Built-in bookcase: Episode 3

The bookcase is painted!  Well, mostly.

Cast your memory back a month or so to remember where we started:

A few weeks ago I started with removing and painting all the doors, so those have been sitting idly waiting for the rest of it to get done to put them back on.  It took me all of one evening just to move all the books off the shelves and all the movies and stuff inside the cabinets to a different location in the house.  Unfortunately, I thought the best place for it was upstairs :(  I guess that was my exercise for the day?

Once I got it all cleared off, here's what the blank canvas looked like after it was all taped off and ready for painting:

The first half of Day One was spent priming the whole thing with this super-intense bonding and sealing primer that I mentioned in a previous post.  I knew it was serious stuff with potential for stinkiness, but I don't think I had truly appreciated the number of brain cells that I believe I burned in the process of using it.  I was incredibly thankful that I had waited until it was truly warm enough to open up every single window in the house - and even then, I felt like I was getting stupider. 

In this process I also learned quite a bit about the usage and disposal of mineral spirits, which are basically paint thinner.  Scary stuff!  If my house accidentally blows up one of these days, you'll know why.

For the second half of Day One, I painted the first coat of topcoat on the top half of the bookcase.  My plan was to get the top half done first so that I can put the TV and lamps back up there and hopefully clear up at least some of the junk floating around my house at the moment.  That, and...I miss my TV.  So here's where Day One left off:

On Day Two, I spent the first half of the day doing a second coat on the top half and a first coat on the bottom half.

After a couple days, things were going well, but it was also really exhausting work.  My arms were both pretty sore, and I was losing patience with the whole thing.  But on the upside, I really liked how it was starting to look, so I tried to use that as motivation to keep calm and carry on.

I won't bother showing you the pictures from Day Three and Day Four because the camera doesn't really pick up the differences, but all in all, it ended up taking four coats to get the interior part of the top half up to snuff and three coats to finish up the bottom half.  Yikes.  What I learned was that if I could have used a roller on more of it I think it would have gone faster and also the paint coverage would have been better.  But there just wasn't really room on the insides of the shelves on top, so I just had to use a paint brush, which ended up taking all those coats to not look streaky.  Maybe the real lesson here is that I'm just a sucky painter?

Anyway, after getting the main body of the bookcase finished up yesterday and letting it dry overnight, I put the doors back on and here we are.

Where are the shelves, you may be wondering?  Well, that will be this week's project.  I've started on a few of them, but as with the doors, it will be slow work because of the two sides and all the drying time involved.  Should be ready to go soon, though!

In the process of hanging up the doors, though, I've been reminded of one of my main issues with the bookcase, which is the crooked hanging doors.  I wasn't sure exactly what the problem was, so I thought that by simply taking them off and re-hanging them, I could at least hope to eliminate that issue as the possible source of the problem, but it didn't work.  It might be something that requires a second person to hold steady and level while the other person puts in the screws.  About three of the doors are still wonky, as you can see below:

The other two options for what's going wrong (I think) are that the holes for the screws that hold the hinges onto the frame could be drilled in the wrong place in a couple of instances, and the other is that the hinges themselves could be off somehow.  I was thinking about replacing the hinges anyway, because the previous owners just painted right over them when they did the last paint job on the bookcase, rather than taking them off when they did the painting.  So now there's remnants of the old paint color on each of the hinges on the doors.  It's not enough to keep me awake at night, but it just doesn't look very profesh, and I didn't want to paint over them and compound the problem with the hinges.  So that will be something to tackle in a future edition of these bookcase posts.

To sum up: I'm very happy with the way the white paint looks on the bookcase.  Hooray for that!  But there's still some work to be done, including finishing and replacing the shelves, re-hanging the cabinet doors, and finding a better way to hide all the cords.  Sigh.  I'll post more pictures when the shelves are up and everything's back where it belongs!

Sparky!

This weekend marked the momentous arrival of a new member of the Berg family: Sparky the Fridge.  Hooray!

Sparky was purchased just as soon as I finished paying off Presssssssshious the Stove.  I figured I might as well keep on moving with this whole appliance binge I'm on so as to get the maximum enjoyment out of my shiny new toys.  Sparky is also being paid off over the next 12 months with no interest, so I feel good that at least I can budget for these things to lessen the financial pain.

