resurfacing

Well that break was not supposed to go on for so long...

A lot happened around here in that time. A few days before my last post, I woke up with a sore throat. That disappeared and was replaced by complete exhaustion - just in time for the workers we had scheduled to come finish up some house projects.

While I slogged through the days, crown molding was added to most of the first floor.

Four closet doors were replaced by nicer, louvered ones. All of them needed to be painted. Do you know how long it takes to paint a louvered door? Far too long. I was feeling better by last weekend. Well enough to paint the doors, install the doorknobs and have a lovely time at Poppy's Halloween party.

(These lead to my closet, I won't bore you with pictures of all of them)

On Monday I woke up feeling great. I shouldn't have been so excited though. By lunchtime, I felt like an anvil was on my chest. Breathing was a chore and I got scared. Going to the ER frightened me even more because I was sure I'd catch something else just sitting there. A visit to the doctor the following day resulting in this:

It looks like I have virally induced asthma. The good news is that the rescue inhaler made a huge difference and I didn't have the flu (either kind), bronchitis or pneumonia.

I've got a few pictures in the draft file of things that were completed before I got hit with all this and hope to have a few more posts in the coming week. I have to excuse myself now, there's a lot of crown molding to be painted. (I'm not going to push it. I just want to get the foyer, which is not heated, done before this 60 degree weather disappears until spring.)

In the meantime, I'm going to enjoy the new details in the house and the ability to take a deep breath and yawn.

thrifty thursday

Look what my neighbor put out on the curb:



After a lot of sanding, priming, painting and decoupaging:

Trixie has a new dresser.

The paper was left over from her walls. (Disty in cowslip by Laura Ashley - pattern is about 8 or 9 years old at this point.) I'm extremely happy with how the pattern lined up on the drawers. I did it by using one piece for both drawers and lining up the edges that meet with the outside edges of the paper which are designed to match the repeats when they butt up against one another. That sounds totally confusing - if you need more information, email me. I used regular modge podge to affix the paper to the drawers and the side panels of the dresser. (Those are really hard to see in the second picture, but they're papered as well.) A few more coats of modge podge over the top of the paper will protect it as well. The paper also lines the drawers, but isn't glued down.

The knobs are the only thing I'm not sure about. I'd planned to use milk glass and repurpose some I had in the house, but Restoration Hardware has stopped carrying them and I didn't have enough on hand. These are glass and came from The Great Indoors. I ran to several stores this past weekend and these were the best of what I could find, unless I just go with painted white wooden knobs. I had originally thought I'd put tiny knobs on the top two drawers and then use a larger size on the bottom. Any thoughts?

These may be permanent though - when Trixie saw the dresser she was thrilled that it had "jewels" on it.

one more thing checked off the list

Did you know that when anaglyptic wallpaper border is removed it will take big chunks of paint and/or plaster with it? I hadn't anticipated that either.

This mess was created over a year ago. I managed to deal with about 3/4 of the walls not too long after I took the border down. Unfortunately, the last portion was on a wall with a very large entertainment center - one I simply can't move by myself. This job also had to be done in a few phases - scrape off as much of the old paint as possible, skim coat the rough edges with patching plaster, sand, clean up mess from sanding, paint. It was just too much for me to manage in the time I had, but too small a job to hire out. Then life got busy, the weather didn't cooperate, blah, blah, blah. In time, I didn't even notice it day to day.

This weekend I'd had it. Maybe it was spending 4 hours staring at it while watching the opening ceremonies. Perhaps it was the fantastic weather report - temps in the 70's, low humidity - that made it a great time to tackle the job. Doesn't matter, because after over a year of looking like this:

It now looks like this! (Don't look too closely at the areas that could have been cut in a bit better or patched and sanded a second time because I'm not doing a damn thing about it.)

Where's my list? Check!