Entryway, take two

A year ago, right before Thanksgiving, I decided to paint our entryway. The color didn't turn out quite like it was supposed to but we lived with it. 

So shiny! So blue!

When I consulted with Anna to pick a paint color for the dining room she noticed that we have a lot of mid-range brown furniture and suggested French Press by Benjamin Moore for the entryway. 

The color has really grown on me but initially both Greg and I missed having blue in here. How silly is that? I really like mixing brown and black but Greg isn't a fan of the black doors with this color. 

I'm really, really, really over gallery walls (I blame Pinterest) but I still like them in very small spaces. I'd love to cover every inch of our bathroom in artwork . . . too bad humidity is so bad for it. I crammed all the spare artwork I could find to juj it up in here.

Greg was teasing that some day someone else will own this house and they'll see all the layers of paint and think they were applied over a 60 year period when in reality it was over three. For now I think this is staying. I finally admitted that our baseboards are so layered in paint that I can't freehand a straight line and used Frog Tape. Holy shit, that stuff actually works!

I'm thinking a more colorful rug will make me fall in love with this entryway. Any opinions?

The bedroom! An outward manifestation of my capriciousness!

While Greg was gone and I was painting the dining room, I also painted the bedroom. For anyone keeping track (me, Greg, psychiatrist), this is the third time I've painted it. I picked this color out myself so I can't even blame Anna if people don't like it. It's Stained Glass by Benjamin Moore.

I promise it's not the same color as the dining room. It's darker and bluer (and very hard to photograph).

I think whoever prepped this house to sell was worried that they would run out of paint, so they decided to paint two walls in each room one color, and the other two walls a different one. The paint colors were all mis-tints bought from the clearance bin at Home Depot. I know this because they left me the cans in the basement. This bedroom had two pale green walls and two French blue walls.

I initially painted it Cilantro Cream by Behr and it was okay.

Then Greg was going to move in and I decided I had to repaint the bedroom. So I tried to get a color match to the spare bedroom color, which was a Metro Paint color. Because Metro Paint is made from recycled paint, there's no consistency to their colors. The color match wasn't very good, but again the color was fine. Pale blue. Like the dining room.

Mid-painting

But now it is dark and delicious and I love it. Why are interiors so hard to photograph?

I really want brass swing-arm sconces instead of those dinky bedside lamps. I don't care if I'm blindly following fads, I think they're pretty:

I used to read books but then I discovered TV, which is like reading except it's less effort and you can surf the web while you do it! This TV is old and weighs over 60 pounds, so I had to con my friend Bill into helping me get it off the wall before I could paint.

I love the color of Dracaena 'Limelight' against the walls

I have something in the works for new drapes, which will hopefully be less labor intensive than when I sewed the living and dining room drapes. The sweater rug at West Elm went on sale recently so we got an 8x10' rug for $350 but now I'm wishing I'd gone with the darker colored rug. And not just because I'll probably spill wine on it.

At the very least we need a new duvet cover, no? I think this one deserves to be replaced after all the wine it's put up with. What color would you go with?

I'd like to incorporate more plants in the room as well, but being so accident prone = no plants on the bedside table. Two things recently made me laugh until I almost peed: an article from The Onion "Man Puts Glass of Water on Bedside Table in Case He Needs to Make Huge Mess in Middle of Night" (thanks Scott) and this photo on Pinterest:

Everything was fine until I got up to pee in the middle of the night, tripped over the stack of books, and impaled myself on the antlers hanging on the wall.

If you're wondering what Greg thought, he likes it! In fact, he's digging the more saturated colors so much that he thinks we should repaint the spare bedroom.

I'm thinking I should let him have the fun this time and I'll just watch. Painting is a lot of work and I have so many things to spill on the new rug.

And then I painted everything

Greg recently went to a trade show in Europe and was gone for two weeks. Two weeks! I have a habit of painting while he's gone (proof here, here, and here) and this time was no different.

Except that he was gone for so long that I had to paint multiple rooms.

First up was the dining room. For anyone keeping track (so far that's me, Greg, and my psychiatrist), this is the third time I've painted this room. The first color was a disaster, so I painted it again two days later.

