With all of the work we've been doing on the house I haven't kept up with the photos like I should so they will be coming at a later date.
We started off the month of April by pulling a let-someone-do-it-for-you. We took the kitchen trim to a guy to strip the layers of paint and varnish off. We had struggled with it when we stripped the basement and north porch doors and decided that if we got the money around it was something we'd leave to a professional. We now have it back, but haven't had the time to get it sanded, primed, and painted yet.
Tim spent most of this month working on the woodwork for the up-stairs hall. It is our most woodwork intensive "room" with two windows and 10 doorways along with endless amounts of base board. Now he seems to be on a kind of woodwork "break." I'm hoping the fact that our next three woodwork projects (the up-stairs closet, kitchen, and mudroom) are painting ones will bring him out of his current retirement.
In preparation for the woodwork being finished we also worked on refinishing the hallway floor. If you remember we rough sanded it last May right before moving in. This month we gave it a final sanding. Which I must say came out much better than anticipated. We had never worked with a soft wood floor and we're kind of scared at how smooth it would turn out. Results=smoother than a baby's butt.
After sanding we put a coat of stain on. It took us awhile to decide if we wanted to stain them or just leave them natural. We decided to go with the approach that we plan on leaving some of the downstairs floors natural so it might be nice to have a little variety up here.
After staining I took a cheap Manards stencil that I bought on a whim on one of their bag sales and stenciled a square pattern in the front floors and a line running along the walls in the back. I just used black stencil paint that you can shade so it looks like the fancy little chain is wood-burned into the floor. And now I've overcome my fear of stencils so I'm free to try it elsewhere in the house and not have to worry about it looking cheap. After stenciling we put 3 coats of varnish over the whole thing.
Once the hall floor was finished we could call the carpet guys back to put the carpet into the back bedroom. They had put in the carpet in the other two bedrooms last month, but had not finished the doorways so we could finish the hall and not have to worry about creating a nice transaction between two floors. The carpet in the big bedroom next to ours in another shaggy one that runs a little lighter than the one in our bedroom. The guest room has a very expensive, but beautiful Berber that has little hints of the mauve color in the walls woven in. For the back bedroom I picked a utilitarian Berber with thick rolls in it. This will help to hold my loom in place when I weave heavy things like rugs. Plus it was very cheap to off-set the cost of the guest room's carpet.
I bought my last gallons of paint this month. The final colors purchased was the white and blue for the mudroom, the red for the dining room, and the pink for the downstairs bathroom. It's kind of sad to know the hours of pouring over the historic paint samples at Lowes is over. Another chapter in our lives over.
I found a light fixture and mirror at Lowes on our last paint shopping trip. They are nothing fancy, but look pretty spiffy in the guest bathroom. The hardware are ones we had purchased for our house in town, but never got around to installing before we decided to move (same with the cream colored tiles in this room). We saw them in the Pottery Barn magazine and just had to have them.
We spent the end of the month cleaning out the mudroom, priming and painting, patching bead board, and laying the sub-floor.
It is at this point that I step into the "modern" world and move my journal over to weblog format. Please click the "return to blog" link below to enter that page.