They say painting is cheap, but that's relative. For the past 2 years, I've been busy repainting my house inside and outside, and I can tell you from personal experience it's not cheap, but it is cheaper than many other methods of changing the colors scheme of your home.
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After the last of my children moved out, I started working on redoing the house - pulling up carpet to restore the hardwood floors underneath, slapping on paint, putting up shelves, converting the front bedroom into a snuggery/guest room (a snuggery is a small, cozy parlor where the female head of the house relaxes), converting the former living room into a sewing room/workshop, installing new fixtures and re-doing the bathroom, and eventually re-doing the kitchen.
The only rooms completely done are the snuggery and my bedroom.
Here are a couple of shots of it:
This is the media closet, displaying my Mardi Gras beads and my DVDs. I've added board and card games and placed my cedar chest in there as well because it fit.
This is a wall of photos important to me. I've added more since I took this picture. You can see that Xoco and Itzl have insinuated themselves into the photo. I'm not sure how Xoco manages to find her way into most of my indoor photos, but she's got the talent.
This is the Tea Wall - it displays my tea cup and pot collection, my bier stein set, and a few other things. I've moved things around and made it prettier, adding my lion and ferret collections and changing out the books.
My snuggery contains a futon sofa that has a high quality Sealey mattresson it for guests to use, 2 confy chairs, a small refrigerator with beverages and cold snacks in it, and a coffee table to use for partaking of tea or working on crafts.
Xoco spends most of her day in the snuggery. It's her favorite room in the house because she can look out the window and snuggle up on the sofa - I have a ramp that lets her up and down on it and her monkeybed and Itzl's are on the sofa. The snuggery is the room I keep cooled in the summer, and the sofa is heated with an electric blanket in winter. And yay! I have the new (smaller) air conditioner installed and running.
I know burgundy, teal, and gray are not usually considered girlie colors, but they were on clearance as returned colors (so I got them really cheap). They ended up going well together and I like them. It's a very cheerfully calming combination of colors. This room makes me happy.
But not as happy as my bedroom.
I painted the walls in varying width stripes in 8 different colors - some were samples and some were returned colors that meant they were on sale cheap. Originally, I was just painting the stripes to see which colors I liked well enough to invest real money in, and instead, I fell in love with the combination of colors on the walls and ended up creating a pattern that makes me happy every time I walk into the room. This picture is before I finished it. I pleated some sheer fabric in a circle fanning out from the central light fixture and attached it along the walls with crown moulding. I haven't put in a pretty light fixture yet, it's just a bare bulb up there. The bed is a canopy bed made of wrought iron draped in mosquito netting, and there's a matching dressing bench. The art on the walls are draped in fabric, and the curtains are a peacock blue damask.I have a night stand that doubles as a dresser and Itzl and Xoco's dressers in tere and a book shelf and rocking chair. It's a cozy room. In winter, I trade the mosquito netting for quilts and it gets downright toasty inside the bed.
And because the outside of the house had gotten worn and disheveled looking with time and storm damage, I repainted that, too. I paid full price for the paint (and wowza! that hurt! because I bought high quality paint, the best I could afford).
This is the front of what was a garage but the former owners sealed it up and turned it into a storage room. They did a crappy job because the wood rotted under the paint - they used chipboard, that cheap kind that they make rickety furniture out of. When I started to scrape the paint off for repainting, I discovered I had to replace all the wood there. That was an unexpected expense, but I bought the best quality I could get because it's the exterior of the house and has to stand up to t he weather we get around here. The window unit showing there doesn't work and never has, but I left it there because I don't know what happened to the window pane and if I remove it, I will have a gap there. So the unit stays until I find a replacement window. I'm not looking too hard for one.
This is what it looked like after the first coat of paint. I've trimmed it out with cobalt blue and it looks much nicer now and the wood will last decades. Too bad paint doesn't!
This is a picture of the house after I did all the light blue paint, before I added the cobalt blue trim and edging. I haven't taken a picture of that yet and since it's raining, I'm not taking a picture now. But it looks much nicer.
Then I got the new roof on because of hail damage. The insurance paid out promptly, but the hassle with the mortgage companies was not to be believed! I did this after the first mortgage company sold my mortgage to the second one and the insurance company adjuster was not the brightest bean in the pot. The insurance company ended up bypassing the adjuster, but we still had to deal with the mortgage companies. Even the roofing company was appalled by their denial and delaying antics - after all, I was improving the property and thus the value of the property and it wasn't even their money. I'm the one who paid the insurance premiums.
