test patches of paint

Today we ran to Dunn-Edwards and picked up samples of the two colors we had narrowed it down to and sought advice as to which kinds of paint and primers were appropriate to use on the house so that the paint doesn't fade and chip too quickly. Much of the paint on the trim work was chipped off pretty bad when we bought the house and some areas had no paint left on them so we want to be certain to get a good paint job that would last more than a year or two.

The guys at Dunn-Edwards were very helpful and recommended Ultra-Grip primer for the trim, doors, etc and Eff-Stop primer for the stucco on the house. They also recommended Perma-Sheen paint for the trim, doors, etc and Evershield for the stucco on the house.

Time to paint the house

Well, when we bought our new house we knew painting it was one of the first things we would have to tackle, so here we are tackling the job of picking a color to paint the exterior of the house. After much thought we decided that we wanted to "match" the color of the stone wall on the front of our house and that we would stick with a bright white for the trim. We decided on the trim color partly due to the windows in the addition having no trim around the white windows and therefore thought that the white would help make the trim around the house blend better.

We went through a stack of paint chips several times in order to narrow our color choices for the main exterior. We are now down to two colors. Dunn Edwards Inside Passage and High Noon. Inside Passage is the lighter color of our stone wall and High Noon is the darker color of our stone wall.

Thoughts, comments, suggestions, etc are welcome as to our color choice for the house. We are hoping to keep the cottage look and feel of the house. We are leaning towards an English cottage style for the front yard landscape, various flowers and plants that can just kind of have the unintentional feel about them - as if they just kind of grew there. Of course I will post some of the ideas for our front yard in the future, but we really do need to get the house painted soon as parts of our trim have no paint left on them.

Inside Passage












High Noon

A little Halloween cheer

The previous homeowners left behind this wreath when they moved out so I thought I'd spice it up a bit for Halloween. I toyed with various ideas on how exactly I wanted to decorate it, but since I was a little short on time I decided to simply cut out some ghosts from the white cardboard on the bottom of an old gift bag (the gift bag was all torn up and unusable). Then I drew on eyes and mouths with a black sharpie marker. I also used the black sharpie marker to draw the ghosts with so that the outline would be there to help make the ghosts stand out a bit. Once the ghosts were all cut out and had their faces I took a needle and some thread and made a little loop out of thread on the top of each ghost so that I could hang them like ornaments from the wreath.

the storage cabinet in the laundry room

This was a fun situation to remedy. This cabinet has a good few inches on either side of the cabinet that is completely empty, but has a "face plate" to cover the space from the front - thereby making it real easy to lose things in these pockets of space. Yes, I did discover these pockets of space when I went to store something above the cabinet and it fell into the pocket of space. Luckily my husband managed to get it out of there for me, but this left me to figure out an elegant solution to this little problem we had discovered.

As I was cleaning up the front bedroom, currently known as our storage room while we are unpacking, I was looking for somewhere to put these two sets of little drawers so I brought them out to the laundry room actually thinking I might mount them below the storage cabinet. Then I realized that they may work for our needs just as well if I put them above the cabinet. Lo and behold not only did they fit well up there, but due to their size it also solved the problem of that empty space on each side of the cabinet. There was just enough space in between the two sets of drawers to fit our new phone book. I love it when things just work out, and I love it even more when it is such a simple yet elegant solution.

the empty space above the stove

Being that our house was built in the 40s the fan for the stove was actually built right into the ceiling and none of the previous owners had "updated" the fan and installed a range hood or a microwave hood over the stove. I had originally thought about adding an actual hood or microwave hood as I was told the fan doesn't work that well, but it turns out that the fan works just fine other than being a little noisy when you first turn it on so I decided not to install a hood in place of the fully functional already existing fan. Once the hood dilemma was solved I was left with this big open space on the wall above the stove - what to do with all of that space that would make it look less awkward. Well I decided to add 2 shelves that were of a similar style to the existing shelves in the breakfast nook. Once that was decided I thought that adding a bar that I could put some hooks on to hang things out of the way while cooking might be nice, unfortunately all of the bars I found were too long for the space. Then I stumbled upon a magnetic strip that would fit the space nicely, the magnetic strip is really meant to hang your knives up on the wall. To make matters better the hooks were able to be attached to the magnetic strip, with just a bit of force required. I think the look I achieved really works well in our 1940s kitchen.

today is picture hanging day

Today I decided that I should get a few more pictures hung around the new place. I guess now that I got the light fixture up in the breakfast nook it seemed like a good time to hang the picture in there and once I got that one hung I figured I'd get a few more hung. I only managed to get three pictures hung so far today because the little man got into one of his destructive phases and needed to be timed out which thankfully has resulted in nap time, but that still means I need to wait a little while till I go hanging more pictures so that I don't wake him up.


Here is the picture hanging in the breakfast nook


Here is the picture hanging over Ethan's old crib, it is now a little sofa for him (still need to get some pillows to put on the bed to make it a little cozier)


Here is the picture hanging over his toy area

Let there be light in the breakfast nook

I wrote previously about the light fixture in our breakfast nook, originally I wrote about how it was not really our taste and so I was planning to update it rather than replace it. Then I wrote about how when I got a better look at the light fixture that I discovered that it was not in good enough shape to continue to be used, that the plastic outer casing around each of the light bulbs was somewhat burned. This of course was especially concerning since the bulbs that had been in the light fixture exceeded the maximum allowable wattage for the fixture so we weren't sure if the fixture might even have some actual damage due to being overloaded.


Well when I pulled down the old fixture I discovered that the wires were mildly damaged so I had to cut the wires back and strip them in order to hang the new fixture we had purchased, of course if you try this at home please remember to turn off the circuit that corresponds to the outlet where you will be working. Once the wires were cut and stripped it was time to hang our new light fixture. This is much easier than many people think it is, all you really have to do is connect the live or hot wires to each other and fasten them with a wire nut and then connect the neutral wires to each other and fasten them with a wire nut (the black wire should be the live wire and the white wire should be the neutral wire). Honestly the most difficult part of the whole thing was cutting and stripping the wires, well unless you want to count drilling the hole for the hook to swag the chain off of so the light hangs in the center of our table. Of course that was only so difficult because I didn't have the right drill bit for the job so I had to make it wide enough with the bit I had. And of course once we got the light fixture up we put a nice little CFL bulb in the fixture. I love CFLs because they don't get nearly as hot as the incandescent bulbs do, just remember what the old fixture looked like after it had too strong of incandescent bulbs in it.