Sweetie & Joy » Painting

I took a risk (surprised? Me too!)

Mon, 25 May 2015 10:00:19 +0000

Remember when I chatted a bit about painting my bedroom (here)? That seemingly simple project took weeks. WEEKS. Truthfully, months. Not because it was a particularly difficult project. In fact, due to the coved ceilings and (rather obnoxious and eventually to be removed) faux fireplace and the various doors/windows in the room, there wasn’t a great deal of actual wall-space to be painted. And, the delay wasn’t due to my (admittedly notorious) indecisiveness either. I boldly chose a paint colour lickity-split-ishly and rushed out to buy the paint before I could question my colour choice (since, once paint is purchased, you’re committed) (because if you buy paint from the good Mr Benjamin Moore like I do, painting is a bit of a financial commitment.)

Nope. The delay was caused by this…

Yup. An adorable squishy active smiley drooly nine month old.

Best reason for a delay ever. :)

However, the lack of painting progress seriously started to wear on me a bit. You see, that same ridiculously cute little man isn’t a particularly predictable napper. Sometimes he naps for a glorious two hours. Sometimes he barely shuts his lovely long-lashed eyelids and – poof! – he’s well-rested and ready to play again. This lack of predictability made it super difficult to get much done on the painting front. The days where I’d predict a lengthy nap were the days that I’d dip my virgin paintbrush into the paint and – bing! – he’d wake up. On the days that I assumed he’d take a quick little cat nap, he’d sleep for hours.

Yup. It’s hard to paint with a baby.

So, defeatedly, I called in the reinforcements: my parents. Mom (happily!) looked after Squishy while dad and I tackled the paint job (thanks mom and dad!) And I’m thrilled to have this project done. Thrilled! And I’m (almost) equally happy with the results!

Here’s what I started with…

And here’s the room lovelied-up with a wee bit of BM Copley Gray…

A full gallery of after shots is pending (there are curtains to go up and a mirror to hang and a few other to-do’s that I’d like to to-do before officially announcing the room DONE) but for now the painting part of this bedroom mini-reno project is complete (can I get a big ol’ yay for progress?) (Yup – YAY!)

What’s that you say? You thought I’d decided on Revere Pewter? I thought I had too. But it just seemed a little too predictable. I painted our bedroom at our last humble abode, our happy little 1940′s house, in Revere Pewter and I loved it, but I wanted to try something different. I’ve been eye-ing up Copley Gray for a while now, and I decided to take the slightly bolder paint-colour plunge.

So am I happy? Mostly. Admittedly, it’s greener on my walls than I’d hoped. At some points in the day, depending on the light, one might even call it (cringe…) sage. But at other times (and, really, most times) it’s a lovely gray/brown/green that is super cozy and warm and rustic (can a colour be rustic? If so, this one is definitely rustic.) And it’s far (far!) better than the poop-ish brown that adorned the walls when we bought this house, so I’m a happy girl for now.

And if, in a few years, I decide to repaint, hopefully Little Squish will be old enough to help? Or at least stay occupied for a bit while mommy paints?

Wishful thinking, I know. :)

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My triumphant (albeit slow moving) return to painting (aka the colour in our bedroom is driving me bonkers)

Thu, 19 Feb 2015 11:00:19 +0000

When we first came to look at this old mauve-coloured house nearly two years ago, I walked away thinking that the master bedroom was painted black. In fact, it’s not black. It’s brown. But it’s a dark-ish brown and the blinds were continually drawn in this room during showings (theory: the home owners were really vampires), and the colour appeared even darker and more awful than it actually is (although it is, indeed, pretty awful.)

For your viewing pleasure (or, perhaps, disbelief), here’s what our master bedroom looked like the first time we saw it…

Ack, eh? Yes. Ack indeed. Flowers and nic-nacs and tiny lamps with tiny lampshades and stuff everywhere. Ev-ver-ry-where. Once again, I think it’s worth noting that we bought a house with rooms that looked like that. We’re very very very brave, my Sweetie and me.

