Family Room Update

Okay, so maybe I'll try to update monthly. Obviously doing it weekly just hasn't worked for me..and since school began about 2 weeks ago we'll just set the bar down low okay?

The big news for September 1st is that our new family room is done. Except for some things we'll be adding later, like a corner fireplace and hardwood floors. And I need to finish the trim paint. But. Other than that, it's done and I am thrilled with how it turned out. 

 Here's a view looking out at the back yard, at a different time of day. Look how different the paint color looks from the photo above!

In this next photo you can see the walk through on the left that leads to the kitchen, which we'll be starting to remodel in January if all goes well. The window pass through is where the kitchen sink is now; we want to make that a wide walk-through too. And that door on the far right is the main hallway from the front door.

 That plank ceiling is the best thing I ever did. I truly want to hug it every day. You can see in the my previous post from last month how much work it was to plane the old boards, remove their staples, rub the watered down white/blue paint on them, and then poly them. But the result was so worth it! Our ceiling fan is from Lowe's. I love the polished nickel finish and the fan lights that look kind of nautical.

This next photo shows the view looking toward the future dining area of the family room. 

 The outside light fixtures were sort of a drab black so I played around with a faux verdigris finish. I kind of like how it turned out...and they were pretty much free--just the cost of a can of hammered copper spraypaint and some little craft paint bottles that I already had laying around. The one on the left below is a slightly different style than the two that I painted. But this one's gonna get the treatment too.

Here are some before and afters for memory's sake.

Coming up in the next month. Well, sorry to say there probably won't be much action on the home improvement front. As I said, I'm back at work which brings my available DIY time from infinity down to almost the opposite of infinity. Also we'll be taking two trips in September which will take away 2 weekends (prime DIY time). And last, we've got a son at college and football tailgates beckon during this time of year. But if we DO start any work..well, Tom is working on a doggy door for the pups so they can go from the yard to the garage. After that we want to start planning some upgrades to the laundry room:

We're going to reconfigure the cabinets, stack the washer/dryer, and add a sink, new countertops, and floor. The idea (Tom's) is that it will be easier to live and work in a gutted kitchen if we have a sink in here. SOoo. The laundry room comes before the kitchen, but probably NOT to be started in September. I'm remaining patient. And smiley. :)

Back-kitchen

I'm calling this the back-kitchen. And it has begun.

 "The destination is the journey." My son wore that on his middle school football practice T-shirt and I totally understand how it relates to sports. And it also applies to our home improvement attitude. We love the process, the little projects that add up to the big change. And we never seem to arrive at our destination--the projects are never going to end--we'll always have another little change to make on our house. That's the whole point--enjoy the journey!

So we have begun a fairly big project. It's our screened porch, which is an addition on the back of our house, behind our kitchen. Here's what the screened porch looked like when we left for our vacation.

It was a lovely room, but screened porches come at a price. They're dusty, pollen-y, and it's really difficult to keep the cobwebs and bugs out. It took hours of cleaning to make it presentable for company, and in our climate we could really only use it for half the year. But most important, we need this space to be part of our finished house so we can expand the kitchen. So as a prelude to the kitchen renovation, we've hired a contractor to convert this space to a roughed-in family room. When we returned from vacation, it looked like this. We were so excited to see the progress!

Another thing about the porch--it was dark. It doesn't look like it in the picture above, but light got absorbed and lost in there. It's because its ceilings and two of its walls were clad in this dark-stained tongue-and-groove pine planking. You can see it here on the ceiling.

 And here on the walls. Kind of overwhelming, huh?

Well the new ceiling will not be flat; it will be angled and the high end will be 14 feet tall. I want to re-use those dark wall planks on that ceiling, white-wash them so they looked sort of pickled. Here's some inspiration...I love the whitewashed planks on the ceiling; there's also some of it on the walls to the left in this photo.

source

And Tom and I also want to add just a touch of blue to our ceilings...here's what inspired us:

source

 The carpenters were kind enough to save us the T&G planks, neatly stacked in our garage. They have a layer of stain, a layer of varnish, and about 15 years of aging on them.

They also had these staples in them, which are like an inch long. Ugh.

