more painting and staining

Today I stained the threshold to the back door and I'm very pleased at how it turned out. I'm so glad I didn't paint it. The wood grain looks kind of wild in this sort of grayish blue-green. I can't wait to reinstall the door. It's going to look so pretty in its new shade of blue.


I spent most of the weekend sanding the walls and doing other prep work for the last two rooms on the main floor that need to be painted. This morning I finished the cut-in painting in the foyer. I'm excited about this color. It's a medium purplish blue called "Wisteria" and I think it will be a nice contrast to the rooms that it is adjacent to. And when the front door is open the combination of the two colors is similar to the colors you see in a hydrangea bush. Hmmm......


I'll post some pictures of the finished rooms withing the next couple of days, I hope.

Possible Mouldings for our Kitchen

While Doug's away, Cyndy will play - with power tools! HaHaHa!!! Usually I avoid these things like the plague because they can be dangerous to your hands and I need my hands. But I decided to save a whole lot of decision-making time by constructing a few mockups of potential moulding for our kitchen cabinets.

We were planning to use a copy of the original crown moulding from our old house to go around the tops of all the cabinets. Doug really want to use it in the kitchen for sentimental reasons. But the other day, he got started putting it up and we realized it didn't look good because the recessed lights cause the moulding to completely cast a shadow upon itself. So we'll just use it somewhere else instead. There are plenty of places it could go.

I remembered the experience with making the vent pipe covering and decided to get things moving by doing a sample of what I had in mind myself. That way when Doug gets back from his trip it won't take as long to get it done because all of the discussions will have already taken place.

My original idea was just to use a piece of half-round. It would look neat and clean and simple. But the sizes I bought were not big enough to look right so I ended up splitting a wooden closet rod in half. That one was so easy to make that I decided to get fancy and play around with the other sizes of half round. The second one I made is a flat trim board with small half-round beads on the top and bottom. Then just for laughs, I made another one that was three pieces of half-round attached to a trim board.

After the glue was dry I cut them with the miter saw and glued the two mitered ends together on each one. I couldn't find the staple gun or the finish nailer so I just used glue to put them together. I primed and painted them last night and this morning I put them up to see how they'd look.

#1

#2

#3

#1

#2


#3 - that's just silly!


#2 on the left, #1 on the right

different angle - #2 on the left, #1 on the right

When I first made #3 I was laughing because I thought it looked like Lincoln Logs, if you're old enough to know what I'm talking about. Then yesterday as I was driving home from my gig, I saw this and it just made me feel like mocking #3 even more.

If you think they all look bad, please don't hesitate to tell me, because the other option is to go with no trim at all. Except that then the stupid outlets for Doug's recessed rope lighting will show.

tile, fans, and trim

So what have we been up to lately? We finally finished putting up the ceiling in the back porch. That was a job and a half, or more actually. It took forever, but it looks really nice.

The tile people came and did our kitchen backsplash. So all that's left in the kitchen is putting on the Bona Traffic floor protection, the moulding around the tops of the cabinets, and the baseboards.

That's Doug's sink above. He can be as messy as he wants there because I have my very own sink too. The company that makes it named it "Orca" because it's so huge.

I selected all of my knobs and pulls and they all arrived last week. I'll be installing them very soon I hope.

I finally found a fan style that Doug LOVES and which also satisfied my need for a low profile light. I got talked into having a fan with a light, which I have never liked the idea of because I think most of them are ugly for one thing, and nobody would believe how much lower the ceiling would end up feeling until we actually installed a fan last week that the fan store guy had talked us (Doug mostly) into buying. It was completely unacceptable so we meticulously repacked it and took it back.

This is what I found instead and Doug immediately latched onto it and found a couple of new ones on eBay. It's a little more modern than the general style of the rest of our porch, but it's plain enough that I think it will look okay. It looks an awful lot like an airplane propeller but the light at the bottom is great and doesn't stick out at all.

It cost a bit more than we were planning to spend, especially since we needed two of them. I'd been planning to buy a cheap brown fan for my bass room which would match the ceiling lights, but after we spent all that money on the fancy fans for the back porch I decided to paint a fan that Doug just so happened to have. He bought it twenty years ago, and it was still new in the box. He doesn't remember why he bought it. He's a hoarder so he probably bought it because it might come in handy one day. This time he was right!

This was a very inexpensive project. I had a can of rustoleum that I was going to use to paint some ceiling light trim that happened to be the right color. I also had a can of brown paint that I'd been thinking about using for the window trim in the pass through of the kitchen. It was in the reject section of the paint department at Home Depot and it only cost a dollar. The color is perfect, but I got my money's worth on the paint quality. Behr paint is absolute crap, or at least the paint in this can was. I'm glad I was only using it for fan blades! Anyway that fan is going to look pretty awesome for only a dollar more than the cost of a can of Rustoleum.

This week we've been putting up the trimwork on the back porch which is a very slow and tedious process. Oh, and I've mowed the grass twice in the past two weeks. Nothing new there.