Making It Our Own

One more room to change from the previous owner's colors to ours. The master bath, oh wait there is only one bedroom so it must be the bedroom bath, was a dark color.Lots of gold glazing on the walls. Pretty, but not what we want.

This is the dustiest room of the house. How can an interior bathroom need to be dusted every week. I am talking the light fixtures and the top of the tile ropework need to be dusted. Hm-m-m maybe it's because of all the holes in the walls.

 Why would you be willing to live with a hole at your light fixture you would see every time you went into your bathroom?






The house has settled so you should fix a crack; right?

When taping the walls I find dozens of little holes all around the room. Why would he have tried to hang something 6 inches down from the ceiling? It was above the head knocker that I the majority of the nail holes. Perplexing questions that you have when you buy an existing home. Wonder what kind of questions and head shakes the buyers of our last house have had.







Got the holes filled, towel racks taken down, taped and started painting.

Had to get creative on how to paint the walls on the backside of the shower enclosure. It is plastic so you can't put any weight on it to lean over. So I taped a paint brush to a towel rod and just threw paint up on the walls. It is in the shadows so you can't tell the paint job is haphazard. When we change out the shower I'll fix it.

This is the base coat and Bill panicked on this color like I did on the powder room color. He sees fire engine red when he looks at this color. We had never realized he is slightly color blind until we opened the rock yard and discovered he shouldn't help people pick out stone for their house. What he sees and most of the world sees are two slightly different things. Pictures being pictures you can't tell but this paint has a cinnamon cast to it. That's where he gets the red.

The glaze made it beautiful. It picks up the bronze from the hardware and our painting of the view from our favorite lunch place in St. Marteen.

 

It's amazing that even though this is a dark paint the room is so much lighter than before. The other paint absorbed the light and this paint reflects it. I think we are going to paint the cabinets the light color of the tiles at a later date.

OCD Anyone

23 years ago we helped some dear friends paint their new house. After we had finished painting; it was time to put the electrical plates on.  Karen wanted every plates' screw to be facing the same way. This scarred my for life. Ever since when I put a plate on I think of this and have to put all the screws facing the same way. I prefer for the line to be horizontal and if for a wonky reason it won't go that way and I have to have vertical it drives me bonkers.

It's the little things that top off a perfect job.

Out With The Old In With The New

When we bought our place the apartment being decorated with heavy dark colors made it feel less like a barn and more like a home. After 6 months we were ready to start changing out paint colors.  

First to go is the Texas Orange bathroom.

Of course, I decide to do this over Spring Break when the grand kids are with us for 4 days and I would prefer playing with them than painting. So the job took awhile.

 

Sutton put on one of my painting tee shirts and grabbed a brush to help. Mallory helped also but I didn't feel comfortable leaving a 2 year old alone with a paint roller while I went to get the camera.

OH NO It's White!

In fact it is almost a blinding white. Not the look I was going for in this room.

Keep calm and remember you are putting a Pearl glaze over top. "The swatch and the cans are much darker. It will be okay". I had to keep repeating that to myself through this process.

It's beautiful! The glazing is incredible. You are suppose to brush it on and then trowel off but our texture is heavy to use the trowel. So I brushed it on waited 5-6 minutes and then toweled it off.

The ceiling has a thing stuck on it that is kinda cool. Glazed it but not the rest of the ceiling.

Now it is a bathroom worthy of House Beautiful! We love it.

I would never have put black granite with a gold and copper sink bowl but replacing the granite will wait until we are getting our other granite.

 

Close The Door!!!!!

Remember Mom hollering at  you to close the door we don't want to heat the outside. Well, this weekend we discovered that we have been doing just that. We were heating our attic all winter long and it has been a cold winter. This could explain the high propane bills.The family room has always felt cool to us. Even with the thermostat set at 72 and a space heater going we watched TV with blankets on our legs. We rarely have our thermostats set at 72 because we feel we can always put a sweater on. But in this apartment we had to set it that high.

This weekend Bill went into the attic to run another phone line and as he was kneeling and  bending over to run the line down the wall he felt maybe a spider on his neck and then maybe a bit of a breeze, and then a full blast of hot air. The previous owner (still can't come up with an appropriate nickname for him) when he put the HVAC duct work in had stretched a section of the insulated duct so tight that it  had separated. So all winter long our family room heated air has been going into the attic. The only up side is that there is so much air exchange between the two areas the downside to the upside is that warm air rises. That is fixed and immediately we were able to lower our thermostat to 69 and were quite comfortable.

The are so many gaps and can lights  not being in the correct housing that when we go into the attic we turn the apartment lights on to light the attic. On the To Do list for later to figure out how to fix all of that.

Top Dressing

My yard is my joy. I have so many ideas for the new yard but I won't do any of them until we get a sprinkler system. Don't want to have to drag hoses everywhere to keep new plants growing. Since that is way down on the to do list I have to make do with the existing beds. The previous owner had come to the rock yard and bought rock for the beds. It's fun knowing that the rock here came from us. He had a great idea just didn't bring enough in. So everyday I have been bringing home 15 5 gallon buckets of rock and top dressing the beds. That means everyday after work I move 1/2 of a ton of rock. It's not too bad, I move the pickup around so the buckets are where they are going then pour the buckets in and then push the rock around with my foot. The buckets only weigh 64-72 pounds each so they are easy to move around once they are off the truck bed. Last night I got off easy and Bill got home at the same time and dumped the rock for me.

This is what the beds look like now. Just not the look we want. They are kinda ugly.This bed will take about 3 tons of rock by itself to be done right. Good thing we know where to get rock cheap.

The beds will be filled in like this. 

When you use rocks as your mulch you need to be very careful of the plants you put in the beds especially when they are out in the open sun like these are.The plants need to be able to take heat and arid conditions. The rocks will retain heat and can dry things up pretty good. All of the existing beds are on the downward slope of the yard so there will be water run off from the lawn watering into them in addition to their watering. The lawn run off will be under the surface. I think these beds can be kept looking pretty good even without a sprinkler system. Of course. I will probably add a few more boulders to the beds also.

Quasi Good News

Good news; we have found a framer who is willing to tackle our garage roof at an affordable price. Bad news is he is at least two months out on his schedule to getting to us. And we have on more guy coming out to talk with us about doing the job. Hopefully he will be the same price and can get to us quicker.

The roof line won't be pretty but we can fix that with building a facade. Remember the old west towns where the general store would look really big from the street and then when you saw the inside it was just a box? That may be what we do on the front to give the roof line some character.