Home Improvements

When we first bought our house, it had dark green, leafy wallpaper in the kitchen, the den was painted pale yellow, the two formal rooms were painted dark maroon on the lower third of the walls, a border being the divider in the dining room, and the downstairs half bath was painted dark green. The upstairs bedrooms were also painted in vibrant colors. I'm not saying it all looked bad. In fact, the way the previous owners had the home fixed up, it was beautiful. That's probably what sold us the house - everything had a place and it all seemed to coordinate so well. But the decor was different from my own and the colors weren't going to work. So we set out to change it. We painted most of it ourselves, though we hired someone to come in and remove the kitchen wallpaper and paint it and the two-story foyer. Yes, we painted it. White. Plain white. And a very white, white. It looked nice, certainly, but over the years it has become too plain... almost drab. And of course, with three children, you can imagine the impact on the solid white walls. They had become adorned with dark lines, various color marks, handprints, odd dirty spots, and of course, the expected dents and missing paint around the corners - not to mention tea stains on the kitchen walls and ceiling (funny story behind that). We have been itching to change it. So, even with sick children, we have managed to repaint most of the open areas of the house, all a lovely shade of beige. So beautiful!

We still have the study and dining room to paint, though we haven't decided on the color just yet. We will either stick with the all beige look, or paint the lower third green - a lighter shade than our pine green carpet - and do beige on the upper section. Or we might decide to paint the whole thing a lovely shade of green, though I think I've already just about ruled that idea out. The dining room is also going to take some work because when the border was removed, the wall was damaged. We decided to retexture the walls. Heh, heh. That was a BIG mistake. We know nothing about texturing, and if you've seen my dining room you'll agree. It looks SOOO bad. Ugly, in fact. Let's just say, we over-textured. We've kept it all these years, but I refuse to paint that room until we've done something about that texturing. So poor Bill. One weekend, I will take the kids to my parents and Bill will bravely sand down the walls in the hopes of removing the massive texturing job. With any luck, just sanding it down will allow us to then paint it and have a nice, slightly textured look. But I worry we'll have to texture it again. Do we even know how this time? I'm afraid of creating another "hairy" room, as best I can describe the current appearance. Sooo... hopefully in the near future we can finish these two rooms. We'll at least do the study soon. But that dining room...

We also have a few rooms upstairs I'd like to paint, but at least for the time being I can just shut the doors to those rooms and enjoy the all new appearance of the rest of my house. Oh, and did I mention I got new appliances?!? My generous and loving husband bought me a new refrigerator and stove. My refrigerator, which was left to us by the original homeowners, worked fine, with the exception of the ice maker. It would produce ice, but you wouldn't want to use it. It had lovely black things frozen into the ice. Yum. So we've always had to use ice trays. And then there were the shelves on the door... When you'd least expect it, one of them would decide to fall off. I learned quickly not to store glass items on those shelves! I think the final flaw, which I believe is what pushed Bill to get a new one, was in its appearance. It was beginning to rust. Bill couldn't stand the sight of it, as it was on the front of the refrigerator just beneath the ice/water dispenser. And on a white refrigerator, it looked pretty bad. So now I have a gorgeous black fridge, with working icemaker, water dispenser, AND gallon size door shelves which never fall off. Can you beat that? As for the stove... Well, replacing it came as a true surprise. My old one worked fine. It did need to be releveled, as I noticed everytime I had to "fry" something in oil, all of my oil would run to one side of the pan. It also only had one large burner, and that sometimes made cooking difficult. Finally, it was hard to clean, which is why I rarely did and it looked mighty gross. So now I have an electric, FLAT TOP stove. I LOVE IT!!!!!!!!!!! It never looks gross, because I can clean it in no time, with very little effort. Celeste, you couldn't have been more right about that! Now... If I can just find a really good excuse to replace the old dishwasher... :)

Notice the lovely new black stove...


Notice the lovely new black refrigerator...


Pictures of recently painted den...




I'll try to post more pictures after we've completed more rooms, which hopefully will be in the next couple of weeks!