Showing posts with label paint colors. Show all posts
Showing posts with label paint colors. Show all posts

Ikea Kitchen Update

Here is where the new kitchen stands. The tile is now up to the middle of the window-the walls were too scarred to leave them bare, but I think it has a nice charm. I'm still working on painting the cabinets and we could use a replacement stove but there's no rush.



















The oak countertops are my favorite new thing- I never thought wood was something appropriate to my messy, sometimes grungy kitchen. I used 6 coats of Waterlox, a tung-oil and resin-based finish. Spills wipe right up, even a day later, and there are no white rings or dark rings. Nothing soaks in. The finish dulls a little when water is left standing for a day, but you wouldn't even notice unless you peered closely. We treat our countertops roughly- though no direct cutting on them- and they haven't chipped yet. If they did, it's easy to recoat or touch-up.

So far we've probably spent 2800-3000 on this kitchen, for a complete re-do. I kind-of regret the new steel-look appliances- they seem cold and not very vintage! How do they look so great in period kitchen magazine photos?

Jason paints!









The pot rack.






What a cute dress!

The bad news- the house next door sold at auction yesterday for $59000 to a slum company! And Lightning? Rain? knocked out our internal phone wiring. Then I fried the phones (I think) by crossing all the red and green wires while trying to shore the place up. doh! I've had a bad cold for two weeks, it wasn't my hands' fault. The good news is the house is feeling better because it just bought a new dress. The body color is silvery gray, the porch is lavender-gray for now, and the window trim is a little more purply-blue than before. The front has been primed and half painted. The stucco sucks up gallons.













I know, it doesn't look all that different. What's important is that everything is clean and shiny. And someone's making ketchup in the kitchen!

Updates!

Since I don't post often enough, here are some updates. I've been doing little stuff but not much worth writing about. Little stuff like finally tightening a screw on a door hinge.

The heat pump was finally fixed in December. It was all of $85 for a replacement, warrantied fan. The fizzing sound I heard in the attic when I accidentally cut through the thermostat wire? Just the air handler fuse blowing. It cost $60 to replace. It just wasn't the $$ circuit board I lay awake worrying how to pay for. And they added 2 lbs of freon to the condenser. It's a "Coleman" brand pump, just like our camping tent. I had no idea they had a branch of home heating and cooling units until our cheapo flipper installed it here.

Speaking of our flipper-installed unit, we went to the local home and patio show a few weeks ago where we were willingly solicited by several AC companies. A guy came over last Saturday to give us a replacement quote. He was from the company whose booth representatives laughed at us. I told them 1. Our house is 80 years old. 2. Our house is not insulated because 3. the crawlspace floods 3-4 times a year (old creek bed) and is a happy place for mildew. When I said the heat pump was a Coleman, he said, eyebrows raised, "Do you live in a trailer?" (what, an 80 year old trailer??) When we walked away, fully aware of how dysfunctional we must be for having an old house, I heard "whooooeeee!" and lots of laughing. Their field guy was much nicer though, and commented on how clean and accessible the attic was, and told me he's seen far worse in old houses. He left me with a roll of aluminum tape and a $4800 system quote.

Outside of the ongoing deck construction, I've been working on the plant situation. I think flowers are great, but in this small yard there really needs to be lots of practicality. I made a border of sweet banana peppers between rows of dusty miller and hibiscus, and planted sage, dill and rosemary around some small plumbago. In the side yard is lots of parsley, some cilantro, dianthus and that herb which is supposed to be a good substitute for sugar and whose name I can't remember. I seeded basil around the plumbago but the rain has been pretty heavy the last 3 weeks so I need to redo it. I think we've had our last frost, though.

We've tried our third go at exterior paint colors. The colors are either too light, too dark, or seem too much like colors in the neighborhood to our north, where only the brave can live. The trick seems to be finding historical colors that won't cause a run-down drab look. Also, the stores which carry small sizes of trial colors are only open til noon on Saturdays. How can we get the swatches, take them home and view them in all lights, then go back for trial bottles then go back to buy the paint? Everytime I think "It will take 3 Saturdays just to choose the house colors!", I decide to do something else like pruning, instead. This weekend I hope to build and replace a fragile fence portion the renters keep knocking through, and then finish the deck framing.

Dusty miller and baby hibiscus. So unglamorous.

We don't know what to do about mulch because it
keeps floating away!

New stuff to write about!

So I had a lengthy hiatus but did lots of things, and now there are projects, slightly unfinished, to write about.

Bathroom: painted, new light and new mirror cabinet ($8 from thrift shop). The new color IS peanut butter and I don't know how long I'll live with it, cause it's unflattering to me. And I keep craving grape jelly. The next coat will be lighter, and maybe not such an orangey tan. The trim painting is awaiting the wall choice so it could be awhile before the painting is completely finished. The window paint was incredibly thick; to strip it we used the ceramic heater and then after we both became dizzy, used a rotary sander to make lots of lead dust. So, not a project good for our health. It only stripped down to the smooth bottom layer of paint, a milk paint? which is very close to the peanut butter color the walls are now.

