Let's take a moment to reflect

Since the flurry of activity subsided a little bit, what with finishing the door knobs and hinges, hanging the art, and replacing the light fixture, I've been trying to decide what to do next. 

First, let's take a small moment to celebrate.  I've made big progress on some of the biggest rooms on the main floor.  First, the living room.  Here's what it originally looked like:

And here it is more or less currently (except without the cords sticking out of the bookcase - whoops, time to get a new picture):

There's still a few more things on the to-do list for this area that I haven't gotten to yet.

• Hang up art
• Build window seat?
• Re-pot umbrella tree
• Replace DVDs and cassette tapes (in progress)
• Drill holes to hide cords on bookcase
• Clean out hall closet and install new shelving system
• Replace doorknobs and hinges

And then the hallway has also made big progress.  Here's where it started:

And now with the addition of stencils and the new light fixture:

I'm basically considering the hallway done!  At some point, the only other thing I was considering doing is maybe re-tiling the floor, but that's a ways off.

• Finish stencil
• Replace lighting fixture
• Re-tile floor?
• Replace doorknobs and hinges

So what's left?  Well, here's the remaining list.

Kitchen

• Re-tile backsplash
• Install work lighting next to refrigerator
• Replace dishwasher
• Replace countertop
• Level cabinets
• Replace or paint cabinets?
• Replace lighting fixture

Downstairs Bathroom

• Re-tile floor?
• Replace bathtub
• Paint walls
• Buy new accessories
• Replace sink faucet
• Replace vanity
• Replace lighting

Upstairs Bathroom

• Fix toilet
• Buy new accessories
• Paint walls?
• Replace doorknobs and hinges

Office

• Finish tossing out junk
• Clean out closet
• Paint desk
• Paint chair?
• Paint walls
• Make it more functional - place to read, listen to music, work?
• Add a console table?
• Decorate

Bedroom

• Clean out closet, figure out better storage system
• Buy new sheets and comforter?
• Organize jewelry

Deck

• Clean dirt off
• Grow herb garden
• Get better chair
• Add rug?

Garage

• Clean
• Buy larger shelving unit
• Figure out storage for outdoor stuff in the winter

Most of that stuff in the kitchen is going to cost a million dollars, and kind of has to be done all at once, so that's off the table until I can save up some money.  So I'm thinking that the next most useful (and cheap) things to be done would be to paint and redecorate the downstairs bathroom.  Here's what it looks like right now:

 

These are not great pictures, but it's a hard room to photograph because it's a really tight space with odd angles.  But what you can get from these is the intense yellow on the walls.  It was there when I moved in, and I left it alone because I don't really hate it - it's not perfect, but I'm okay with it.  I kind of decorated around it with the light green and brown accents.  However, it's not something I want to live with forever, so I think I'm feeling ready to paint it up in there.  Just not sure about color...  It's a tiny room, and it has no windows, so I think I'd like to try something a little lighter, perhaps more neutral, and then spruce it up with fun accents on the towels and shower curtain (instead of doing the reverse like it is now). 


This got me thinking - back when I started painting last year, I sort of started making a color palette, which is how I ended up with the colors I have.  Here was what I started with:

 

This thing was something I picked up in the paint store because I was attracted to the bright, bold colors, and I ended up using the big green color (Green Giggle) for my kitchen.  Hooray!  But now that I'm moving on to other parts of the house, I think it's time to be a little more strategic about the overall look.  I spent some time messing around with this today, and came up with this slightly edited color scheme. 

It's similar to the one I started with, but I took out the bright red and orange because I just couldn't see myself doing anything quite THAT bright.  I also took out the green on the far right because it's called "Retro Green," and although it looks pretty on the swatch, I fear that if I actually used it it would go too far towards the avocado color so favored by '60s housewives.  This new palette looks a little fresher to me with the yellowish-orange added in and the more muted orange, plus a few more neutrals.  The two greens and the top middle brown are already on various walls in the house, and the darkest brown is kind of there in the oil-rubbed bronze doorknobs.

I'll probably noodle on this a bit more before doing anything, but the bathroom should be on high alert: you're next.