I still have the 2 high end gables and soffits to paint, which means renting a really high scaffold since my little scaffold won't get me tall enough to paint the top 2/3s of them (or may 3/4 or 4/5 - anyway, most of the gables are out of my reach). I have to save the money up for that.
While I've got the carpet ripped up in the soon-to-be sewing room, I haven't painted in there yet. It's going to have a cobalt blue wall with pumpkin colored shelves. The other walls will be parchment yellow, and the baseboards and trim will be pumpkin. The curtains will remain denim with the star lace under curtains. There will be a sewing table running down the center of the room, and the shelves will be filled with patterns, fabrics, craft kits, and the like. I'm still pulling staples up out of the floor from the carpeting and I need to finish the floor before I do the walls and shelves.
All of this has taken me 2 years to do. I am far so very from being done.
There's the former garage turned storage room. I have insulation and such to create walls in the garage and I will turn that room into a library. The little room between it and the back yard will be a walk in pantry and my laundry room (well, it's already the laundry room, but I'll expand it a bit and create a walk-in pantry).
I haven't even started on the kitchen - oy!
But right now, the sewing room, kitchen, and library are a hideous, hideous mess.
No one outside of family enters my house without a warrant until it's finished because there are just narrow game trails through the front room and kitchen. I can't decide if I'll do the kitchen next or the sewing room.
To divert your mind from the shambles that is the horrible mess waiting for me, I give you Top Comments, Comment Mojo, and the lovely Picture Quilt:
TOP COMMENTS
June 4, 2012
Thanks to tonight's Top Comments contributors! Let us hear from YOU
when you find that proficient comment.
From edrie:
This is definitely the best I've seen in a long time: KathleenM1 discusses Christian Fundie shopping needs if they boycotted all the gay-friendly businesses.
From Sherry:
Peace voter gave a nice comment on NAFTA and Democrats
From me:
Friend of the court speculates on the effects Phoebe Looseinhouse's diary on austerity for Christmas will have on China
Phoebe Loosinhouse responds to a comment about icebergs
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TOP MOJO
June 3, 2012
(excluding Tip Jars and first comments)
Got mik!
<!-- Top Mojo for 06/03/12 ... cut here ... -->
1) OMG! Please let this news get far and wide! by zett — 164
2) Actually, as I understand it, by ER Doc — 126
3) Beautiful diary. Thanks as always. by Eman — 123
4) WOW--let the light brigade get going with this by Diana in NoVa — 112
5) Walker is a bad guy, as is Ryan by RFK Lives — 112
6) Lt. Governor vote looking very important by mnguitar — 95
7) Here, Here! by MinistryOfTruth — 88
8) the unseen costs by jamess — 87
9) Always interesting to me by gchaucer2 — 83
10) I'm consistently impressed with your by johnny wurster — 83
11) We'll be in Providence this coming... by Meteor Blades — 81
12) I welcome the day... by KathleenM1 — 79
13) he did not seem like a man at ease by alguien — 77
14) I was very nervous about last night: by badscience — 73
15) I sooo wish that this had come to life earlier or by rubyr — 69
16) On the other side we have Democrats by 2laneIA — 68
17) Brilliant writing by SJ, horrors of privatization by FishOutofWater — 65
18) Scotty's in trouble now! by elwior — 65
19) Thanks, Name-Backwards... I like names by noise of rain — 65
20) I was going to ironically ignore this diary... by jbou — 62
21) What noise wrote in the diary about by ruleoflaw — 61
22) LOL! And Don't Start Me Tweeting When I'm Angry: by leonard145b — 60
23) Sekritarmy don't take nuttin' from no one. by kerflooey — 58
24) I have yet to see why MSNBC keeps by Paddy999 — 58
25) True, but by Frederick Clarkson — 58
26) Well, she is just one of the volunteers, out by noise of rain — 58
27) Every single State by gchaucer2 — 57
28) First there was... by mcronan — 56
29) Great news! by markthshark — 56
30) Very nice videos. Interesting article about by rosarugosa — 55
31) Nothing makes me more angry than... by Matt Esler — 55
32) The Washington Cocktail Party Democrats-- by zenbassoon — 55
33) This is very reassuring, twigg by Diana in NoVa — 55
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TOP PHOTOS
June 3, 2012
Enjoy jotter's wonderful PictureQuilt™ below. Just click on the picture and it will magically take you to the comment that features that photo. Have fun, Kossacks!
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