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?

2011 favorites

I've noticed that a lot of blogs are running posts featuring some of their most popular projects or posts from the past year and who am I to avoid hopping on a bandwagon?

 

So let's take a look at what you all were digging in 2011.

 

You really liked Looking back at the reno, a year later, and to be honest, I like it too. Even though it still wasn't that long ago, it's pretty amazing to see that our house went from this:

 

To this:

 

This silly little lamp redo, in which I exercised my newfound love/respect for spray paint to save a pretty ugly lamp.

 

A bit of the house tour of the kitchen, which we really haven't done much work to, was also at the top of the list. And yeah, still no art over the banquette. I just don't do placeholders so I'm still waiting for the right thing to come along.

 

And from a room that hasn't been changed much (other than putting in that banquette, which I still think is one of the best changes we've made to the house) to a room that didn't exist a year and a half ago: the bathroom.

 

And I'm happy to note that I might prevent some of you from making some of the same plant mistakes I've made by telling you about some plants I'll (probably) never plant again including the dreaded artemesia 'Oriental Lime Light.'

 

I hope to bring you lots more interesting posts in 2012 and I so very much appreciate all of you who stop by daily, or just once, to check out the blog.

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.

House tour: Living room

After the bathroom and the kitchen, this is a somewhat unexciting stop in the house tour: the living room. This is pretty much our only living area in the house and I would say this is the room we spend most of our time in. Almost every blog post I've written has been composed on that red couch.
Although the living room was ripped apart during the renovation, very little changed aesthetically speaking. This was the room that I thought we were going to live in during most of the renovation, and then we found out that the roof on this half of the house was sagging and would have to be shored up at some point. Since we weren't planning on ripping up the house again anytime soon, we opted to take care of while everything was ripped up.
You might recall that the living room walls and ceiling were covered in the oddest heavily textured swoopy stuff that was a dust magnet and drove me nuts. When the construction guys started taking down the ceiling they discovered that it was actually joint compound. We think that a previous owner just bought buckets of the stuff and stuck it on for a plaster look. The compound was on so thickly that they couldn't cut pieces much bigger than 3-by-2 feet because they were so heavy. Anyway, once the framework was exposed, they jacked up the 2x6 joists (which apparently is what they used in 1938) and sistered them with 2x8s (it's OK to be impressed by my vast knowledge of construction terms). Then we had them do about 4 inches of spray foam insulation and fill the rest in with rolled insulation, as we did in the rest of the house.


Here's a view from upstairs looking into the living room the day that the drywall texture was applied (it's still wet so that's why it looks all wonky in the picture). The wainscoting on the lower level is original, and in we had them replace the drywall to get rid of the horrible texture on the walls as well. This picture shows where they removed the railing during the construction and I have to say, it was really freaky to not have that there.

And here it is now.


Here's a view looking the other direction so you can get a feel for the whole room. You can see the horrific wall texture (which I'm lucky enough to experience every day in the three rooms in the house that remain untouched) in this picture taken before the renovation.


You can also see the very first thing we changed in the house in these pictures: the sconces that flank the fireplace. When we bought the house they were some kind of shiny gold, beveled glass 1980s wonder and I couldn't stand them. We bought those copper outdoor lights from Smith and Hawken way before anyone (in Wisconsin at least) heard of putting outdoor lights inside. The Calder-esque mobile that is hanging from the beam in both photos came with the house (one of many, many things left behind by the previous owner during a chaotic moving day). Even though it doesn't have a lot in common with the room, I love it. And, I fit under it. Mr. Much More Patient does not.
As much as I once loved the color scheme in here, I don't much anymore. I'd love to change it all over to a navy, off white, pop of color thing, but I'll just add that to the list. I've given some thought to having the beams (which we found out really are structural) faux painted to be a different color (they do have a bit of a pink cast to them sometimes), but they don't bother me that much and I bet that would be pretty expensive.
I sort of wimped out in choosing colors in this room, but I felt like the ceiling and walls should be the same color since they sort of flow into each other, and I knew I wanted something I wouldn't easily get sick of because with the super tall ceilings, this is definitely a professional paint job. Plus, I knew at some point I wanted to change from the red/mustard color scheme and I didn't want to limit myself with the existing wall colors.
There's not a lot to tell about this room, but here are the paint colors:

• Walls, ceiling, trim: Benjamin Moore Mascarpone
• Wainscotting, wall paneling: Benjamin Moore Gray Husky

House tour: The Kitchen

From a room that didn't even exist a year ago, our tour moves to the kitchen, which has had some modifications made over the years but is largely the same as it was when we bought the house.

