Thursday, December 29, 2011

Master Bath - Painting Complete!

Well, it's finally done!

For those looking: I chose Martha Stewart Living's Tadpole Green, color-matched to Behr Premium Plus Ultra.  I could have gotten away with one coat and a little touch-up, but I did two full coats, and it covered beautifully. 

Before - when we moved in
After (but before I touched-up the edges)

Before - when we moved in
After - new floors, new toilet, and the new sheet-rock in place

Before - when we moved in
After
Wow, that's a remarkable improvement over how it looked when we moved in!

After - with door replaced with sheet-rock and made into a walk-through

Before - during renovations
After!
Before - After we replaced the cabinetry


After!
 Of course it looks darker because it's night-time, there's no ambient lighting (the lighting over the vanity is missing), and there's no mirror to reflect light...but trust me.  It's beautiful.  :)

Here's a shot of it right next to the tile.  You can see that it brings out all the light-greens in the tiles while still being a great complement to the overall room.


This is probably the best color-for-color shot of the green.  This is what color it looks like in person, and it looks great against the tile!  It was difficult to find a green that worked with the dark, tight space of the powder room but also warmed up the room and looked great against the large, bright space of the main bath area.

As you can see from this area, we will need to replace the baseboard trim.  :)

So, what do you think?  Sadly I get home way after dark so I can never take any bright pictures, but trust me.  It's beautiful.  :)

Now all that's left is painting and putting down baseboards throughout, building the cabinetry, painting the cabinets, putting the mirrors up (i.e. finding a mirror for the main bath area), shopping for new light fixtures, figuring out the towel-rack situation, and covering up the patio door with some kind of window blind.  Wow, that sounds more daunting than originally thought. 

Next up: Upstairs bathroom painting, and gardening this weekend.

Tuesday, December 27, 2011

Sneak Peek

I have to do some ceiling touch-ups (hopefully tonight) and remove all the tape/plastic sheeting before I can post an official "complete" picture, but here's a sneak peek at the bathroom!

The green is so fabulous.  Beyond words.  It looks amazing in person.

Powder room, where mirror should be
Comparison of tile beside new paint (ignore the tape separating them)

A peek into the powder room from the shower area (ignore the tape!)

More pictures soon!

Hope you all had a great holiday, whatever you were celebrating.

Friday, December 23, 2011

Getting Primed

So I taunted you all with primer pics, and now I shall deliver!

Except, pictures of white walls are boring, and there's not really a lot to say about them.  "Ooooh, they're...primed and ready for paint!  Yay!"  Boring.  Painting walls white is boring.

Before
After

Vanity

Medicine cabinet

Walk-through to powder room



From powder room - notice freshly-painted ceiling!



 After priming, I went ahead and painted the ceiling last night (Glidden Ceiling Paint - it was the cheapest, and it seems to actually cover better than a lot of more expensive ceiling paints.  It only required one coat to achieve a nice, even white).

Newly-textured area above shower

Main bathroom ceiling - looks sooooo good
 You may not remember how the ceiling in the powder room looked before I painted it, but it was pretty terrible.  I took a full hour on it with a belt-sander to mow it down to a manageable amount, but there were random chunks taken out of the wall where the original stalactites used to live.  Now it's all nice and even.  :)

Over sink

Over toilet
Today is time to slap on the green!  I'm so excited.

Thursday, December 22, 2011

Two Tickets to Sheet-Rock Town!

As mentioned in my previous post, I have some free time off work with the holidays coming up, and if Husband and I don't end up going on an unplanned vacation for New Years (which, let’s be honest, is not out of the question), my intent is to spend this time off gardening.  I haven't had a lot of time to garden in recent weeks, given the weekends have been filled with trips to other cities (and states) to visit family and friends, and after work is impossible given I’m home well after dark.  I’d planned on getting started on the gardening for this weekend (since I have a three-day weekend off – thanks, Christmas!), but something kind of awesome and exciting has come up:

We just got the bathroom sheet-rocked and re-textured.

That means finally being able to paint!!  Yay!  I love painting.  I had been sitting on my paint colors for about three months, waiting for us to drum up the money (or more accurately, be bothered to call someone to come out) to get it finished.  We found an awesome guy who, unlike all of the other sheetrock guys we called, actually showed up when he said he would, and did a fine job.

To prep for his arrival, we had to rip out the door-frame that led from the powder room to the main bath, and we decided that while we liked the chair rail, it didn't go with the rest of the house (as there was not another chair rail anywhere else in the entirety of the house...why is it in the powder room?), so we ripped it out as well.  (And by "we", I mean Husband.)

Let’s have a little reminder of how it used to look, for all of those who’ve (understandably) forgotten:

Missing medicine cabinet that needs to be filled in


Above you can see where the door-frame and chair rail were removed, as well as the spot where the McLazies "fixed" the wall
So to sum up, we needed to fill in the hole where the medicine cabinet was removed, have the wall behind the bathtub/just right of the toilet repaired (see above), fix the area where we removed the door between the powder room and the main bathroom, and texture the ceiling and wall where Husband replaced the bathtub with the shower setup (no pictures of before, sorry!).

Because he’d have to texture the walls where he made repairs, we elected to just have him re-texture all of the walls.  This worked for me, because the wall texture was remarkably different between the two rooms.  The main bathroom area had almost no texture whatsoever (which I liked), but the powder room had that same horrifying, will-cut-your-hand-if-you-touch-it texture.  Even after I spent eons sanding it down, it was still pretty hard core and looked bad.  So he re-textured it all with a nice stomp-grind.  Here are the results:

The powder room

More powder room

Powder room, mirror side
The walk-through
Walk-through from the main bath
Medicine cabinet no more!

Shower-area ceiling retexture

Now you may have noticed something special here in the previous picture.  This was my favorite part of this whole process...the ceiling was retextured too!!

A better picture of the ceiling and wall together



I literally cannot express my joy enough at this ceiling.  SO EXCITING!  It was like Christmas morning when I walked in and saw that the horrible semi-gloss and stalactite ceiling was gone, and replaced with it was this beautiful, evenly-coated ceiling.  Pure joy, y'all.


We put a coat of primer on last night (Husband helped, and it cut down on the completion time considerably), which I will post pictures of tomorrow.  Tonight, if all goes well, I will be putting the first coat of official paint on!  Yay!


Stay tuned for primer shots!


Wednesday, December 21, 2011

Minor Update to Garden

Hi all!  It's been a while, but I have some new stuff to show you (finally).  Merry Christmas, here's your present!  :)

So if you remember from my previous garden post, I had to dead-head the snapdragons.  They were also extremely unruly and just flopping about (see picture below):


I was worried that I had waited too long to deadhead, and that I would be resigned to forever green bushes (which would be fine, as long as they didn't die).  Still, the area just looked unruly, like the snapdragons owned me.  I was not having it.

I tried a few avenues, and purchased a few "plant wranglers" online.  But they did not work, and Husband came through in the clench...with green chicken wire.

At first, I was reluctant.  But the result actually turned out gorgeous:


So I chicken-wired them on December 7th, fertilized them, and kept a close eye on their progress.  I didn't overwater, but I didn't underwater either.  I got lucky with a few hefty rains that kept them nice and moist.

Slowly, I started seeing some pink buds come back.  It started at the front, where the sun hits the bushes the most.  But now?  They're all blooming!

Forgive the leaves - it was windy the night before!

The ones at the front are still the most bloomy - this one below kicked out a set that rivaled how many blooms it had when I purchased it.

 
I think we have a winner, folks!

More garden updates to follow, hopefully over New Years weekend.