(And yes, the two pictures hanging above the bed are indeed hung at different heights. Because lazer level be damned, willy-nilly picture hanging is how the previous house owners rolled. Those crazy loveable crooked-picture-hanging vampire-esque rebels.)

Of course, when Sweetie and I moved in, all that stuff (thankfully!) went away (and, miraculously, the room suddenly looked a gazillion times larger.) But that didn’t change the fact that the room is brown.

Icky brown, to be exact.

Here’s another look at that wall colour, minus all the clutter and with a wee bit of natural light…

Well hello there, ridiculously cute little man! :) Behind all that squishy adorableness are my ugly brown walls. A (temporarily) comfy black cat is also lounging somewhere back there. In fact, this picture was taken mere moments before I had to intervene in feline/infant interactions and declare “No, we don’t chew on the cat.” (A statement I never ever thought I’d have to make prior to having a baby.)

So what colour am I going with? Alas, I’m not being particularly original or daring with this project. Instead I’m falling back on the reliable, always lovely, Revere Pewter. I painted our bedroom at our beloved little 1940′s house this colour and I loved it.

It’s peaceful. It’s serene. It’s an actual colour and dark enough to be impactful, but not so much so that it’s overwhelming. Some have called Revere Pewter the perfect paint colour. I call it lovely and soft and well-suited for a bedroom. (And, particularly, for my bedroom.)

Now all I have to do is find the time to paint this aforementioned bedroom. With a small boy who doesn’t nap predictably (or, oftentimes, for very long), this might be a project best suited for the evening hours (once that same small sweet little man is fast asleep for the night.) Assuming, of course, that I can stay awake long enough to attack those ugly brown walls with my trusted paintbrush.

But, ahhhhh… Yup. It feels good to return to home renos, even if I now move a whole lot more slowly than before. Slow progress of any sort is still progress nonetheless. :)

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A quick closet makeover (another “slap some paint on it and it’ll look so much better” sort of project) (aka: paint fixes everything)

Mon, 07 Jul 2014 10:00:17 +0000

Some people have scary basements. I had a scary closet. (Well, I have a scary basement too, but that’s a whole other story for a whole other blog post.) How scary was our bedroom closet? It looked like this when we moved in…

Ack. Nightmarish, eh? Yup. Absolutely terrifying.

And since “make closet pretty” wasn’t first and foremost (or even seventh and semi-important) on my big ol’ home reno to do list, it stayed that way for the past ten months. Empty. Ugly. Mocking me. Daring me to step inside (which I would never ever ever do due to the aforementioned scariness factor.)

So where were all of our clothes? In the nursery closet of course. (See where this is leading?) But, with Baby on the way in a few short weeks (yep, you guessed it), it was time to clear out that closet. Meaning that it was also time for us to face the scariness once and for all and make our bedroom closet a much more hospitable, much less horror movie-esque little place.

So what did I do?

I painted it.

And by that I mean that I really quickly and lazily painted it, using leftover Edgecomb Gray paint that I already had on hand. Did I remove the wallpaper from the walls? Nope. Did I sand down the drywall compound patching job that Sweetie did (since originally there were plaster cracks on the back wall of the closet that made it look even more terrifying?) Nope. Did I prime or prep or do anything to make the ugly innards of my closet more humane-looking? Nope. I just slapped some paint on those closet walls and called it a day.

And it didn’t turn out so bad. Behold the after…

I even tossed a quick coat of paint on the baseboards. Same colour as the walls. We’re not talking anything fancy here (it is a closet, afterall.)

Yep. A quick coat of paint and suddenly the closet ain’t so scary any more.

(I mean, I wouldn’t want to hang out and read a book in there, of course, but it’s way better.)

So there. That’s my scary-closet-turned-not-quite-as-scary-due-to-Baby’s-impending-arrival story for you. Since I’m guessing that Baby will need its own closet.

