So Long, Tan Paint!

FINALLY. You guys, I am SO excited about this: our bedroom isn't tan any more!  And now that it's finally put back together, I can show you how that all went down.

We really started the process last Thursday, when I taped off the trim and patched up some holes and cracks in the wall.

This turned out to be a mistake. We were planning to paint the trim, too, and if we'd been thinking, we'd have painted it first, and THEN taped it off. That would have made our (well, my) life much easier down the road, because trim has some really tiny, narrow areas that need to be painted, and it would have been nice to paint it without having to worry so much about getting paint on the rest of the walls. It wound up taking me every night for a week to paint all the trim.  So, for next time: trim first.

Friday involved finishing the trim and moving all the furniture out of the room so we could start painting on Saturday morning. This also meant that we had to find a home for our bed, which is not exactly small! After some deliberation, we wound up moving the mattress (and only the mattress) to the living room. We figured it wouldn't be a big deal for a couple of nights... and it wound up down there for a week. Heh. Whoops.

Saturday actually went really well. We decided to get started on the ceiling first, so Troy did the big stuff and I worked around the edges to fill in where his roller couldn't reach. Thomas came over to help after a little while, which was fantastic, and between the three of us we managed to get two coats of paint on the ceiling and the dark green accent wall, and one coat on the light green walls. It went so well, in fact, that I forgot to take a single picture all day.  But - it was good. We went to bed pretty optimistic about finishing on Sunday.

Sunday morning we saw why that wasn't going to work.

Oh. Boo.

Tape fail!

It turns out that our taping job was not as good as we'd hoped, and that the fancy edger tool that we bought hadn't been too successful at keeping paint from leaking under the tape, either. Our walls are pretty heavily textured, which means that anywhere the tape didn't make it all the way into one of the textured dips, the paint did, and welled up in there. Which meant I was going to be spending my day fixing what we'd messed up the day before, while Troy put the second coat on the light green walls and finished the edge work. It was a long, frustrating day.

I finished fixing the ceiling, thankfully, but it wasn't until Monday evening that I could start painting the trim. We developed a pretty good system for getting to the bulk of it.  We took a long putty knife and used it to shove the drop cloth under the trim to protect the carpet and get it out of the way. Then we painted with a small trim roller while the putty knife was still there, to keep the carpet and the drop cloth out of the paint.

That worked really well for everything except that little ledge where the trim meets the wall. That part had to be done with a paintbrush. We'd already seen what would happen if we just taped it, so instead I took a craft paintbrush and did it by hand, around the whole room.

It took me the better part of the week to finish that part. SO FRUSTRATING.

Troy took the time to do awesome things like spray paint our light fixture and the outlet and switch plates with oil-rubbed bronze, which turned out absolutely beautiful: 

Okay, the flowers aren't my favorite ever, but they're pretty hard to see unless you're this close.

And hang the curtain rods more intelligently than we did last time.

Using painter's tape to mark where the holes go = brilliant!

Some day we are going to replace those ugly Wal-Mart curtains.

When I finally got done with the trim, I hung the plaques back on the wall above where the bed would go.

Our walls are shiny. Sorry.

And finally, on Friday night, we were ready to pull up the drop cloths, clear the room, and vacuum.

Puggles love freshly vacuumed carpets.

And then - finally - we could start moving furniture back in. Finally. I was SO ready to be done sleeping on the living room floor.

By this point, were were pooped (to say the least!) so the rest had to wait for Saturday. That included mounting the TV to the wall across from the bed:

At least painter's tape is good for something!

We hadn't put the doors back on the bathroom or the closet yet.

And then it was just down to putting things back together and making it look like a useful room again.

Now that the doors are back on, it's a fully functional room once more! Which makes me pretty darn happy.

Haven't figured out yet how to keep the flash from blinding off the mirror.

There are still a couple things I'd like to do, and they are both visible in this picture.

They are:

1. We need to find a different/smaller/better laundry basket for jeans. They don't fit well in our awesome laundry sorter, but we haven't figured out yet where they are going to live long-term.
2. That mirror. It was a cheap Wal-Mart purchase, and it fell off the closet door a long time ago. But we don't have a replacement yet, and I need something, so it stays until we figure out what to get.
3. Ugly cords. We're discussing ways to hide those or make them less ugly, we just haven't settled on anything yet.

Personally, I would love to get one of those tall, free-standing mirrors like this one, or this one, or this one. But those are pricey, and our bedroom budget is wiped out for now, so we'll have to wait.  Still, what good is it if we don't have something to look forward to?

The next stop, though, will be the kitchen. It's time to take some ugly house paint off some cabinets!

Cat Door

Next on our bedroom agenda was the door. We were having problems with the dog, Chewie, wandering through the house while we were asleep and wreaking havoc, as Chewie is wont to do. (He likes to pee on stuff. The brat.)  But we couldn't keep the door closed at night because the cat, Lucy, will panic and scratch at the door all night if we lock her out, and won't be able to get to her food or litter box if we lock her in.  So we needed a way for Lucy to be able to go in and out as she pleased, but something small enough that Chewie wouldn't be able to do the same.