Goodbye, Klimt

Continuing my recent run of finishing up projects that have long been on the to-do list, I recently got around to hanging up some art that I had been debating about for several months.  I used to have this big Klimt print hanging up over the cabinet that I keep my dishes in.

I still love the print, but it just got to be time to take it down.  Around the same time, my grandma died, leaving behind a lot of great art.  I don't know anything about art, but I love just about everything she and my grandpa had collected over the years.  It's all very fun, but stylish and elegant.  Given the chance to claim some of the pretty pictures for myself, here's what I chose:

And here they are together.  I thought they could all be hung up together because of their similar frames, and I liked the contrast between the black and white line drawing and the two more colorful, abstract ones.

They sat here like this, kind of just collecting dust, for the past few months while I debated whether I really did want to hang them all up together, or if I wanted to reframe them or what.  The frames made me pause a bit because they're so...well, GOLD...and I didn't want it to look too old-fashioned.  But I ended up deciding that not only was it too expensive to reframe them all, but I kind of liked the gold being so different from everything else in the house.  So at least for now, they're staying just the way I got them.   

I decided this was a good time to experiment with a picture-hanging technique I had seen on the interwebs, when you're hanging up a group of pieces together.  I found a piece of leftover wrapping paper, turned it over, and spread it on the ground.  I measured it to the maximum size that I wanted the paintings to fit into, and then laid the paintings onto it and moved them around a bit to find an arrangement that I liked.

After settling on the arrangement I wanted, I traced the outline of the pictures onto the paper.  I also measured where the nails would go and marked those spots on the paper.

I then taped the paper to the wall, making sure it was centered and level and all that good stuff.  And then I just nailed right through it in the spots I had previously marked, then tore the paper away. 

And voila!  I hung up the pictures and it turned out pretty good.

Here's a wider shot of the room and how it looks in relation to the other stuff on that wall.

And now going the other direction...  For some reason when you look at it this way, it just makes the entire room feel about 3 feet taller than it did before.  I think I hung the pictures a little higher than I usually would, which - it turns out - I quite like!

Glad to check this one off the list.

Light it up

This has been the month of finishing up long-standing projects, and I have one more to report on.  Those of you who follow Me Party closely (all 3 of you) will remember that when I finished the stenciling in the hallway and the change in door hardware, I just had one more thing to do before I felt like the hallway was complete: the ugly light fixture.

The improvement that the stenciling and door hardware made was huge, but it just made this ugly old-fashioned light stick out all the more.

I spent an inordinate amount of time looking for the right fixture to replace it with.  I knew I wanted it to be modern and to go with the new oil-rubbed bronze hardware, so maybe kind of industrial-looking.  But because of its placement, it also had to fit in with the dining area and kitchen lights; if you're looking in that direction from the living room, you can see all three lights at once, so they have to relate to each other in some way.  (I wish I had a picture of it before with the old light so you could see what I'm talking about, but alas I don't.)

I finally found one that fit the bill - modern, angular, and with enough wattage to make the hall a little brighter.  It's an area without any natural light, so it was a priority for me to find something that 1) wasn't frosted, 2) had more bulbs than the two that were in my old light, and 3) was a little airier than the old one, meaning a bit more negative space.  After several months of searching, I found one on Joss & Main that was just right, and most importantly, on sale:

Pat Smith is my usual go-to in all matters electrical, so I called him up when it was time to do the actual replacing.  He came over one afternoon and we both thought we'd be done in an hour or so...oh, how nice it would have been for that to be the case.  After we started digging into it, several issues reared their ugly heads.  The biggest one was the electrical box, which is the thing in the ceiling that the wires are situated in.  As we were trying to secure the fixture to the electrical box, it just wasn't solid, and the more Pat futzed with it, the more janky it got, to the point where it just broke off in his hands.  Here's a picture of the sad little thing:

See that part on the right?  That's where a pretty big bolt was supposed to go to hold the light fixture in place.  Yeah...it's not so much there anymore....that kind of won't work.  We discussed some options, but in the end, we decided that our next best bet was to just replace the electrical box.  Pat came over again the next day with his adorbs son Asher, who I got to babysit while Pat played around with the wires.

