Family Room Makeover

As I was putting the finishing touches on the guest room, we learned that my dad had to take an impromptu trip to Tampa on Monday and would be gone for two, possibly three days. 

My mum and I both perked up: That would be the perfect time to paint the family room!

Allow me to explain:

1) My dad's job takes him out of town for upwards of 200 days a year. We were hoping he would get sent out while I was living here so that we could get this project done, but instead he was "sent" right here to Jacksonville.

2) My dad is the sort of person who loves his routines. I get that from him, but not as severely. His main routine consists of coming into the family room after dinner, sitting in his recliner, and watching his flatscreen (usually Frasier or Cheers reruns) until he falls asleep. Then he goes to bed. Disrupting this routine, even for a couple of days, would result in a very grumpy father. 

Also:

That's our couch... in our foyer.

And our loveseat in our living room. That's pretty disruptive too (despite how much my brother loved climbing all over the furniture like a monkey) so it was best to do this when my dad was gone.

Guest Room: Finished!

Whew!

Sorry for the delay in this post--this room was actually done on Saturday, but I wasn't able to get to it until now due to circumstances I will explain in another post.

So, without further ado, let's get rockin' on this final chapter!

Ahh, the trim. I had lofty goals for the trim. I was going to sand it all down and primer it and give it a nice bright white finish. But that was a corner that had to be cut, because I didn't have three hours to spend sanding down the baseboards by hand.

This is my personal tape trick I use when I have to touch up baseboards along the carpet. I hope not to have this issue in the foreseeable future, but we'll know more about that in a month or two.

I smash the tape down onto the carpet and use my fingertips to get it into the crevice against the baseboard. It's 95% effective, and it works for me.

Painting it was a bit of a nightmare. The paint beaded up (that's what I get for cutting corners) and refused to stick unless I went sloooowly around the room... twice. So, those three hours I would've spent sanding? I spent those doing two coats on the baseboard. But it still saved time (and elbow grease!).

I was also going to sand down the closet and bedroom doors before painting them, but that plan was scrapped too. The paint stuck to the closet door a little better, but it took three coats to get it looking white instead of yellow.

Unfortunately, I didn't get to paint the bedroom door. I figured people won't notice it anyway unless the door is shut.

This in-progress shot shows the difference in color... the front of the door is white, but the side of it (the one that closes) is still the old off-white version, as is the trim. It looked so dingy next to the beautiful deep blue-green.

And my baseboards were looking (sort of) pristine! 

My mum took this somewhat-blurry picture of me touching up along the trim (again!) with the green paint. It was easier for me to paint the wall along the baseboard than it was for me to paint the actual baseboard along the wall.

(And yes I have dipped my hair into my paint can/tray many times using this crouch-down-to-eye-level-with-baseboard method, it would be adorable if it didn't happen so much.)

I like checking the swatch against the actual paint when all is said and done, to see the accuracy of the color-matching as well as the accuracy of the swatch itself. This one was near-perfect.

Of course it's a bit greener in the picture than it is in real life, but at least you can tell the colors are close.

Finally the tape peeled off, the drop cloths were gathered up, and it was time to vacuum the edges of the room.

And finally, the furniture was moved back to the walls!

Voila! What do you think?

It's actually their guest-slash-entertainment room. Various game consoles, a cable box, and my brother's Vizio are in there for anyone to use. My mum and I already chose a futon to put on the opposite wall, and that lone bookshelf? Well, it didn't stay lone for long...

Remember when I said my mum has a slight book obsession? This is probably only 50% of the actual books she has around the house. Has anyone heard of this Magic Treehouse series? My youngest brother and sister swear by them, I think they're the modern histroy-based version of the Babysitters Club. Or Goosebumps. 

Up on the white shelves, we have more books (consisting mostly of A Series of Unfortunate Events and the Pretty Little Liars books she got secondhand) and some DVDs. The top shelf will have framed family photos.

Until we get the futon in here, my mattress-on-the-floor bed is public domain. Oh well, at least I get free reign of the Netflix channel on the Wii after all the little children have gone to bed.

That's the same black desk that was in Shane's room. He really did a number on his old desk, it's graffitied like the side of an old warehouse, so we figured we may as well let him keep it until he outgrows that charming stage.

Oh, and that's Lucy, she thinks this is her bedroom since she sleeps in it every night.

What? What was that? You want... comparison photos?!

We started it in a tropical storm and ended it in 100+ degree temperatures.

Goodbye, clouds! Hello, pretty blue-green paint!

And of course, as I showed above, the shelves have been re-installed.

I wish I could say I took a nice, long break after cleaning and repainting two bedrooms, but I did the exact opposite of taking a break--I helped to paint an entire family room and hallway in a matter of three days. Stay tuned for that post!

Guest Room, Part 2: Painter's Tape Boogaloo

And the winner is...

"Talipot Palm" from Sherwin-Williams!

Mini Guest Room Update

Notice anything different?

Hmm?

How about from this angle?

No?

What if I supply this picture from the other day?

YES.

