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.
 

 

Adults Have Dining Rooms... Now I Do!

July 2010

 

It was now July and we had moved into the dining room.  I want to start by saying this is my favorite room in the whole house. It was probably one of the reasons I agreed to buy the Castle.  The room is almost a square, which is my favorite shape for a room.  There are two large windows on the East and a set of small English Cottage style casement windows (you know the ones you see on Masterpiece where the farmers wife puts her head out the window and calls everyone in for supper, those kind).  The room has an original built-in and a small arch over the windows.  This is probably too much information, but I am an architect and I get excited about these things. 

 

I wanted to make the dining room feel intimate and cozy, the kind of place you can sit with friends after dinner for a long time.  We decided to go with a warm dark chocolate color in the space.  This ended up being harder then we thought.  Did we want a blue brown, a red brown, or a purple brown... ummm kinda just wanted dark chocolate.  In the end, we chose Benjamin Moore Barista and I am very happy about it.  This room had a lot of damage to the trim work and we ended up tenting the doorways off and sanding for many many days.  This was also the point in the project where we stopped hand sanding and bought an orbital sander... why we did not do this earlier? I can't really tell you, but it makes life o so much easier.

 

After a week of sanding we got about priming everything in the room and applied the Barista, it went on like fudge.  It was so delicious looking I felt tempted to eat it several times when it dripped on my fingers. Over share, maybe? This is a much smaller room than the living room and only required two coats, phew. We removed the tenting and got to work painting out the trim each night. I was really excited to see this room happen because we have never had a dining room and it felt very grown-up to have one.  Also, its right off the family room and I have to look at it every day.