Front Hallway Painted

Another short post to show off the front hallway. I will just quickly mention that for some reason I'm rarely getting my notifications for new comments. Apologies if you haven't gotten a reply on a recent comment.

The front hallway was painted just before Christmas (the week before). I had been planning to paint the hallway for months and I absolutely wanted to have it done before my Christmas party on the 21st. Basically it wasn't a huge job, but it was definitely last minute. In the process of taking stuff down and prepping for paint, I figured out why my doorbell had stopped working. Turns out that the dust from sanding the floors earlier this summer had accumulated on the contact for the hammer and it wouldn't conduct electricity anymore. I just had to clean it. Works perfectly now.

The colour I chose was picked out about 4 years ago, and it's a shade of peacock blue. I had seen this exact colour used in a local historic house and wanted to use it somewhere. Depending on the lighting (especially in the evening in artificial light) it can look a bit more greenish.

View from the living room (which is the light green room):


This shows part of the staircase wall. The wall going up the stairs is very light grey:


Corner view showing front door (wood) with the doorbell I talked about above, the office doorway is on the right. I had put my Christmas decorations up:


View from the office looking across the hallway and into the living room. As mentioned above, the walls going up the stairs are very light grey:


This is the hallway (the main space of it) looking towards the kitchen, which is a hot mess. I had not yet re-installed my wall shelf/coat rack on the left wall:

Jaw-Dropping

I rarely see a house where there "isn't a single thing I would change", but I just stumbled across one that I absolutely HAD to share.

I spotted it while doing my weekly browse through the posts on Old House Dreams.

Old House Dreams


The listing is for a 2 million dollar home, and the owners are clearly well-off. Whoever did the decorating and colour choices did a perfect job. It looks just like an old well-cared-for country home should, and I just can't stop gushing over it.

Click through and browse the full-sized photos. The property is amazing, and from what I can see, the main house is a combination of 6 different additions. You can see a log home, and a very old stone house, and they were added-onto in different stages. Yet, even with all these additions, everything seems to blend together really smoothly.

http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1790-Limekiln-Rd-Douglassville-PA-19518/82192825_zpid/

I'm not sure how long the listing will be up, so I'll just include a few highlight photos. The photography is also amazing.

Miscellaneous Things

These are a few random recent things.

First, a few additional detailed LR colour photos. I'm heavily leaning towards the "Shy Blossom". Refer to the prior post for the colour names and info.

The dark green on the left along with the swatch (second colour) is the green from my aunt's living room that I liked so much, but it will look too dark in my house.



Here is the green that is quite popular in the comments, but I find it looks pretty grey/grim/depressing/corpse-like (lol).



The "Shy Blossom" on another wall.



Next is an antique lamp that I recently finished repairing (after several months). This was an old lamp given to me by a good friend of mine as a gift. It's a typical "Mogul Lamp" from the early 1900's (likely 1920s-1940s). This one was missing several pieces, with a few others bent, or needing attention. I forget where she got it from, but I love these lamps, and I was happy to get it.

Here are the "as received" photos of the lamp. Here it is next to one of my other lamps (the one I got from my Mom). NOTE THE SCARY WIRING JOB.



The entire top of the lamp (with the large shade holder and mogul socket) was missing.



This was the halfway point, with the lamp rewired, and parts straightened and repainted (the base) but with the top still missing.



And here's the finished lamp. I just recently found parts for the missing top from another lamp. Unfortunately, the top I got was in a polished chrome finish, so I had to colour-match it with various spray paints in browns and gold to get approximately the right colour.



I touched-up the base again, and got rid of the lighter gold band (it didn't look right).



The gold candle covers were originals from the other parts lamp top that I bought. The old shade was a thrift store find. They are actually fairly easy to find, and usually under 5$.



Shade (borrowed from the other lamp). I'll get another identical one for this lamp. They have it in white or black, but I think I'll stick with white.



Lastly, here's a shot of my "Weather Glass" (or Storm Glass) from this morning. Yesterday morning (and for several days prior), the entire solution was clear with absolutely no crystal formations. It was literally just the white sandy crystals sitting in the bottom. Then just last night, I noticed some of the crystals were forming again in the base.

They are just so incredibly beautiful to look at. It's hard to capture them properly in a photo, but it looks like a patch of ferns, or feathers. Some crystals also started to form at the top. The other really fun and exciting formation is that there are tiny little snow flakes of crystals just floating in the liquid (which I haven't seen very often - the liquid is clear 99% of the time). According to the chart, stars in the liquid usually indicates snow, but I find that unlikely at this time of year, so it may indicate rain.

Since I'm so fascinated by this gizmo, I'll be posting pictures of it from time to time.

Living Room Colour?

Help me pick a colour!

I'm looking for your thoughts/opinions. Originally, I really wanted the same green as my aunt's living room which is the green on the walls in this photo:

Behr's "Olivine"



But I'm pretty sure it will look too dark, and I won't like it as much as I think I would.

However, I do like many other dark green rooms I've seen, like these:









But then I like some of the lighter shades, too...









What do you think? Am I just being a chicken and playing it safe, or should I aim for a bit of a lighter colour?

Why does it have to be so hard to pick colours?

Anyhow, these are the three samples of green that I have currently.



