it. As it was the mister almost got banged in the head with a fan blade more than once.

You'll also notice that the dreaded wall texture showed up in this room too. The only real tragedy of the upstairs renovation is that the bedroom floors couldn't be saved. They were original to the house and we were told they were "just Douglas fir" but when we had all the floors refinished shortly after we bought the house, we told them to just do their best with the bedroom floors and they ended up being absolutely gorgeous. I actually don't think our contractor really tried to save the floors and it still sort of bugs me, but what's done is done.

This is what it looked like after one day of demo. The old chimney (make of Cream City brick, which is a material unique to the Milwaukee/southeastern Wisconsin area) had been sandwiched in the walls and was removed brick by brick. We also found out that the closets in both bedrooms had been cedar lined but someone had drywalled in the cedar. Don't you wish you could ask previous homeowners what they were thinking sometimes?

 

And here's how it looks today.

 

By putting in a small (5x5-foot) walk-in closet at the end of what had been the hall, we got rid of the small closets between the two bedrooms and we put that extra floor space into the master, which added a couple of feet to the room. The entire east side of the room is now windows, which not only floods the room with light that spills into the living room downstairs, but also gives us a bit of a view of the lake beyond our neighbors' houses when the leaves are off the trees. I designed the built-ins and we had the same great craftsman who built the banquette in the kitchen make them. He and his teenage son spent an entire day installing them and then I finished them myself. They provide a huge amount of storage and hide a little television as well.

I'm still using the old headboard, which I don't think particularly works anymore but it's one of those things that was one of my first big "grown-up" purchases and it's tough to get rid of those. We have no art hanging in here yet, and I think I need a couple of mirrors to flank the bed. You'll notice that the nightstands don't match, which is a look I prefer although ours REALLY don't match. Still, I don't mind the look. I bet you can tell which side is mine and which is Mr. Much More Patient's.

The wood-plank ceilings are one of my favorite features in the room. What you can't see is that there's a bit of paint problem with them. The ceilings and the doors are the only things we paid a professional painter to do for us (upstairs) and I made sure that the knots in the wood were spot-primed with BIN shellac-based primer (a must for sealing knots). And I was told they were. Well guess what? Every knot had bled through and the ceiling looks like Swiss cheese now. I need to call the painter to see how we'll be dealing with this, but it's a drag. If you do this, make sure you spot-prime the knots!

Here's the info on the room:

• Floors: Teragren Bambo Portfolio Brown Sugar (self-installed)
• Paint: Walls: Benjamin Moore Revere Pewter, trim, ceiling and built-in: BM Mascarpone
• Duvet cover: Rough Linen
• Nightstands: Pottery Barn (white) and World Market (wood)
• Lighting: Lamps Plus

 

Things left to do in this room:

• Art! I must get something on these walls. It's driving me mad. I just need to find or create the right thing.
• Mirrors. I think mirrors would be good behind the nightstands.
• Banquette cushion (I borrowed pillows from the kitchen banquette for the photos). I have the fabric, I just need to get my mom to help me make it.

Putting the clothes (and the paint brush) away

It will (and it probably should) horrify many of you to know that we have been living with our clothes on makeshift shelving and stored in laundry baskets in the basement for about nine months since the start of the remodel. Can you even imagine that? I actually lost track of a lot of my clothes in the process.

But last weekend, when I was supposed to be working on the path but the weather had other ideas, we officially moved our stuff back into our room. The holdup was a very long paint job on the built-ins in our bedroom. It took me well over a month to paint them. Normally it wouldn't have taken so long but I was so burned out on painting that it was very hard to get myself inspired to get back to work on them and I wanted to do a really good job on them. It is so hard to paint doors and anything with edges, at least for me.

I designed these built-ins and had an amazingly talented woodworker (the same person who built the banquette in the kitchen) create them. He and I work well together because he seems to actually understand my vision for these things. As we were going through the remodel one thing I learned is that sometimes things that make perfect sense to me are pictured entirely different by the person who is actually doing the work.

Between all those drawers, which are nice and deep and have soft-close sliders that mean there is no excuse to ever have a drawer sticking out, and the new walk-in closet, we have a lot of storage. Since we both pared down our wardrobes quite a bit (if I didn't need it for the last nine months, I probably don't need it now was my thought) we have more than enough room. This is especially exciting because we've never had enough room to store both of our wardrobes in the same room (this speaks more to the diminutive size of our house rather than any propensity towards being clothes horses).

Obviously I have a lot of work still to do on the built-ins. I'll be making a cushion for the window seat as soon as I find the right fabric. I'm looking for a couple of baskets for those cut-outs underneath the window seat. And I need to bring in books and accessories for the open shelving. You'll notice I painted the back of the open shelves that flank the windows a light blue (mixed from all the different blues I tried to paint the bathroom before I realized that grayish white was really the color it should be).

And while moving our clothing back into a proper storage area feels better than you can imagine, finishing the built-ins marks a major milestone for me: the painting is finished. OK, it's not totally finished as there are a few very small painting projects to be done, but for the most part my paint brush is taking the summer off and I am so relieved.