Operation "Whoa, That's a Lot of Purple" Completed

Matt hauls off the Late Lamented. Shower remnants visible on the right.

Phew. Busy day. Tackled the mudroom renovation. Matt capped off the plumbing (which, lucky for us, came through the water heater closet, so he was able to do his plumbing in there) to the old shower and then pulled out what was left of the stall. Then he cleaned what appeared to be years of grime, dryer fluff, dust, and a recent overlayment of cat hair. Not going to dwell on all that. Makes me feel kind of queasy.

I was in charge of removing everything from the walls, spackling, and painting. Just like back in the early days of Elgin House, every, every surface had to be coated, from the air vent in the ceiling on down. While I was at it, I also painted the inside and out of the exterior door, which had been a lovely combination of taupe and pale mustard (WTF?) And once you paint the door, you really need to paint the trim around the door or you'll end up with clashing shades of white, or, in this case, clashing shades of "Betsy's Linen" and grimy, moldy, filthy off-white. So I was at it all day.

Nine rooms after I first raised a brush in this house, and I've finally learned some things about painting.

(1) Use thick coats on the ceiling. Doesn't really matter if it takes ages to dry, after all. Much preferable to applying multiple coats.
(2) Should have bought paint from Ace's from the start. The Lowe's stuff I used for everything else took 2 or often 3 coats to cover the white underneath. Ace's brand takes 1 coat, and the cost is fairly close.
(3) Give up on all the stupid little gimmicks and tools for painting straight lines--none of them work; they all end up seeping and blobbing. Get a good quality chisel-tip brush and freehand it as best you can. Faster and less heart-breaking. Press the brush forcefully against the wall near the line you need to paint. The brush should fan out slightly. Carefully move into place, always tracking the location of the outermost set of bristles as those are the ones that will form the edge. Don't breathe.

Matt, somewhat to my surprise, didn't make any protest when I informed him I'd be painting the laudry room "Globe Thistle." Other than a slightly sardonic expression around the eyebrows, anyway. It's a really lovely color--a sort of lilac with a touch of grey. But zowie, it's powerful in large quantities. Something a little more tame might have been a better choice, but we've got two cans of the stuff--we're sticking with "Globe Thistle," dammit.

New "Globe Thistle" walls

So there it is. It's improved in terms of grime, but it's hardly white-glove clean, largely because the disintegrating linoleum is so foul. Also, I need to put a second coat on the trim and do some more work behind the dryer *shudder*.

However, as you can see, there is now space for the washer where the shower used to be. Will order tomorrow--very exciting.

Future plans:
(1) Replace nasty linoleum
(2) Buy dryer to match front-loading washer and stack the two units over by the window.
(3) Get Javier to build a laundry station to the right of the machines. Will have cabinets going all the way up to the ceiling, a pull-out counter for folding, a bar for hanging clothes while drying, and a space at the bottom for tucking away the Beasts' litterbox nicely out of sight.
(4) Buy and install chandelier (with little dangly crystal bits!) to replace grotty, half-shorted-out old "brass" fixture.

For the moment, I've had all the fun with laundry renovation I can stand, though. Going to be aggressively lazy for the next few days. Other than catching up on a bunch of laundry, anyway.

Tile!

This part was easy (except writing the check at the end. And making 4 trips to Lowe's for tile, grout, and hardibacker. And loading and unloading the 70 tons of tile we'd bought. Yeah. Except for those things, it was easy.) It's nice paying someone else to do your work for you. I briefly toyed with taking on the tile myself, but the time, the need for expensive power tools, the wasted money if you screw up... just seemed like false economy, in the end. Also, it seemed like an insuperable pain in the fundament. We've served our DIY time with the paint and the bamboo, I think.

So we go these nice tiles--big ones in the kitchen and hall; little ones in the bathroom (they're porcelain, Mom & Dad, not ceramic. You convinced me.) The kitchen looks SO much more inhabitable now that that nasty old linoleum is no longer visible.
See how much prettier it looks? (Aunt Pauline, if you're reading this, you'll see I took your advice about newsprint in the windows. Only in this case it's tissue paper, as Ladonna had given us a stack for packing purposes. Might have looked a little more polished if I hadn't fastened them with painter's tape. Eh well.) Tomorrow we'll move the island back in, as well as the china cabinet and rocking chair. One step closer to being really, truly, properly moved in! With each step, the house looks better and more... I don't know... satisfying, pretty, pulled together, nice. Anyway, it's gratifying to see the thing I wanted emerge from the thing that was neglected and scuffed and unhappy looking.

Meanwhile, we're still sleeping on the sofabed in the living room.

And we're actually using that weird bathroom/laundry room/mudroom--we're waiting for the grout to set in the other bathrooms, and this is the only one that wasn't tiled. So I shouldn't have made fun of it for being a misbegotten freak of a room--it's actually coming in handy.

I'm sure you'll all feel sad for me when I tell you that this weekend I'll have to finally turn my attention back to... painting. We never finished the master bath, and I have to do the insides of the cabinets there and the insides of the hall closet before we can unpack the things that belong in them.

Ug.