Welcome to our home … our second attempt at a fixer-upper.

The paint is amazing.

I know I said that in the last post.

But now, you guys, we took all the paper off of the floors in the family room.

It looks so amazing.

Exactly what we were going for.

So, here’s some background.

When I started painting the family room, Patrick & I stood around marveling at how amazing it all looked … and then he said, “Uh oh.  I hope that all this reflective white doesn’t mess with my projector and make it look all washed out.”

After-thought.

After we planned the design scheme.  After we bought the paint.  After I painted most of the room.

Uh oh.

But, in our defense, initially we weren’t too concerned about his set-up being in the family room.  It was only supposed to be in that room for a few months; then it would move to the finished basement.  But then plans changed.

We’ve spent more time in the house.  (It’s kind of big to us, not sure we initially need more finished space.)

We’ve gotten some quotes back on what we want to do in the basement.  (It’s kind of more than we want to spend.)

We really, really want the outdoor space, like now. (It’s kind of a higher priority for us.)

So, we decided to just leave his set-up in the family room for now.  It works.  It has close proximity to the bathroom, kitchen, and outdoor, backyard patio.  Also, it’s on the opposite side of the house from the master bedroom, so he won’t have to turn the volume way down when I go to bed.  (Right now, we’re literally separated by a small, jack&jill bathroom, and you can hear EVERYTHING!)

BUT …

Neither of us thought back to the paint color and design scheme when we decided we’d leave the theater set-up in the family room.

Opps.

So, I painted the rest of the large wall and moved on to the living room for the time being – because I didn’t want to paint the family room yet again (remember: prime, prime, paint, paint) if we just picked out a different, darker color to go in there now.  (Plus, I didn’t want to waste a gallon of paint, money right down the drain.)

Then we gave it a couple days and just thought about it.  (We kept working, just not on painting the family room – no time for breaks now!)

I was actually okay with finding a dark, neutral color to paint that room.  My thought was to do the exact same design scheme –  trim, walls, & ceilings all in the same color, different sheens – but in the dark color.  From the front door, it wouldn’t have looked quite as cohesive as visitors walked in … but we’re living here, not designing a show house, so it would have worked.  Patrick did not like that idea.  He thought it would look odd.  Like this cave set off to the side, different from the rest of the house.  And, he is kind of right … but, again, we are living here and have to make it work for us and the space needs to be functional.  It might not have been quite as cohesive as the original design, but it would have worked … and it would have looked good.

Moving on …

My second idea was to paint the side wall where the screen would go a dark/black color, and just carry that stripe up the wall and across the ceilings; then match that same color on the fireplace bricks.  It would have still been mostly white in there, but the screen & projector would have been surrounded by the dark colors and the look would have still been modern in design.

[Wanna know a secret?  That wasn’t my first-choice back-up idea.]  That was my back-up to my back-up idea.  But, I didn’t think there was ANY WAY that Patrick would agree to go along with my crazy, brilliant idea (like, NO WAY, NO HOW).  So, when we talked, I prefaced it with a bunch of … “This would be so cool.  I want you to trust me.  I know it’s going to be weird, but it’ll look so incredible.”  Before explaining my idea, I showed him a picture online.  He was immediately sold and I was floored.  And so super excited.  I’m not going to explain it on the blog.  It would be easy to explain what we’re doing, but hard for the scope of the idea to come together without pictures.  So … stay tuned. 😊

For now, the family room is totally painted (except for the area behind the screen), and we pulled the red painter’s paper off the floors – and like I said before, and cannot say enough times, it looks so good in there.  We love it.  The warm, red, natural floors really work well with the white.  (It actually is the perfect white for our design too; the other options would not have achieved the same look.)

What else we’ve finished, and what we’re still working on …

We also painted the fireplace itself.  It was an old, brassy gold.  I spray painted it with the High Heat, matte black spray paint.  It worked very well, and was pretty easy.  The taping off took some time, but it looks so much better.  When the rest of the fireplace (brick area) is painted, it’ll look much better (and you won’t be able to see where I didn’t quite tape far enough and ended up spraying the bricks too … but, that’s a future project.)  We left the pulleys brassy; it added a little flare.

I caulked the ugly gap between the cabinet molding and the ceiling in the kitchen.  When the ceilings were stamped, you couldn’t really see a gap – they installed the cabinets about ¼” to ½” lower than the ceiling because of the decorative stamped pattern.  Since we smoothed all the ceilings out, the cabinets all looked like they were either installed incorrectly (not flush with the ceiling) or had started sagging – neither was a good look.  The drywall crew couldn’t smooth the ceilings above the cabinets without taking them all down (nope, not happening), so you could still see the edge of the popcorn/stamped look above the molding.  None of it looked pretty.  It actually looked pretty horrible.  I wasn’t sure that caulk would work – some of the gaps are kind of big – but, I looked into putting another piece of molding around, adding shims to just be painted, and a few other ideas … and, well, caulking was the cheapest, fastest, and easiest solution.  So, I figured if it didn’t work, we’d move on to figuring something else out and the worst outcome would be that that the caulk just squirts back into the cabinet/ceiling abyss.  And then someone would have a good laugh and wonder why there were these piles of caulk back there when they finally replace the kitchen cabinets (because that is not something we plan to do).  Some of the gaps took several rounds of caulk to completely fill, but overall (and from the floor) it looks pretty good, and definitely better than it did.  Yay!

And, the foyer and hallway are almost ready for wallpaper.  I mudded the walls this past weekend – turns out, I’m not horrible at mudding, and I kind of like doing it.  A bit of sanding and those walls will be all ready for wallpaper.  Patrick also finished prepping the kitchen walls for paint.  So, hopefully, the main level will be primed and painted by the end of next weekend … or right around then.  We’ve also committed to starting to clean regularly (this place is kind of getting pretty dirty).  We finally covered most of the vents with filtered registers to help with the dust a little, and once we’re done sanding the kitchen/foyer area, I think it’ll be much easier to keep everything mostly clean … maybe?

We picked out a sink, faucets, toilets, and hardware, so that’s a bunch of checkmarks.  We bought a new bed for the ourselves (since we have an extra guest room now, which we’re pretty excited about!).  We also received the wallpaper for the foyer,  ½ bath, and upstairs main bathroom in the mail this week … so we’ll get to some of that this week, hopefully the foyer & ½ bath anyway.  It’ll be so super nice to have a functional bathroom down there again. 😉

And, finally … our washing machine at our first house has been in the crapper for about 6 months now – and it doesn’t really get anything clean anymore, and it sounds like a freight train or jet engine rumbling through our basement when we run it.  So, we’ve been taking our laundry with us to the new house and doing loads as we work on the weekends – it’s been working out really well (since shopping for a washing machine is the worst).  While we waited for our last load of laundry to finish, but after we were done with our work for the day, we walked downtown to have a beer on the patio … and I think we’re going to like it here.  (It doesn’t hurt that we are starting to have real Spring here … flowers, rain, warmer weather, and lawn maintenance.) 

A FINAL NOTE …

A previous post had misinformation.  I know.  I know.  You’re probably super upset and going to stop even visiting … because, well, it’s like I lied to you.  But, I just got it all mixed up and when Patrick finally got around to reading the blog, he made sure to correct me.  So – we have RED oak floors.  I accidentally misinformed everyone who reads this blog (our moms) that we had white oak floors.  But, really, if you read closely, I just confused everyone, because I wrote that we had both white & red oak floors currently in the house and about-to-be installed, all in the same post.  Anyway, I fixed it now.  You can re-read it here if you want?  (Don’t worry – I only went back to fix it so the historical information was correct, not because I wanted to read it again either.)