Paint, Paint, Paint!

Well the paint is up! It took a ton of work, but it looks great.

Now it's starting to look like something more than a construction site to me.

And now I'm crazy about the paneling.  Note to self: never make a decision based on half the information.  You would think I would learn this lesson, but as you will see, I continue to have to relearn it.

Ok admit it, that fireplace is better than the window it replaced!  You never doubted me, right?

But that red has GOT to go!  Lucky for me, at this point I left for a week and half of work/vacation.  And look what I came back to!

Oooooh, the brown is up!  Thank you Dad, Mike & Bruce for the surprise! 

Ok, here again I make the same mistake of looking at it and saying "I love it, but is it too dark do you think?"  This question I continued to ask myself, and everyone within earshot, for the next month until the furniture was put in place.  Remember that lesson above?  I'm still learning, I admit. 

Patience and Putting it in perspective

If you're still alive, it's a good day.  When you've had one of those days and you're pulling out your hair, my dad used to ask me "is anyone dead?".  If they're not, if you're ok and your family is ok, its not really a bad day.  There are going to be days in your renovation when you want to pull your hair out.  Take a deep breath and ask yourself "is anyone dead?".  Ok, now put it in perspective.  Things can be fixed. 

Here's my bad day.  I hired a friend to do the painting and he truly believed he could do it.  However, paint is very different than stain and if you don't know what you're doing with a paint sprayer, things can go very bad very fast.  By the time I brought in another painter, he shook his head at it and refused to touch it.  The second painter agreed, but for $2500 to start, and up from there depending on how much time it would take.  The third painter suggested I remove the trim and start again. 

My brother, Mike, looked at it and shook his head.  He's a bit of a perfectionist.  Actually those of you who know him will shake your head at the "bit" part.  He's a builder and a cabinet maker, so he knows what he's doing.  He took on the challenge and went to work.

Here he is hard at work.  Of course this was after a month, yes I said a month, of prep work.  You see, although I'd always like to jump to the fun stuff, there is a price to be paid for skipping the prep work.  When I came home the first time and saw the paint, I didn't get that "wow" feeling.  So Mike went to work on the not-fun stuff.  He sanded.  And sanded.  And then sanded some more.  Just when I thought he was done sanding, you got it, more sanding.  He filled the holes, he caulked, he sanded some more.  We spent an entire night taping things off.  Then we spent another whole night taking down cabinet doors, covering things with plastic and moving everything out.  Oh, and then another night vacuuming.

Does all this sound tedious?  Well then you know how I felt.  I felt like "get on with it!!".  I obviously do not have the patience to be a good painter.  I can slap some paint on the walls, but I hate all the prep work.  Mike is patient tho, and he kept reminding me that the majority of a good paint job is the prep. 

 

The bookcase after weeks of sanding.

Finally after the vacuuming, he was ready to spray on the primer.  Then after one more round of sanding, the final paint went on.  It went on in four thin coats.  He even took his time mixing it to just the right consistency.  Apparently this also matters.  It determines how durable your final paint job will be.  

 

Here's Mike in his paint gear priming my new paneling.   

So I guess what this amounts to is that you are going to have set backs in your remodeling.  You're also going to have things that take longer and are more work than you expected, and many times you don't get to see a lot of forward progress for all the work.  But that work is just what makes it all look so spectacular when it's done.  You can take the easy way around, but you won't get the result you want.  

Oh, and for all the trouble you have, you're also going to have those heroes that come through for you.  And then there's that "wow" moment.

Chunky, but in a good way!

I hate the word chunky.  But I couldn't think of a better way to describe the moldings I was after.  Of course my builder, and my brother, also a builder, could and did.  How about casings, crowns, wainstcots, panels, base and sills?  How about ranch, reeded, fluted, colonial, architrave, victorian, traditional?  Honestly, it's enough to make my head spin.  Much easier to just yank out a picture, show it to your builder and say THIS.  Open up those design books and blogs and look for what you love.

Love that Brooke Giannetti.  Here's an entrance she did that struck me for two reasons.  Number one, I love the panels on the walls and the moldings.  Number two is the spectacular staircase taking a starring role here.  I adore the wood steps and the white risers.  That's going on my list of "must haves".

 

The Brooke Giannetti picture that convinced me I had to add panels to my walls.  Turns out if you don't do all the extra trim inside and just go craftsman style, it's fairly inexpensive for a big impact.

 

So this is what I showed my builder and he nodded and said "yep",  Jim is great that way.  Then he said "and you're planning on doing your doors the same way right?"  I must add at this juncture that it is perfectly ok to lie to your builder as long as it won't set back the remodeling process.  "Of course, that's exactly what I planned," I told him. 

After a few disastrous attempts at picking out baseboard, my brothers finally helped me out and selected it for me.

The crown was pretty easy.  Once Jim had an idea of what I was going for, he just selected it for me.  Have I mentioned that having a builder you can trust is probably one of the most important aspects of a good remodel?  If you're working, you're going to be leaving your house open for this person.  You're going to be relying on him or her to ask the right amount of questions.  Not too many that you're better off just being on site, and not too few that when you get home you say "oh wow, what would make you think I didn't need a door there?" 