The color(s) when I moved in

First disastrous paint color, minty fresh

Two days later, second alright color

The second color, that washed out blue, was never something I was in love with. It just didn't make me shudder the way that minty green did, so it stayed. Also, I was sick of painting by that point.

But! Now I had holes in the ceiling to repair and a ginormous hole in the wall to fix. When you're very lucky, your house comes with TWO fuse boxes.

This fuse box confounded three different electricians, who couldn't figure out WHY there would be two boxes in one house, one upstairs, one down. It powered a very strange set of things, like: the refrigerator, the outlets in the bedroom, one switch in the living room, and, somewhere in Mongolia, a single lamp that an ancient man cooked by. The main box in the basement powered everything else.

One reason that our electrical upgrade took so long is that our electrician removed this and properly rerouted our wires to one single box in the basement, which he then balanced and upgraded. This is all fancy talk for saying that we had a huge hole in the wall now, and the lights no longer dim when you run the microwave. Huzzah!

Blah blah blah, patchy patchy patchy . . .

I finally got smart and got professional help on the paint color. Anna Kulgren is a gardening friend who I came to learn also has degrees in architecture, interior design, horticulture, and loads of other things. She's also a brilliant color specialist and runs a small design-build studio in Portland called Optic Verve. She came over with her suitcases full of color swatch decks and got down to business.

In no time she found the perfect color for the dining room. You guys, she's SO GOOD.

But first I also had to patch the ceiling where the old light fixtures were. I think I did a pretty okay job.

We chose Benjamin Moore's Caribbean Teal and I'm head over heels for it.

I cannot recommend Anna enough. If you are struggling with finding the right colors for your home, call her. She also figured out colors for our crazy blue entryway and our bathroom. I can't wait to get painting again. That's really saying something, considering I spent two weeks prepping and painting. I'll show you the bedroom next!

Ready for insulation

I'm also ready for my nervous breakdown. I don't know why, but this upgrade-the-electrical-and-insulate-the-house project has broken me. Oh wait, I know why: it's really freaking expensive and disruptive. Again, I would never survive a full-scale remodel.

I'm going to apologize in advance for how whiny I'm being. Break out your tiny violins.

I mentioned a while back that Greg was going to invest in the house and pay for electrical upgrades and insulation, but that changed. Everything is fine with the two of us but it left me scrambling to apply for financing and it annihilated my savings to pay the electrician. As expected, everything took a bit longer than expected, if that makes sense.

The financing took place with Umpqua Bank with a really obnoxious man who kept asking, "No husband? You're doing this by yourself?" Then he slowly explained how a checking account works and what would happen if I "just had to have that diamond ring" and overdrafted my account. I am not making this shit up.

Have I mentioned that I've been having insomnia so I cut alcohol out of my diet? It's like I'm not thinking sometimes.

Anyway. Our electrician finished all the work in the attic! Instead of wires hanging out of our living room ceiling we have this super cheap Ikea fixture.

I'm not sure this is an upgrade.

I want something beautiful and dangling in here eventually but I have no money right now. So a cheap Ikea fixture it is! Yay, throwaway culture. The good news is that my electrician redesigned the wiring so things make a modicum of sense. Everything's up to code! If we die in a house fire it probably won't be due to sketchy wiring!

I also had him put in a new receptacle in the hallway so we can better see how badly we need to vacuum.

I grabbed these $39 schoolhouse fixtures from Lamps Plus, then went into a shame spiral over how they were made in China and I should have bought real Schoolhouse Electric fixtures and supported a local company.

We really need to vacuum.

Then Greg came out and said, "I think the scale is wrong and they're too big for the space," which made me start worrying about that. But you know what? I'd rather they be too big than too small. And everyone is going to be distracted by the fact that we need to vacuum so badly in here, and then they'll be noticing that our rug is the wrong length for the hallway. So it doesn't matter.

If you need me I'll be here, waiting for my waaahmbulance and reminding myself that things could be worse. I'm not destitute, nor do I live in a country where I could be punished for being a woman and driving a car. I can put up with stupid loan officers. Also: my mother sent me this:

Reference

She's the best.

And lo, there was hyperbole!

Guys, these lights almost killed us.

