Wappoo What??

In my Family Room Makeover post, I snuck in this picture my grandmother painted and mentioned offhand that it was a landscape of the Intracoastal Waterway.

Well, I was wrong.

Today, my dad was going through the paintings in my grandmother's estate and happened to mention this painting above the mantel, again referring to it as "my favorite painting." I asked him why that particular painting was his favorite. After all, he has many of her seascapes, landscapes, flower renderings, and paintings of The Citadel (the college he and his brothers attended). He's always been partial to the shrimp boats or magnolia paintings... What was so special about this one?

It's one of those funny childhood memories, ones that we all probably have, of driving past the same point so often, and seeing a particular landscape over and over again, that it becomes part of your childhood. 

This painting is actually of Wappoo Cut, which runs between the Stono River and the Ashley River in Charleston, S.C. Dad said every time they drove over the Wappoo Cut bridge, this is the view they'd see. 

I've gotten one gorgeous painting from my grandmother's estate, and we are planning to bid on a few more. She painted thousands of watercolors and quite a few oil paintings as well, and was something of a local celebrity. 

New House Reveal!

Mr. Cheddar signed the lease yesterday at 1:00.

We are renting-to-own, as I've mentioned before, and it's a 70's style house in a small town outside of Tallahassee.

Now... prepare yourselves. The pictures Mr. C snapped on his iPhone are not very pretty. This house is not our dream house as it looks right now, but it has great potential if we stay diligent and budget properly for the next couple of years. There isn't a single room or aspect of this house that doesn't need work--it's a fixer-upper in every sense.

First, a rough floorplan I drew up on floorplanner.com (and then was forced to re-create and edit in Photoshop since Floorplanner has some irreversible glitches). 

I'm phenomenally horrible at spatial reasoning. Just... completely hopeless. So obviously, all of these dimensions are off (like I'm sure Guest Room #3 isn't that long, the master bedroom is certainly not that big) and minor details don't make a lot of sense. One thing that is accurate is the size of the bathrooms, especially compared to the rest of the rooms. Postage stamp-sized bathrooms! The homebuilders must not have spent a lot of time gussying up. But we'll get to that.

Now, on to some pictures.

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.

{Recipe} Keleguin

This is a special post, because this is a recipe that isn't very common, but is amazingly delicious. My mum got it from her mother, who was born and raised on Saipan, a small island located north of Guam. My dad calls the dish "Pelican" just to drive my mum crazy and I'm pretty sure my youngest brother is convinced we're actually eating pelicans.

I want to emphasize that this is by no means an "official" recipe. My mum does it the way she remembers her mum doing it, and her mum never had an exact method. As such, this recipe is also not precise--these are all estimates, but as close as we could get to accuracy. 

While this recipe takes a good bit of time and effort, the payoff is worth it, and it's a dish that gets better after some time in the refrigerator as well. I highly recommend trying it if you're feeling adventurous.

Ingredients:

12 boneless chicken thighs
lemon pepper, onion powder, garlic powder, salt, and pepper for seasoning chicken thighs
4 cups freshly grated coconut
3/4 of an onion, diced
2 tbsp banana peppers
1 tbsp red pepper paste
3/4 c lemon juice
salt and pepper

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!