Our Home Office: The "During" Phase.

Guy and I have been good little worker bees this weekend. We spent most of Friday and Saturday working in the home office. It's really the second bedroom of our little cape cod. We moved in, refinished the floors, threw a rug down, and cobbled together a desk that ran flush against 2 walls in the room. The layout of the desk is fantastic. It gives us a ton of useable space (really, enough for 3 full sized desktop computers, plus random network gadgets, and a printer) but we constructed it out of inexpensive pine. It's been sitting here, albeit serving the purpose it was put together for, looking naked and quite unfinished for a year now.


We liked Benjamin Moore's Davenport Tan pretty early on, and we ended up going with it. With our paint color finally chosen, we put up a new Hunter fan to replace the 10-year-old brass one that was up when we moved in.

The existing color in the office could be described as very light yellow-brown. And it was FILTHY. Even after a hard scrubbing it still looked dingy. Painting was a no-brainer but the desk surface took a little more thinking. The wood is cheap and uneven in spots, plus it's two pieces mended together. I wanted a white surface and one that will hold up to a LOT of use. Paint wasn't really on my list.

Here's some "before" shots of the office. I don't have a lot because it was so ugly it brought shame upon my entire family.

So retro, so grimey

What kind of Aunt makes their niece clean their house? *ME ME I DO*

The picture from the real estate listing. Notice the carpet.

Eek! I barely remember the wall-to-wall carpet in this place! And the photo from the real estate listing makes it look not-quite-filthy. For reference, that corner is the same one my niecey is standing in holding her broom. Yeah.

Now, we aren't quite finished with the office, but I have some nice in-progress shots, the walls are painted and the desk surface down, and I'm very excited because now all we have to do is some detail work!

Benjamin Moore Davenport Tan in a small office

Coat number 1

Desk grommets! I love these!

How did I do my pretty white desk? Come back and I'll tell ya!

Like I said, just details now, and I hope to have the grand unveiling before the month is out. One or two more trips to the Home Depot ought to do the trick.

I have a few tricks I'm employing to keep things neat, and I plan to share how I did it here pretty soon. 

I almost forgot, Marley was wonderful, she really held it together during us emptying everything out of the office, the vacuum and drill running, etc.

Just kidding!

whatareyoudoing

NO

New Office Fan

Our office fan was probably the most recent addition to the house - it was from 2004. However, it was still shiny brass, because I guess they wanted to match the rest of the shiny brass in the house.

Well I'm the great brass remover!! And under my reign all shiny brass shall suffer!!

BRASS. Oh and this fan was wayyy too large for the room.

Out with the old...

Naked ceiling bits.

...in with the new!

Because no brass.

Here's the best part, I, frugal Jen found this fan on eBay for $50 shipped! Did I mention it's a Hunter and it doesn't.make.a.peep?

Don't worry about the "old" fan, it's being re-purposed elsewhere. Because there was a drill going and activity going on in the way of Guy and me getting up and down off chairs, Marley became sick to her stomach and felt lying down for a while might calm her nerves.

"... oh God..."

 Aaaand, we picked an office color! Benjamin Moore Davenport Tan. Once again, the guys at the Cleveland Paint Co. were awesome and helpful. Thanks!

Little Cape Guest Spot: Euclid Boo!

So I have a nifty little thing we came across tonight, but it didn't happen at the Little Cape, but rather my mom's house, Boo!

Guy and I lived at Boo for years, and we painted quite a bit of it, along with numerous other upgrades during our stay. The walls always had a weird thickness to them and the paint was cracked, and I mean cracked... like crazy... all over.

It went through a few looks while we lived there, here's a very brief visual history of Ninny's dining room:

Boo's Dining Room in white - move in day

In purple, with light purple trim and builtin. Ack.

Dining room in stripes Gingerbread removed from built-in

I loved the stripes, but they ended up being painted over with an incredibly neutral light tan. Long story. We also pried the gingerbread trim off, as you can see.

Guy's parents are giving my mom a set of beautiful corner cabinets, so naturally my mom wanted the very builders-grade, old built in to go. As we started to pry the wood from the walls tonight, we found something that surprised me - paint underneath! I thought the built-in was original to the house... guess not!

We pulled more out, and it was when we removed the middle shelf that I saw a strip of wallpaper.

So of course, we slowly tear off some paint that gives easily, and next thing you know, we can make out that under the numerous but expected layers of paint, there are THREE layers of wallpaper!

What happens next? We stripped the entire room! My husband, me, my brother, his girlfriend, we're in there stripping... err, well you know.

This wallpaper is definitely from the 1940's. I didn't get any good photos of the one layer of paper under IT, which I'd peg as original to the dining room. House was built in 1941. Neat!!

Just peeling paint with our fingers!

Totes cray, right?!?

The insanity goes on, remember how I said the walls up and down were cracking, splitting, and sagging? Turns out the once upon a timers wallpapered EVERYTHING (even DOORWAYS that don't have wood trim)! So we're going to strip everything off (with just our hands, it literally peels off) and go to town!

Do I sound excited? I kinda am. Why?

House history = porn for me and,
The walls have looked bad for years and we never knew why.

I'm kind of surprised the freaking paint stayed up this long. Maybe one more coat would have been the back-breaking straw, ya think?

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.

Living Room Color

I had no problem choosing the color for the kitchen, but I've gotten countless color swatches for the living room. I want something green, but without too much yellow. Or blue. Or too dark.

Nothing seems perfect.

The closest I've gotten is a Benjamin Moore color called Creekside Green and a Glidden called Hazy Sage. The colors on the walls now, I was not so affectionately calling "Banana Cream Pie". My husband said it was more like something else, bananas foster or banana split or mashed banana mashed banana. We found the almost *exact* match in Glidden. BANANA CREAM PIE.

Mm. Anyway, the color is offensive to my delicate sense of style, and incredibly warm, giving the room a sickly orange cast. Maybe now you can understand why I fear a green with too much yellow in it.

Benjamin Moore "Creekside Green"

Glidden "Hazy Sage"

What's in the room:
Crystal Spider Lamp in "Pewter"
Mainstays Poly Duck Strip Curtain in "Palm"

Hometrends Welgrove Floor Lamp
Sofa and Loveseat in "Stoked Midnight"
Erias Home Designs Suave 49 in. x 13 in. Framed Mirror, White (3)