To get the finish I wanted, we had to completely remove the old finish, and to do that, we decided to borrow a planer from Tom's dad. He's got all sorts of tools and repeatedly comes to our rescue with them..

 Here's the big boss planer. It's so easy to use! It literally pulls the board through all by itself, and it comes out the other side with the finish removed.  But before we could run planks through the planer, we had to remove those staples. If only there were a machine for that! Here's Tom on staple duty and Joey on planer duty.

 My job was to catch the planks as they emerged. And this was my view all day:

We made it through about 1/4 of the T&G boards...and then we broke the planer. The big boss literally melted his belt. AAaaauagh! So we've ordered another belt (and a spare just in case), and we've got to wait till that arrives before we can continue.

In the meantime, I experimented with the paint and water ratios to get the whitewashed look I wanted. Here's what I came up with:

1 part very pale blue semigloss paint (I already had 2 quarts of this that I had used to paint some furniture)
1 part flat white paint (I used white primer I had in the basement already--it's kind of thin and chalky)

Mix those together to make 2 parts of paint.
Add 1 part water; stir, and you've got your whitewash (aka homemade pickle stain).

I went ahead and stained the boards that were ready, and this is a sample of what they look like so far:

Before the carpenters can install them, I need to give them a coat of water-based polyurethane. And of course we need to finish all the rest of them! So still a few more steps to go on the whitewashed plank ceiling. I sure wish we hadn't broken the big boss planer..but as they say, the journey IS the destination. We're moving along, and we'll get there eventually.

 More later!

And some Dining Room Tweaks

The dining room is a special case. It's about to be partially demolished, so things here are in major transition. Even so, I have tweaked. I have made a few changes here and there, over the past three months.

We're about to knock down half of one wall--the one to the right of the door below--and add built-ins across the wall with the sideboard below. (Well, we're not ABOUT to do it but we're going to do it in conjunction with our kitchen remodel..so sometime in the next year is the plan.)

Got a new rug, 7x7, brown, teal, coral, and cream. Perfect for the space. From Overstock, of course. It's my favorite rug source.

Got Ikea chairs with white slipcovers. They wash really well and don't dwarf the space. I'm thinking of dying them another color but I'll wait till the kitchen mess is done first. I made some covers for the lumbar pillows that came with them.

Found this canvas art at World Market. It has all my colors and I love its organic yet modern feel.

I Fell in love with these prints from Ballard, especially since we have shorebirds swooping along the creek all the time. I thought they'd be perfect for the dining room or any other room in the house for that matter.

But there is a cost issue. Each framed print is $149 from Ballard...which means for all four I'd have paid $600. Yikes! So I got busy, read the fine print from the Ballard's descriptions and found the birds' names. Then I searched for them in the New York Public Library's digital archives. I found 4 prints that were very close...each one $35 sent right to my house.

With white mats (on sale at A.C. Moore) and white frames from Ikea, and I got a very similar look for about $51 each. That's one-third of the catalog price.

So my dining room is functional and fairly easy on the eyes, even though it will be demolition central within a few months. *grin* I can't wait!

Matte/Gloss stencil in the Tiny Powder Room

I HAD to tweak the walls of the Tiny Powder Room. They were driving me crazy. There's a *really* subtle difference between the wall above the chair rail and the wall below. Can you see it here?

How about in this shot. The wall above the chair rail has the light hitting it a little better here.

Yep, it's white on white, but it's not wallpaper anymore.

But before I go back to the result, I'll start at the beginning. I posted about the facelift of the Tiny Powder Room two years ago; it was the first room we tackled with anything other than paint after we moved in. In here, we originally overhauled the paint, tile, fixtures, and added wallpaper. Everything is still wonderful in the Tiny Powder Room, except the wallpaper. It's gone.

At the time, I chose a white-on-white wallpaper that was shimmery white in the background with matte white leaves over the top. It really caught my eye and added some visual interest to a tiny wall space. I had vowed to never do wallpaper again, but I didn't know how to get that shimmery texture with paint, and so I took the plunge and wallpapered. Here's how the wallpaper looked when it was fresh:

shimmery white on white wallpaper we originally used

Of course today, two years later, there's Pinterest, where I recently discovered how to do tone-on-tone shimmer walls with paint. Anyway, back to the wallpaper--over the past two years, it has become evident that I didn't hang this wallpaper very well. The seams were gapping and becoming really distracting.

ugly wallpaper seam that detracted from the pretty wallpaper

More ugliness.