You know, for cute little onesies and pretty dresses (if Baby is a girl) or tiny overalls (if this wiggly little belly-mover is a boy) and stuff. :)

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My fantastic front door plans (prepare yourself – this could be shocking)

Mon, 23 Jun 2014 10:00:15 +0000

So hear me out for a second k? No judgy-judgy… Just trust me on this for a moment. I have an announcement:

I might paint my front door pink.

(Let’s pause briefly while that all sinks in… You ok? K. Let’s continue.)

Yes, I’ve lamented for months now that our house is mauve.

And yes, I’ve previously stated that perhaps a muted plum door would tone down the pinkness of the siding on our house while still looking sophisticated and coordinated.

And yes, I’ve even mentioned (several times) how much I’d really really like to repaint our old mauve house and be rid of the pink altogether.

But (this is where my anti-mauve plans go a bit awry), then I noticed this…

See those geraniums slyly photobombing this pic of my front door (and my beloved new house numbers?) They’re coral. And they’re pretty. And see how nice they look against my (much despised) mauve siding?

Dear Mother Nature: you sneaky fox. You’ve coyly inspired me. Big pat on the back for you, missy. Nicely done. :)

So I might paint my front door a corally-pink. It’s absolutely mind boggling, I know.

And don’t get me wrong: we’re not talking fuchsia here. (Random diatribe: FUCHSIA might, in fact, be the oddest-spelled word in the entire English language. It always takes me at least three or four attempts to type it out correctly. FUSHIA looks right, but it’s not. Fuscia could even be correct, but, strangely, is not. Nope. Fuchsia is indeed one of those words that makes me yearn to have a stern conversation with the good folk at Miriam-Webster and ask them what the heck they were thinking when they decided to add so many miscellaneous letters to a rather simple, two syllable colour.)

(Thank you for letting me rant. Carrying on…)

Nope. We’re talking a corally pink. Like this (via ByStephanieLynn)…

Or like this cheery door (courtesy of Marty’s Musings)…

Or even this (the top paint chip is Benjamin Moore’s Glamour Pink, and I THINK it could work, although it’s a bit more pink-ish than coral-ly.)

Please ignore the partially painted screen door – that’s a whole other project for a whole other post. (But I need it to stop raining first. Once the rain stops, the door will be painted. Until the rain stops, it’ll stay splotchy.) (Sorry neighbours!)

So yes. This is my new plan. A coral door for my mauve house. Who would have thunk it, eh?

Mind you, Sweetie and I haven’t discussed this yet. He might have issues with the words “pink” and “coral”, so I may call it a “muted light reddish-slightly-orange colour.” Or perhaps even just “geranium,” since I’m doubting he’d know which flower I’m describing. Sweetie isn’t much of a flower guy. But give him some rare weird variety of tomato plant and he’s all over that like ants on an apple. :)

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My blue kitchen (aka why test pots exist) (and, consequently, why you should use them)

Mon, 02 Jun 2014 10:00:37 +0000

So I decided the other day that I couldn’t handle these dark/dreary/oh-my-god-who-seriously-paints-their-walls-these-colours? walls any more. With Baby on the way (only nine weeks to go till my due date) (ack!), I had sworn off painting for the next little bit (even though some say you can absolutely paint while preggers) (however I’m super sensitive to smells right now, so painting just didn’t seem to be in the cards for me.) Based on a recommendation from a co-worker (hi Laura!) I brought someone in to paint my living room, dining room, and (yay!) kitchen. It took her less than five hours to paint all three rooms. FIVE HOURS! I was (and still am) in painting-land awe. I’m not sure how she did it (seriously, what she accomplished in five hours would have taken me several weekends!) (maybe I’m just a rather pokey painter?), but suffice it to say that the house feels like a totally new house now. The rooms feel bigger and lighter and cheerier. The ceilings seem so much higher. And I am one mighty happy momma-to-be.

However, let me break in on this little newly painted room love-fest with a bit of a confession: my kitchen was supposed to be gray. A nice, light, slightly bluish airy fairly neutral gray colour.

The Coles Notes version of the story? I got blue.

Like, really blue.

Grumble.

