What I am about to share with you takes some courage on two fronts. This first is to admit to you that last week while grading mid-terms in front of the TV, Garth and I decided to watch one of the two Lifetime Martha Stewart Bio-pics (Martha Inc: The Martha Stewart Story) that we had TIVOed. Yes we TIVOed them, and yes, we watched one. What is more upsetting than this is that I couldn’t help but COMPLETELY SEE MYSELF in this clip about re-doing her house.
The first month in our house for both of us was a flurry of motion. Like Martha, I snapped awake ready to tackle the next task. I could only think that one hour spent scraping paper from a wall in this corner would put me one hour closer to painting the walls and eventually relaxing in said space. I’ve heard that women often don’t remember the full experience of childbirth and as I look back at the progress we have made it is hard to remember how we have come as far as we have. Hours and days have disappeared. I still don’t always know what day it is.
Over drinks, a friend said to me, “You can’t take everything on at once, it really does take years to change a house.”
Oookay, I thought. It might take years if you don’t have drive and a crazed work ethic. Years. Ha.
During our wallpaper removal party, I overheard a friend’s boyfriend say to Garth, “There is so much work to do, I can’t wait to see you slowly change this place. It is gonna take forever.”
Garth scoffed at him, “Have you met my wife? The bulk of this will be done by Christmas.”
The former owner stopped by to pick up some mail that had failed to be forwarded. She said she was glad we stayed in touch. I told her we would love to have them over after we had the place in working order. I was thinking January, perhaps?
She laughed and waved, “See you in five years!”
I shook my head and smiled– five years? Ha.
The first area that we really attacked in the house is the living room and parlor. The walls were sponge painted beige on darker beige with a wallpaper border circling both rooms just above the molding. This seemed a logical place to start because there was little wallpaper to remove, and the walls could simply be primed and painted.
Naturally, before we even had keys to the house, I had selected colors for every room. This room would be green. If bright colors make you queasy now would be a good time to stop reading our blog. The rooms in this house are moving from neutral and patterned to bright and solid ASAP, and it all starts in the living room and parlor.
Our very first night in the house we climbed ladders and sprayed fabric softener at the borders. We had it all down in a couple of hours and I began to tape off the room. I figured in one day we could have this room looking like new.
Not so fast.
These two rooms are fairly large, and my room painting skills were sorely out of practice. I primed the walls and didn’t manage to fully finish this task before our wall paper removing party began. The following day with Garth and I both painting the coverage wasn’t great, and it seemed like the walls would need ten coats at the rate we were moving.
Garth ran back to Sherwin Williams to grab more gallons of Direct Green and reported our problem to the paint man. We used the wrong primer. Feh.
I knew this and somehow let it slip my mind. If you are using darker colors (reds, blues, greens– not pastels) it is good to prime the walls with gray. You will need less coats of paint and the overall color will be more brilliant. What is even better is to ask the paint person (they will do this most anywhere that they sell paint) to tint your primer towards your final color. We have done this in other rooms and I wish we had done it in the living room.
Of course, I had used straight white primer. This ended up costing us a lot more than we had intended and took precious work time away from other tasks that could have been accomplished during our week of work before we moved in.
Below is the color on the wall (I am not showing the entire space yet because we aren’t nearly finished with it).
Before the wallpaper party revealed the walls beneath the paper, my intentions were to paint the living room, dining room and kitchen before we moved in. I shifted my focus to painting the living room, bedroom and studio before our move-in date.
I was still painting green around the trim four days later. FOUR DAYS!! I realized that maybe I wasn’t going to get the bedroom painted before we moved in (but I’ll be damned if I wasn’t up until all hours scraping at the glue the wallpaper left on the walls).
At this point you must be thinking, “This is where Claire comes to her senses and realizes that it just might take five years to pull the house together.”
Hmph.
I can make this into my vision of a house. I can make it happen relatively quickly. The bulk of it will be pulled together by Christmas.
It has to. The In-laws are coming.
YES YOU CAN! When we got our current house, I painted 7 rooms in 6 days, before any furniture moving in, all with a 3 year-old in tow. Thankfully the rooms are not huge, and the walls had been freshly painted flat white. And I did mid-tones, so I didn’t need the blessed tinted primer. We walked away from houses during our house-hunt process because of excessive wallpaper to be removed. LOVE your color choice for the living room – so vibrant and happy. Wishing you all the best in your reno and can’t wait to read more in the weeks and months (NOT years) to come.
I am like you in that I don’t like to wait around to get a reno under way, but I have been learning the merits in holding off. First, renovating should be a process of discovery, both of yourself and of your aesthetics. When I think of tear down and renovate now, I think of flips and of pottery barn catalogs. In both instances, there’s little soul in the final redo.
Do you agree?
There is nothing more motivating than house guests. Good luck, things look amazing already! I’m really enjoying this blog.
I love me some bright green, and I think it would be delightful to have a parlor that color! Good luck, your adventure is already inspiring to me.
I can see the merits of going slowly and discovering things about your own aesthetics, and flipping a house certainly brings to my mind middle of the road aesthetics like Pottery Barn or Pier One. I am sure that entirely depends on the person and their intentions. Garth and intend to stay in the house for some time, not flip it for a quick buck, so while we are moving at a “rapid” pace things are certainly not happening quickly. Most of the time it is just me working on things, which means things are slow going. I want it done NOW, but I also want it done right, which can really slow things down, you know?
Additionally we are both artists and have already pretty definitive home decorating tastes. We love bold colors, we own a lot of art work, and we enjoy buying vintage and antique furniture– these things inspire us and dictate the directions we take the rooms we are working with. Although I have the palette for the house picked out, my mind shifts and changes about other things as we go. Believe me, this is a constant and shifting process and I hope it doesn’t turn out soul-less! Though I must say it would be hard to fill a home with all of our handmade items and have it be anything but warm and inviting.
Yowza, a woman after my own heart. Thanks for the good wishes!
Ha! That clip was a LOL. Apparently, it takes about fifteen seconds to change a house.
Is that a R2-D2 wood burning stove I see? Or am just imagining things? Anyhow, the green is impressive! Bold choice but I’m liking it. Can’t wait to see what other colors you come up with.
[...] painting our two front rooms green and, unfortunately, before we learned the magic of a wall paper steamer, we knew we had to attack [...]
Thelin Gnome stove!! Do you guys actually use it for space heating, or for looks?
Those gnomes aren’t just for looks! The stove is totally for heat! We throw a little handful of pellets in it every night and work in the living room without having to heat the rest of the house. I can’t imagine my life without it at this point. Pellet stoves rule! People who bitch about regular wood being way cheaper than pellets don’t take into account how efficient the stoves are. We go through MAYBE a $5 bag of pellets every two weeks. Viva Thelin!
i met erim mcintosh in ny while she was here- as i was showing her my ‘glitter on vinyl’ pieces, she asked me if i knew of your work. i didnt, but i went to your website and saw it, and i love it! ive been using glitter (slightly differently- i do ‘reverse pieces on clear vinyl’ so the glitter is seen thru vinyl- ive recently been doing all glitter pieces (when you go to my website, go to ‘recent work’ that is where the all glitter pieces manifest- ive been using it for years, in small quantities- now its just taken over! id love to see your work in person, and if you ever come to ny, id love for you to come to my studio as well. its in Noho, on Bond st- and ive just opened up the front of the space into an exhiibition space, which has been really wonderful. im so glad i met erin and heard about your work!!! sincerely, robin gaynes-bachman