Green is the New Pink

After weeks and weeks of planning, hemming and hawing over color selection and type of paint, and hours of effort, the guest room has now been painted!

 

 

Before                                                            After

It looks terrific!  I am very excited. First of all, many thanks to my amazing mother-in-law who gave up her entire day to come help me paint.  She did most of the cutting-in while I used the roller.  We make a great team, and it was fun!  She's willing to come out and help the next time I paint a room so apparently I did not scare her away.  I am also very grateful to my husband, who not only paid for this project (Christmas gift) but took time away from his bar prep to look after our puppy and his mom's dog while we painted.  So thanks a million, you two!

Moving on to other things...the Benjamin Moore Regal Select paint is excellent, and definitely worth the extra $15/gallon I spent on it as compared to ben, their bargain line.  Yep, it ain't cheap, but it was worth the extra bucks.  I am glad I bought it instead of spending the extra money on the Natura line.  Regal Select all the way!  It provided great coverage in two coats, went on smoothly and easily, and there was absolutely no spatter.  Wait, let me say that again: the GIANT novice over here painted an entire bedroom and there was no spatter.  Drying time was a couple of hours, which worked out great: we put on the first coat, went out for lunch, and by the time we got back it was time to put on the second coat.  Plus, it's low VOC (yay), and the odor was very mild and did not bother us at all.  It was only noticeable once you left the room and then came back again.  Of the two gallons I purchased I still have about 3/4 of a gallon left to use for something smaller....guest bathroom, maybe?  I am officially sold on this paint.  That is going to make painting the rest of this house more expensive...but that's why it's getting done in stages.

The color is lovely as well.  I agonized over colors, and was originally going to go with the darker Prescott Green, but am glad I opted for the lighter Hollingsworth Green instead.  It's so pretty!  In natural light it's a soft grey-green; in artificial light it is brighter and a little minty, but not obnoxiously so, which is what I was worried about.  It looks really nice with the hardwood floor, as well, which I hadn't really thought about ahead of time but was a lovely surprise once I took up the drop cloth.  Nick really likes it too, and not just the polite "appease the wifey" likes it.  I can tell the difference...usually.

But what about the Frog Tape?  The what tape, you ask?  It's a painter's tape that claims to be better than the standard blue painter's tape sold in stores.  I saw it for the first time at my local Benjamin Moore store, next to their blue tape.  They (the BM folks) had a little display set up where they had placed three types of tape on a backing (Frog Tape and two different kinds of standard painters tape), painted over them and then pulled the paint off.  Of the three, only the Frog Tape had absolutely no bleed-through of the paint.  It piqued my interest but I wasn't about to spend the extra money without being reasonably certain it was worth it.  I did some online research, and by and large folks say it really works.  So I bought a roll and used it to mark off the crown molding, baseboards, windows and doors (closet and main).  I haven't painted a room since I was about 16, so I figured I needed all the help I could get.  Followed the directions in laying the tape on in short strips (so as not to stretch it), carefully overlapped the strips, and burnished all the edges.  As soon as the second coat was done, we gently pulled it off....and...?

Perfect edges.  Every.  Single.  Last.  One.  No bleeding through of paint.  Anywhere in the entire room.  I didn't think that was possible.  This stuff is the real deal!  And it's Danielle-proof, which is better than idiot-proof, since I am a smart girl so can find all sorts of creative ways to mess these sorts of things up.  I can't even draw a straight line, much less paint one.  But if you're willing to spend the time to carefully lay it down, it works perfectly.  Totally worth a couple of extra bucks.  My mother-in-law was impressed too, and felt like it made the painting much easier and stress-free.  Plus, it's bright green with a giant frog on the package, which was almost enough to make my buy it anyway.  True story.

Not the best picture, but does demonstrate
the nice clean lines we got with the Frog Tape

So....yep!  Room is painted.  Next up is repainting the trim, because as mentioned in my last post, the previous owners painted the very top of the baseboard and the very bottom of the crown molding pink.  You can now only see it if you look closely, but I know it's there and it's bothering me.  Plus the baseboard has some yellowing on it.  We think they left some white semigloss behind.  It'll have to wait until this paint cures anyway, though, so I think that's three weeks?  Then comes the furniture!  My in-laws have generously donated a beautiful bed frame that just needs some TLC (and a mattress), as well as a side table and a chest of drawers I will be repainting in the coming months.  By the time the weather is nice enough around here for anyone to want to visit, we should have an actual room in which they can stay!

Getting it in Gear

This weekend is officially the guest room painting weekend.  You know how I know?  Because yesterday I washed the walls and filled holes (I am not very good at using spackle, by the way), today I taped off all of the windows, baseboards, molding, and doorjamb, and then I sanded the set spackle and the peeling paint patches.  All of this in preparation for my mother-in-law's visit tomorrow, at which time we're breaking out the 2 gallons of Hollingswoth Green and getting this thing DONE.