- In the top left is "Shy Blossom" (by CIL) which is a bright, fun pistachio shade of green (towards the yellow spectre). It looks pretty close to the photo above with the basil plant.
- Below it, is "Sea Drops" (by CIL) which is the colour I had planned to use in the upstairs "L" Room. This one is in the light grey tones, but is a night light green shade.
- On the right is one shade darker than the "Sea Drops" and this one is "Woodland Mystery" (by CIL). I like this one the least, and it's a bit too "drab grey". I'm worried it may look a bit too lifeless and boring, like the photo below:



I don't have an actual sample of the "Olivine" but it's much darker (2-3 shades) than all three of the samples I've got on the wall currently.

Thoughts?

Office Teaser!

In typical fashion with most of my paint colours so far, the finished colour is a bit darker than I expected, but I still like it.

Here's a teaser. I've got the entire first coat on, and I'll be doing the second coat in a few hours, so by tomorrow morning I'll have finished photos (hopefully).

"L Room" Progress

I finished painting the "L Room" mouldings the other day. They turned out pretty well, except that I'm kind of pissed off at Rona.

Paint Rant:

As some of you might know, all my house paint is the pricey "Behr Premium Plus Ultra (Paint and Primer in One)" and I absolutely love it. It's as thick as pudding (not exaggerating here, you literally can't pour it), and it's worth every penny, HOWEVER, for all my trim paint, I wound up using Rona's "Natural White Semi-Gloss" paint. This was mainly only because back when I started, they were having a big paint sale, and I also wound up getting a few gift cards from there. The Rona paint isn't cheap at over $35 + tax, but the quality just isn't there. I literally have to slather it on pretty thick to get good coverage.

But that's not why I'm upset with them. They changed their paint labels (which already had me worried at the store). I was told that it's only a new label, and the paint is still exactly the same. Well, it isn't. It's the same shade of white (which I suppose is the only really important part), but it's not the same gloss. It's much shinier than the last 3-4 cans I've gone through. This really annoys me, but there's not much I can do about it.

Luckily, I still have a small 1/5 of a can of my original stuff left, so I can use that to finish a few spots that aren't done yet, like the Office built-in (the bottom moulding), etc. But it means that all my unfinished trim on the main floor isn't going to be a perfect match. In the rooms with the hardwood floors, all the bottom mouldings are currently removed, so when I paint those to blend into the door casings, it won't be a 100% match.

Ugh.

But at least it's still the same shade. I really regret going with them for the trim paint. I also had NO IDEA how much paint I'd be going through. To give you an idea, just the "L Room" casings (2 window casings, 2 door casings minus both jambs, and 90% of the baseboards), I went through about 1/5 to 1/4 of the can (4L/1gal). I've actually lost track of how many cans I've gone through, but I've kept ALL the receipts for the house renos since the start, so some day I'll add them all up.

End of Paint Rant

The real reason you're here! Photos!



The jamb on the main door was already painted when I did the hallway trim, but the closet jamb is pine, and I'll need to do some shellac on it before I paint it, or it'll bleed through, so I'm saving that for later.







I also got a paint sample. Quick story about this: I knew I wanted a light green. I wanted something a bit "drab" and greyed-down to match the neutral colour scheme and overall paint theme I'm going with, and I knew it might be tough to find just the right shade of light green. I have a notoriously hard time picking paint colours. So one day, a week or so ago, I was wandering around in Wal-Mart, and I saw this light green bath towel that I thought might be a good candidate. It was a band "matches with everything" kind of colour, and I could easily see it on my walls. I took one of the small face cloths with me to their paint chips, and I did an eyeballed colour match to the closest two colours. I brought those home and I tacked them to the wall in the "L Room". I had them up for several days, and I knew I always have a tendency to go too dark with a paint colour (because the big white area around the chip always makes it look lighter than it actually is), so I picked the one shade lighter from the colour I wanted, and got a sample of it yesterday. This is how it turned out.

I had also started a "Help Me Pick A Light Green" type thread on OHW (that's Old House Web for those who aren't in the loop), and I got mixed responses there (several in hard to find paint chips for my area).

So yeah, this is my first and only green sample so far, and I quite like it. It's a tad on the bright/cheery side compared to some of my other colours, but I think it could work well in here. Thoughts?







Please realize that I'm not 100% decided on this colour yet. If you don't quite like it, PLEASE SAY SO. I might want to get something a bit less pastel/nursery room looking.

I don't want too much of a minty ice cream colour, nothing too trendy, and I want it to blend-in with the other colours near it (in this case, the sand brown hallway and the light beige bathroom).

I have to say, though, it's VERY VERY close to some of my inspiration photos, though some of these have a bit more yellow in them:





This one is a bit too minty, but in the same range.

"L Room" Windows Are Paint-Ready!

Well, I've been procrastinating about the small job of routing, cutting, fitting, and installing the window trim mouldings in the "L Room" (the last 2 windows to do in the house) for about a year, but it's finally DONE!





In the meantime, I'm not going to be ready for wall paint until the ceiling is done, but I'm starting to look at colours. I want a light green for this room.

The following are 3 of my "inspiration" photos. I'm looking for something similar to these:







These are two samples that I "colour matched" to some hand towels I saw while I was at Wal-Mart, but I haven't had too much luck picking colours based on swatches.





If any of you have a similar colour (along with the name/company) I'd appreciate it.