The Evan Incident

Recently I had a little bit of an incident in my house that necessitated some further improvements to the hallway.  Don't worry, no one got hurt - but there was definitely some discomfort involved.  With that set-up, let's go back in time to about a year ago when I discovered that somehow the doorknob on the inside of my downstairs bathroom had stopped working.

I have no idea how it happened, or exactly when, but people who came over started accidentally locking themselves in my bathroom, which was (it goes without saying) fairly awkward.  So I'd think to myself, "Man, I should really do something about that"... and then promptly forget all about it.  As a single dweller, I never shut that door, so it would only ever occur to me when someone else was in the house.  I'd warn them about the door, and give them the option of using the upstairs bathroom, or using the downstairs bathroom but not shutting the door all the way.  It was obviously a little weird, but somehow it just kept on not rising to the level of a Major Priority.

Until now. 

My friends Andrew and Evan were staying with me for a night before heading down to our college reunion.  We went out, had a few drinks, I gave them my usual spiel about their bathroom options, and then we all went to bed.  At some point in the night, Evan got up and - forgetting about my warning in his half-asleep haze - went to the downstairs bathroom, shut the door, and locked himself in.  

Or at least that's how I would react to being locked in a small, windowless room in the middle of the night.  Evan's a pretty laid-back guy, so he thought instead of "bothering" someone (his words), he would just lay down and go to sleep.  On the cold tile floor.  He admitted that he thought someone else would come along after not too long to let him out, but he did not reckon with my iron-clad bladder, unfortunately. 

So when I woke up in the morning, I saw the bathroom door closed, and not thinking too much about it in my own half-asleep haze, I opened it.  The door bumped into something, the lights were out, and I heard someone make some kind of noise.  So that's how I finally freed Evan, and that's when the whole sad story came out.  He didn't even use the towel for a pillow!  So now that I've confessed what a terrible host I am, I decided the time had finally come (and gone) to do something about the door so that this horrible incident would never be repeated.

All of the doorknobs in that hallway are the same kind of white enamel design, except for the door to the back stairs, which is in a satin nickel finish.  Pretty much all of the hardware in my house is in this same finish, so it's pretty tempting to just replace the white enamel knobs with something like the satin nickel and be done with it.  But there's something about having that finish absolutely everywhere in the house that just feels a little weird and bland to me, like I'm in a reasonably-priced hotel.  Not a cheap motel, because they actually do look quite nice - but just a place lacking in personality, if that makes any sense.

The issue is that changing all of those knobs (and then possibly more of the other hardware) is a pretty big commitment that I'm not sure I'm quite ready for.  And if you have half of the doorknobs in some other finish, and half in the satin nickel, does that look even weirder than if you had just gone all in with one of them?  And if you make the wrong decision, that's pretty expensive, because each one of these doorknob sets could cost as much as $30 (and waaaaaaaaay more than that if you get crazy with it).  And I've got 8 doors to deal with on the first floor, so that would be an expensive mistake. 

I was agonizing over this when my mom suggested that I basically just do a little experiment, rather than making the decision right now.  Good idea!  I figured I could talk myself into getting past the possible waste of $20ish bucks if it was in the name of getting the right thing later.  One of the options that I was most interested in was a dark oil-rubbed bronze kind of color.  I had used something like that when I redid the bookcase, and I liked how that turned out. 

The think this high-contrast look manages to look traditional enough that it fits in my 1870-something house, but adds just a little more sharpness that looks modern.  So maybe it would look just as nice with the doors in the hallway, where all the trim, doors, and floor are white.  I decided to pick up a doorknob in this dark finish to use for my experiment (rather than a satin nickel one), because I felt pretty confident that nothing BAD would come of having all the knobs in the satin nickel.  It might be a little boring, but that's about the worst thing I could say about it - I actually really like the satin nickel for a lot of the hardware that I have, so I'd be perfectly happy to revert to that if the experiment went badly.