What I was hoping for? A slightly brighter lighter version of the same colour that adorned my happy little 1940s kitchen at our last house. That kitchen was painted in Benjamin Moore’s Stonington Gray, and I loved it. Loooooved it.

Our current kitchen, in our old mauve house, gets far less natural light than our previous sunny little kitchen did. And it’s less open and needed brightening up a bit. So my seemingly obvious solution was to confidently (ie “ruthlessly skipping the whole test-pot phase of painting”) go one paint chip lighter on the same paint-swatch card thingy from my previously adored Stonington Gray colour. Seemed foolproof enough, I thought. And, even when I held the paint chip up in various places around my kitchen, my newly decided upon colour (Wickham Gray) appeared to be a light gray with a teeny tiny smidgen of blue-y green-y muddy undertones mixed in for a bit of wall colour pizazz.

The real-life post-painting result? Apparently Wickham Gray turns blue in my kitchen.

Like, very very blue.

Here’s where we started (all gold-y and dark and such):

And here’s where we are now. Blue blue blue.

Yep. Definitely blue. Super ginormous sigh.

Don’t get me wrong! There are lots of lovely blue kitchens out in the world. In fact, my Pinterest Kitchens board features several blue-hued kitchens that I’ve admired for a while. There’s this one, from House Beautiful (although I searched the House Beautiful site and couldn’t find a link directly to this particular image – sorry!):

And this super lovely kitchen featured on the Better Homes and Gardens website…

And, my favourite (pretty!), this cheery blue kitchen courtesy of… um, Pinterest source unknown. (I hate those source unknown sorta Pins, don’t you?) (If this is your kitchen, a: I want to move into your house please! and b: let me know!)

So see? I’m not at all against blue kitchens. In fact, I think blue is so fresh and pretty in a kitchen!

But… it’s not what I had planned for my kitchen. And against my currently cream coloured upper cabinets and brown-tiled backsplash and countertops the blue looks a bit… off.

I’m going to live with it for a bit. And maybe (with a little tweaking and accessorizing and such) it’ll grow on me! With Baby on the (ever nearing) (ack!) horizon, and my painting budget tapped for the time being, blue is definitely, if nothing else, better than the muddy gold colour that was there before. And, when I someday get around to painting the kitchen cabinets a whiter crisper shade of white (Benjamin Moore’s Snowfall White, my all-time favourite trim and cupboard colour, to be be exact), I think the blue might actually look quite spectacular.

But, for now… meh. At least it’s not gold.

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Blue cabinetry lust (pretty pretty pretty!)

Mon, 10 Feb 2014 11:00:42 +0000

I adore Samantha Pynn. I really do. Call it a bit of a designer-crush, but I think she’s amazing, and super talented, and I love everything she does. (And, she’s a fellow Canadian to boot!)

So imagine my delight when she posted pictures of this kitchen in her regular National Post column…

And imagine all the swooning (from me) that followed shortly thereafter. That blue – it’s perfect! That marble (or a close lookalike!) countertop – how lovely. The whole kitchen screams the word “fresh!” I seriously want to cook in there.

And now I’m seriously rethinking my kitchen plans.

Our kitchen currently features cream-coloured cabinets on the uppers, with dark navy lower cabinets. I didn’t paint these (the house came like this) and while the two-toned look has grown on me, I’ve always found the combination a little dated and dark (despite that two-toned cabinets seem to be very in style right now!)

I’ve always planned to repaint both the uppers and lower cupboards in a crisp off-white, Benjamin Moore’s Snowfall White, to be exact. We painted our last kitchen’s cupboards this colour, and it was the perfect bright white, with just a hint of creaminess to take away any overt starkness. It was lovely, and made me very very happy.

But now I’m changing my mind just a little. The upper cabinets will still get a good-sized dose of Snowfall White, of course (since the existing cream-colour is just so… dark) (if cream can be dark? I think it can…) but I’m now second-guessing my bottom-cupboard intentions. How pretty would a little electric-ish blue be? My answer? VERY.

