Naughty Bedroom Photos

I've been naughty. I need a spanking.

Kathy and I did a lot of, um, remodeling in the second-floor bedroom but I never posted most of the pictures. In fact, the bedroom is one of the first rooms we completed (as opposed to just started) so it really deserves special mention.

As you can see, it's quite nice. The room was painted "bordello red" like many of the other rooms in the house. After we pulled up the green carpet and refinished the floor, Kathy set about painting the ceiling and and hanging the wallpaper. The ceiling color extends a few inches down the wall to create a dropped ceiling, then there's wallpaper on the upper half and slightly darker paint on the lower half. The overall effect is very nice, we think.

We removed the old upper molding (picture rail) and lower molding (chair rail) and replaced them with newer ones that we painted white. For this room, I think the white moldings look pretty good, as there's already plenty of dark wood in the floor and furniture. The white window molding, picture rail, chair rail, and base molding go better with the yellow paint and wallpaper.

I'd initially had a grand plan to take off all the base molding and cut a groove in the back to hide new Romex. I bought a new router bit and everything. That plan didn't work. The base moldings won't come off without a lot of coaxing, and we didn't want to pry against the plaster walls. The best I could do was loosen up a few feet before giving up, so we painted them in place.

Finally, we ditched the dark-brown louvered closet doors and replaced them with new six-panel ones painted in complementary colors.

Does This Color Make Me Look Gay?

We spend a lot of time in our parlor (a word I'd never used in the first 48 years of my life). It's a nice place to sit with our coffee and newspaper in the morning or a glass of wine in the evening. It gets morning sun and affords a great view over the main street. You can even see the ocean from here. If we're not in the kitchen or flopped in front of the TV, we're probably in the parlor.

So why has it taken us so long to paint this room? It's been this dark-green color since we moved in, which went oh-so-well with the blood-red carpet. The carpet disappeared six months ago, but the walls remained green.

Until yesterday. Out came the paintbrushes, up went the ladders, and pop went the can openers. Three new paint cans, three new brushes, and three new rollers. We're in bidness.

First step: put primer over the dark green paint. I like to do primer coats because you don't have to be very good. It doesn't have to cover very well, and you don't really have to get everything. If I get 90% coverage I'm happy. I get to play with the paint without having to worry about feathering edges, cutting in, or any of that technical stuff.

After the primer comes the first color coat. We're using two colors: one on the walls and a lighter shade on the ceiling. I did the ceiling while Kathy started on the walls. If we do this right, we'll both finish at about the same time. We're a good team.

I'll just come right out and say it. We're painting the room purple. Yup, it's our lavender love lounge. Really, it's not so bad, and it complements the old wallpaper in the adjoining rooms (which may not say much for the wallpaper, I realize). The new color lightens up the room quite a bit.

Paint colors have funny names. Kathy will tell you that I deliberately avoid reading the silly names written on the back of the paint samples so that they don't color (sorry) my decision. I don't want to know that one shade of white is called Wedding Cake while another is named Shroud of Turin or Albino Bicuspid or something like that.

Case in point: Our new ceiling color is called Mystic Fairy. Really? Can you see walking into Home Depot and asking for a gallon of Mystic Fairy? "Would you like the matching lipstick with that, sir?" Stupid paint companies.

Tediouser and Tediouser

For a small garage, this thing sure has a lot of surface area. Doesn't that violate some kind of law of physics? Maybe it's a three-dimensional fractal. Mandelbrot's Garage.

Kathy tested this theory a few weeks ago by starting to paint the garage doors. Simple, you say. Yet somehow, six hours later, we still had more to go--lots more. This place is all nooks and crannies and tiny places inaccessible to paintbrushes.

Even the siding on the walls was more time-consuming than we imagined. We'd considered using a paint sprayer but decided that (a) too much paint would blow away in the wind, and (b) it'll be easy with a brush and a roller. "How hard can it be?" has been our mantra this last year or so.

After a few days of fair-weather painting, the garage is now mostly painted. The white part is about done, but we still have to paint the contrasting trim colors around the top. But that, in turn, requires permission from the city. More on that later.

Are You Board Yet?

Wednesday was woodworking day. And the project of the day was to strip and repaint the base molding in the upstairs kitchen.

That's trickier than it sounds because the kitchen cabinets are now in entirely different places than before, so none of the molding will fit back in its original location. Instead, we have to cut and combine pieces to fit the new arrangement. There's one long wall, in particular, that has no cabinets on it so it needs one long piece of base molding.

Which is what you see here. The molding is redwood, like most everything else in the house. It was painted white (also like nearly everything else), which is fine, except that the white paint was about the 23rd coat of paint on this miserable board. So rather than add a 24th coat, I stripped off all the old layers first, then primed and repainted it... white.


I did that to two of the longest pieces we had, then mitered and joined them together. I also took the opportunity to fill in some of the bigger gouges and holes with wood putty. I didn't want to make the molding look perfect (as if) but did want to remove some of the nastier bits of character it had acquired over the years.

Now that it's all done it looks like... white base molding. Big deal, I know. But that's two days of work yer lookin' at right there. Admire it. Now.

WTF #28

This house is just full of surprises. As we pulled up the carpet in Kathy's 3rd-floor office we expected to find paint-splattered wood underneath—and we weren't disappointed.

