Projects from today and this week

The excitement of Lydle coming to live with us for a while has really inspired us to tackle some projects we just keep setting aside. For instance, this week, we decided to pain "Lydia's" room!

Here are some before and afters - before is the gray and after is the sugar paper blue :) It's a pretty cool color! Even the name, you see, way back when, sugar used to be sold in blue paper sacks. Hence, in Italy this color will be forever known as Sugar Paper :) 

This view before...

This view after :)

Left wall before...

Left wall after :)

Zeno painting the ceiling! 

Grey corner before...

Blue and White corner after! 

Radiator before...

Radiator after :D

Zeno after ;)

All we have left now is to put up the molding around the top of the ceiling where the white and blue meet :) And, of course, paint the trim, but we figure we can do that together with Lydle when she comes ;)

Instead, today, I tackled our "plate project"! We had so many plates going around and there are just the two of us, so I saw this great plate display on a wall and decided it would be perfect for our unfinished kitchen walls. Here is the result - before and then after:

wall before the plates

plates aranged in pattern on the floor... 

And they're up! 

And looking quite nice I must say :)

 Being in the hanging stuff on the walls mode, I took the opportunity to put up a few little knickknack shelves I'd painted and decorate them with teacups and saucers. They turned out quite nice too! 

No more projects this weekend. I'm about to hit the laundry, and tomorrow, hopefully you'll get some footage of the world championships of fireworks!!!

Our New Stairs :)

Check them out! They're pretty sweet :) And this makes our hallway nearly complete - just a few last finishing touches left!

Tackling the "Rat Room"

There is a room in our house that we reserve for unwanted guests (we apologize if any of our readers have been banished to this room!). You will be relieved to know that Zeno took the job upon himself to salvage our "rat room"! I wish I had a few "before" pictures, but honestly, I think I was too scared of the room to open it up and take pics of it before now... 
It's true history was that it is where the coal was kept when the house was warmed by coal. It's been a good 50+ years since anyone has ventured into or used the room. Our final goal is to turn it into a pantry of sorts complete with a deep freezer! :) 


Here are Z's initial attacks... you can see that some of the cleaning fluids and solvents he had to use to make his first attacks went to his head a bit...

You get to the "rat room" by passing through the kitchen, into the first pantry, and wa lah! 

Zeno cleaned it out, fixed some of the crumbling cement and painted it

This is our dehumidifier doing it's best to dry the place out

See the little sqare part in the roof? That's a secret passage way up to our first floor landing! Too cool huh?

Here's the brave man himself

The attacked caused premature aging... note the increase in grey hairs

in addition, I noted some psychological effects from the trauma of the cleaning attempts...

Stay tuned for the final results of Z's labors!!!! He's working on the floor and putting down more cement as we speak... 

Painting Everything Whipped-Cream!

I’ve been working on freshening up one of our kitchen hutches for a good 6 months now.  It was taking so long because I could only get to it after work and then it required me to sand down the layers and layers of old paint. Honestly, it was painted with thick layers of pink paint and after sanding it down I had pink dust EVERYWHERE! It nearly made me go insane… because of that I completely lost heart in my project for a while.

However, I got back to it around the turn of the year and began painting and painting. It took care and each door had 16 windows that needed to be taped over and then scraped with a blade after every coat of paint. Long work. Well, with the long part done, I finally reached the point where I could paint the colors – lavender, sage and warm beige.  It started coming really nice! And when I hung the doors back on and put the shiny new knobs in place – Wow! What a splendid  result! 

I was so overcome with enthusiasm that without consulting Z, I began sanding and painting all the rest of the “ugly” furniture in our kitchen!!!! Yahoo!

Here you see the results :) !

On top of this fantastic victory Zeno finished the walls in our notorious kitchen hallway! They are now lovely blue/gold and yellow. So warm and inviting :) 

What a huge sense of fulfillment it is to see home projects come together.