In His Spare Time

Kevin's been working very hard on painting the dining room.  The house is about 85-90 years old and the dining room walls are the original plaster with decades of paint over it.  Flaky, garish paint.  Kevin scraped and sanded until either he hit plaster or the paint stopped flaking off.  If he's said it once, he's said it 42 times: 'Prep work is crucial to a good paint job.'

Down to the nub:

With a coat of primer:

Once again we enlisted the help of our neighbor, Sandy, to choose colors for us.  Let's see if I can remember the color numbers and find them online.  Hmm hmm hmm....

Okay, I think I can link you to the colors.  Go here to look at Benjamin Moore's paint chips.  Choose 'Historical Colors' from the drop down menu.  IIRC, the walls will be Georgian Brick HC-50 and the trim will be Peale Green HC-121.  Dark!  I think of the new colors as the old colors, just much darker.  I do tend to go too light when choosing paint colors.

The Benjamin Moore website also has this thing where you can play with colors in different kinds of rooms.  Huh.  Maybe I should have done that before buying the paint.  I just did it and I like it.  Whew!

He'll paint the living room, which is off of the dining room, next in the same colors.  We got some light fixtures for those rooms and the foyer (the rooms all run together).  After painting, we'll get the floors refinished.  At least, we hope we can get them refinished.  They're not in great shape and there are some fixes that are much more practical than attractive (e.g., small pieces of floorboard that were inserted for a fix, but inserted perpendicular to the original floorboards).  It's an oak floor, but it is not the original floor.  The original pine floor is underneath; you can see its underside from the basement.  I don't know what kind of condition it's in on the floor side.  I don't mind that the floor's imperfect, unlevel and kinda funky in spots.  I like old houses precisely bc they look lived in and not just by us, but by lots of people before us with their own stories.  So yeah, get the floors done.  Then we can get dining room furniture!  And we'll be able to sit down at a nice table!  And have more than two people over for dinner!

We bought my mom a glider at Snyder's Furniture in PA; we'll probably pick it up next week.  That was a task, finding an unupholstered glider.  Saint Bridget insisted that she does not like upholstery and wanted the plainest chair possible.  It's hard to tell how much of that is actual personal preference and how much is martyrdom and wishing to save us money.  Aargh.

Anyway, when we were there we looked at their dining room stuff, liked it and might get our stuff there.  I like the Mission style furniture.  One thing that annoys me about dining room chairs with arms is when the arms don't reach the end of the seat.  Most uncomfortable if one wants to sit and yammer on for hours after dinner with their friends.  I think they have a lot of other stuff there that's not on the website.

Seeing as I'm becoming the domestic diva, what with my forays into cooking and knitting, I'm considering making the curtains for the dining and living rooms myself.  Nothing fancy, just panel curtains that can be hung on rings with 3/4 lace sheers underneath.  I basically want the same style curtains for almost every room.  E.g., we have curtains similar to these in the Mens' Room, hung on brass rods like these, using rings like these, and 3/4 length lace sheers like these.  The 3/4 length is so that the cats can sit in the windows without having/getting to fuss with the sheers.  We think of everything.  You know, it might have been easier to find a picture.  Let's see what we can find.

Okay, here we go; this was taken shortly after Kevin repainted Slimmie's room.

Let's just take a moment to remember our dear boy, Slim.

Mwah!

Why bother making curtains?  Well, for one thing, about half of our windows have radiators under them.  Most curtains that I can buy are too long (even if only by a few inches as you can see in the above picture) and end up bunching up on top of the radiator or behind it.  Unattractive.  I also don't like the idea of the fabric in contact with radiators.  If they're just panels, I should be able to handle that, although I would like to line them with insulating and/or blackout material.  Of course, I will consult with Sandy next door wrt fabric selection.

Thanks for all your hard work, Kev!

Comments

[Zack Nutter]

I hope you had a mask when removing all the old paint because it probably had lead in it.