What we didn't expect was this metal plate. It's galvanized steel and nailed into the floor right by the doorway. I'd say it measures about 12x18 inches. The nailing job is sloppy, like someone did it with the heel of a shoe.

I know I've got to pull this plate up, just to see what's underneath. Besides, we've got to replace it before we paint the floor; we can't just leave it here. But I'm postponing that little project for a few days. We've got company coming, and if this thing opens up a hole into another dimension or something I don't want to deal with it until after the weekend.

We Need Therapy

"We'll remodel one room per year. That's all."

Yup, we really said that when we first moved in. That was a year-and-a-half ago, and have we done 1.5 rooms? No, siree. We've done about eight rooms, the garage, and some of the outside. And today, just for giggles, we started on another one.

Please make it stop. Somebody plan an intervention. We can't help ourselves. We're sick, we know, but we're too weak to resist the strange urge to remodel, paint, stain, or just plain demolish. The toolbox and paintbrush call to us.

Today started out ordinary enough. A nice day where normal people go to the beach or have a picnic. But when I heard ripping noises coming from upstairs I knew what Kathy had gotten us into. She was ripping up the carpet in her office.

We'd been talking for months about removing that carpet, but always in terms of "sometime next year" and "no rush" and "we're not ready yet." The discussion always ended with, "we don't need another project."

And then the ripping noise.

It's so easy to start. Just pull up a corner of the carpet and there you go. But of course, once you start you can't stop. You can't leave the room with one corner pulled up and the rest still lying in place like nothing happened. You're not going to fool anybody. They'd know what you've been up to. No, once you start carpet ripping you have to go all the way.

It all came up pretty easily. That's the trouble. You can be done in less than an hour: Committed to refinishing the floor, moving all the furniture, and disposing of the carpet scraps and shredded foam padding. And the dust it kicks up is... too disgusting to think about. It's a filthy habit, I know. But we can't stop.

And like the floors downstairs, the wood under the carpet was completely paint-splattered. What were these people thinking? What combination of circumstances would have made that a good idea? The floor was previously painted wood, not stained like downstairs. It was dark brown, and they evidently sprayed (splattered, more like it) green paint on the walls, letting it get all over the floor in the process. They apparently knew they were going to carpet the room immediately afterwards, so they wasted no energy keeping the floor clean. Consequently, it's about half brown and half green. Charming. At first glance it looks fabulously moldy.

Anyway, now we're committed. The floor is bereft of carpet and the scraps are piled up in the garage awaiting our next trip to the dump (do they offer a frequent-customer program, I wonder?). Now Kathy and I get to sit on the floor with pliers and carefully find and remove the billions and billions of little staples and nails that held down the tack strips and padding. Every time we think we've found them all we vacuum the floor and find a few dozen more. Lather, rinse, repeat.

When that's all done, we'll strip away some of the old paint(s), fill in some of the gouges and nail holes, and then paint the floor again. (No staining for us; we've had enough of that for awhile.) But not right away. We're going to wait until after Christmas. Right.

Deck, Deck, Goose

Immediately after the garage was finished (minus the doors) the contractors started on the rear stairs. We demolished the "original" stairs (actually built in the 1930s when the house was already 40 years old) because the city condemned them as unsafe. We knew this before we bought the house. We continued to use the old stairs for awhile, especially during last year's kitchen remodel, but after that it was time for them to go.

That left us with a 2nd-floor door to nowhere and no easy way into our new kitchen from the outside. Everything had to come in and out the front door and up/down the main staircase. Now, with the new back stairs we'll be able to easily get to/from the new kitchen and the backyard. This will be especially important once we start parking in the garage (imagine!) and hauling groceries that way.

Here you can see where the old stairs used to go, circling around two sides of the house from the upstairs kitchen. Apart from being old and rickety, we just didn't like where the stairs were placed. They went the wrong way: when we go downstairs we want to go to the left, not the right. These stairs lead in the wrong direction if you're heading to/from a car in the garage.

So with the city's blessing, we re-routed the new stairs to lead down and to the left. The new stairs will hug the house, taking advantage of the "L" shape just to the left of the doors, folding back on themselves and taking up less space than the old ones. Got it?

The first step to making this work is to build a new landing on the 2nd floor. Here it is being framed. It's all being built with pressure-treated lumber, with some redwood pieces where it's visible. The new landing and stairs should last a lot longer than the old ones (and they lasted 70 years).

Here's the same landing a few weeks later. It's bigger than the old one, and gives us a nice little deck just outside the kitchen/laundry door. I'm thinking this is where I might put our new meat smoker (thanks, Steve and Paul!).

And here are the new stairs. It's all dark wood now, but Kathy's already started painting it white--which is a much more tedious job than it sounds. There's a lot of surface area on those little 1x1 stringers and banisters and steps, etc...

As you can (kind of) see, these stairs head in the opposite direction from the old stairs, hugging the back of the house and passing directly behind the garage. Craftily, we planned a tiny 1-inch gap between the stairs and the garage--very close, but without touching. That's to satisfy the city, which forbids the historic structure (i.e., the house) from connecting to the non-historic garage. The gap keeps the two structures separate in the eyes of the historical committee, and also prevents us (theoretically) from stepping off the stairs onto the back "deck" of the garage.

We use the stairs every day now. It's a much shorter route when we're unloading groceries, and a great shortcut when I'm working in the backyard. Now if we can just find a way to pay for all that hourly labor...