So I decided to take down the wallpaper. My mission: to recreate that wallpaper's shimmery patterned leaf effect with the matte/gloss stencil method I'd seen on Pinterest.

For me, paint is always easier, faster, and cheaper than hanging wallpaper. And since my Tiny Powder Room is not much bigger than a postage stamp, I knew I could get this done in just a day or two. It was a no-brainer.

Here are some inspirations from by blog-surfing:

This wall by Jesse at Good Girl Gone Glad is so pretty.

And this one by Centsational Girl is pure class.

Looking at these beautiful examples, I was almost ready to go with a trellis pattern like theirs. But in the end I decided to go with an all-over leafy pattern instead, trying to keep with the look of the wallpaper I loved so much.

The stencil I found at A.C. Moore. Yay for their 15% teacher discount!

To begin of course, I had to remove the wallpaper, and I was worried that this would be the most difficult and tedious part of the project. But it was a surprisingly easy task! Much of it just pulled right off. I sponged a bit of water on the backing layer and it easily scraped or pulled off the wall. I had it done and cleaned up in less than an hour.

I'm sure the easy removal is at least partially due to my poor installation two years ago! Anyway, after I cleaned it up with TSP, Tom patched the walls and ceiling for me, and even did the sanding work for me too. What a guy!

All finished with prepping--on to the ceiling paint, and I decided on blue this time.

After all, there's already plenty of white in here and I had a bunch of blue paint already--I had mixed it up myself from some old partially full blue and white cans of paint. I used it to paint this dresser in my basement...

...and I still have 2 quarts left over. So you can imagine I'm on the lookout for other things to transform to pale glossy blue.

For the walls, I bought two quarts of paint at Lowe's (I only needed a quart of the base paint because the wall space I needed to cover is so small. If this were a full sized room, I'd have needed to buy a gallon of base paint), one quart matte, and one semi-gloss.

I decided to go with matte for the background, and stencil glossy leaves on top. After I painted the walls with the matte (Bistro White) and let it dry, I used a small foam roller to roll on the gloss (Polar White) over the stencil. The stencil was about 24"x24", and I taped it up wherever it would fit completely on the walls.

After I had done that and let it dry, I cut up the stencil to make smaller sections that I could fill in on gaps, edges, and corners. I basically slapped these on the wall wherever I wanted more glossy leaves. For these smaller areas, I didn't use the foam roller; instead I used a little foam brush.

I didn't worry about lining up the stencil at all and I let the stencil overlap earlier stencilings, which made this a very easy stencil to apply. I wanted it to be just a flowing, glossy leafy pattern. In the end, I had a tiny little piece of stencil that I taped down and tap-tapped to put some leaves on any sparse spots.

After the leaves were finished, the walls looked like this. It's hard to take a picture of the entire wall because the room is so darn tiny!

The biggest chunk of time for this project was the hour or so for the paint to dry between stencilings. Even with that, and touch-ups and clean-ups, I got it all finished within 24 hours. If I did this again, I think I'd look for some stencil paint that was pearlized, and mix that with the white semi-gloss wall paint for stenciling. Because although these leaves shimmer when the light hits them, I'd kinda like them to shimmer even without the light hitting them.

Here's the final result:

With lights on:

and lights off:

There's a very subtle contrast when the light doesn't reflect. I think the blue ceiling is playing with the matte background and giving it a subtle blue tinge, which I love. You can see just barely see it next to the mirror:

Here's how the matte/gloss stencil compares to the wallpaper (except for the difference in light exposure):

Here are a few shots of the wall and blue ceiling reflected in the mirror. When the room is only 40" x 60", you have to get creative with your photos! Like, bumping your backside against the wall and sliding down and aiming up.  

I love how this turned out. And the fun thing is: If I want more leaves, I can just whip out that stencil and add 'em! And you know I just might do that! Happy continuing summer everyone!

ps I decided to link to Thrifty Decor Chick's "Show Us Your Bathrooms" just for fun. And because I'm off for the summer, so why not? :) There are lots of lovely bathroom posts over there to feed your bathroom decorating imagination.