Enter the cat door. We found a nice, small door on Amazon that looked like it would suit our needs perfectly. We actually bought it way back in October... and couldn't decide whether we wanted to put it on the bedroom door or on the door to Lucy's food and litter box, which at the time were in separate rooms. We finally decided on the bedroom because Chewie was spending his nights in his kennel, and also spending his days in his kennel while we were at work (well - in a bigger kennel downstairs, but still), and it didn't seem right to lock him up night and day.  So to the bedroom it went.

The first step was to take off the door so we could work on it in the garage. There was no point in fighting that battle with the door still attached.

Thankfully, DJ's saw horses are still in our basement, so we were able to prop the door onto those to work. That made it much easier. We traced the inside of the cat door so we knew where we absolutely had to cut to make the hole big enough.

And then we traced around the template that came with the cat hole, which would be our outer limit for where we could cut.

Troy did the cutting, and I went inside to paint the wood white, to match the door.

Really should have thought about how I was going to do both on the same scrap of cardboard before I started.

It turned out that I had a MUCH easier task to do. When I got back downstairs, Troy was still trying to figure out how he was going to cut the door. He finally settled on his new jigsaw, which worked pretty well...

... but, well, let's just say that he needs some practice.

It's a work in progress.

This isn't a super big deal, though, because the cat door covered it up anyway. Crisis averted.

You can see in that picture that it's just sort of clamped on the door by the screws. That turned out to be a problem later, since it kept slipping back down and scraping across the carpet. We wound up having to go back and re-attach it to keep it from doing that all the time. That was some weeks later, and sadly, I have no pictures, so you're just going to have to trust me: if you're getting one of these, glue that sucker on. You'll be glad you did in the long run.

But it sure looked good when it was all done, and we were pretty confident that it was going to work. 

Success!

Lucy has no problem using it, although she doesn't rub against the brush at all, which surprised us somewhat. We were expecting to have to be constantly vacuuming cat hair off that thing, and so far, that hasn't happened. I don't mind not having to vacuum it, don't get me wrong! But I am surprised.

Chewie can't get through, which is the other good thing about it. But that doesn't stop him from wishing he could, and he has no qualms with shoving his nose through there!  

Next stop: painting. It is SO time for one of the rooms in this house to be a color other than frikking tan.  SO. TIME.

Build-A-Bed

Hello, all!

Since we are lucky enough to have an amazing house, and lucky enough to have the ability to make it even MORE amazing, we decided to create our very own blog to document the process, so we can come back and laugh at ourselves in five years, and you can come and laugh at us now. 

Today, our subject is: the bedroom.  In fact, this will be our subject for a little while, because the bedroom needed some serious help. Who wants to sleep in a boring, personality-free room? Not me!  So, first on our agenda was a new bed.

Our old bed, while large (it was a king size), was kind of deteriorating. It was memory foam, which you'd think would be cool... but was not as cool as that implies. Neither of us were sleeping very well, so we decided to take a long, serious look at a sleep number bed.  Which we did.  Turns out those things are darn expensive. Who knew?

So, the sleep number was out, but there are other mattresses, and eventually after a long and mostly boring process we settled on a high-end bed that cost what one of the low-end beds at sleep number cost. The mattress-choosing process was not, however, what I want to emphasize here.  Because we also did not have a headboard, and while we were wandering around furniture row, we found this: 

(Spoiler alert: we bought it. That is it, in our house.) 

Yep, that lovely bed was on clearance for a mere $298, on account of its having a few dents, and a broken slat. 

Oh no! Dents!

Probably not going to hold anything up.

Yep. That's a problem all right.

So, new slats were in order. Rather than replace the broken one with one that would probably also break, we bought some plain trim - made of REAL WOOD - and used that instead.   

Much better.

We also used six, instead of the original three.  Just to be really, really sure we weren't going to have any problems, and especially because the foundations for the air mattress are heavier than box springs. Also, we are not exactly the smallest people in the world. (We're working on being smaller, but we'll never be THAT small!)

You'll also notice that the original slats had supports in the center. So we bought a nice long 2x2 and cut it down to create six center supports. We used one of the original, not-broken slats to make sure our new and improved version lined up right.

See how ours (in the back) look sturdier? Yeah. That's a good thing.

We used deck screws to make sure that those slats weren't going anywhere.

This was Troy's idea.

A little bit of decoration, courtesy of some wonderful friends and family...

A little bit of furniture rearranging...

Pay no attention to that Pepsi bottle on the dresser!

... and we were in business!

Bonus: the bedding actually came free with the bed frame. And by "came free" I mean "they told us that they wouldn't sell us the bed unless we took the bedding." This bedding was actually sitting on the bed next to the one we bought, but we asked if we could switch them out since we liked this one SO much better. Thankfully, it wasn't a problem, since I don't know what we would have done with the ugly thing that was on this bed before!  And this, though it is seriously the heaviest comforter I have ever slept under, at least looks pretty nice and is well-made enough that it will withstand some abuse.

So, all in all, the bed upgrade was a success! We hope to get around to patching up those scratches down the road, but we need to find the right color of stain first. Don't want to make it worse. For now, I scribbled over them with one of those furniture touch-up pens you can get at Walmart, and they're barely noticeable at all.

Next stop: the door.