I've Got the Blues...

A few weeks ago I mentioned something I was lusting after, design-wise.  I had originally been thinking of a different colour, but once I received a comment from the lovely Rambling Renovators to think about a different colour, I couldn't get it out of my head!!  So this weekend, we decided to just go for it!!!

Here is the before - 

I had always thought we'd sand and re-stain the door, but it was actually in pretty terrible condition.  See below:

                        

I guess years of bad weather and lack of proper care will take its toll on a wooden door.

So off to Home Depot we went (doesn't everyone do that on a Saturday night?).

This morning we filled holes and sanded. 

We taped:

                      

I pulled out the paint - CIL exterior semi-gloss with some kind of triple weather protection (i.e. good marketing to make me choose it):

The paint was colour matched to Benjamin Moore's "Polo Blue":

And the painting began!!!

                           

                           

And here is the final product - still drying a bit and missing a few accessories, but I wanted to show you guys!!

                          

                          

                           

So now the house is full of flies (can't close the door until it dries), and we want to add a few things (new kick-plate to protect the bottom of the door) and we are thinking about maybe cleaning the mail slot/door knocker etc. Plus we need to get a new urn with some nice flowers :-)

Anyways - I LOVE the colour! It is almost black looking from the inside (just like I wanted!) but it is definitely blue from the outside. I had thought the blue was a little bright for my liking on the outside, but I think it adds a nice pop of colour!

Hubs and I are now super keen on painting other interior doors. I can't get over the transformation from the inside:

                          

                          

                          

That's all for now! Hope you had a great weekend!

I Know it is Trendy, but...

I can't get these images out of my head:

How gorgeous are these black doors?! I know it is trendy - but I'm itching to do this to my doors!!

Do you think I would be crazy? What about these doors?:

Or our front door?

Would black work with the front of our house?

Comments welcome!!!

And if you haven't already done so, it is the last full day for entering MY GIVEAWAY. C'mon - who doesn't want $40 to use at any CSN Store!?

Photos of the Painted Dining Room

Yep - this is the room that made me throw down my paintbrush and give up.  After that fiasco, we took extra time and taped up everything and finished painting it this past weekend.  J did most of it this time (I had done all of the trim work myself) and it went pretty quickly.

It is dark out, so hard to get a good shot - but here are a few:

Note the ugly tiled fireplace. Old owners just used the cheap tile leftover from the bathroom and it doesn't really go with much. We'll fix it up one day!

The dining room is just waiting for our dining set to arrive (now postponed until mid-December). The buffet will go on the right I think, with a large mirror on the opposite wall.

The furniture in here is not staying - just temporary until we get the right stuff eventually.  Okay the couch stays, but the rest are stand-ins :-)

Not sure if I've shown this yet - this was our $45 find at the Cabbagetown festival. It is on wheels!!  I'm planning on painting it and putting it my dressing room once I find the perfect vanity. It is in rough shape on the top, so I won't feel bad when I paint it white!

Anyways - there is some eye candy since I haven't shown an 'after' in a while!

I spoke too soon...

Wasn't it only yesterday when I wrote "how hard can it be?" about painting the living room/dining room?

Well it was hard. And we quit.

Granted, we started kind of late in the evening, and then realized that no, I can NOT free-hand the edges and yes we ran out of tape and no I didn’t have any more puffy rollers for the little roller.

Le sigh.

We finished one wall and I was so frustrated that I said THAT’S IT!! And packed it up.  The wall looked terrible. It had one of those bands around the top from the edging not matching up with the rolling and the odd little paint blister and many spots where I would have to touch up the white trim. Ugh.

So tonight hubs is going to get all of the equipment we need to do it right and we can try again.

Good news is that once the walls dried, the band was gone and it looked pretty good (minus the ‘oops’ spots on the white trim).  I guess we freaked out because the dried matte band was SO different from the wet-ish wall paint that we didn’t realize the wall still had a ways to go to get matte.  The wall is fine now and will just take some touch ups with the white trim paint.

I think I said “we should have hired someone” about 15 times.  Make that 16 cuz I’m still saying it!

Weekend Project - the Dining Room!

So I decided that this weekend I wanted to paint the dining room.  It's one room with 2 windows and 2 doorways. How tough could that be, right?

We had to go get some extra trim paint but we already had the wall colour. However, in typical fashion, I decided when I was at the paint store to get some more wall colour. A new shade? Nope. Same shade, different paint.

Remember how I told you about the steal I found on the hallway paint? Well we had bought that paint and had it tinted to the darker colour we wanted for the dining room. The paint type was eggshell, which many people told me would be fine for the hallway and really the whole house if I wanted.

We painted the hallway in it and while I like the colour, the sheen bothers me because we have wonky plaster walls (as is typical in a house like this) and the sheen hilights every bump and crack. Ugh.

So I bought our wall colour in matte/flat.  Hubs thought I was silly, but I think it is the right move.

Will we repaint the hallway? HELLS no.  It was the WORST to paint the hallway and I will NEVER do it again.

Here is a before picture:

I know - it was actually already really nice (IMO).  However, we don't have all that many renos to do so we'd like to feel like we've made our mark and that it is our house and not the previous owners' you know?

I also took one more picture to highlight the blue crown mouldings - see if this one is more descriptive.

So you can see that the left is the side I had just painted and the right is what it used to be. It looks white, but let me tell you. It was baby blue/white.  In my painting I found that the walls used to be dark green and at one point red, so it isn't so surprising anymore that the mouldings were blue!!

So hubs is out for the day but I've convinced him to tackle the walls this afternoon/evening :-)

Long Weekend Project Teaser

Hellloooo bloggers!

So over the long weekend, between eating turkey and roast beef and stuffing and gravy (twice), hubs and I finally painted our hallway!!!

We started out on the trim because for some reason, our crown moulding was blue.  Like baby blue mixed with white, but there was no doubt it had a very strong blue undertone.

It took us approximately 5-6 hours to do all of the trim painting. Old victorians have INSANE amounts of trim (especially hallways with oh...NINE doorways in them!!).

I'm not sure if you can see the difference in this picture but I thought I'd try...

Can you see what we'd painted and what we hadn't? We used matte cloud white (which is clearly different than the shiny blue white that was there!). The previous owners had left a half can so that is what we used!

So the part on the right is the unpainted blue white trim. Can you tell the difference? Makes the cloud white look beige, but once you put it next to the wall colour that we put up, it looks white white.

This weather has caused some problems for me getting good day-light pictures (oh and WORKING all day and night), so I only have a few so far that don't represent the colour properly. Those will come tomorrow :-)