omg pewl partee.

So, like everyone else in Euclid, Wickliffe, Eastlake, Willowick, Mentor, and Mentor-on-the-Lake, Ohio... we got water in the basement!

The rains were so heavy last Friday (July 19th, 2013) that the streets and sidewalks were flooded... then came the really fun part, the water starting coming up through drains.

And coming, and coming.

Lucky for us, we only really had plastic totes on the actual floor. We will have to put the washer and dryer up on blocks, though, because seeing them sitting in water was not pleasant.

Guy forgot his bikini.

SAVE TEH PUMPKIN!1

Our STUNNING New Bathroom Shelves!

Whoa baby, get a load of my new gorgeous, GLASS bathroom shelves! They're Moen Kingsley Glass shelves.

We can never leave anything alone, they came in Antique Nickel but in order to make them match our dark fixtures, we spray painted them. Nice, eh?

Thanks loads to Guy's parents for hooking us up with these. I am in love!! The bathroom is small (this is our full bath) and this space was just vacant space above the toilet. It makes it much more, mm what's the word? Cozy?

We have a cozy bathroom now!

A Mini Project! Triangle Baseboard Registers!

I didn't research the bejeezus out of this little project, I just kind of went for it after painting the living room.

I'll have some during and after pictures after I remember to take them on the second register. Ha.

So evidently we have those triangle baseboard register cover diffusers. The interwebs says these are old gravity fed covers. I don't know about that so much, but I know every house in this neighborhood has the same ones.

Our are CAKED in paint so I thought maybe the Home Depot would have replacements, yeah, they don't.

But you can buy new ones. THEY ARE SEVENTY DOLLARS A PIECE.

Guy better start showing a little leg if we want to be able to afford nice things like THAT.

Oh AND... like they aren't even one piece. They're a triangle and then an insert of sorts is put in. Yeah, not authentic at all.

So I decided to scrape at ours. Then I paint brushed it up with chemical stripper. Then rubbed it down with mineral spirits and finally got in the grooves with a big paint stripper bit on a drill. Sounds kinky but it wasn't.

But literally, that's how I got the paint off our steel registers that evidently are made by one man in the universe and that's why they are SEVENTY DOLLARS.

Kk, time for some before imagery. I really hate that the holes of the grate are actually smaller because there is...

so

much

paint.

Sup vent.

Your vents look like this, too.

These people painted with limp fish.

Ooh I have a special guest mention in the LCC blog today... Someone misses you, SuePaul!

"YOU LEFT MEEEeeeee!!" - Distraught Tape Measure

A Trip to an Actual Paint Store

Well, we actually went through with it! Picked a color, put it on the walls, and actually ceased obsessively looking through colors.

Confession time.

I can't help it. I just can't. Something is very wrong with me and I'm at a point in my life where I can accept it, embrace it, and hope my dear husband also finds it somehow charming.

:)

In my defense, I did go straight in and ask about Comet. There weren't any chips on the floor so the nice salesman grabbed a deck and ripped the color chip out for me. I slapped it down on the table (first thing in the morning, dirty hair, no coffee in me) and immediately it strikes me as having way too much red in it, rendering it a purple hue.

It's one of those things that even as well calibrated as your semi-professional monitor may be, you just have to see colors in person. I did see this color in person, and it wasn't happening.

It wasn't that purple, but doesn't matter.

I was kind of unhappy. I sincerely had planned to swipe the color and have it color matched in Glidden at the Home Depot. I felt like I was back at square one.

In a panicked state of mind, Guy starts grabbing at greens, but I had enough faith in blue being the right color for our room. I found a chip that had two awfully promising colors on it, Benjamin Moore Labrador Blue and Saratoga Springs (also called Saratoga Blue, 1669).

The latter was a lighter blue, (I kept calling it Sarasota blue, because I was sleepy, irritated, de-caffinated and apparently secretly in love with Florida) and guess what, we both felt ok about it.

While I sat at a table, poring over colors, Guy noticed that the Benjamin Moore Spec paint was like, $3.00 more than Glidden... which really made NOT going to the Home Depot a no brainer.

We pulled the trigger on the color and the brand.

We opted for the eggshell finish

The living room, primered up!

Marley hates this. Everything. Go lay by the plant stand.

The paint went on so damn nice. We had to do a coat and a half, basically. My cutting in work didn't need to be gone over at all. Kick ass! We did a quick and dirty coat of Zinsser primer the night before. Bonus: We love the color! I've gushed before about the Benjamin Moore color visualizer, but you can see with your own eyes just how accurate it actually is.

How our preview looks...

How our living room looks! Spot on! (click for larger)

Wow wow!! A happy Jen and a happy Guy this color does make.

In another post, I will be writing about my experience with the place we purchased our Benjamin Moore paint from, the Cleveland Paint Company.

Going with the {Color} Flow

You know that I have been stressing out about a living room color since December.

I painted the kitchen way back when in Glidden's "Pebble Grey" without much thought to the other colors in the house. In February we painted our bedroom a gorgeous teal, Color Place "Mysterious Ocean Fog".

Gray + teal = green in the living room, right?

Only I hated every green. Anything with too much blue looked far too close to my Mysterious Ocean Fog bedroom. My other options were a brownish green and a yellowish green.

I hate brown and the living room is already yellow.

Poor Guy. Every time I'd say, "yes, this is the color, let's pull the trigger," he'd come home the next night to a whole new set of color chips.

Last night my same saint of a husband found an incredibly useful website called Encycolorpedia

You put in a name of a paint, a hex code, whatever, and it gives you a WEALTH of information on the color. It even provides you with the closest paint colors by multiple manufacturers. Hell, it even gives you matching car colors!

Before we knew it, we were creating a color flow based on paint colors that were already on our walls. All we needed to do was find something that we liked that was "closely related" to our chosen color, which in this case, was our bedroom. The hex code of Mysterious Ocean Fog is #9db1b0

We were pleasantly surprised to see that our "oops" paint from Walmart in the back entrance hallway was strikingly close to Ash grey. Even moreso when we noticed our kitchen Paint, Pebble Grey, was a nearly identical match to Gray (x11 gray)!

That left us with a couple choices, while completely eliminating months of manually picking out greens we liked then grew to not like at all.

We tried Cambridge Blue, Pastel blue, and Cadet grey.

Benjamin Moore has a very nice color visualizer, and I recommend getting a well lit, high quality picture of your room (panorama, if you can) and uploading it there. Paint till you're blue in the face.

Cambridge Blue (Benjamin Moore "Appalachian Trail" / 633) was too minty.
Pastel blue (Benjamin Moore "Blue Stream" / 1668) was too light.

We clicked Cadet grey and grabbed the Benjamin Moore color "Comet" / 1628 and we really liked the look of it!

All along, we tried to put green in the living room to make the bedroom seem bluer, and we never though to go blue in the living room, and let the bedroom be the coastal green!

I'm excited to get some paint this week and get started. The woodwork needs just a touch up with my Behr high gloss white in there and it'll be finished.

Here's my color flow, I'm only missing colors for the office, bathroom and hallway.