Bedroom Plans

The living room cabinetry is installed, but I won't be adding new photos till after I prime and paint. And before that, I have to mud and sand. So, while the first round of topping compoound is drying, I'm going to do some more work on a quilt I started, oh, about a decade and a half ago.


This quilt is a goal of long standing. When I was in my late teens, we visited a craft fair in West VIrginia, where I saw my first log cabin quilt ever. I fell in love with the combination of folksy tradition and geometric sophistication. Ever since then, I've wanted one for my own bed. Finally, I'm close! I still need to sew the seam down the center, and add a row on each end. Then comes the quilting process itself. It'll take a while, but it's something to look forward to.

At this point, I'm wondering what color to paint the bedroom where this quilt is going. It needs to be a dark color, to mitigate the early-early morning and late-late night sunshine we get at this northern latitude. It needs to be a cool color, since the bedroom retains a lot of heat in the summer. The furniture in that room is on the darker side (walnut tones), and our accessories have a lot of metal tones (silver and copper). I'm thinking of color-washed shades of dark blue, but I'm open to other suggestions. What would you use? Comments are welcome!

Designed to Stay

Have you ever watched Designed to Sell on HGTV and expected the homeowners to say at the end of the show, "Wait, I've changed my mind! This place looks so good now, I'm not moving out after all." That's usually my reaction. With that in mind, I've been reading the book based on the TV show. I want some ideas for making our small rooms seem as spacious as possible. A lot of the advice is just what you'd expect: remove the clutter; focus attention on the room's best features; repaint; for a color scheme, think neutral, neutral, neutral. Since we're going to live here for the foreseeable future, we don't have to be quite so conservative with the decor. But I'm definitely aboard with the no-clutter theme.

The author says, "Buyers love built-ins." Well, I love them too. They add charm and function to a room. That's why we're building them. However, the process is painfully slow. Add to that the fact that older houses like ours have no true right angles, meaning that no matter how hard we work to get the built-ins level where they should be level, and parallel where they should be parallel, they end up looking slightly uneven from one vantage point or another. I think the built-ins for this house will end with the living room. For the rest of the house, I'll buy furniture instead. If a future buyer expresses a wish for more built-ins, I'll tell them to nail the furniture to the wall and call it good.

Since work on said built-ins is proceeding at a snail's pace, there are no updated pictures to add right now.
However, just to keep things interesting, here are a couple of pictures of a bedroom we converted into a library/office. It's the only room in the entire house that's all the way finished, although these pictures were taken before all the furniture got moved in.

First, we re-insulated, put up new drywall, and replaced two small, square, high windows with a single large egress window to meet local safety codes. To decorate, we went for a simple, clean, modern look, inspired by the mahogany bookshelves my husband made many years ago. The books and knickknacks provide color and pattern enough, so I chose a neutral beige ("Gobi Desert" by Behr) for the walls.

The beige-on-beige carpet has just enough pattern to give it a bit of life, but not enough to compete with the bookshelves. We liked the look of crown molding, but we didn't want to overwhelm such a small room, so we chose the smallest molding we could find to stay in scale. The molding, doors, ceiling, and other trim were painted with Behr "Swiss Coffee," a beautifully clear white with just a hint of ivory. For the final touch, we sanded and refinished the hardwood floors. I love the way it all turned out, lively and interesting, but restful and relaxed, too.

It's nice to have one good room to retreat to when the rest of the renovations get too crazy. Or too slow.

Mudding Tight Corners

We have 3/4" aluminum channels to hold the rope lights inside our cabinets. We should have cut these off flush with the floor of the cabinet, but for some reason,the floor got cut out to fit around the aluminum channels instead. This leaves a gap, a "black hole" I don't want stuff falling into. I needed a very narrow offset spatula to mud the hole in, so my talented carpenter/subcontractor/tool-and-die-maker/spouse created this one for me.




Here you can see, top to bottom: 1) the gap left by the aluminum channel, 2) using the tool to pack in and level off the mud, and 3) the finished result (before sanding).

We're sort of designing things as we go along, which is not the best way of doing it. I think if I had it to do over, the rope lights and aluminum channels would only have come as far down as the open display shelves. I don't even remember why we chose to have them extend into the storage below, unless maybe it was to make it easier to rummage about in the storage section to find things.

Anyway, I've abandoned the idea of adding similar built-ins to the rest of the house. It's too time-consuming. I've lived long enough in a construction zone, and now, I just want it finished!