We got rid of the... weird... I don't know what it was, actually. Mum kept calling it an entertainment center, but whenever I ventured into Messy Room Land, it was always piled with clothes and treated as a dresser, so... I kept calling it a dresser. Which is weird, because it has no drawers.

Getting that thing out enabled me to move the bookshelf around to the other side, giving me more breathing space along the right wall.

Kara and I hauled it downstairs and out to the curb:

It wasn't that heavy, but when your hauling partner is a 14-year-old girl with weak arms, it gets dicey. 

The white boards are the disassembled rickety white shelf from the corner of the guest room that I covered in this post.

And those of you who left your opinions on wall colors on this post, thank you! I was pleased so many of you agreed with me, but I think my dad's decision will surprise you. Stay tuned!

The Fun Colors Post!

So where I left off yesterday, we had a freshly primer-ed guest room just waiting to get some color added.

I had spent nearly an hour at the Home Depot paint counter in pursuit of three sample Behr colors for the wall, and along with an older sample of Valspar, I had four colors to test on the wall. After all the cleaning, spackling, sanding, and priming, I was dying to get to the fun part--transforming the room!

So here are the samples in all their glory:

... So?

What do you think?

Do you love?

... Well for me, after I stepped back to take a better look at these samples, all I could hear in my head was a sad trumpet sound.

Yeah. Unfortunately, I'm not wild about any of these colors.

Let's take a closer look:

Guest Room Adventures

Remember how I said that the ultimate goal of moving my brother into a new bedroom was to ultimately convert his old room to a guest room?

Well, we got him moved out just in time for me to move in. Mr. Cheddar is off in training halfway across the state, and until he signs the lease on our oh-so-nerve-wracking fixer-upper, I am staying behind with Lucy. 

So while I'm sleeping on an air mattress, it's my job to get that guest room up and running to the best of my abilities.

If you remember from my last post, this is how the room started out:

I wasn't even able to get into the room to get different angles of the "before" pictures. It was mess-ay!

Now THAT'S Entertainment!

Remember this big brown monstrosity?

It's the entertainment center that used to be in our living room for most of the '90's and a lot of the '00's. 

My first idea was to throw the thing out. It's not the most solid piece of furniture in the world, it looks outdated, and the way it was dark and looming always made the room feel smaller.

But I know my mother, and she doesn't like to throw stuff out. So I immediately came up with Plan B: PAINT!

Baby Bro's New Room

The weird thing about being so much older than my siblings (I was eleven when my sister was born and turned sixteen the day after my brother was born) is that I remember their entire lives. I actually picked both of their names! And the house my parents live in is nineteen years old (the same age as my other sister) so all three of my youngest siblings were newborns in the same house.

This room was the nursery my youngest sister was brought home to, decorated with sky blue paint and sponged-on clouds. In the fourteen years that have passed, the paint hasn't changed, even though it's been a virtual revolving door of room inhabitants. 

But now, enough kids have moved out of their house that my parents are able to have a guest room for the first time since my brother and I were babies, and they want to turn the biggest room into the guest room. Unfortunately, my baby brother is still living in the biggest room all by himself, so some changes were in order...

First: moving my brother into the smallest room. This is where we started on Tuesday.

It's needed a makeover for a while (a nine-year-old boy is already a bit too old for whimsical clouds and light blue paint, plus he's a big fan of the color red) and there was nineteen years' worth of nail holes and my other brother's anger management issues to patch up.

Back Hallway Alcove

Whew, I thought this post would never get done!

I finished this bad boy over a week ago, but we were covered with heavy rain for five days, so natural light was scarce. When the sun finally came out, I was four and a half hours away in Charleston, S.C, for my grandmother's funeral. When I finally got back, it was overcast again, so I had to settle for these pictures. Just know, in natural light conditions during the day, this hallway looks a lot better.

So, remember me talking about the alcove at the end of our back hallway?

Well I really, really wanted to do a herringbone pattern in that alcove. I thought it would add some flair to an otherwise plain hallway.

Measuring the lines and keeping them straight was a challenge. I actually ended up having Mr. Cheddar do it, since math isn't my thing. And our leveler is that short red thing you see on the ledge! It's a miracle these came out straight.

Painting the Back Hallway

Ahh, baby poop brown!

What, that doesn't sound appealing to you?

Well, does it LOOK appealing?

Painting the Guest Bathroom

What better way to kick off a home improvement/DIY/cooking blog with a painting project! Better yet, we're kicking it off with a painting project that seemed like it should be simple, but it wasn't!

Our guest bathroom doubles as mine and Hubs' main bathroom because of our complicated living situation. It's hard enough to keep it clean for guests, but my two-day paint job stretched into a five-day paint job, and that made it pretty darn impossible. It ended up taking more time than I planned because we live in a rental, which has very gorgeous, deep, expensive paint that was unceremoniously slapped onto the walls. The trim was a mess. And I learned that when the trim needs to get re-touched, you should do the trim FIRST, let it dry for a day, then tape it up and move on with your real painting job.

But it's done now, and without further ado, I present a side-by-side representation!