Peach Siding?

On Friday, when K was building our new flower beds in the front of the house, we had to re-pin down the drain pipe in that corner of the house.  The bracket that holds it on has been broken since before we got the house.  So, right now the drain pipe is held in place with a couple of mini bungee cords--  K's secret weapon for everything.

While crouching at the corner of the house, helping K, I noticed this peach/beige-colored shadow from behind where the pipe used to be/should be attached:

I pointed this out to K (who was busy and distracted), and she's like, "I don't know, looks like that's the color the house used to be?"

And looking back on those MLS photos, I realize that in the 1997 photo the house looks like this peachy-beige color.  And in the 1999 photo the house is clearly yellow. 

1997

 

1999

Continuing on the Living Room Ceiling

Last weekend, we got going again on the living room ceiling. We started work on it back in September, with scraping the popcorn finish off, and then K adding one skimcoat to the ceiling and coves. But then in October we had our housewarming party and wanted to use the living room, so we took the ram board up off the floor and made it back into a usable room.

Through the winter, we added some salvaged chairs, put stuff on the bookcases, etc. Now all that needed to be moved out again in order to work on the room We decided to pull off the baseboards around the floors, since it's in bad shape-- too many layers of paint, and too many dents through all the years of use. It will make painting the walls and re-finishing the floor easier, too.

K pulling off the base boards

And look at what we found underneath the trim --  More pink paint!

Was this whole house pink at one time?  That baby/cotton candy pink in the basement, and then this corally pink that's in the living room and the stairwell...  Fun!

Pink paint dripped underneath the trim...  Old wall color!

K added a new skimcoat to the ceiling and coves, and I went behind and knocked down the thick spots.  Mudding is certainly NOT her favorite job, but now that the room is all messy again, we're planning to just keep plugging away until it's done.

Yesterday we worked on rebuilding the coves.  We don't know if the popcorn finish was put on the ceiling originally or later.  K thinks that the coves are probably a bit uneven like they are, because they put the popcorn finish on it right away and so the coves didn't need to be perfect.  The coves are a bit thin in areas, and certainly aren't as sharp as we'd like them to be.  And in knocking off the layer of popcorn finish, bits of the coves crumbled off, too, so they're pretty lumpy looking, and we definitely needed to build them back up to make them look sharp again.

K added some thicker & stronger mud to just the coves to rebuild them, and after sanding they're going to look really nice! 

Chandeliers and Switch Plates

While having a lazy, laying-in-bed morning today, K and I discussed some of the decorating we plan to do in our bedroom, and I asked her if she could please put up the chandelier today.  It's been sitting in the storage room for a few months, finished.  And she said yes, she would put it up for us!  :-)

Here's the before:

That base is kind of cool-- I wonder what the glass looked like....

We got the chandelier up, with one quick $6 trip to the Home Depot to get the needed hardware that was slightly different than what was there from the old fixture.

Once all the bulbs were lit up, it was like, "Holy crap, we have to get a dimmer on this thing!"  With all those bulbs in a normal-sized bedroom, it was a LOT of light.  So K ran to her supply of goodies and grabbed a dimmer switch, and installed it.  I makes a huge difference!

Finished and lit up!  Except for the one bulb on the left that likes to go on and off...

The previous light fixture had a bigger base, as you can see around the medallion of the chandelier.  This will get fixed later!

And then that led into K working on our messed-up light switch situation.  The house has switches that don't do anything, lots of missing switch plates and a couple weirdly-placed outlets.  She fixed 2 broken switches, and figured out that our hall light is wired to a box that, until now, had an outlet in it.  In the middle of the wall!  So, now we've got a switch there and we are able to turn the hall light on and off without pulling a string attached to the fixture/ base holding a bare bulb.

K also put in a new switch at the bottom of the stairs leading to my office.  Until now, there has only been a foam insulator as a switch plate, with a normal up/down switch.  It seems really out of place there, on an inside wall.  Like, I could see putting one of those on an outside wall, if you really wanted to be picky about insulating every inch.  But this piece had obviously been painted over at least once, and it was just weird.

Foam insulator "switch plate"

Last week at the thrift store, K had found the coolest, strange, old switch for 25 cents!  It's the push button kind, and it's really just a clear lucite plate and you can put whatever kind of paper or fabric that you want underneath.

Whoever had owned it put a cool patterned, blue paper under the plate.  It looked kind of old, maybe even 50s, I'm not sure.  But the paper was double-sided and on the back was...  a crazy clown!!  The paper was perfectly centered so that if the clown was facing the front of the switch, the push-button would actually be his nose!  I flipped out and I had to have it!

Pretty, patterned paper

Clown face on the other side of the paper!
The brass button makes the perfect nose for him.

And while installing this switch, we found more pink paint had been on the walls of the stairway at some point.  A coral rose color pink, more vivid than the pink in the basement.

Here is how the thrift store switch turned out!  I love it!  Obviously, our walls still need some love, but we'll get to that at some point.

For now, I'm just excited that this button makes it easier to turn the lights on and off.  I'm usually going up the stairs carrying my breakfast or armloads of other stuff, and it's much easier to hit this switch with my hands full.

Boy kitty climbed the ladder to sniff the chandelier, then had to figure out how to get down!

Basement Flooring Addition

K is a HUGE Packer fan.  Like, borderline obsessed.  I don't mind her preoccupation with the team, and I actually support pretty much whatever she wants to do when it comes to them.   Buy stock in the team?  Sure!  Go to pretty much any game that you can?  Sure!  Buy all sorts of Packer merch whenever you see it?  Sure!       And as a result of her team admiration and the encouragement of me and our families, K has amassed quite a collection of Packer swag.

While we were looking at houses, among our considerations were: "Where will T's office be?"  and  "Where will K's Packer room be?"

No joke-- it was a serious criteria for our perfect house.  A garage would be okay, but not ideal.  Preferably a office or a basement.

K has been working on her Packer basement in this house for quite some time.  The idea is that once she has her "calm zone," she will be able to work on house projects and then escape to a room that's settled. 

She got a few rolls of black rubber flooring, left over from a remodel job.  It's the kind of flooring you see in gyms because it has some bounce and absorbs shock.  Nice and comfy to put over a hard basement floor!

However, being that this is a football-themed room, K decided to paint the flooring green.  Packer green, turf green...  exactly.   She spray-painted it in the yard, green and then clear-coat.

Little assistant Syd, helping with the tape!

She installed it on the floor with plain carpet tape.  Not a permanent install, in case she replaces it with something else later.  And as she pulled off the baseboard, we saw that the basement used to be
PINK.  We were both surprised to see that color.  It does match the spatter paint that we saw on the cinder blocks, but it just seemed like an interesting color to paint basement walls.

Actually, along with the pale brick fireplace down here, and those spattered walls, a pink wall probably looked pretty nice.  Warm and cozy, with some rugs on the floor... 
Well, it's going to look pretty different now!