Confessions of a Serial Painter

I've been doing a lot of painting lately so I thought I’d pass along some tips I've learned in the process of painting.  Lots and lots of painting.

My current color combo love is grays with bright white trim.  It was previously grayish green with bright white trim.  I've never really been all that into bright colors - I did have a red wall once, but it got old pretty fast.

See - very pretty but no, not my house

How to choose colors: go to a paint store, or Lowes or Home Depot, pick up a massive amount of samples, look online at what's popular, mix it all together with what you like, the style of home you live in, your furniture, put together a palette and wah lah! You've picked your paint colors!

Let me just say, every time someone asks me what I’m doing and I say “painting!” I get the same thing, “UGH, I HATE painting!!”  No one ever likes painting.  Why is that? I like painting.  So then I have to ask myself, do people truly HATE painting or are they not using the right tools which makes painting a much bigger chore than it should be?  Because really, painting is one of the fastest, easiest, least costly ways to update a room or to give it a whole new feel or even just make it look new again.

Adventures in Remodeling - This is Gonna Get Ugly

So when you buy an ugly house, it can only get uglier before it gets better right?  Right?  Ok, so maybe not in all cases but certainly in mine.  This is what my super ugly house looked like when I bought it.

The photo is from the Spokane County website, taken in 2004, not much had changed in appearance when I bought it.

I’m not entirely sure why out of the many many potential homes I looked at, I settled on this.  But, one reason is that I had owned it when I was married and had lost it when I divorced because I simply couldn’t afford to keep it on my own.  It was a sad day, I had so many plans for my home then and now it looked like I was getting another chance.

I sealed the deal in February of 2007 and with keys in hand, started making plans without a clue as to how to do ANY of it or how much it would cost.  I had planned to live there for a very long time so I wanted it to be to my liking but still remodel in a way that would be appealing to a lot of people if I ever had to sell it.  So, with what I wanted and what I thought of as “timeless”, I opened the front door.

After working on some pretty major projects indoors, I thought it was time to move outdoors, sort of backwards, but I needed a place to come home to that was comfortable and functional.  Once I came home from work/school and shut the front door behind me, I cared very little what the outside looked like.  I had my little oasis behind the ugly exterior.

Paint colors.  Oh. My. God.  How I can make something so difficult or why I feel the need to obsess over the PERFECT color, I’ll never know.  I tend to choose colors in shades of green and gray.  And yes, I obsessed about the perfect grayish/greenish color for what seemed like and probably was months.  Every weekend I’d bring home a new sample to try out so I could stare at it for a while and decide if I liked it.

Adventures in Remodeling - Bathroom #2

The arbitrary bathroom numbering system is based on the order in which the rooms were remodeled.  Number 2 & number 3 kind of got torn apart at the same time because of, well, read on...  Number 3 didn’t get finished until almost the last week or two that I lived in the house.

So, on to bathroom number two!

The Elvis Sink after I painted it so I could deal with it for a while

When I purchased the house, lovely bathroom number two was fitted with what I called “The Elvis Sink”.  I called that because of its likeness to the era in which fat Elvis would have lived.  It was awful.  Awful is an understatement.  It sparkled and had swirls that were supposed to look like marble I think, but really just looked pitiful.  Not only was the lovely Elvis sink attached to the wall, the walls themselves looked like exterior stucco and since it’s small, these little stucco fingers would reach out and grab you every time you turned around.  Stucco Fingers got sanded down and the walls painted until I could come up with the money to do anything else.  It just had to be usable.  Bathroom number two also had a pocket door that didn't work, or worked sometimes but then came off the track and was impossible to get back on so it eventually just stayed off the track and we proceeded to tear it and the wall apart every time we opened or closed the door.  Oh yeah, it was also a hallow apartment style door that was fitted to a pocket door so never even right to begin with.

The day finally came when I’d had enough of bathroom number two and decided it was its best interest to be torn out.  In order to get the bathtub out, part of the wall had to come out but before that the toilet had to come out.  Since the toilet was fairly new I decided to keep it, clean it and reuse it.  After all, anything that can be reused in a whole home remodel is valuable.

There has to be SOME modesty in remodeling!  That grate looking thing was a "vent" that opened to the downstairs bathroom and was more of a "intercom" than anything of actual use.  It was weird.

Adventures in Remodeling - Kitchen

So, while refinishing floors and tearing out a bathroom I also decided to go ahead and take the kitchen apart because, well, it just needed it.  And I wanted it.  I figured if it wasn't there, I'd have to do something new rather than just dealing with it until god knows when.

So this was the kitchen, in all it's splendor and glory, completely unchanged from when I had owned the house 10 or so years before.  Oh yeah, I owned the house when I was married and it was foreclosed on and I lost in in the divorce.

From the lovely dropped ceiling to the doorway that you could barley fit through because the stove stuck out into it, the particle board cabinets that were falling apart and had things in them that were indescribable and the darling blue, again with the blue, linoleum flooring.  There was also a sliding glass door that didn't work and the whole thing was just UGLY.  To be nice about it.

Adventures in Remodeling - Bathroom #1

While I was tearing out the carpet and refinishing the floor and annihilating the existing kitchen, I decided just one more thing was necessary prior to my moving in and that was rip out the main bathroom and give it an overhaul.

Lovely

Sadly, I didn't get actual intact before pics because well, I just wasn't there to do the picture taking.  Regardless of the beauty you see above, saying the main bath was ugly is a HUGE understatement.

Adventures in Remodeling - Hardwood Flooring

You buy a beat up old wreck of a house and what's the first thing a girl does when she gets the keys?  Well, pull up the carpet and see if there is hardwood underneath.

Yay! Wood floors!

The next thing you do, because you don't know any better, is rip the baseboard out in an effort to "update" not realizing how incredibly expensive it will be to replace it.  Lessons learned....

Sanded, stained and finished