OMG I hate red now

So I painted the front door this weekend and let me just tell you:  if you ever have the inclination to paint a door red, don't do it.  Even if you love red, pick another color.  Seriously it is a pain. in. the. ass.

Ugh.

ANYWAY, here's the Before with a boring green door:

I tested two colors (Barn on the left and Ladybug on the right) to see which I liked best.  Ladybug won out.

So I removed the hardware, sanded and rolled the red paint onto the flat parts.  See how I wrote that in one sentence?  Yeah, it took FOR. FREAKIN. EVER.  Removing the hardware took about an hour when one of the handle's screw heads broke off the screw and Chris had to dig/drill it out.  There was some swearing involved.  Then as I was sanding, the old paint kept flaking off and being a pain, so THAT took twice as long as I had planned. 

Anyway, painting those little crevices around those six panels was a horrible, horrible pain in the ass and I'm still not totally in love with how it turned out.  Oh well--after 5 coats, I'm saying good enough!  Also, when I detached the door handles, I gave it a quick coat of matte black spray paint.  The handles were in good shape, but just ugly, rusty, grungy brass.  I liked the shape too, and a $3 can of spray paint did the job perfectly. 

Then it came to putting the lock back ON.  Had we been paying attention when we removed it, it wouldn't have taken long, but we finally got it figured out.  Lesson learned!

Anyway, here it is! 

We'll also put a door knocker and the house numbers on the door sometime this week.  We also plan to paint the shutters black and do some power washing and hedge clipping this spring and I think it'll really look good.

Also this weekend:  Chris made this for breakfast on Sunday morning.  Ridiculous.  It was damn good too.

Hope you had a great weekend! 

TGIF!

Oh, thank goodness it's Friday!  This weekend is supposed to be pretty and I'm hoping to get outside and deal with The Crabgrass Situation (again).  Hopefully I can get the rest of it pulled out and then throw down some grass seed.  Although I'm sure if I throw down seed, we'll have a giant snowstorm next week.

This weekend I also plan on painting the front door and priming the baseboards in the upstairs bedroom.  I seriously cannot WAIT until all the baseboards and trim is done--thankfully this is the last room I need to tackle and it shouldn't be too bad.

Anyway, the dining room rug arrived yesterday, as did the new poster:

We're going to start looking for a small, low cabinet to put underneath the beer poster on the right.

We also need to figure out a paint color for this room.  The beige is just too...beige.  Plus, we now have a neutral rug, neutral colored posters and it's just too much neutral.  So I'm debating between navy, green and pink (yes, I'm all over the place on this one).  We won't be tackling this project this weekend, but it's time to start thinking about a new color.

Hope everyone has a lovely weekend, doing whatever it is that relaxes and rejuvenates you!

A random assortment of stuff

Considering these for the living room.  Thoughts?

Picked this up on Tuesday, so I have a feeling it'll be a craft-tacular weekend in this household (when I'm not painting baseboards and the front door and re-seeding the front lawn--my life is a thrill a minute, I tell ya!  P.S.  We have daffodils blooming already!)

The new rug and the poster should be here this afternoon.  Look for pics here tomorrow.

Also, did anyone watch Tuesday's episode of Glee?  I had mixed opinions about it--I liked the episode personally, but I think I'd be pissed if I had kids that were watching it.  But then again, if I had kids that liked the show, I probably would've started previewing the show a long time ago.  Thoughts?

Ladybug!

So a decision has been made regarding the front of the house:

We're going with Ladybug, the color on the right.  The color on the left (Barn) is just a little too pink.  It'll be at least a satin finish, if not a high gloss and the side door will get a coat too.  I'm thinking eventually the shutters will be painted black and it will all look oh so great.

And yes, I'll be removing the pine wreath before March rolls around. 

What I ended up with

Remember my Friday shopping list?.  Unfortunately, I didn't end up with these and no rich benefactor came through:

Sigh.

