The Floors

I'm sitting here at the Toyota dealership waiting for my oil to be changed, and figured it was a good time to (finally) update the blog :)

No recent updates, because things have been at a bit of a stand still while the floors were being refinished.  The smell is finally going away, and thanks to some 70 degree days (yup, and it was in the negatives last week) Tony has been able to keep the windows and doors open to air out the house a bit.  The floors are beautiful and they did a really excellent job on them.  The color is exactly what Tony wanted, and even though he was a little apprehensive about spending so much money redoing floors that were in good shape, I think he doesn't regret it at all.  It makes everything look more updated and more uniform (there were a few different colors of hardwoods before they were refinished).

Unfortunately, I haven't been at the house during daylight since the floors were refinished...lots of very long work days and photo-shoots.  So, I haven't had time to get any good pictures of the floors, so all I have are a couple of quick iPhone pictures I snapped that will have to do for now.

Here are the kitchen floors before:

And after... (again...terrible quality iPhone picture with poor lighting)

This photo makes them look a bit darker than they actually are, but it is close.

Den before and after:

The rest are just a few random pictures of the floors from my iPhone...

Guest Bedroom

Master Bedroom

Hallway standing at the entry of the full guest bath.  Ignore the very dirty bathroom floor...we were doing lots of wallpaper removal and other fun stuff in there and it really needs to be cleaned up!

Breakfast Nook in the Kitchen

Maybe I will have some free time soon and will be able to take some better pictures that are more true to color :)

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Master Bedroom Walls and Refinishing the Floors

So, I have lots of picture updates but not much time, so I thought I would quickly show the color we ended up picking for the master bedroom.  For some reason, we just couldn't find something we loved for the master, and it is the only paint color we hadn't picked out as of this past Monday.  We wanted something to go with our gray(ish) color palette, but we wanted it to be different and darker than the lighter walls in the rest of the house.  We just kept going back and forth...not really sure if we wanted all of the walls the same color, or maybe do one wall dark and the rest light...we have kind of just been all over the place with this decision.

We played around with these three colors:

All colors are Benjamin Moore.  Top is Alexandria Beige, bottom right is Kingsport Gray and the bottom left is Manchester Tan. 

We weren't a fan of any of them, and so it was back to where we started...having no idea what to choose.

Then, this past weekend reality struck and we realized we needed to paint the Master before they started redoing the hardwoods.  We just didn't want to deal with having to do any major painting (other than trim) after spending lots of money to redo the hardwoods in the whole house.  Hardwood refinishing began Wednesday morning at 9am, so we were on a tight schedule.

After finding nothing we both liked over the weekend, we had kind of given up and given in to the fact that we might be painting the walls after the floors were refinished, which wasn't ideal but would work out just fine in the end.  Then, at work on Monday, I received a text message from Tony telling me to look at Duxbury Gray.  I did a very quick google search where I found this:

From: http://katieandchriscoleman.blogspot.com

and this:

From here: http://ths.gardenweb.com/forums/load/decor/gal0111342625932.html

So, I was a little confused as to what it would actually look like because the colors were so different in the two rooms.  However, I loved the way it looked in the first picture, so we decided to take the risk and go for it.  We painted that night and could not be happier.  The color is absolutely lovely, and looks much more like the first photo that I found than the second.  It definitely has some green in it, but not much and is more gray than green.  Tony disagrees and says it is army green...it isn't (in my opinion at least).  Here are a few quick iPhone pictures of the room, color is a little off, but not much:

Inside of closets are currently still baby blue and trim was just sort of painted in these pictures, so it will look better once I actually do it...I just wanted to get an idea of what it would look like.

For now, we are at a stand still.  The floors are being redone and we can't get into the house until Sunday.  After working on the house for Almost a full month (he closed January 13), it feels strange not to go home from work every night and work constantly until 2am or later.  I guess it's good to take a break, though, because my knees are killing me (from painting the baseboard), my wrists are hands and wrists are always sore (from all of the painting, carpet staple removal, etc etc...I could go on and on) and I'm just overall tired...all the time.

We went back and forth on the color he wanted to choose for the floors for a while, but eventually decided on a darker color, but not too dark, with a little red, but not too much red...easy, right? :)

He is using highly recommended, First Pace Flooring, and they have been awesome so far.  On Wednesday, he sent me a sample of the colors while I was at work to confirm that we were on the same page as far as color goes and we both agreed on the same one.

Another cell phone picture...we both liked the far left best.

I believe the color he ended up choosing was English Chestnut that he custom mixed to be slightly darker with a little more red in it.

We will be able to go into the house wearing socks on Sunday.  However, we won't be able to move furniture back into the rooms until Tuesday, and we won't be able to put down carpets for 3 weeks.  I will post pictures as soon as we see the final results :)

-Annie

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The Entry

The entry is almost finished! We just have a few switch plates to change out and of course furnish it, and then we're good! I'm going to be posting the pictures, but Tony was much more involved in the actual taking down of the wallpaper and refinishing the walls. Without his mad skim coat skills, the walls would seriously look like crap. So, I'll let him explain on the picture captions below...

Entry during the inspection.

Entry during the inspection

Entry on first day of move-in

The wallpaper seemed like it was in pretty good shape and fairly new, so I thought that it wouldn't be too hard to take down. I was wrong. It turned out that the people who put it up had skim coated the wall and then went straight to putting up the wallpaper without properly sizing. So after many hours of peeling small strips of wallpaper with Annie's Mom's magical steam gun, we noticed that the surface of the wall now looked like the surface of the moon. If we would have painted it as-is it would have looked awful, so I decided to skim coat the wall again. I went with a pre-mixed finishing joint compound which turned out to go on fairly easy and sand easy as well. It was still my first time ever skim coating a wall so I did my fair share of sanding. With the exception of a few rough spots around the light switches, the walls came out looking pretty good.

Entry after skim coat added to even out the walls

Entry after skim coat was added to even out the walls

First layer of wall paint (New York State of Mind), no trim paint yet.

As you can see from the caption above Annie keeps referring to this paint as New York State of Mind. Well, that is only 90% correct. We decided that the original New York State of Mind was too dark so we went 10% lighter. By doing this, it is now a new paint color, deserving of it's own name. The paint was named Papa Smurf Blue by the clerk who mixed it at Allied Paints in Topeka.  Annie refuses to acknowledge that he named it this.

(Almost) finished entry. Wall paint and trim paint done.

(Almost) finished entry. Wall paint and trim paint done.

(Almost) finished entry. Wall paint (New York State of Mind) and trim (Mascarpone) finished, still waiting on a few details and of course furniture.

This chandelier was from the previous owner. We cleaned it up a little, and while it is kind of dated and has fake wax dripping from the "candles" (aka light bulbs)...we actually like it and it is staying.

Due to the overwhelming amount of snow that we got yesterday, everything looked blue outside last night. It was the craziest thing. This is a view out the front door window of the blue outside.

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