Numerous Shades of Grey (and a Little Gold)

If the door is the "smile of the house", our porch was that one ugly black hair that sprouts from your chin that you always forget to pluck the night before a hot date or big job interview.

 

 

 

Gross, right?

Well, not anymore!
 

We were originally going to strip the brick to match the foundation, but after consulting various sources (and trying our hand at a couple) we realized that it would never fully be paint-free and so we'd just end up painting it again anyway.

 

Score one for rational laziness.

It took us some deliberating to decide on a color, though. Gray (if you haven't noticed by now...which is impossible) is our go-to "paint all the things" color, but because the cracking, peeling paint was a shade of gray (fine as a color, maybe, but looking at it on our porch made me want to get a tetanus shot), I wasn't feeling very pro-gray. 

Joseph suggested a nice, lighter gray. Specifically Pearl Gray in Behr's Masonry, Stucco, & Brick Paint. (side note: we actually got the guy at Home Depot to mix us a gallon of Pearl Gray in the Behr Porch and Patio Floor Paint since he said the other was meant for exterior walls and not high traffic areas.)

Well, this gray, which looked like a lovely pale shade on the sample, appeared blindingly white once we applied it to the steps.
 

It actually hurt to look at. 

No kidding. 

I tried to take a picture but it just came out looking like the surface of the sun. 

We packed up the remaining 3/4 of a gallon and went back to Home Depot. Thankfully we previously learned that Home Depot will tint your already purchased paint fo' freeee, so we asked them to tone it down a little. I think we used a swatch of French Gray (pic) for color matching. 

Much nicer. 

The stoop is the original blindingly light color (we decided in small doses it was alright), while the steps got a fresh coat of the new, more muted gray. Which, let's face it, is still pretty bright. 

Then....I decided the top needed some pizazz. If you know me at all, you will know that I am not a pizazz person. (I raise an eyebrow when people add those "cha-cha-chas" into "Happy Birthday". My favorite color...is gray.) Pizazz and I are not friends, or even acquaintances, but I've been spending a lot of time stalking reading Mandi's blog Vintage revivals and she has pizazz in spades! Some of it must have rubbed off on my brain because our front porch all of a sudden seemed to be crying out for something bold! Something exciting! Something that could be done in an afternoon with a paint pen! 

So, I straight up stole Mandi's wallpaper sharpie idea. 

Because Joseph says we should have more pictures of "us doing stuff" on our blog, here is a picture of me, in what I call my "sexy outfit", using a yard stick. It's crazy up in here. But back to the porch...

And I am not sorry. 

I love it.
 

So much. 

The only thing I changed from her tutorial is that mine are based on a spacing of 7 inches
 

and 10 inches
 

 

(instead of 6 1/2") because...that was easier for my math-hating brain. 

(Also, in case you ever read our blog and go, "Hey, where are their kids while they're doing this stuff?"
 

They're right here! Helping...in their own way.)

How it will hold up outside remains to be seen. The paint pen I used is oil-based (not water-based) and says it can be used on concrete, but doesn't say anything about outside projects. Or foot traffic. Probably because who draws on their porch??

We do. 

And we like it that way. 

Confession: I am now a little paint pen crazy. I'm thiiiis close to using it for an accent wall in our bedroom... My cautious self is trying to talk me down. "Too trendy," it says. "You'll hate it in a year." 

My new-found inner pizazz (who sounds a lot like Ms. Frizzle, now that I think about it) is encouraging me to "Take chances!" And "Make mistakes!"

Hmm...we'll see how this goes down...

Moody Blues

Blergh-blah-blah-blah.

The above is my brain right now. The summer heat has finally fried it. Maybe that's why perusing snowy, Nordic-themed items has been so soothing. Also, taking a big step and changing the paint color in Grayson's room from this:

 

Apparently we dislike this color so much
we didn't even take a real "after" shot.

 

to this:

 

feels very cool and refreshing. (Also, sorry, these pictures are in no way "styled" and the lighting is terrible. We were in one of those "Just...take pictures! Get it done!" moods.)

It looks a little dark now, but we think that once we add some light, airy curtains and accent things, it'll lighten the feel of the room. 

We really lucked out with this paint, we grabbed it a few weekends ago when Ace Hardware had their "Buy one gallon, get one gallon free!" deal. (We also picked up the white we used to finish our Board and Batten)

It's the first time we've used a Clark & Kensington brand paint to do a room (we're usually Behr people. Aahh! Bear People!) and, while we did notice some differences, for the most part, we liked it. 