Color aside, the most important new thing is the shower rod; it's one continuous bar instead of the expandable kind with the joint that catches curtain rings. What a luxury! For only $6!

The new light fixture is 30's-esque, and wouldn't you know it, I chipped the sink somehow while painting. The curtain is a print of baseballs from last summer, my contribution to my husband's object-related superstitions about the Red Sox and their winning many games and having great luck. Its hanging in the bathroom must be the reason they won the World Series, of course.

Even if I think the color is too intense for such a small room, this is miles from the 70's dark wood strip vanity lighting and cracked plastic door hook, anyway.



The next picture is part two of the deck. It was precursed by debate over levels. We agreed that this section could be sunk down a step for a more private eating area. However, if we ever remove this pair of windows (where you can see the reflection of my hand) and replace them with doors out to the third section of the deck (see trash can), the third section would have to match the floor level of the house or be down a step. Mathematically it seemed best to keep part three at the height of the already-built first section, which matches to the back door threshold. But, if you wanted to walk from the first deck section to the third, you'd go across the corner of the second with a step down-half step ahead-step up. This seemed tedious to me so the deck will now be all one level.

A weekend of stripping

While, yes, in need of some extra money, no one here lacked clothing for this stripping and the only pink lights were from my computer monitor suffering pink death. This weekend I tried both lye stripping, and the super-heated sort which I built from Ocean Manor House's instructions.

The goal was to strip the cold concrete front porch, a slab built on blocks and infill. One morning, months ago, the sprinkler was tucked away behind the porch swing when its timer turned on and the porch was doused for nearly an hour. Lifting up the rubber-bottomed doormat a few days later, the thick paint underneath sheeted off. I tried a similar path with wet towels overlaid with garbage bags but it didn't seem to work as well. So I wanted to try lye after reading around the internet of its usefulness on painted brick.

The recipies I read were mostly the same; two parts water to one part lye, and add a solution of flour or cornstarch to thicken. The biggest thing for me to overcome were the warnings to stand back, it will splutter when mixed! Don't breathe the fumes! (which were pretty noxious) So I expected fireworks! The lye was from Lowes, in crystal form for drain-cleaning, not flakes. Amazingly, the only thing it did was melt the plastic container it was mixed in. Through several glass jars I tried again, and added flour or cornstarch. The directions never specified when to add, and my flour solidified into funnel cake and the cornstarch looked like spray foam. I left the liquid part on the porch overnight, and now it has hardened into crystals.

Although equally as ineffective on the cold porch floor, the heated paint remover worked wonders on the interior wood. I have a layer of gold milk-paint underneath everything, so the heater only stripped down to that layer (like most of the store-bought chemicals I tried) but that was fine since I was aiming to restore moulding details and fully close thickened doors, not turn it to varnished wood. It is a good thing too, since I scorched the pantry doors on my first two tries. The best time for me to scrape was when the paint turned into bubbly cooked marshmallow consistency, which would be just before the crunchy tan part happens.

I think I'll continue with the heater for the interior and might just go buy another rubber and jute doormat to use to strip the porch, one 2x3 square at a time. The lye is almost gone anyway. With all the trouble I had keeping cat tails and feet out of it, it's probably for the best.

Picking our (noses) paint

We took a few months off from working on the house, as it gets pretty hot down here in the summer. The new heat pump being broken didn't help much, so we spent much of our time elsewhere. In about a month it should be cool enough to go into the attic again, where I have some wiring and demolition for the bedroom closet planned. In the meantime, we're doing things to the outside of the house. Last weekend we tried out paint colors.

We picked a blue and white scheme similar to our own a few months ago. One day on the way to work I realized we liked the scheme because it was on a nearby 1920s building, a glass-cutting business. I couldn't have us copy something so nearby!

Jason gets really impatient with me all the time. I know I like mulling more than doing, but when I give in to his pressure it usually costs us money. To chose our new scheme, we picked up a small shrub's worth of swatches at the paint store. As I was being indecisive, he said he would end my agony by picking the colors himself and that would be that. He picked a trim color called Seahawk, which instantly made me think guy = dark colors = couch = beer = Seattle Seahawks. It looked alright against the house, especially with a copper color I chose. He said, "Let's go get it now" and against my better judgement we bought 2 gal of Seahawk rather than a sample quart. Of course, on the window trim it looks like the teal of our local NFL team. I tried to blacken it, hoping I had picked a similarly lamp black-pigmented paint, but it turned mucky instead. Now, blue is out and brown, red, green and beige are next, to match all the red brick houses around us.
Our house is so small and plain, with not much ornamentation. Our neighborhood is becoming bad. I'd like a careful but friendly scheme that doesn't imply "rental" or "it's okay to break in". Did I mention that a month after J was held up, someone tried to steal my 20-year old car? Since there is truth to the statistics saying painted houses and trash in appropriate receptacles helps with decreasing crime, I want to do all I can. It's a bigger issue than what colors I think are pretty. That's what is holding me up. This week we'll try some new colors, in sample sizes.
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