Actually, now that I think of it, Asher got to play around with wires too - no worries, Mother Megan, nothing live :)

In the meantime, this is what the hallway looked like:

I won't bore you with the details, but it took Pat and I another couple of visits for everything to get squared away.  So it ended up being about 4 hours, plus one trip to Menard's in total - WAY more than we thought it would be.  Pat was a good sport, but we were both kind of sick of it by the time it finally got done.  But, luckily, the finished product looked pretty cool.  Here it is in the daytime when it's not getting so much natural light in the area:

And here it is at night:

It's hard to picture since I don't have a "before" picture of the old light when it was on, but this fixture gives off a lot more light, which is very welcome.  And I think it fits nicely with the dining area light, which you can see here (also with the ugly kitchen light) in the daytime:

And then here at nighttime:

With that, the hallway is complete!  At least for now - the only other change that I might consider making in the future is replacing the tile in the bathroom...but that will wait for another day.

Unsightly cords are no longer cramping my style

Recently I decided to tackle a long-standing item on the to-do list: hiding the irritating cords that are laying all over the bookcase where the TV and DVD are.

There's an outlet on the far left side of the picture here, and then the other one is inside of the cabinet door that's open.  The problem is the only place that there's a hole from the top of the bookcase ledge which you can thread cords through is behind the TV - and it's too small.  So the end result is just kind of draping all the cords wherever they fit and just trying to ignore it.  But that means I can't shut the door of the cabinet, which looks messy and is also pretty irritating.

Here's a closer picture of the left side, where the cords for the lamp and the antenna hang over the side of the bookcase.

In the middle section, here's a not-great pic of the hole behind the TV.

And then on the right side, here you can see how many cords are trying to fit through the cabinet door.

Messy, messy, messy.  Not really knowing how to fix it, I thought I'd just try something.  I borrowed my Dad's drill, measured to the center of the left side, and just starting drilling.  Here's a picture of where it started, with the two holes I had sketched to assess how big the hole needed to be to fit the cords through it.

And then I just started drilling holes.  With just a regular-sized bit.  Seriously.  Clearly I didn't think this through very well ahead of time, because what I ended up doing was just drilling a bunch of holes next to each other, hoping to make them become one bigger hole.  I know, this seems idiotic, but I don't have a better explanation for my thought process.  Lesson learned: fail to plan, plan to fail.  I wish I had thought to take a picture of what the disaster looked like, but basically it was just a super-lumpy, ugly hole.

Whenever I have a failure of some sort, Pat Smith is generally my first call.  As usual, Pat had the answer.  Something called a hole saw or a hole bit - who knew that such magical things, specifically designed for this very purpose, existed?!??!?  Clearly, not me.  But how cool!  They just attach right to the end of the drill, and create a really nice clean hole.  Pat had a couple of bits himself, but they were not quite the right size - too big or too small.  So I measured the size of the cords I needed to deal with, and it looked like a 1 1/4" diameter was the size that would work, and I picked one up at the store for about $8.

I tried the bit first on the right-hand third of the bookcase, where no holes had been drilled yet.  It was super smooth and easy, and here's how nice that hole came out:

And here's a shot from farther away so you can see it in context.  Still pretty small and unobtrusive...

...but even better when covered by a lamp!

Buoyed by this first success, I moved on to the left-hand side of the bookcase, where my lumpy disaster hole was.  Unfortunately, this one was harder to drill.  Because there was already a hole there, that left nothing for the bit to grab on to, so it slid around a lot.  It got done, but here was the result.

The middle hole had the same problem.  Luckily, they were easily covered over with some spackle and paint so they cleaned up nicely.  It's not 100% perfect, but the whole idea is for the holes to be basically invisible, so it works just fine.  The final result was well worth the wait!

See how nice and clean that looks?  As compared to this?

Here's some close-ups on each side.  On the left I was able to get rid of the lamp cord, but couldn't solve the antenna cord, since it has a huge chunk on the end that there's no way I'm drilling a hole big enough for.  Maybe someday I'll brainstorm a solution for this, but it's still an improvement.

On the right, I was able to get rid of the lamp cord, the DVD cord, and the TV cord (which now fits in the hole directly behind the TV).

You can still see that one white cord poking out of the bottom, for my laptop, which plugs into the power strip located in the bottom right cabinet.  I can always put it fully away when I have company over, or when I'm not using my laptop, but even with it plugged in I can now shut the cabinet door like 95% of the way, which is a huge improvement!