When we painted this room yellow a few months ago, we were painting over a pinky-beige that the sellers had used for every room in the house (we called it "band-aid beige"). Yellow over beige? No problem! Oh, how naive we were. It took us three coats, two whole gallons of paint and there were still spots where the beige showed through. But by that point we had already decided that we had chosen the wrong color and were not willing to invest in more of it just to finish. Neither were we willing to jump right in to painting it an entirely different color. So, the room stayed butter yellow for a few months while we saved to replenish our painting budget. 

Finding a new color was fairly easy. We had toyed around with the idea of a blue-green room before, but decided against it in favor of the brighter yellow. Well, this time we trusted our instinct and, when we got our free gallon from Ace, had them color match Plumage by Martha Stewart.
 

It looks a little washed out here, but on the walls, as you can see, it's quite bold. 

Clark & Kensington is not "no VOC" , only "low VOC" which we don't love (Behr is "no VOC") but the coverage of this paint was A-ma-zing. One gallon, two coats did....the entire room.
 

 

I did a dance. 

Aside: we left that ugly, jagged strip of unpainted wall around the ceiling on purpose. Experience has taught us that we are not the tidiest of painters (even with tape) around the ceiling and, since we will be putting up crown molding in here anyway, we opted to leave a little seam. Yes, it's tacky and unattractive, but we thought it was preferable to a smudgy ceiling. For us, anyway. Not recommending it as a "new look". 

In addition to new paint, we also have some awesome mood boards to share! 

My sister-in-law has really been helping to keep us inspired and energetic about Grayson's room. I'm so grateful. There are many days when I open the door and think, "Did the toys give birth to MORE toys last night while we slept? I will never conquer this room. Toys, you've won." 

But then I pull up these Mood Boards and I feel re-energized. 

 

The first two are kind of what we are going for now and the third one is updated a bit for when Alice is a little older and they're sharing a room. It's nice to see how the look can evolve. 

We have already made an Ikea run for those curtains and a sheepskin. And we are planning another - I need that duvet cover!  

It's exciting to see this room coming together. Grayson likes everyone spending so much time in his room and he also appreciates all the Frozen songs I sing while I'm in there. 

...Actually, that's a lie. 

He always (every time!) says: "I'm just Grayson and you're just Mamma and don't sing that song."

How long do you think it will be before we, as a society, can say "let it go" without bursting into song?

My money's on 1,000 years...

Some Awkward Questions ...

So, we've gotten to know each other a little bit better over the past few months. You've seen our good side our not so good and our chocolate doughnut side:

I feel like we've gotten to the point in this relationship where we can ask each other some awkward questions. You're really wondering where this is going right? Well, don't worry! Pop some popcorn, flop on a sleeping bag and put your best Karen Smith expression on...

 I'll go first.


This...is awkward:

And, honestly, it has us a bit stumped.
This weird little wall cut-out is part of what used to be the chimney. The wall here is actually still made of brick that has been plastered over, which makes hanging something here a bit more challenging. But not impossible. We've considered a mirror. Either full-length or something smaller and more decorative. My only thought with that is this wall faces our bedroom door and I'm not sure my confidence could handle stumbling out of bed every morning and being confronted with my own squashy faced bed-headedness.
The other option we were considering was painting the recessed section with chalkboard paint and maybe adding some wooden strips on the edges to create a faux framed look.

Like this:

via

I'm a little hesitant to jump on the chalkboard paint bandwagon, but I do think they're fun and it would be a great place for random bursts of creativity. Always important.
So, what do you guys think? Originally, I think the plan was to continue the Board & Batten into the space and just kind of...pretend it wasn't there, but we are also open to other, unconventional, ideas. Maybe inserting a panel of lattice for an easily changeable kids artwork or photo display? Oh, the possibilities!
While we're on the subject of "awkward spaces", this confounds me:

It's so wide. And empty. It begs to be filled with something but...what?

A picture wall?

Honeycomb shelves?

via

Would that push our house over the edge into "too much bee theme"?

A velvet Elvis?

Okay, not that last one. Joseph would never go for that.

But maybe one day, Velvet Elvis, when I have a craft room of my own...

One day...


Does anyone else out there have any "awkward" spaces in their home? How have you dealt with it? Strategically placed plant? Lamp? Hung a Velvet Elvis so everyone is so distracted by The King that no one notices the awkwardness? (Or anything else about your home, for that matter?) That's it! My new solution for it all: Put a bird Velvet Elvis on it!

