I Can't Stop Painting...

April 2014

 

This year seems to be the year of painting everything.  This time I decided to paint the guest room.  Back in the winter,  I painted the panelling in the room white.  Since there was only panelling on two walls, this left two walls unpainted.  These walls were plaster and had several damaged areas that we had not fixed.  One location was the area around the new wall light the other area was some existing  damage below the South window that we had avoided for three years.  Not having the money or energy to do a full skim coat of the the walls,  I decided to try and fix these areas as best I could.  I chipped away any plaster that was loose and then over the course of several days patched and sanded the areas back.  
  

I think I did a pretty good job, although as I worked I kept noticing more areas with cracks, dents, and dimples. If we stay in the house long term we will probably have to have the plaster professionally repaired, but since this is our guest room I patched what I could and primed the areas.  As you will noticed the room was a light butternut squash color.  Our roommate picked out the color and we liked it, however, we never kept the swatch and had no idea what it was.  We either had to try and color match the existing color or paint it an entirely new color.

 

The decision to go with a new color hinged on a gift. For our wedding, a family friend of Josh's gave us a large beautiful watercolor they had painted.  We loved the painting but walking through our house we were having a hard time finding a wall that was big enough to work with the painting.  Honestly, there was only one wall in the house where it would truly work and it was in the guest room above the dresser.   We decided to take down our current piece of art (which we like, but holds no sentimental value).  The only issue was the watercolor really didn't work with the rooms orange color.
 

 

We decided to try and pull out the muted colors in the watercolor by painting the wall a dark color.  We felt the room could handle going dark given the amount of white trim, panelling on two walls, and the large window and closet to break up the space.  We tried several dark blue grays from Benjamin Moore.  In the end, we choose Lead Gray. I went out and bought a gallon and set about painting the space.

Once again, our lighting caused the color to come out way more blue then we were expecting.  It reads a deep navy and not so much gray.  But when we put the watercolor up against it- we were completely sold. 

 

This was probably our most saturated color to date and no matter how good frog tape is, there was a fair amount of touch up.  The bold color against the white requires a perfect line, so I spent an afternoon with a mini brush touching up the wood work and ceiling.  

 

The room has a bit of a nautical feel with the blue and white, so I took the vibe and brought our large ship painting from the stairwell and put it in the room.  Perfect fit!  Josh hung the piece and I cleaned the room.  I think we can call this room almost complete.
 

Guest Room Embarrassments

August 2013

As the summer wound down we were rushing to complete a few glaring projects throughout our house. The worst offender: the three windows in the guest room. Back in 2011, we replaced all the double hung windows in the space. While the outside of the wood windows were painted with the exterior the interior remained unpainted. To our defense: we had a roommate living in the room so access to paint them was non existent. Fast forward TWO YEARS and we still hadn't painted the windows. Fail. I can come up with a lot of excuses, it needed to be warm to paint, we had a lot of patching on the woodwork due to some damage when it was removed to install the windows. yada yada yada. The truth is: it's a room we rarely use and divided lite windows are some of the worst things to paint. Josh and I spent two weeks patching, sanding and repatching before we decided to call it repaired enough and start to paint.
 

 

It took a weekend to three coat the window and trim. The longest time was spent taping all the window panes. We already had the paint and the brush so it cost us nothing. It looked a lot better.  Although now the dark wood paneling seemed to bother me more than ever.  Probably because this was the longest time I had spent in the room since 2012.

The other obvious issue in the room was the wall light in the corner. I am not sure you can call it a light fixture when it is only a bare bulb sticking out of the wall on a metal hook. Ghetto is truly the only word I had for it. It happened to be the only hardwired light in the entire room and we figured we should keep it. Does it have a purpose? Not really. But, it seemed to be original and that is often one of the fun things about old houses, sometimes there are lights, trim, built-ins for no obvious purpose. We bit the bullet and went to School House Electric to get a new period reproduction light. They had a sale so we were able to score a cheap clear globe for the wall light. Unfortunately, due to fact we needed it to have a switch in the style and color we wanted we had to custom order it. A few weeks later it had been made (here in Portland!) and I took it home.
 

This was the wonderful time in 2012 when we lived in the guest room during our master remodel.  Shabby chic right?

That weekend Josh removed the existing janky light and and did a fair amount of patching since the new light was smaller. The plaster gave up a fight but eventually we got the new light installed and removed one of the last horrible 1970's lights in the house. At this point, we have updated or replaced every light, fan, or fixture in our house except for the office. It has been a slow process, but it feels so good to check this one off our list. Of course, we have yet to paint the patching from the new light, but let's ignore that for now.