Sparky is only maybe an inch taller and wider than my old fridge - seen in profile here:

(As a side note, one thing I've learned about myself through this little blog project is how bad I am at taking "before" pictures.  It's all well and good to have the "after" but if you have nothing to compare it to, that takes some of the fun out of it.)

Anyway, my point was that Sparky is not actually that much bigger than my old fridge, but seems ENORMOUS by comparison when you're just looking at it.  Deciding where to put all the fun shelves and things took me quite a while, but I think I've settled on an arrangement that works for me.  I contemplated taking a picture of the inside of the fridge to post here, but remembered all the ridicule I've been subjected to over the years for my fridge contents, and decided against it.  Nevertheless, I will share with you that I have an entire shelf dedicated to various types of mustard.  Mock away!

Anyway, I'll throw in a couple pictures to show you how nicely Sparky complements the rest of the members of the kitchen family.

And then one with the lamp included so you can see the improvement that has already been made in the space compared with the pic above.  (Thank you to Ellen for the beautiful flowers gracing the table!)

Besides getting the fridge delivered, this weekend has also been exciting because I've started the bookcase painting project.  I'm about halfway done as I write this - after two full days of work on it - so hopefully it won't be long before I can show you the finished product!

Built-in bookcase: Episode 2

The big painting project that will likely take up most of this summer has officially begun!  Step one was to paint the built-in bookcase white to match the trim.  When you last saw it, it looked like this:

Last weekend when I had some free time, I decided to start with the cabinet doors - mostly to avoid having to unplug the TV :)  I think I mentioned before that I had searched out the same paint that had been used by the previous owners on the trim, so I could match it.  The people at the paint store also recommended using a particular kind of primer that bonds and seals because of the heavy-duty usage this thing gets.  

Here's my little workshop that I set up in my house.  I waited to start this until it was warm enough outside that I could open up the windows - unfortunately what I had not pieced together was that that also meant I spent most of a really nice weekend inside.  Bad planning on my part, but it felt good to get started on this thing that I've been anticipating for so long!

Anyway, I didn't have space to do all 8 doors at once, so I just worked on 4 at a time.  Obviously there are two sides to each door, so that's 16 sides x 1 coat of primer x 3 coats of topcoat.  And each of those takes a couple hours before you can even touch them, and the 8 hours before you can put another coat on.  All of which is to say - it was a lengthy process, and brought home how long it's going to take to do the rest of the bookcase.  Oy. 

But finally getting the doors done made it feel a lot more real, and will definitely spur me to get moving on the rest of the bookcase very, very soon.  I've got next Friday off of work, and have officially blocked off the ENTIRE weekend - literally, on my calendar - to work on finishing it up.  The white doors already look very crisp and clean and modern, so I can't wait to see the final result!

Paint your wagons

Now that it's getting gloriously warm out, it's time to start working on The Big Plan, which mostly involves a lot of painting.  To refresh your memory, here's the color scheme I'm interested in for the main floor:

There are many possible variations on this general idea, but the master plan is to paint the walls brown, the built-in bookcase white (possible accent color on the back wall?), and then have a green accent wall somewhere in there.  To kick things off, I figured I should start the process of narrowing the options for the brown, because there's A LOT of directions this could go.

First, a word on the subject of brown walls.  I know it's not for everyone, and I would not say I'm completely without doubt about whether it will work or not.  It could totally fail, and be too dark, etc, etc.  But I figure that brown is one of my favorite colors, and if I'm getting something that at least I like, it can't be that bad.  And if it IS that bad, well then, you just repaint.  So wish me luck (even if you don't like my choice)!

My official color consultant Erin Jude and I (and her daughter Etta) spent a lovely afternoon mixing and matching and taping paint chips up on the wall.  We finally narrowed it down to one or two that we were most fond of.  I then took those chips out again to the paint stores and picked up samples of the original two, then added a couple more new ones to the mix whose chips appeared very close in color. 

I painted all these lovely browns up on the wall in three different places to get a sense of what they would look like in different areas.  Because it's meant to cover basically a whole floor, it has to work in a lot of different light.  First, here they are on the wall in the dining area.  (In each of these pictures, including the pictures taken near the bookcase, the four colors are arranged in the same order top to bottom).

Then, on the wall in the corner near the front window and the built-in bookcase.