  

See?  I bought non-returnable paint!

I'm sure the previous owners of this home were very nice people, but they were not very good painters.  Not that I'm a professional, but even I know you're supposed to repaint the trim after you paint the room.  They didn't, so there is a considerable percentage of white trim that is pink.  Ergh.

 See the top of the trim here?  It's not supposed to be pink.
However, we were going to repaint it anyway...

The giant patches of paint that peeled off when I removed the "removable" decals have been sanded to smooth the edges.  Photo below shows before sanding.

 I've also finally accurately captured photographically just how pink this room really is. 

 This?  This is wicked pissah pink, yo.
It's so pink even the white trim looks pink in this photo.

In related news, my neck hurts from craning my head back to tape crown molding.  Mmm, naproxen, how I love thee.

And tomorrow?  Tomorrow, we PAINT!

Painting

Project: Paint the Guest Room is officially on.  I bought two gallons of Benjamin Moore Regal Select Hollingsworth Green paint yesterday.  I settled on that line of paint because it's still low-VOC, not quite as pricey as the Natura line but has better finish options than the low-budget ben line.  I need to clean the walls and sand the newly wounded wall edges, because when I pulled the old vinyl decals off of those horrible pink walls some of the paint peeled off.  At the end of the month my mother-in-law has offered to come help paint.  Yay!

My camera fails to capture how bright this pink is.

Feed the Birds

I love living in a part of the country that has wildlife.  Back home as a kid, I thought squirrels were exciting, and the only birds I ever saw were sparrows, pigeons, crows, seagulls, and the occasional robin.  Robins were a big deal.

Out here, we have an impressive array of various birds, and since we have woods in our backyard and a pair of bird feeders, we get all sorts of avian visitors!  So far I have seen at our feeders:

• Ruby-throated hummingbirds (gone for the winter now)
• House finches
• Gold finches
• Sparrows (I'm not sure what kind)
• Black-capped chickadees
• Northern cardinals (they can't use the feeders but they eat the spilled seeds on the ground)
• Tufted titmice
• White-breasted nuthatches
• Dark-eyed juncos (so pretty!)
• And the newest one this morning, a Red-headed woodpecker.  Yep, a woodpecker at the seed feeder.  Don't believe me?  I've got proof!

Neat, huh?

Plus, in the neighborhood we have blue jays, bluebirds (bluebirds!!), robins, turkey vultures, and some sort of raptor with a brown-and-white speckled breast.

Now if only they would stop pooping on my newly painted mailbox...

New Year's Day

Happy New Year!  It's hard to believe that 2013 is already here, but it's exciting to welcome in the new year in our new home.

We haven't done any actual physical work on the home or projects lately, but there has been a lot of planning.  The goal for this month is to get the guest room painted.  We'll need to do some patching of the walls first; the previous owners put vinyl decals up and when you take them down, the pink paint comes off with them in chunks.  Looks like there was only one coat of that hideous pink, but we'll need to patch the places where it has come off so that we can put the new paint smoothly.

The garden is still going (and growing) strong, despite winter weather's damaging the cloche here and there.  Thus far we've been able to repair problems in time to prevent permanent damage to our veggies, and we're still harvesting!  One broccoli plant sustained severe damage so Nick picked the little broccoli sprout early and ate it - he said it was terrific.  We had a salad with lettuce and radishes from the garden just last week - that's at the end of December! 

We were also fortunate enough to receive some pretty terrific gifts from the family at Christmastime.  Nick's sister bought us a really neat portobello mushroom growing kit, so now we are growing mushrooms in the hall closet.  I kid you not.  See?

More to come on the mushrooms one they start growing, which should be soon!

We now own two cookbooks focused on fresh seasonal ingredients (they also happen to be vegan cookbooks but that is besides the point).  A few nights ago we made a delicious dinner using recipes from the books: French lentils with roasted roots, caramelized onions and thyme, and sautéed kale with red onions and cannellini beans.  Simply delicious!

Additionally, my in-laws bought us a yogurt maker, so now we can make delicious yogurt at home without having to pay through the nose at the supermarket.  Nick is already planning to make  snack-sized cups of coffee and vanilla-flavored yogurt, while I am excited about the possibility of making my own fruit-on-the-bottom yogurts for work.  Hubby says it can be done with low-sugar preserves.  Sounds so good!  The first batch of plain yogurt using Greek yogurt we already had as a starter was a roaring success.

Oh yes, and one mustn't forget the big gift I purchased for my beloved this Christmas...

As his sister pointed out, he's one of the few people we know who can be trusted with a chainsaw.  Plus, we have a lot of trees to take down in the backyard and we don't want to hire someone just for the little ones.  Nick also received the Kreg Jig he's been asking for, to facilitate furniture-making.  Add to that a homesteading encyclopedia and a book on intensive small-scale farming, and we are golden!