This has been bugging me for 3 years, and it's FINALLY fixed!  Life is good.

It takes a village to replace my door hinges

Over the past couple of weeks I've been slowly working on the remainder of my door hardware makeover.  I had finished up all the interior doorknobs, but I still needed to replace the exterior doorknobs and deadbolts and all of the hinges.

First issue with both of these things was just assembling all of the hardware.  The exterior doorknob and deadbolt sets were $50 each (for a pretty run of the mill set from Home Depot, so I can only imagine what others must cost).  $100 for doorknobs for two doors?!?!  It took me a while to just feel comfortable spending that, so that's why they didn't get done earlier.

As far as the hinges, those took a fair amount of work just to figure out what I needed to buy.  As it turns out, there are a million different shapes and sizes of door hinges, so I had to carefully measure mine (and then bring pictures with me to the store) in order to make sure I was buying replacement hinges that would even fit on my doors.  That all worked fine for the interior doors - here are all the hinges for those 9 doors.

The ones on the left are a slightly different size and shape than the ones on the right, because (wouldn't you know) the doors of one of the closets were cut in a slightly different way than the other ones.  Then I actually had to special order the bigger hinges for the exterior doors because they were so unusually shaped...sheesh.  Anyway, I finally got all this stuff assembled, but needed some help.  So obviously I called up the Lady Homeowner's Co-Op.

This group is the brainchild of my friend Phoebe, who realized that we knew several gals that all own houses.  The problem is that we all live solo, so we might occasionally need an extra set of hands to help with doing some of the work on the house.  We also figured we could pool the various tools and expertise we might have.  So Project Door Hinge became our first "meeting," since I needed some help with hanging the doors.

For our first effort, I'd call it a smashing success.  We worked in pairs, with one person screwing and unscrewing hinges, and the other person holding the door in place.  Here's Phoebe and Monica making it look easy. 

And here's Shannon using her special tool like a boss.

It took us a couple hours with 4 of us working on it, so I can only imagine how long it would have taken without them.  Thank you ladies of the Co-Op!  Things started to look pretty good after that.  9 of the 11 doors now had both their knobs and hinges.  Here's the final before and after of the upstairs bathroom:

On the main floor, as you'll recall, I was still waiting on some deliveries and cash flow to take care of the exterior doorknobs and hinges.  It took me a few weeks, but once I finally assembled all of the materials, I still needed to find a victim helper to help me take off the doors and hold them while I re-hung them.  Luckily, I was able to talk yet another friend (thank you Brian!) into helping out with that in return for some free beer.  I'm lucky I have so many people willing to give up their time to help me with my nonsense.  Especially for this thing, because it was (of course) more complicated than we initially thought.

The exterior hinges were trickier because they were spring hinges, meaning they also had to be tightened once they were hung in order to make them sort of snap back after being opened.  And installing the deadbolts themselves proved to be slightly annoying because everything has to line up just so in order for it to close properly.  But I won't dwell on that because it's not very interesting - the point is, it took another 4 or so hours, but it got done! 

Here's the before and after of the main floor exterior door and the hall closet.  The first picture is part-way through the process after I had replaced the doorknobs on the closet but done nothing else:

And then here they are after everything had been replaced.

Then, the true piece de resistance - the hallway, which includes an exterior door, and doors to the bathroom, bedroom, laundry room, and linen closet.  If you cast your mind back a month ago to when I started working on this, I started with these white enamel knobs and satin nickel hinges on most of the doors, with satin nickel knob and hinges on the exterior door.  (Again, these pictures were taken after I had started, so you'll see the bathroom door already has the oil-rubbed bronze doorknob but nothing else had been done yet) 

And now...control yourselves...the finished product.

So cool, right???  I love how tied together and distinctive it looks.  Everything is just a little crisper.  When it all was all over with, I was left with this mess of discarded hinges, knobs, and screws to clean up, but it was totally worth it.

Thanks to all who helped get this thing done!  The hallway is sooooooooo close to looking the way I want.  Last thing to do (which I should be able to report on shortly) is the replacement of this uggo light fixture.

Soon, it too will be just an unpleasant memory.