Built-ins are trimmed out and getting primed

This picture probably doesn't look wildly different than the last (and is it really possible to have accumulated even more crap in the foreground?) but the built-ins are now trimmed out and bolted in. Poor Tyler has to deal with priming and painting the whole thing. It is going to take forever.


Here are the cabinet doors, all lined up and ready to be primed.



And once they are completely painted, the hardware will go on, including these knobs from House of Antique Hardware:

Our built-ins have arrived!

Though they aren't anywhere near done. Our friend Zane brought over the built-ins and placed them into their spot, but they are not yet bolted in or trimmed out yet.


Tyler is downstairs right now priming the ends of the bookshelves that you'll be able to see once bolted in, but will be difficult to get to (making priming/painting a big challenge). Once he's done with that Zane will be back to bolt everything in and put all the final trim on as well as doors, hardware, and do a final sand. Then we'll prime and paint the rest BM Decorators White (the same paint that is on the brick).

My plan is to have the shelves filled with CDs (we have more than we could ever know what to do with -- this would actually be just the tip of the proverbial iceberg) and then have baskets in the bench cabinets so that we can toss toys in there in an attempt to be tidy.

Once the built-ins are complete we'll be able to finally make sense of the mess that has taken over the rest of the room. Someone is coming to pick up our futon tomorrow - yay!

Baby's first horse.

No, we haven't gotten our unborn child a pony just yet.

You may or may not know that I'm a lifelong equestrian. I think my first words might have been "riding lessons?" Will our little one be afflicted with the same case of horse fever?

Here I am with a former mount, Hank, enjoying a lovely fall day.

I'm not sure baby's grandparents know what they might be encouraging with the following gift: a gorgeous rocking horse! We didn't expect it and it is a wonderful addition to our home.

It is nice to have baby stuff that is aesthetically pleasing.

Someone isn't so sure about these changes.

Painting forever.

Here's another painting-in-progress shot. Tyler applies BM Gray Wisp to the eastern wall of our family room.


You can get an idea of what we're dealing with in this basement -- electrical and pipes everywhere. The bungalow is made out of "tile-blox" construction. In other words, it is made out of huge chunks of concrete. (There is pebble-dash stucco all over the exterior.) When one of the previous owners "finished" the basement in the early 1950s, they left it pretty bare bones. It was turned into a one bedroom/one bathroom apartment complete with kitchen, but as you can see, it is still very much a basement. Because of the concrete walls, all the plumbing and electrical is run on top of the walls. We just don't have the budget to completely drywall everything, so we're working with what we have.

I wish I could take some prettier pictures, but right now everything is shoved to the middle of the room and it looks like hell. It is definitely a case of "it is going to get a lot worse before it gets better." So here's hoping that it gets a whole lot better. We're very excited for the built-ins which should arrive soon, but we'll have to prime/paint them before they are installed.

Family room, in progress.

I'm slow in posting Tyler's painting progress because he's actually done more than these photos show, but here is the one wall he did last weekend. New shiny white paint on the brick (it was dull, matte off-white before) and Benjamin Moore Night Train on the walls.


The other walls will soon be the lighter BM Gray Wisp.


We keep having to move all of our furniture around the room and it is getting pretty annoying, especially because I'm so useless as a pregnant person -- useless at painting and useless at lifting heavy objects.

Lately I've been fretting over the couch that we'll be getting for our improved family room. We currently have a shabby old futon down there as well as a very well-worn loveseat. My requirements for a couch are these: 1) needs to be a sleeper, 2) needs to have a slipcover, 3) needs to be relatively cheap. It will come as no surprise that these requirements lead me straight to IKEA. Unfortunately, our closest IKEA is about 8 hours away. (At least until they open IKEA Denver which will be in... oh... a couple of years. Too long to wait to buy this couch, though what a happy day it will be.)

These days I'm leaning towards the Karlstad sofa bed in Sivik dark gray. I'm hoping it will go well with the grays that we've got going on in the room. We'll have to have them ship it to us, unfortunately, and that will cost a bundle.
I am liking those clean lines.

Painting fools

These pretty colors are the palette we are using downstairs in our basement. As I mentioned in my last post, we painted the guest room Benjamin Moore's Gray Wisp which is their duplicate of Restoration Hardware Silver Sage. The pic above shows the chip for RH Silver Sage in the bottom right. Right above it is the chip for RH's Blue Sage which, as it turns out, doesn't seem to have a match anywhere. I wanted to stick with Benjamin Moore's zero-VOC Natura paint so I figured that I'd have BM match it, but as it turned out their Night Train color was close enough to make me happy. (It definitely isn't a match. It is more gray than Blue Sage, but it was close enough for me.) Night Train is the second one up on the BM strip in the picture.

This is what it now looks like as you head into the family room. A mess.

We're turning our attention from the guest room, which is now serviceable, to the family room. We underestimated the quality of the Natura paint and bought two cans of Gray Wisp for the guest room. We just assumed we'd need two coats. As it turns out we only needed one coat and some touching up, and we used less than one can. So this helped me make the decision that we'd be using Gray Wisp in the family room as well.



But I had this brilliant idea -- it happens very occasionally -- to have someone build a media center for us in our basement. Media center might be the wrong word, but it would involve built-in shelves with a bench all along the bottom that will contain storage space. It will be almost the full length of the wall pictured above. The TV will sit on the bench centered in front of the brick (which is getting a coat of BM Decorators White) and the bookshelves will go on either side under the two windows. Does that make any sense whatsoever?

My brilliant idea went one daring step further. We'd paint the wall behind the built-in a different color than the Gray Wisp -- an accent wall! This is something very odd for me. Although I tend to appreciate accent walls in other people's homes, it is something I'd never consider for my own. Most likely because it doesn't really fit into the craftsman bungalow aesthetic. But our basement, with its exposed pipes and electrical wiring, also doesn't fit into the bungalow aesthetic so it gives us room to do something a little different. Here's where BM Night Train comes in. I'm hoping it will help to make the built-ins (white) and the brick section pop a bit.

Eventually we'll get different furniture. Our poor futon and loveseat have got to go. But first things first... Tyler is down there painting even now.

It started with a really old bed...

The history of the bed that we know of starts with my aunts (twins) sleeping in it as children. But we know the bed has been in our family longer than that, and it is believed to have been built around 1850. For the first 50 years or so, the bed's whereabouts are a mystery. It made its way to New Jersey and to Connecticut and to New York. Then it hopped on a truck to Denver, where it was reunited with my aunt 10 years ago. (Her twin sister was in a fatal car accident in her 20s.)

My aunt has been experiencing unfortunate back troubles and felt that a lower bed would be the way to go. She offered this bed to us. Of course! I love the bed. Who wouldn't?

It gave us incentive to get our guest room together. We hadn't done much to it since we moved in, and it still had the old light blue paint and a mural of a tree in one corner. We decided it was time to give the room a fresh coat of paint before moving the bed in. The room is now Benjamin Moore Gray Wisp which is the dupe of Restoration Hardware's Silver Sage (this is the color that they paint all of their stores).

The room has a little ways to go and desperately needs some art on the wall. It is a basement bedroom and will always look like a basement bedroom, but it is definitely an improvement.


And here's a funny little side table that I picked up from a flea market in town.