 

 

The cabinets, countertops (laminate, but not bad looking, and very easy to keep clean) and window treatments haven't changed. We did replace the white vinyl kitchen floor with porcelain tile, bought new appliances, moved the laundry out of what should have been a pantry and made it back into a pantry (next to the dividing wall between the eating and cooking areas, shown just in the bottom left corner of the second photo). I also painted the walls and the paneled ceiling, which was sort of pickled pink.

The eating area has changed quite a bit. We took it from a round table that seated four people and stuck out into the walkway from the back door (the most frequently used entrance) to a banquette that can seat seven or more. We still badly need a piece of art on that wall, but I'm picky about art and haven't found the right thing for that spot.

Paint

• Walls: Benjamin Moore Revere Pewter
• Trim, ceilings, banquette, table: Benjamin Moore Mascarpone AF-20
• Cabinets: Unknown color badly in need of painting, but it's close to Benjamin Moore White Dove

Sources

• Banquette: Custom made (if you are local, contact me for information)
• Banquette fabrics: www.fabric.com, www.joann.com
• Entry rug: Dash & Albert indoor/outdoor (highly recommended, washes up bright white in the washer)
• Table: Restoration Hardware Outlet
• Chairs: Existing
• Eating area lights: Velocity Art & Design
• Butcher block light: Pottery Barn (several years ago, I don't know if they still carry it)
• Sink light: Barn Light Electric

 

Here's a roundup of some of the projects we've done in the kitchen:

• Some befores and general overviews
• Easy art
• Dog feeding station
• Table tutorial here and here

The future of the kitchen:

I'm not finished in here yet. At the very least the cabinets need a coat of paint, but I'm not satisfied to stop there. Once we've recovered a bit financially from the renovation, we'll do some sprucing up in here. What we do will be largely driven by budget, but ideally, I'd like to continue the cabinets all the way up to the ceiling by adding another row of cabinets on top of the existing cabinets sort of like this:

via Pinterest

There is nothing wrong with our cabinet boxes, so I'd keep those, but if the budget allowed, I'd have them refaced, skipping the arches that are seen on the top cabinets. I'd also like to turn some of the lower cabinets into drawers if possible. And then, of course, I'd like new counters, but every day I go back and forth on what those might look like. I'm pretty sure I'd pick a quartz though, as I'm thrilled with how our bathroom counter has performed and as beautiful as marble is, I'm not a person who would be satisfied with a counter that gets "a patina." And last but not least, I'd add in a backsplash, probably some variation on classic subway tile like this elongated tile:

via granitegurus.com

House tour: The bathroom

I know I've show some (OK, a lot) of photos of the renovation here, but I thought I'd do a bit of a house tour now that I have some good photos of the rooms thanks to getting the photos from the article that was done on the house (a wide-angle lens is a beautiful thing).

And there is no better place to start than my favorite room that came out of the renovation: the upstairs bathroom. Since we were a one-bathroom household before this (and that bathroom leaves something to be desired in the space and decor department), it was a real treat to be able to make room for a second bathroom, and, as I've mentioned before, any splurging that happened in the renovation, happened in this room.

Here's what the space that became the bathroom (thanks to raising the roof and adding a small shed dormer) looked like before. Take special note of the absolute hideous wall texture. The peak of that mini dormer ceiling was 5 feet 3 inches.

And here's what it looks like now.

 

 

 

Paint:

 

• Walls: Benjamin Moore Gray Mist
• Ceiling: Benjamin Moore Healing Aloe
• Trim: Benjamin Moore Cloud White

Fixtures (All Kohler unless otherwise noted):

• Sink: Archer undermount
• Vanity faucet: Margaux
• Shower valve trim: Purist
• Showerhead: Flipside 02 (LOVE this thing!)
• Toilet: Toto Carolina II
• Towel warmer: Runtal Neptune

Other:

• Countertops: Hanstone Ruscello Aspen
• Vanity/cabinet: custom, made of beech veneer
• Teak shower floor (removable) and teak niche shelf
• Mirror: Pottery Barn Kensington pivot mirror
• Bath fan/light: Panasonic Whisper
• Vanity lights: Sonneman 1-Light pendant
• Door: Salvaged from my grandmother's house

Sources

• www.faucetdirect.com (all Kohler fixtures)
• www.houseofantiquehardware.com (door hardware)
• www.grabbarspecialists.com (towel warmer)
• www.lumens.com (pendants)
• www.bathroomfanexperts.com (fan)
• www.blindschalet.com (blinds)
• www.ebates.com (make sure you sign up at ebates if you're an online shopper. I got hundreds of dollars back by shopping through them whenever possible.)

 

Let me know if I missed anything or you have any other questions.

Wide angle photos by Sam Arendt/Ozaukee Press