Thursday, January 22, 2009

Back to houseblogging

In the words of Tiny White Bungalow*, "Now, Let's get back to houseblogging." Right. Let's. But we have only been making slow progress on that sitting room. Ken and I attacked the crazy assortment of walls with joint compound and patches over the weekend; still need to finish that up.

Then it turned out to be a busy week at work, so all I've managed to keep moving forward is stripping paint off the little 2 inch strip of wood inside the door jamb. Talk about feeling like getting nothing done - it took 4 evenings and still needs touch up! Thick paint, limited time, etc. I think we're finally over the hump on that one. We feel like we need to do the correct thing with all the door jambs, since we (sort of) were published in American Bungalow for asking for official guidance about where paint meets natural wood.
Armed with the knowledge of how it should be done, we've felt obligated to do it that way. Stupid high road. Although, it seems kind of weird that it looks to have been originally painted. But maybe the builders didn't read AB! :) Anyways, if it were painted my common sense suggests that you'd be able to see the strip of white from the hall, which is against the advice of the AB editor, so we're doing it this way. What an esoteric thing to worry about - so we'll stop. It wasn't so bad in the guest room, where they bizarrely only painted one of the sides and the other one was stained (hello?), but in this room, it was covered with layers of sticky old paint. Hopefully the door will shut a bit easier now too, so maybe that will make it feel more worth it. Hrmmph.

And the last tiny thing we got done this week was that, on a run to the office store for supplies for a work project, I remembered to bring my tracing of the lantern from the old wallpaper and got it enlarged (they do a 3'x4' enlargement at Staples for $5!). We think we'll paint it on one wall of the room. What do you think? Too "Changing Rooms?" I thought it would be good to commemorate the original wallpaper - and it's a pretty design.


* TWB: your blog keeps trying to run scripts & crashes my browser, so sorry I'm not linking to you here, but maybe you want to check that out!

5 comments:

Karen Anne said...

I had a door like that in my bungalow, between the kitchen and the dining room. Kitchen side painted, dining room side not.

Then again some PO(s) mangled the kitchen perhaps more than once between the 1930s and 1950s, so who knows what went on.

Admin said...

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Jennifer said...

I like the lantern tracing... maybe a bit smaller though? Just like 10% smaller, at least for that wall. I like the idea of paying homage to the wallpaper.

Anonymous said...

I like the lantern painting quite a lot, but if it were me doing the painting, I'd do it on a large canvas. But maybe I'm just afraid of commitment.

Susie said...

Wow! Look at you two rocking and rolling! Miss you guys - let's hang out soon. I think Thom has some info for your blog too...