Decorating with Color Fail

Anyone who knew me through and survived the First Street years (Adrienne) knows that my color palette doesn’t extend far beyond the brown family.

There was the time we painted the basement – the WHOLE basement – a light pink. The pink stayed up for a few days before it gave me a headache, and then we re-painted it a cream color.

The kitchen and living room got a makeover in about 2005 with the colors “Harvest Brown” and “Mississippi Mud.” Mud & Brown pretty aptly describe my color comfort zone.

When Mom arrived on Sunday with a suitcase of old sweatpants and new paintbrushes, I had to make some choices about colors: wall colors, cabinet colors, hardware colors, countertop colors… And I was going to be bold and break out of the mud-brown rut (ditch, maybe?) I have been in for ten years.

This plan was bound to fail when I chose my granite color:


But I thought that, even with these hues, I might be able to break out of the browns into the grays, so I bought a quart (a quart of paint for a whole room does not speak to the buyer’s confidence in the choice) of “Gentle Rain.”


All the time we were painting, however, Prince was in my head singing “Purple Rain.” The "color" had to go. At least we didn’t get any further than the soffit above the stove:


And the new color is… “Wheat Bread.” Yep. Brownish:

Excuse

As someone recently noted, I'm "the worst blogger ever."

Let the record show that it's not my fault. My modem connection was, until today, behind these boxes:

A Diamond in the Rough

I can’t stand Jodi from Total Wrecklamation (Planet Green) – way too high energy. But today at the Habitat for Humanity Re-Store, I felt a little of the thrill her bidders must get when they get a great bargain at her auctions.

Habitat for Humanity accepts donations of useful-to-someone (but no-longer-useful-to-you) home fixtures (e.g. doors, lights, appliances, etc.) which they sell to fund their good works. In return, you get a receipt that will likely do nothing to offset your tax obligation and the warm feeling that comes from having done something charitable. Or in this case, a vague feeling of guilt for having pawned the ugliest of sinks off on to someone else.

Dad and I went to drop off the gold chandelier, the gold ceiling fan, and the horrible black clamshell sink from the powder room. (For those of you who were hoping to snag the sink for yourselves, don’t worry: I have two more, available in late summer.)

My father, who has always left a junkyard with his trunk more full than when he arrived, suggested we check out the merchandise while we were there. I was skeptical. The Re-Store sells everything from mismatched tiles to 18-piece kitchen cabinet sets, and most of it is junk, much like what we had just deposited at the loading dock.

HOWEVER (obviously this story has to have a turning point)…, as we were browsing through the sinks (and, incidentally, witnessed my powder room orphan being loaded onto a shelf, where it will probably stay for eternity), I found a diamond in the rough: a 35 square foot L-shaped LG HiMacs solid surface countertop with a built-in sink (retails for about $2,500) for $175! (I realize I sound like Ralphie from A Christmas Story describing the Red Ryder, carbine action, two-hundred shot range model air rifle with a compass in the stock and a thing that tells time.)

The volunteer teenagers at Habitat helped us load it onto the truck, but unloading it was all up to us… So here’s how it went:

Off the truck, up the stairs, through the living room (sorry, I was too busy lifting my half to take pictures) and onto the porch and tied to a rope…

…the rope was wound around a stud which was screwed to the door-frame…

…flipped over the porch…

…lowered down…

…onto the ground…

…and into the basement…

... where we hoped we could install it with the neighbors being none the wiser. In fact, to keep them in the dark, we considered executing this operation under the cloak of night, but worried we might drop the countertop and break it. So, instead, we figured the day's low temperatures would drive most of my neighbors in off their porches and we lowered the sink and all in complete silence, miming directions to each other. But as I walked back up the steps, I noticed my neighbor John, sitting on his patio, sipping his wine, enjoying the show.

Good, Bad, & Ugly

Day 8 of homeownership:

It’s a stretch to find something to call ‘good.’ But it’s also difficult to differentiate between the bad and the ugly.

While most things are still being taken apart, some parts of the house are in various stages of being put back together and very few actually look like something you’d recognize as part of a livable house. One bright spot in the mess is the coat closet.


I thought swapping out this powder room vanity for a pedestal sink would be the simplest of jobs.


Wrong. There was a 12-inch HVAC vent pipe routed through the vanity.


Now for the ugly: In order to open up the kitchen wall, we needed to take out what may or may not have been some supporting posts and re-route some plumbing. Dad ran out of 3" PVC ell and until we get it, we can’t run water down the drains, except for the kitchen sink which he rigged so we could at least brush our teeth.


Your eyes aren't playing tricks on you. That's a bit of tape joining one pipe to another.

The Devolution of the Kitchen

Dad drove down from New York with his truck full of tools, which he laid out in a great wall across the middle of the living room.



Then he set to work demolishing the kitchen:


Until the last picture, there are three 2x4's nailed together in the wall cavity about three inches to the right of the PVC pipe. There was some back and forth about whether or not they were necessary and load bearing. Throwing caution to the wind, Dad cut them down and the house is still standing. For now.

This place is for the dogs

Before Dad could go knocking on doors, someone rang my doorbell. Apparently the neighbor who invited us to dinner mistakenly put my address on the Evite he sent out to the whole neighborhood. No big deal. And now I have an unopened bottle of Two Buck Chuck and an Easter Lily. But seriously, dinner was great. The neighbors all seem very nice. And they love me because I'm not 4 college age girls.

The TimeWarner guy came to install my Internet yesterday. So I'm up and running, so to speak:


When I got home from dinner, Charlie had escaped from the kitchen he was supposed to be confined to. The jerk jumped the two and a half foot baby gate and peed on Dad's bed.


Before I hit my un-peed on bed and have more nightmares about load-bearing walls collapsing on me, I thought I'd close with some of the progress that has been made.

Old gold-tone ceiling fan and chandelier.




New and improved lighting.

Before the Demo

I haven't even had this house a week, and I feel at home. And by that I mean there's sheet-rock crumble all over the floors and the whole house has the aroma of sawdust.

After Dad took down the kitchen walls, ripped up the carpet, flooded the basement bathroom, and filled the house with half of Home Depot's inventory, he remembered what his friend Jim Leskinin said shortly after buying his house: "I bought a nice house and I turned it into a great handy-man special."

Well, here are the pictures of the nice house I bought.

It was built in 1987 (when gold-tone was cool) and little has been updated since then. Unfortunately, that includes the HVAC system.

There are nice pergo floors, but only in the foyer, which incidentally lacks a coat closet.



The kitchen boasts salmon colored walls, which may be nice, but certainly are not my taste.


I know the living / dining area looks pretty unremarkable. But right now, I'm envious of the me that took these pictures three days ago, because it's clean.



Judge the wallpaper, the clam-shell sink & the broadway lights for yourself.


Dad has scored us an invite to dinner with some of my new neighbors. But we don't know which neighbor, so we're going to knock on doors until someone lets us in.