Jim came highly recommended by my brother who had worked with him on many jobs.  He had a great design sense and made decisions I would have made.  As my brother said to me, you want someone  that would do things the way you would and not take the shortcut.  I never had to track him down, he was there when he said he would be and he accomplished things very quickly.  Also important to me, he never scoffed at my ideas but talked them through with me and came up with great solutions.

So my advice would be to get recommendations from people you can trust.  If you're going to do a huge job, start with a small one and see how it goes first.  Look at their portfolio of work.  If you have a tradesperson that you trust, like an electrician, plumber, or installer, ask them which builders they like to work with.  Many times these insiders have better information because they know who's doing clean work, who's consistently busy and who they can trust when they need to be paid. 

 So here's my new pantry trimmed out.  The new crown molding capping these walls really makes a statement.

A shot of the windows, baseboard and fireplace in the middle of painting.  The cat loves this sill.  He's sure I had it installed just for him.

 

The paneling going in.  At this point I was definitely questioning my decision. 
 

  

And finally the fireplace!!  Here it is all trimmed out, primed and ready to be painted.  

When does the fun part start?

Surrender to the process.  That's the very best advice I can give to people going through renovations.  Just surrender.  You're going to be living in a mess.  There are going to be problems you don't anticipate and it's going to drag on longer than you dreamed.  Everything you own will wind up in a spot you didn't expect and you'll find yourself saying things you never thought you'd say.  I think the cat may be down in the heating vent.  Hey, it's summer, so this hole in my house is kinda like extra air conditioning.  No, I don't know where the can opener is, have you checked the bathtub?

Here is my house, deep in the thick of it.

I had a nine foot wall here (where you see the red) in front of my kitchen.  I think it was meant to give you some privacy but mostly it prevented anyone in the kitchen from talking to anyone in the living room.  We cut it down.

 

 A shot back toward the bathroom.  We put in pocket doors shutting off the bath and two bedrooms which will eventually be a master suite.  We also moved the closet door into the kitchen, thus turning a small closet into a pantry.  

The horrific mess.  The kitchen is getting ready to be attacked.  Plan of attack for my builder is to remove all the tiny plain molding from all the doors and windows and replace it with something a bit more weighty.  Also, the inexpensive cabinets are to be dressed up with cladding and crown molding.  I'll be replacing the doors later.  This is a relatively inexpensive way to dress up stock cabinets.  

Just when you think things are never going to get any better, there's a ray of sunshine.

I no longer have a hole in my house, and the fireplace is in.  There's still a long way to go, but look ... a fireplace! 

This is where we begin

Thanks for visiting.  This is a big year of changes for me.  I started with my house.  When I moved it, it was all white, pink, mint green and stencils.  I had certain things I had to change immediately, so other things I had to live with.  My mint green counters and vinyl floor had to stay, but I painted the walls yellow and red in order to live with it.  My carpet was a plan white berber with no fleck and no colors.  I had the Mary Engelbreit thing going on.

  

These are all from once the construction began.  I wish I had gotten some pictures from before then.  But as you can see, it's pretty colorful.  Everyone always told me how cute my house was.  Please notice the word "cute".  All my accent pieces in the kitchen were red.  I had hand me down couches from my grandmother that were slipcovered in white.  The table was a $10 garage sale find that I redid myself.  The chairs were $10 a piece at a thrift shop.  The console (the only piece staying) was $60 at a antique shop and the cost of a can of white paint.

So, for 10 years I've been dreaming of houses, flipping through design books and watching design shows.  I've collected a scrapbook of options but never been ready to move forward.  I have a bi-level, and the living room, dining room and kitchen are all connected.  You can't really start and stop that easily.

I think I've picked hundreds of schemes and driven my family crazy as we shop and shop and shop.  Finally I was like the boy who cried wolf.  Sure sure sure you're going to redo your house.  What have you picked this week?  It was time to square my jaw, roll up my sleeves and commit to a design direction.  That's really the hard part because by picking one, you're abandoning all the other options.  And when you work at a design store, something even more beautiful comes in every week.

Here's what I discovered.  Go through all your design books and whittle.  Pull out pages you absolutely love.  Look at them again in a few days.  See if you find any trends.  I consistently picked out white cabinets and dark counters, big chunky moldings, fireplaces surrounded by bookcases, crisp beadboard, glamorous chandeliers.

  This is from one of my favorite designers, Brooke Giannetti.  Her blog, Velvet and Linen,  is amazing and full of inspiration.  I just kept pulling out these white fireplaces with built in bookcases over and over.

 

Another from Brooke.  I love the molding work and the backs of the bookcases.  The slat board gives a lot of visual interest even while staying all white.  

Rex Brown does gorgeous fireplaces as well.  Here's one I drooled over

I love this fireplace. Did I mention i LOVE this fireplace?  It has major drama and the coffered ceiling is so lovely.


After I marked every white fireplace I found, I realized this was a must have for my house.  My bi-level came sans-fireplace and I was determined to have one.  Where to put it was another question.  I finally decided to sacrifice a side window that looked into the neighbor's side window.  It was actually a straight shot from my bathroom into their house.  I'm thinking I made the right choice for both of our houses.  However, everyone else thought I was crazy.  But, this is where we start.  Window out, fireplace going in, seriously committed at this point.