 

I didn't end up with this rug either (it was sold out):

But I did get this one instead:

I'm excited to see how it'll look in the dining room.  It's a formal dining room with a fairly formal looking dining room set, but I don't want the room to feel formal (we're not really like that), so bringing in some casual accessories, like the sisal rug will hopefully keep the room from feeling stuffy.  Ya know?

Speaking of dining room accessories, here's what I got Chris for Valentine's Day:

And on Saturday I saw that Pop Chart Lab released another poster, so I ordered it. 

This and the beer poster will flank the window in the dining room and look super cool.  Photos to come.  Still need to decide on a paint color for that room.  Decisions, decisions...

By the way, Pop Chart Lab has some other really cool posters.  These two are my other faves:

And now for the master closet!

This weekend we were busy, busy, BUSY!  We woke up Saturday morning and decided to suck it up and tackle the master closet finally.  We knew when we moved in that we'd have to eventually re-do it, but decided to live with it for awhile before deciding how we wanted to lay it out. 

Before there wasn't enough shelf space and the whole thing was laid out in such a way that it was really awkward.  We didn't really have enough room for all our clothes and my shoes, so as a result our clothes and shoes tended to pile up on the floor.  (Some may argue and say that that's a poor excuse, but that's my story and I'm sticking to it.)  Here are some befores:

Yep, a bunch of Chris's stuff is still in a box from when we moved in...

So Saturday morning, we moved all our clothes into other closets and once we started taking down the rods and shelves, we realized that the walls were in pretty bad shape and that we'd have to patch and paint the whole thing to really do the job right.

It's hard to tell, but there's a lot of lumpy drywall here.

We think the closet used to be smaller and originally ended at this weird pole thing.  It appears to be structural and for whatever reason, someone covered it with molding.   

Also, this shelf-thingy wasn't screwed into a stud, so it wiggled around quite a bit.  Quality.

Anyway, after patching and sanding, we chose to paint the whole closet with Martha Stewart's Enamelware blue and I'm tickled with how it turned out.

Rather than removing the molding and patching the drywall around the weird pole thing, we figured we'd just paint over the whole thing to make it visually disappear.  Much better.

Griz never ceases to astonish me with how calm she is with big projects and lots of noise.

Anyway, yesterday the shelves began to go up:

Then we added some more:

We added a small space for long things like dresses and garment bags. 

And here it is mostly done! 

We still need to add a few more shelves, but that's going to have to wait until next weekend when we have time to dig out the power tools again.  We'll also probably add a small rug and a mirror, but that can wait too.

 

All in all, I'm thrilled with how it turned out.  It's already a lot more functional and spacious and I think the color just makes it feel fresh and clean and special. 

What do you think?

Shopping List

This weekend's purchases will definitely include these:

A rug for our dining room

Running shoes for my feet

A pretty book for my brain

I doubt my weekend will include these, but I would very much like them nonetheless:

From here, here, here, here, and here

Ummmmmmmmm

I'm exhausted and don't have anything interesting to post, since I've been out of town on bizness.  I'm going to have some more wine tonight and get back to our regularly scheduled posting on Friday. 

Watching

So, ever since we got our Bluray player that hooks up to the internet, we've been watching a ridiculous amount of shows via Netflix that we can't normally watch (we choose to subscribe only to basic cable and supplement with Netflix).  The past few months, we've been rotating between Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations and Mythbusters.  And when Chris is out of the room, Say Yes to the Dress.

Anyway, with Oscar season upon us, it kind of reminded me that there are actual movies out there to be watched.  So here's a rundown of stuff we've watched recently:

Note by Note: The Making of Steinway L1037.  If you're a little on the nerdy side (which you probably are if you've read this far), then you'll like this.  Really interesting documentary about the making of one Steinway piano.  True story: it take a YEAR to make a Steinway.  BABIES take less time to make.  Geez.  And an astonishing amount of a Steinway is made purely by hand.  This was remarkable and I highly recommend watching it.