It's the Little Things

So after our recent string of big projects like putting up board and batten, pulling up the sidewalk, getting all of our trees cut down, and covering our yard in top soil and reseeding it (maybe we'll do a post on that once the grass has fully come in) we haven't been terribly keen on jumping into something huge. Instead we've been working on small things, or doing some small steps for things that have been sitting on our to-do list forever.

We picked up a wall hook from the Young House Love line at Target to use as a towel hook in the bathroom.

There's kind of a bumble bee theme in there so it was perfect.

Whatever you want to say about the energy efficiency and long life of those twirly new fangled light bulbs they are huge and ugly. Meredith replaced the ones in our bathroom with some standard old school bulbs and they look better, their light is better, and they don't make a buzzing sound (I don't know if you've ever noticed but those new bulbs hum). She also added a little detail on the rim of the lamps that looks quite nice.

Ain't it purty?

Meredith liked some decorative mud room/shoe storage options she saw online that utilized wooden crates so I made one out of scrap I got fo' free at work.

That's right, I saved us like five bucks! Really it was just for the fun of making it.

We hung this fruit basket that Meredith painted gold in our kitchen. Now this space feels more useful and we don't have to have as many bowls of produce taking up all of our counter space.

The observant nerd will notice The Wookie Cookbook amongst our more traditional cookbooks.

Meredith started some artwork that will be revealed as soon as she completes it and we think of a place to hang it.

Steps have been taken to replace the old ugly hedges we removed shortly after we moved in. This is only about halfway done so you'll have to wait for the full reveal on this as well.

Grayson and Meredith painted and hung this adorable bird house which I think adds a nice homey touch to the front yard.

We've started to remove the piles of pine needles we let sit all winter. After ten bags and not even being half done I'm really starting to feel this shouldn't be consider a "little thing"...

So. many. pine needles.

Meredith's brother Jesse was kind enough to come over with their dad's industrial strength leaf blower and blow off the driveway. After getting the trees taken down it just looked like a mess. Thank God for fathers-in-law with overpowered tools and brothers-in-law willing to wield them.

We added light kits to both bedrooms, which HOLY CRAP MAKES ME WONDER WHY WE HAVEN'T DONE THIS BEFORE.

This one was actually the wrong color (we got it on clearance at Decorator Outlet) so we painted it silver. It's not a perfect match but we just wanted it up. We'll probably fix it later.

We stained two of our dining room chairs. Just two of them because, frankly, we need a place to sit. Once these have a second coat and get sealed we'll do the other two.

We got some sample colors on our door. I actually really like the idea of a black door for some reason but it's just not the right choice for this house. We'll probably go into more detail about our choices when we complete this project but here's the two samples Meredith painted on. Guess which one we're going with?

And of course I saved the best for last. The most important little thing that's happened, and the one we're most excited about is our new baby... grass!

 

 

 

YAY! GRASS!

 

 

Have you knocked anything off of your to do list lately? Big things? Small things? Care to hazard a guess which paint color we picked?

A Quick Question...

On Friday I said we were going to paint a table this weekend.

Well, we did not. 

But that's okay! Because now I get to ask you about it. 

So, this:

 

is our Coffee Table. We inherited it from a very generous family and we've been happy with it (at various points it's also been a TV stand and a gaming table) but now that we're settling in to a house of our own, we're feeling the need to....how do you say....paint this baby!

The only problem we're having is deciding exactly what color/colors would work best. Our original plan was to paint the entire thing white, with a light grey top and a distressed white pattern on the top. Like this:

Swiped from the Young House Love book.

But then we looked around our house and realized: We have a lot of grey. And white. 

So, now I feel a little stuck. I like the idea of incorporating a pop of color (maybe on the top, instead of grey) but still using a distressed white pattern? And then we remembered we got some free Clark & Kensington paint last year in a deep eggplant, so maybe that could work. (Our couch had purple corduroy throw pillows.) But what about an orange? Or a coral-y pink? I just don't know. (Picture me throwing up my hands and questioning the Heavens, ala King Lear.) First World Problems, you know...they warrant such drama. *grin*

Anyway, I thought I'd see if anyone (with a better decorating sense than I) had any ideas. 

Otherwise, I might go crazy and decide I might need to paint it to coordinate with this lamp:



For more hideous lighting specimens click here.