So here's the new doorknob kit, and the tools for the job. 

The whole thing was pretty simple, and I learned some new doorknob-words.  Like did you know this thing that goes in the middle of the lock is called a pawl?

Nothing much to see here process-wise except for the finished product, which now looks like this. 

And the best news yet - it's functional!  I wanted to try it out, and I almost did my experiment from inside the bathroom, before having a horrible flashback to The Evan Incident and deciding I wouldn't press my luck with that until someone else was here to let me out.  But I did try it from the outside, and everything worked great.

So now the question is, which finish to use for the remaining doors.  Here's a few shots where you can see the range of finishes that are now next to each other in the hallway, so there's a pretty good side-by-side comparison to think about.

If there was nothing besides aesthetics to think about, I think I would go with the dark bronze finish.  Compared to the other ones, I just think it looks way more interesting since there's SO MUCH white everywhere in the hallway.  It's just a nice little accent.  But if I think matching is important (and I confess I think I do, at least when they're right next to each other like this), that would mean not only redoing the closet and bedroom doors, but also the keyed entry door.  So then you get into the issues with my house keys - would I have to get new locks, new keys, and new spare sets of keys?  And let's not even talk about the hinges.  That seems like a lot of unnecessary work just to have some pretty doorknobs. 

Well, who can say where this will end up, but I will probably think about it for a little while before doing anything.  If anyone has any ideas or strong preferences, I'd love to hear them!  I'm also still searching for a new hallway light, and thinking about how that might play into this, so I'm sure this is not the last that you will hear about the hallway.

Ella ella ella eh eh eh

So in the midst of all this stenciling, I was also able to check another one of my long-standing to-dos off my list.  I've had this large plant for a couple of years.  I have no idea what it is, but I saw another one online that looked very similar that its owner described as an umbrella tree, so that's what I've decided it is (hence my Rihanna reference).

If you know me, you know I don't have a particularly green thumb, so you can imagine my delight that this tree has proven extremely easy to take care of, and has grown by probably two feet since the time I got it.  It occurred to me a while ago (in a "yeah, I think I read that once in a book" kind of way) that as the plant keeps getting bigger, its roots are also probably growing, and probably want more room to expand.  Not that I know anything about any of this, it just seemed like a logical conclusion.  Plus, the container that it was in was this sort of woven basket kind of thing that was just looking kind of old and grubby.

So I had spent some time searching online for a nice big planter that would give my "tree" enough space and also add a little something special to the room.  Finally found one on Joss and Main for a decent price that fit both those requirements.  It was a planter made to look like a wooden bucket with a kind of distressed finish that I liked.  Here's a couple of pictures where you can see the size comparison between the woven basket that the tree was in with the new bucket.

I think this should be enough room for the tree to grow into for quite a while.  Certainly long enough for it to grow another couple of feet, at which point I might want to get rid of it anyway because it'll be huge!  To make sure I had some proper drainage, I got a plastic nursery pot to put inside the bucket, which the tree would actually be planted in.

The nursery pot fit inside the bucket, but unfortunately the plastic pot had these handles that stuck out from the main part that made it sit unevenly in the bucket, which you can see here.

To fix this, I decided to try to trim off the nursery pot's handles and some of the rim, since it was just made out of plastic.  I don't have any fancy tools, but it turned out a simple scissors worked just fine for what I needed.  When I was done, it fit perfectly!

So the next step in solving the drainage issue was putting something in there to protect the inside of the planter from sopping up too much sitting water and possibly discoloring, or worse - seeping through to my hardwood floors.  For some ideas, I went back to the old woven basket, which it turned out had this plastic sheeting lining the inside of it for this very purpose.

I decided something like this could probably work just fine in my new bucket too, so I found some plastic and spread it out around the bottom of the bucket before putting the nursery pot in.

