Sunday, February 24, 2019
After painting the hallway yellow, 5/7 of the rooms on the first floor were some shade of yellow. Then the office went from yellow floral to blue gray, and here the living room has gone to a warm gray/white! Now only the den and kitchen have their original pale yellow! After this room, we're taking a painting break. Maybe we'll take this time to acquire some curtain hardware!
What the living room lacks in wallpaper, it makes up for in sheer volume of uncaulked-trim. So, so much trim.
And the usual: peeling wallpaint, wallpaint stained where furniture touched it for 70 years, gaping holes in the plaster where artwork was, house-settling cracks above doors & windows, and some sort of weird exhaust/smoke staining from the baseboard radiators. But no peeling ceiling paint! Due to some color discrepancy in the realtor photos and real life, I suspect the ceiling was actually painted sometime in the past 5 years. We still primed & painted it, because I'm not leaving anything to chance. There's a lot of peeling ceiling paint involved in old houses.
This photo below shows off the nice, Doctor-Who-esque crack-in-the-wall above the fireplace, from house settling. A round of scrape-sand-spackle-sand for that! The cornice-matching mantle is sticking around, because I can pretend it lends a Scandinavian feel to the room (can't we all pretend?). Longterm TODO list!
That back right corner is earmarked for a cat tower of some sort - the cat loved sitting atop the old one, so we'd like her to have another high point (i.e., defensible) to observe us and the dog from. A cat tower, or maybe a photo ledge and a bunch of large plants. Not sure.
True story - we requested the carpet as part of our negotiations, because this room only has hardwood floors for a two-foot border around the perimeter of the room, and plywood in the middle. Another thing on the longterm TODO list.
Sweet, sweet radiator smoke-staining. And a nice long 50s cornice to match the ones from the office.
This room, like the dining room is really only part-way finished. Until a month ago, there wasn't really any furniture in this room except for the hand-me-down futon, the liquor cabinet, thrifted mid century side table, and a family-obtained drop-leaf-table. The knock-off Eames loungers in camel leather were quite the craigslist steal, although we had to drive 3 hours round-trip to retrieve them. The version of the room in these photos is the budget-version. Furnished enough, and quickly, so it doesn't look like an empty room we have no purpose for.
I still need to make a modern quilt to hang over the fireplace (maybe in this color scheme). And create a custom slipcover for the futon in a mottled blue color (white dog + brown cat = mottled). Then there's also the bamboo shades to replace the rollers, curtain hardware + diamond sheer curtains (custom-sized), artwork, and printing the split mountain print from etsy/TheRiverKing as mentioned in my art post. etc. etc. So much to do. Curtain hardware is probably next.
The black side tables are the Londonberry from Target, cement table lamp from Target (budget version of this one), brass lamp from Wayfair, the Umbra wood clock was a wedding gift, and I've had the giant Secret Garden print from Michelle Armas for years (it needs a frame). More art and lighting to come! And furniture. There's some weird things going on - I'd like to put the cement lamp on the mantel, but we have to wait for the paint to cure so in the meantime it's sitting awkwardly on a tiny table, lol. Mid-process.
1 comments:
Phew, you guys really have been working on the house!
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