Elegy.  Penelope Cruz and Ben Kingsley are the main characters who fall in love.  He's a professor and she's a just-graduated student.  Not to be superficial or anything, but I HATED her hair in the first part of the movie.  Awful.  But still, I loved the complexity of their love and despite a 30 year age difference, it made sense and was really touching.

A Secret.  A french movie about a family's secret past during World War II--totally different than any other WWII movie I'd seen before.  It was beautifully done and more on the psychological side than anything.  Watch it.

And finally, A Single Man.  I love, love, LOVED this.  Colin Firth is amazing in it as a gay man in the 60's who loses his partner.  It's sad, sweet, charming, and stylish.  I still haven't seen The King's Speech, but this movie sealed in my mind that Colin Firth is one of the greatest actors around these days. 
What have you seen lately?  Anything I need to catch while it's at the theater?  I'm woefully behind on new releases.

Homemade Granola

I didn't really give a proper weekend update yesterday.  Blogger was being weird, so I decided to hit 'Publish' before Blogger decided it hated me forever.  And now it's back to hating me again...grrrrrrrr....

Anyway, I stuck to my plan and didn't do any projects this past weekend.  Doesn't mean I did nothing nothing, but I undertook no projects, so how's that?  Truthfully, I don't find it relaxing at all to lounge around watching tv all weekend so instead I did some much needed cleaning and a bit of cooking.  Chris also did some baking and made some bread. 

Is there any doubt as to why he's been my valentine for the last 8 years?

I made lasagna and some homemade granola.  Granola is one of the easiest things to make and it makes the house smell so good.  One of the other reasons I love to make it is because you there are so many variations: you can add cinnamon and nutmeg, omit the nuts, or substitute the raisins for cranberries, dried apricots or dried cherries.  I used some hazelnuts instead of cashews and chose to omit the coconut (mainly because I was out and was too lazy to drive to the store) and used raisins and dried cherries.  Yum. 

Here's the recipe:

Ingredients

3 cups rolled oats
1 cup slivered almonds
1 cup cashews
3/4 cup shredded sweet coconut
1/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons dark brown sugar
1/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons maple syrup
1/4 cup vegetable oil
3/4 teaspoon salt
1 cup raisins

Directions

Preheat oven to 250 degrees F.

In a large bowl, combine the oats, nuts, coconut, and brown sugar.

In a separate bowl, combine maple syrup, oil, and salt. Combine both mixtures and pour onto 2 sheet pans. Cook for 1 hour and 15 minutes, stirring every 15 minutes to achieve an even color.

Remove from oven and transfer into a large bowl. Add raisins and mix until evenly distributed.  I had some for breakfast yesterday with blackberries.  YUM.

In other news, Grizabella had a rough weekend.  Clearly:

What???  It'd been a few weeks AT LEAST since I posted a picture of her.  Right????  Right?

Inspiration

While digging into blog-land over the weekend, I came up with the inspiration for the upstairs bedroom. I'd been struggling with what color to paint that room and had yet to come up with anything. I was originally think a light aqua color, but I wasn't really feeling passionate about the color.

Here's the room I'm referring to:

These pictures were taken on move-in day and the room has remained completely unchanged since then, which was 11 months ago.  There's zero furniture in the room and it currently houses some boxes and coolers.  Glamorous, huh?  When we get the money from our tax return, the plan is to buy to twin beds for this room.  I don't expect that it'll ever be used as anyone's permanent bedroom, but it'll be a fun room for overflow guests and for future kids to have slumber parties and stuff. 

Anyway, color scheme will be this:

Via designstiles

Via designstiles

Yes, orange walls.  It may not be everyone's cup of tea, but I think it'll be fun.  The room layout will be similar to this:

Source unknown

Domino magazine 

Source unknown

Of course, I still have to paint the trim before I really even get started, so don't expect to see any "Befores and Afters" in the very near future.  But sometime this spring, hopefully.