Once I got everything put together, it was just a matter of transferring the tree into the new pot and adding some more potting soil.  Pretty soon, she was looking pretty damn good if I do say so myself.

Now that it's back in its home in the living room, I think the tree is looking and feeling pretty good.  The transferring process didn't seem to harm it at all, and it certainly looks way better than it did before.  The larger bucket just seems to balance the top-heaviness of the tree out more than the tiny little basket did, and I think this planter is more cohesive with the overall look of the house.  Success!

In other plant news, my herb garden is coming along nicely as well.  Maybe I'm an awesome gardener and didn't even know it?  Or maybe I just choose super-easy plants to grow?  Probably the latter.  At any rate, everything is still alive and even thriving!

Well, make that *most* everything is alive - the basil is really suffering.  You can see it here in this picture, the tiny pitiful plant front and center that's being swallowed by the big scary parsley plant.  A few days ago I tried trimming back the parsley and trying to position the basil so it would get more sun, so we'll see if that helps at all.

You might have noticed a couple extra plants in there that weren't in the original batch, and those are cayenne plants, courtesy of my mom (thank you!).

She gave them to me as a way to keep away the squirrels who run rampant pretty much all around my house.  Either the cayenne is super-effective at doing just that or the squirrels can't get to my deck from the surrounding trees, because I don't seem to have had any issues with them eating anything yet.  I will now knock on wood that it stays that way.

Whimsical is the new black

It's done!  It's done!  It's done!  I can't believe it (and you probably can't either), but the much-prolonged stencil project is finally finished.  I feel like I should open some bubbly or something.  (But let's not kid ourselves, I'd probably be doing that anyway.)

Last week I did about half the hallway, and ended here:

I finally had some more time to work on this this past weekend.  I hung up some more newspapers to plan out the different heights of the flowers, and then did some sketching to figure out what angles I wanted them to bend and which colors I wanted to use.  It all worked pretty well, but there was a certain amount of making it up as I went along - thankfully, no real disasters occurred.  

I didn't take any process photos this time around, so I'll just show you what the end result was.  Here's a little sliver between the door to my bedroom and the door to the laundry room.

And here's another little sliver on the other side of the laundry room door, with the hall closet door on the left.  This was a tricky one to do, trying to cross the point where the wall angles back and keeping the angle of the flower consistent.  Anytime I got too close to a corner or a door or anything, doing the stencil became harder because the stencil couldn't lie flat on the wall and had to really be held down by hand to make sure it stayed in place.  The stem on the lighter-colored flower got a little wonky at the very end of it, and I had to restart the dark brown flower three different times because of issues with the paint being runny, but it's probably the kind of stuff that nobody besides me would ever notice because you wouldn't look at something that closely.  Or maybe I'm just rationalizing...

Thank God there was also a big flat wall in this round of painting!  Having the bigger "canvas" to work on made it more fun, but also more daunting to figure out what the composition would look like.  I just felt like there was a lot more room for error because your eye is drawn so much more to these big walls, but hopefully it turned out okay.

So here's what the hall looking toward the living room now looks like.  You can see the first little sliver I showed you in the bottom right corner of this photo.

And here's another shot looking in the opposite direction.  Sorry for the weird lighting in all of these photos, by the way - this space is tough to photograph because there's some natural light that comes in, but it's really quite dark when the overhead light isn't on.  And when you do turn the light on, there's kind of a glare because it's such a small space.  Wah wah.

So far it's been really fun to have it all up on the walls!  It's kind of like walking through a little garden when I walk down to my bedroom.  It's whimsical, but not goofy (I don't think).  So now that I have my little art project on the walls, there's just a couple remaining things that I want to do to "finish" the hallway.  One is to get rid of this light.

It's old-fashioned, ugly, and just totally out of place in my new magical fairyland hallway.  It must go!  I mean, seriously, look at this thing.

Gross.  So I think that's next up on my list.  Someday I think I'd like to re-tile that floor and make it less antiseptic-feeling, but that's probably a ways off.