It's kind of crazy how different they look at different times of the day, right?  I've now narrowed it down to definitely the top two, and am pretty much almost decided on the brown that is at the top of the column.  Which just happens to be the original one that Erin and I picked out!  I'm in love with the biggest green square (called "Green Giggle") on the big color scheme chip, and I think that looks nice with this brown, so I'm determined to use it on a wall somewhere.  Exactly where remains to be seen.

Before I actually start any of the brown walls, I'm first working on painting the bookcase white to match all the trim in the house.  I think it'll brighten up that corner a bit and make the bookcase pop more instead of blending into the wall.  Once that's done, I'll start painting the brown on the walls.  If that goes okay and I'm still liking the look, then I might go back and put some kind of accent color on the back wall of the bookcase - I'm thinking orange....

Lampin' it*

*Post title credit: Teddy Berg

One of the things that's always bugged me about the main floor of my house was this ugly overhead light that was in the dining area.  The fixture itself wasn't particularly attractive, and the overhead light was sort of like being in a conference room.  As a result, I almost never had it on, so it was kind of a waste of space.  (I could have sworn I took other pictures of it before I took it down, but can't find them, so this one below is the best I could do to show you the "before.")

My plan to replace it was to find a pendant lamp that hung down over the dining table, to help define the space, and also to make the light a little warmer, rather than having it be this horrible overhead lighting.  But the tricky part was to also find something that was the right size: too much chandelier would overwhelm the relatively small space, and too small would just look odd.  I found a nice lamp from Crate and Barrel that I thought kind of fit with the other linens and natural fibers I have in various spots in my house, and was a nice medium size.  Then it was just a matter of installing it...yikes.

I toyed with the idea of doing it 100% myself because I had seen some things online that convinced me it wasn't that tricky.  So I managed to learn a little bit about the whole process, but then chickened out at the last minute after talking to some friends and deciding it was best for me, a novice DIY-er, to NOT mess with potentially lethal powers.  But!  I have no shame in asking my friends to mess with those same powers, so once again I called in the masterful Pat Smith.

Once again, Pat very patiently came over to help me take out the old lamp, install the new lamp, and show me everything he did along the way.  In fact, he was right - it wasn't that hard once you knew a few simple rules about the colors of the wires, and had a couple cheap pieces of equipment to twist the wires together and to tell when a wire was hot or not.  So here's the finished product:

Nice, huh?  I'm pretty delighted with it.  I went from never ever using that light fixture at all, and having half the room be dark constantly, to having it on all the time when I'm home.  I love its shape, and the light it casts really makes the warm feel so much warmer.  Plus, it was a huge bonus that I learned I don't have to hire an electrician to do stuff like this!  I've got another overhead light in the hallway that has irked me from day one, so that's next on my list, and that one I'm determined to do myself - possibly with Pat's supervision, since I'm still a little bit of a scaredy-cat.

You may have noticed the weird brown colorings on the wall in those pictures above.  No, this is not some odd new modern art I've picked up.  I'm working on picking out a new color for many of the walls on the main floor, and those are the finalists.  There'll be a more complete post about that one of these days, so stay tuned!

Shiny happy outlet covers

One of the guiding principles behind everything I'm working on in the kitchen is to just make it look more modern.  I think the stainless steel appliances will go a long way towards doing that, but I thought I could make it look just a bit more snazzy by adding matching stainless outlet covers.

So here's the before:

Oh, yeah, and I added this lamp to the left kitchen corner, which is the darkest part of the room.  I've got some surface lights on the other two sides, so I've been trying this out for a little bit.  I like having the light there, but I'm not sure this is the permanent solution.  I'm not a huge fan of adding more stuff to the countertop to clutter it up, and the cord is kind of annoying when I'm cooking.  But so far I haven't worked on finding anything better, so it'll probably stay here for a bit until I do.  Here's the lamp in use - the picture is obviously not great so you don't get the real idea, but it does add some warmth to that corner.

Anyway, back to the outlet covers.  I found two of them really easily at the hardware store, but the one with the two switches and the toggle was trickier and had to be specially ordered.  I ended up having a whole conversation with the guy at the hardware store how he was having the exact same problem finding this unique arrangement for an outlet cover.

So here you go with the finished product.

Ta da!  A nice easy fix.  I have to admit that for right now it doesn't change things a whole heck of a lot, but I'm betting (and hoping I'm right) that the impact is greater when you have the whole kitchen snazzied up with shiny appliances.  Including a new fridge, just recently ordered, set to be delivered in a couple weeks...SQUEAL!!!