We’ll see just how brave I’m feeling come kitchen-painting time. I’m a bit of a kitchen cupboard painting chicken, truth be told. Kitchen cupboards take a long time to paint, so it’s one of those tasks where I’ve always returned to my safety-zone hues (since I can’t imagine having to repaint all my kitchen cupboards for a second time.)

Here’s hoping that kitchen-painting time comes soon! Only 743 other projects to finish up first….

]]> http://sweetieandjoy.ca/2014/02/blue-cabinetry-lust-pretty-pretty-pretty/feed/ 3 Admissions of a mint-loving maniac (and plans for my next purdy little kitchen) http://sweetieandjoy.ca/2013/08/admissions-of-a-mint-loving-maniac-and-plans-for-my-next-purdy-little-kitchen-that-i-dont-yet-own/ http://sweetieandjoy.ca/2013/08/admissions-of-a-mint-loving-maniac-and-plans-for-my-next-purdy-little-kitchen-that-i-dont-yet-own/#comments Mon, 26 Aug 2013 10:00:24 +0000 http://sweetieandjoy.ca/?p=4659

One last project (because nothing says “Welcome to your new home!” like a freshly painted porch)

Thu, 16 May 2013 13:00:57 +0000

In a rather shocking turn of events, my front porch finally got its facelift. Poof! It was a last minute pre-listing omg-the-porch-looks-like-crap kind of moment that spawned this project. I woke up on Monday morning, opened the door so the cats could look outside through the screen, and declared (to my cats – now that I’m home by myself every day we chat quite a bit) (yep – I’m that crazy cat lady who has full conversations with her cats) that it was a porch painting sorta day.

And it looks so much better.

Truth be told, I had really good porch-painting intentions all last summer and fall, but my painting plans were constantly thwarted by rainy-forecasts and too-hot days. Selling (and a string of lovely-spring-weather days) was the kick in the tooshy I needed to get this project done.

Here’s the really ugly before (-ish – I forgot to take a real before shot, so this was a couple hours into painting) (but it still shows just how awful-looking my wee little porch had gotten):

(See the little furry faces peeking through the screen door? I had quite the porch painting audience.)

After!

So. Much. Better. Eh? I went with paint rather than stain – staining (according to the nice lady at my local Benjamin Moore store) would have required sanding. I don’t like sanding. And that all seemed like a lot of work. However paint, she said, could just be plopped right on top of the old finish. Given that this was one of a gazillion projects I had on the go, I was sold. The colour I bravely chose (since exterior house colour choosing is hard!) is Benjamin Moore’s Stampede. It seems to match some of the little stones that live in our brick.

Sweetie removed the sad-looking (and, well, dead) bushes that sat in front of the house and planted those tiiiny and rather adorable globe cedars for me. They’ll get bigger. Eventually. And they need a bit more mulch and my front flowerbeds in general need a lot more love. But, in the meantime, I think those little green balls of cedarness are pretty darn cute.

And my front bench got a little fancying up too with a pretty new pillow and a potted yellow gerbera daisy…

It screams “Buy me! Buy me! You could sip wine here!” no? Hoping so!

All in all, porch painting was not fun. It took me two days (I thought it would take a couple hours) and three quarts of paint (I figured it would take one.) But I’m pretty sure it was a worthwhile effort. Here’s hoping a bit of curb appeal will go a long way in enticing house shoppers to fall in love with our happy little home. :)

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It’s always darkest before the dawn (a tour of our pretty painted/primped bedroom) (and an examination of my newly unemployed state)

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 10:00:33 +0000

I’ve been a bit unintentionally MIA for the past couple of weeks. In all honesty, the last-week-of-workness, trying-to-get-house-ready-to-list-ishness, OMG-need-to-find-another-job-soon-ness, and all of the related stress took its toll on me last week and I sorta just wanted to curl up in a corner and sleep for a bit.

But all that is over now. Work is done, for better or for worse. I’m applying for jobs like crazy and hoping that a promising phone call from some nice prospective employer-person (who thinks I’m awesome and wants to pay me loads of money to come work at their fine organization) comes soon. We’re working on the house and have been in talks with our agent so we can list as soon as possible. And we’re looking at other houses and trying to make smart and solid plans for what to do next.

