1970's Called.... It Wants Your Paneling

November 2013

After the wedding, Josh and I took a much needed month vacation from any house or life projects.  It was glorious!  Then it happened, I started to feel the itch and needed to find a quick and easy house project that wouldn't cost me anything.  Just so you can understand how much I need house projects I started this on November 9, 40 days after we returned from our honeymoon. 40 days and 40 nights without house project, the longest I had gone in over 4 years. Impressive.

 

 

Ever since painting the windows in the guest room I had the urge to paint the dark wood panelling in the space.  Originally, I embraced it in all it's 1970's glory, but the fact was it was in pretty beat up shape.  There were several areas that needed patching and repair. So it started on a Saturday when I spent a few hours moving everything to one side of the room and patching and caulking a few holes, gouges, and cracks.  A quick sand and wipe down and I was ready to rumble. 

 

 

We only have panelling on two walls, so this was going to be a quick project. I decided to put the primer on Saturday night right after dinner so it had a good 10 hours to dry.  Very quickly I discovered our primer had gone off (apparently 3 years is all you get with Kilz). It was chunky and smelled horrible. After spending 30 minutes trying to salvage it by mixing and adding bleach I had to call it.  I managed to find another primer deep in the depths of our basement hoard.  By the time I restarted it was 8pm and suddenly my easy project had me painting late into the night in a grumpy mood. Sigh.

 

This photo was taken with my cell phone- not classy

Sunday ,I woke up early so I could get two coats of paint on the panels.  The primer had essentially absorbed into the wall so I knew multiple coats may be in my future.  I decided to paint the entire wall with a brush.  I figured I could get more paint on, get into the crevices of the panelling and wood grain and hopefully give the panelling a more wood work look.  I used a three inch brush and moved through the room painting our bone white acrinamel.  It definitely was slow in comparison to a roller, but it wasn't horrible.  It took me about 90 minutes to finish the first coat.  Later, around dinner time, I went back and did a second coat.  Luckily, that seemed to be all the room needed. 

 

I cleaned the floors and dusted the furniture and then put everything back into place on Monday.  This is now the brightest room in our house.  It gets both South and West light so with the new white panelling it practically glowed afterward.  A small mini update and the room was ready for my parents to visit for Thanksgiving.
 

Brick: To Paint? Or Not To Paint?

January 2013

After I finished staining the mantel I spent the week applying the poly protective coats.  It took three coats that I applied with a foam brush.  By Thursday, I knew I could no longer ignore the lower portion of our fireplace.  This was my dilemma: I love brick, heck I am from Virginia.  Our clay soil means we are the biggest producers and users of brick in the US (I just made this fact up, but it could be true).    Our brick had problems- big problems. One, it was not the nicest brick, just kinda of a boring 'I am brown' brick, not that I was going to hold it against it.  Worst, the mortar was pink, yes, pink.  Urgh I hated that mortar.  On top of all of that: the brick was covered with 80 years of soot and general dirty house funk.  Just to remind you what the brick was looking like:      

I had some choices.  I could clean the brick. There were several methods I found online that were home made and involved a lot of elbow grease.  There were also several expensive solutions I could purchase where I slathered some goopy gel on the brick wait a day and then according to the pictures have an amazing before and after moment.  The problem was none of these options would help my pink mortar.  This meant I would have to pay someone to come and repoint my fireplace with more attractive mortar- namely any other sensible color such as gray or tan. Read between the lines: very expensive for little change.

The other option was to paint the brick and mortar and be done with the darn thing.  Gulp.  This was tough, there was no going back, once painted brick would be painted forever. There is no stripper for brick. I liked our rustic living room and painting brick felt modern and cold to me.  The problem was I didn't really want to spend any more money of this fireplace. I looked online and searched painted brick fireplaces. Honestly they did make a huge difference to rooms. Rooms that felt old and tired looked fresh and bright.

On a Saturday, I decided to do a quick clean to brick to see if it made a difference. I cleaned the brick and cleaned and it looked exactly the same: sooty sad brown.  I made the decision- we were painting. 

The next step was what to paint the brick?  We could go with the same brown as the chimney breast or the standard bone white of all of our trim and ceilings.  Josh and I decided since our new surround was dark brown we should paint the brick Bone White to stand out.   I bought masonry primer and with way more confidence then I felt I started painting the bricks. 

It was pretty quick work, one coat of primer on Saturday night, then two coats of bone white acrinamel the next day. Getting in the cracks and mortar lines took a long time.  Luckily, small detailed oriented projects are my jam. The best part was since it was January and I had my Downton Abbey to replay over and over.  I had to make sure I had memorized every scathing Maggie Smith reproach.

By the end of the weekend the fireplace looked like this:

Regret it- no, Love it- maybe not totally?

Kitchen The Saga Begins...

 May 2010

 

For the next 6 days we officially owned a house, but were not able to enter it.  The flooring guys came and worked their butts off but we were breathing down their necks.  There was a list of things that had to get done before I was willing to move into that house and we now had only two weeks until move out day in our apartment.

 

Kitchen was #1:  My first job was washing the walls.  There appeared to have been a small but smoky stove fire that had left everything in the space with a grimy layer of soot.  Josh and I both agreed we wanted a fresh green kitchen, however, our bold choice of Eccentric Lime was probably due to the depressing dinge of the original walls. 

Everything in the house is lead, that is the truth, you really can't expect anything less in a house of that age. My take on it is: encase it, and don't allow toddlers to knaw on your wood work.  Everything required a thick coat of white oil primer, thank god for kilz!  It is pretty much the wrapping that protects us from our house's true inner dirt.  Before we could prime we also had to remove some AMAZING vinyl floral 70's wallpaper that I honestly wish we had kept as a souvenier.  Josh set about that task and I went about removing the 2-3 layers of contact paper that covered every cabinet. We scrapped for two straight days, it was mind numbing.  

 

 

In the end, everything took three layers of paint on top of the primer.... so yes that is four coats of paint.  This process took a very long time and the cabinets required endless patience with a wee roller. We were painting the kitchen LONG into our move in process.  Which meant we 'camped' for about 2 weeks before we could unpack everything.  The kitchen would become and continues to be a daily struggle for me.  You will see more blog entries about this kitchen then you ever thought possible.