I came home from the gym last week after attending one of those classes with an oily bohunk who makes you lunge and lift and squat, all the while yelling, "faster! faster!" while he flexes his enormous, hairless muscles at you. It felt like I was part of a movie montage where the nerds try to get in shape but they're hopelessly flabby.

Anyway. I got home from the gym and the electrician had wired up the receptacles we installed and Greg was like, "Should we hang up the lights now?"

I was like, "Um, of COURSE we should hang those right now. But let me go throw up first and then I think I'm supposed to drink a glass of egg yolks."

There were a series of errors, beginning with the fact that the sun was going down, so we were working by headlamp. Next: Greg was hangry. He's a very sweet man until he gets hungry and then he gets mean. Third: At some point I dropped one of the nuts that attaches the fixture to the ceiling and it rolled away to parts unknown, laughing most likely. Remember how Greg was hangry? This was not our best moment. And we couldn't install the last light fixture.

Also: at some point I misplaced one of the Edison bulbs that came with the light fixture and we didn't have a replacement. We spent 20 minutes tearing the house apart looking for it.

I went and took a shower, during which time Greg located the missing nut! I came out from the shower and we finished the last light installation. Thank freaking goodness.

Nine hours after we started this project I flipped the breaker back on and hit the brand new dimmer switch . . . and nothing happened. Sonofabitch.

There was nothing to be done except go to dinner (at 9:30! so European!) and bemoan our lack of a proper reveal. We assumed the problem was in the dimmer switch, since our electrician seems to know what he's doing. After dinner Greg decided to swap out the new dimmer switch with the old one and voila! it freaking worked. FINALLY.

We were missing a bulb but it was still pretty glorious. To celebrate I promptly got a migraine that lasted four days.

But I'm fine now! And lights! Such pretty lights! Such pretty holes in the ceiling that need to be patched! Boy, I don't feel like doing that at all!

But if I've learned anything from movie montages it's that my muscles will soon be huge, I will get the girl, and you will find me either yelling Adwian!Adwian!* or singing We Are the Champions with my buddies** at the end of all this.

I love movie references. I love lamp***. The end.

*see: Rocky.
**see: Revenge of the Nerds.
***see: Anchorman.

Plaster dust does nothing to cover gray hair, just FYI

Whenever I take photos of my dining room (which isn't all that often) I try to crop out the light fixtures. 

They are ugly and utilitarian and they make a terrible humming noise if you try to dim them.

Terrible photos, ahoy!

I never noticed that they're not even aligned, to boot. It took cutting holes in the ceiling for me to notice this.

Greg (an engineer) was like, "How have you never noticed that those lights aren't aligned?" and I was like, "Oh, I don't know, I've just been exploring the wonder of the natural world and worrying about bumblebees. God."

Except in reality I've been watching The Bachelorette and playing The Simpsons Tapped Out on my iPad. You know, the important things in life.

ANYWAY.

I got to use the hole saw to punch those beautiful holes in the ceiling. I wear glasses, which I thought would protect me from the falling debris but I ended up with two eyes full of plaster crud, which was awful. Our electrician went and grabbed his safety goggles for me, but I couldn't wear them with my glasses so I had to operate the hole saw blind, basically. I qualify as legally blind without corrective lenses, so I'd like a medal for getting three perfect holes in the ceiling (Greg was in the attic) without any blood loss.

Greg is in here somewhere

You have not lived until you've passed tools back and forth to your love through a hole in the ceiling while trying to discern what the other is saying.

Mumble mumble barn owls.
THERE'S AN OWL IN THE ATTIC?!?
I said I needed a drill bit! Focus, Heather.

The house was a mess and it took multiple showers to get the plaster out of my hair, but we got the electrical boxes installed and they are ready to be wired.

This was all a walk in the park compared to picking out light fixtures. I don't think Greg and I would ever survive a full-scale remodel and all the decisions that come with it, unless Jimmy Carter was involved. We finally found one single light fixture that neither of us hated, based on this picture:

Greg worked some Photoshop magic to mock this up:

I thought they were too far apart, so then we switched it to this:

But the attic beams conspired against us, so the final placement is somewhere between the two. Hopefully our electrician will be finishing up the attic work soon so we can ditch the old lights, patch the ceiling, and hang the new lights.

Grody carpeting, I'm coming for you next.