But, in the midst of all this chaos, I realized that I never posted my “look-what-we-did!” big reveal on our bedroom makeover. So I thought I’d take a bit of a timeout from everything else and indulge in a quick “tada!” moment. :)

First, let’s take a looksee back on what the room looked like pre-painting/-primping/-improving, k? Our room wasn’t terrible. At all! But I’m not a sage green kind of girl – I’d like to be, and I like it in other people’s homes, but it’s just not me.

A couple coats of BM Revere Pewter later (plus a pretty pendant light, a much-obsessed-about new duvet cover and some new curtains too) and here’s our lovely little bedroom now (on a mighty sunny day!)…

I’m particularly happy with our curtains (Matilda from the awesome curtain-making folk over in Ikea-land.) Cheap and cheerful and sorta girly but simple.

And I’m also in love with our duvet cover. Also cheap. Also cheerful. Also Ikea (Alvine Orter.)

For now I’ve tossed (er, lovingly and carefully placed) a random navy and red striped Roots blanket that I’ve had for eons at the foot of the bed. Once spring hits (weather-wise at least!) I’ll likely swap the heavy blanket out for a lighter throw. But for the time being, it works. :)

And I’m ridiculously pleased by how nice our freshly painted walls look against our awesome black-brown Hemnes dressers. I’ve been wanting to paint a room (a wall? A random piece of furniture? Anything!) Revere Pewter for years. Mr. Benjamin Moore? You did not disappoint!

So there’s your mini bedroom makeover update! There are still a few additional plans in the works. New colourful pillowcases, and maybe a few throw cushions too, to make the head of the bed a bit prettier. Snazzy new bedside lamps perhaps. Maybe even a new nighttable for Sweetie (since the nighttable cleverly and deliberately hidden on his side of the bed is archaic and rather awful looking.) If you look really closely, the ugly nightstand (and ugly lamp and one uninspiringly beige pillow) sneakily snuck into the corner of this pic…

Silly photo-bombing pillow! Updates on further updates to follow. :)

But for now, Jacob is a really big fan of what we’ve accomplished to date. So much so that he refused to leave the room (or, really, the bed) while I wandered around taking pics (hence some of the somewhat wonky angles in these images – I was working around a rather stubborn cat.) But, really, how could I say no to this little orange face?

Yup. Jacob knows exactly how to get his way with his cat-loving fur-friendly mom. Smart boy.

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Lions and zebras and giraffes (oh my!) (it’s a bit like a Toto song in here…)

Mon, 18 Feb 2013 14:58:37 +0000

Have I ever mentioned that we have not one, but TWO bedrooms in this house? Shocking, I know! The second bedroom sits directly across the tiny little hallway from our master-ish bedroom (“master-ish” because at about 10×10′ it’s hardly grandiose.) And this second bedroom is where we hide stuff. (True story.) A desk, our filing cabinet, a couple of storage chests, random boxes that we still haven’t emptied since the move (um, like, 2+ years ago…) I leave the door closed 95% of the time because I can’t handle looking at the mess. Why don’t we use this bedroom for something substantial (like an office or a guest room or some sort of similarly dignified purpose?) Afterall, our house IS rather tiny, so you’d think we’d put the room to good, functional use, right?

Look…

Yup. Lookout Tarzan, we’ve entered a happy little jungle!

The people who owned this house before us used this room as their nursery (obviously.) And, truth be told, I’m hoping that one day it might possibly be our nursery too. And, because of that, I can’t bear to paint over the rather cheery-looking animals that someone carefully and lovingly painted on the walls.

Are jungle animals my thing? Um, no. And even when this does become our nursery some day, the animals will likely get traded in for a far more subdued colour palette (since it’s rather glaringly bright in this room, and I’m more of a muted grays kinda gal.) But, until then, I don’t have the heart to ruthlessly paint over those happy little faces.

Especially the giraffe. He makes me smile. :)

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