grey is the new black

I'm sure some of you have noticed the beautiful turquoise of our house. I can only guess that turquoise was wildly popular in the 1950s, when the house was built, because the previous owners never painted it since. Needless to say, the paint has peeled a bit since the 1950s. And when I say a bit, I mean a lot.
Travis and I had a grand idea of sanding the house, sanding all the windows, and painting the house ourselves. We are young and ambitious! We can do it all! Well, we quickly found out that we can't do it all. So, we hired some of our friends for free labor. Hey, we paid with beer and bbq! Well, after forcing our friends in slave labor for a week, we decided that it'd be even easier if we just paid someone to sand and paint the house. Genius! My mom and dad were nice enough to hire my sister's contractor, Jose, to finish the job. Jose and his crew worked 10 hour days for 7 days. They rocked! And here's the end result:Here's my sister being Vanna White for new house. As you can see, Trav's already started some of the planting. We have dark and light green ferns along the front wall. They look really pretty and I can't wait to hide a couple gnomes within the leaves!
The color seemed a little too light when I first saw it, but it now looks a lot better since we've started to add plants. The color is Pratt & Lambert 'Driftwood.' The metal work at the front porch is a medium gray now. I'm thinking of painting the shutters that gray too. Opinions?
We also bought new house numbers. I agonized about which numbers to get. There are a ton of great house numbers online, with wonderful fonts and cool materials. But they were sooo expensive! I couldn't justify spending $100 or more for house numbers. So we went to the usual, good old Home Depot, and bought numbers for $4 each! Can't beat it. And I really like them. They are a very nice font and they have little metal spacers that hold them off the wall. It creates a nice shadow effect. What do you think?

before and not much after

So, the first order of business of the house remodel was to wash all the interior walls and ceilings, prime all the interior walls and ceilings, and finally paint all the interior walls and ceilings. Have you ever heard of TSP? Well, I never want to hear about it again. We spent days washing every wall, ceiling, piece of trim, baseboard, etc. with TSP. I am surprised my mom has any skin left on her arms from all the TSP-ing she did. She was the TSP champion! Here's a picture of her working hard:

Oh wait, I mean here she is:

If something's dirty, leave it to my Mom to get it clean! Speaking of moms and cleaning, my in-laws came up to visit and we made them clean the whole weekend! Cruel, I know! But the range looked so pretty when they were done. And the bathroom. My mother-in-law practically asphyxiated herself scrubbing down the bathroom. It needed a lot of bleach. Bob and Karen were such troopers. We really appreciated all their work! Yeah Bob and Karen!

Oh, yeah, Trav and I worked too. See, here I am:

Back to the cleaning and painting the walls, we were all surprised how much work it took to get everything clean enough to prime it. I couldn't believe how gross it all was. Everything was covered in nicotine. Our rags were stained yellow. Yellow and brown rivers ran down the walls while we were cleaning. But somehow, we made the walls and ceilings resemble some variation of white. It was a relief.

After some much needed caulking and sanding, the walls and ceilings were ready to prime and paint. The paint lady at OSH recommended a shellac primer that sealed in any smells in the drywall. Perfect. The primer was so toxic smelling, that I couldn't believe that we could smell anything after applying the primer.

Everything got two coast of fresh paint. I used a white in all the main rooms called "Chantilly Lace" from Benjamin Moore. The name made me a bit nervous, but it is a very nice, soft white. Not blue-ish or pink-ish or beige. Just white.

Our bedroom is a really pretty stone grey, the middle bedroom is white, but will eventually get wallpaper, and the front room is a robin's egg blue. The blue was a bold move, but it ended up looking pretty cute. Here are pictures of everyone working, including Megan and Betsy, (Irv helped a lot with caulking the crown molding, but we didn't get a picture).

And here are some before and after pictures (by the way, we had the floors redone. They look really good):

Before image of the Living Room :

and after:
before image of Dining Room:

and after:
This before of the front bedroom is scary. Don't say you weren't warned...

Ugh, it felt like we need to perform an exorcism in that bedroom. Here's after:


That's it for now. Pictures of the outside to follow.

radio champagne

Welcome to our blog! Travis and I have been married for five years. and we just bought our first house. So the next logical step in our lives was to...start a blog! What? What did you think I was going to say?

Anyway, our new home is a small little one story at the end of a pleasant, tree lined street in San Rafael. Though the house is small, the backyard is huge! We have two apple trees, the cutest little pear tree, and some citrus plants we think are lemons, but they've been neglected so the friut is small and wrinkly. Speaking of neglected, the house has demanded a LOT of fixing up. We bought the house from the original owner who had lived there for almost 60 years! We think about 20 years ago, he stopped cleaning the house. So now all of our time (and my parent's time!) is dedicated to the house.
We wanted to start this blog to track the progression of our house remodel. We've already started, so I'll post a bunch of pictures soon. We welcome any building/design/construction suggestions as fix up the house room by room. We defintely are learning as we go! Stay tuned!