Back on the stencil horse!

After a hiatus of almost a year, I put my painting pants back on (literally and figuratively) and got down to some hardcore stenciling.  Without further ado, here's a first look:

Whaddya think?  I'm digging it.  So let's back up to how we got here.  Last weekend I had laid everything out on the walls with newspapers (heights of the flowers, that is), and was flattening the stencil.  This weekend I was ready to get going with some actual paint.  I decided to start with a little test version on a cardboard box I had laying around.

I got out my base color from the hallway wall painting job of last summer, and got out my little test pot of white paint, mixed it up, and came up with a lighter version of the wall color.

Then, I sprayed some stencil glue (yep, that is a thing that exists) on the back and taped it down to try to get it to lay flat, and started smooshing paint onto it with this weird little foam spongey thing.

Pretty soon, I had a nice-looking little flower!

It looked pretty good for a first try, but I did learn a valuable lesson about what can happen when the paint gets behind the stencil.  See the lower left corner, some of the paint kind of ran a bit?  Yeah, gotta watch out for that.

So, feeling pretty good about that first baby step, I decided to approach the wall.  But since I was still a little gun-shy, I started on a teeny tiny flower on a hard-to-see strip of wall in between the back door and the bathroom door.  Technically, it worked fine, but I'm glad I started with this less-visible flower because it turns out that my paint color was just a little too subtle.  See how you can barely tell there's a flower here?  Like there once was one, and then someone tried to scrub it off but it left some weird residue?  Yeah, not the look I'm going for.

So, I decided to go back to the drawing board with this color and added a ton more white.  That helped a LOT.  Feeling a little more confident, I moved on to some of the more visible walls.  And voila!  Project Stencil was finally underway.

In order to do some of the taller ones, I needed to figure out a way to make the stems long enough to reach the ground.  I found that once I painted all the way down to the end of the stem, I could pull off the stencil and turn it around 180 degrees to match up the part where the stem left off to where I would start painting again.  Here's a picture where you can see what I'm talking about (which is probably easier to understand than the description I just wrote):

 It seemed like it worked pretty well, so I decided to keep going with it.  I did a few flowers in this color, then mixed up a slightly darker one and did a few more.

Here's where the first wrench got thrown in.  I had bought a test pot of black paint to mix a slightly darker color to use for a few of the flowers.  I put a little black in, and it looked kind of greyish and not dark enough, so I added more.  And then a little more.  Finally, it looked like this - not exactly an appealing thing to put on the walls.  Oops.

I did some quick thinking and decided the best way to fix it would be to run to the hardware store and buy a brand new test pot of a color that was in the same family as the base coat, but darker.  That way, if I needed to lighten it I could using the white, or maybe it would just work as is.  Either way, it wouldn't turn into a weird muddy color like the previous one had.  Turns out that was a decent plan.  I found a dark brown color (enticingly called "Hidden Valley") that I thought fit in with the general color scheme, and went home and continued with the stenciling.  Whew! 

So one problem solved, but of course I knew it couldn't be that easy.  I hadn't screwed up my stenciling...until now.  When I did the first flower in this new color I must have used too much paint on the brush, because it got super-smudged.  It doesn't look so bad from far away...

...but when you get up close to it you can see where things went awry.

Still, it's small enough and so far away from eye level that I'm not sure I care too much about fixing it up.  At least not right now.  So I kept moving with the other flowers, and after about four hours of total work, that half of the hallway is done!

I've still got several walls I need to do before the whole hallway is done, but I feel like I've made good progress for today.  I'm rewarding myself with some wine and Indian food, but before I dug into that I put up some more newspapers to plan out my next moves on the remaining walls.

That last one is kind of awkward-looking, but I'll figure something out.  Wish me luck, readers!  Next time you hear from me I should have lots more artsy-looking dandelions on the walls.