Category: my house.

Are any of you fans of Sarah Richardson?  If you’re not familiar, she’s a Canadian designer and has had several decorating shows on HGTV.  This summer I’ve been watching her makeover her cottage on YouTube.

None of that is really relevant to this post except to explain that she always calls the master bedroom the ‘principle bedroom’ instead.  And the feminist in me rather likes that idea.  I googled it, and apparently this is a Canadian thing.  How about it my Canadian readers,  have you always called it the ‘principle bedroom’ too?

Well, today I’m sharing our principle bedroom as we continue the tour of our home.

If you’re new to my blog, you may not know that we totally revamped this room back in the summer of 2017 from the floors on up.  We started by hiring some college guys to refinish the floors.  I chose to go with a matte finish and I absolutely love how they turned out.

They aren’t perfect, but then again they are over 100 years old so how could they be?  Matte finishes are always better at minimizing flaws than shinier ones.  The same is true for walls and painted furniture too.

Next up we painted the room in Benjamin Moore’s Edgecomb Gray.  I’d seen so many people raving about this color online so I went with it.  In hindsight I wish I’d tried a few more colors and found a better choice for my room.  This color tends to turn a sort of pinky beige in both early morning and late evening light.  It just goes to show that you really can’t pick wall colors based on pictures you’ve seen.  You need to get samples and try them on your own walls in your own lighting conditions.

After painting, we added a faux ship lap wall (which is painted in Dutch Boy’s Cotton Blossom) behind the bed with the help of handyman/neighbor Ken.

We modified a full size antique Eastlake style headboard to fit a queen sized bed, and I painted it using Homestead House milk paint in Coal Black.

I also painted a pair of mismatched pieces to use as nightstands, but for them I chose Miss Mustard Seed’s milk paint in Grain Sack.

The bench at the foot of the bed is one of the rare instances when I chose not to paint something.

I used some of my non-collection of vintage advertisement hangers to hang a few of our travel photos on the wall next to the closet.

And in case you are wondering, yes, that is the only closet in the room and it’s pretty small.  It just contains my current season’s wardrobe.  Mr. Q has a closet in his study for his clothes, and we both use the guest room closet for our off-season clothes.  I just moved the summer clothes into the guest room.  Yep, it’s that time of year.

 I keep my non-hanging clothes in an old jelly cupboard that is also painted in Miss Mustard Seed’s milk paint in Grain Sack.  I added a couple of Prima Marketing transfers to the doors.

These are an old design called French Pots III.  Unfortunately this design is discontinued.  You may be able to find it online, but no promises.

I’ve made a couple of tweaks to this side of the room since we originally finished it.  I brought in a companion for Lulu (the black manikin).

Collette, the dress form, has been stripped of her original covering and then dressed back up with another Prima Marketing transfer called Catalogue (sorry, also discontinued).

I also hung the vintage laundry drying rack that I found at a garage sale this summer on the other side of the cupboard.

I find that I’m often adding things to a room, or moving things around from room to room so that a space just keeps evolving.  I’ll never be one of those people who decorates and room and then considers it ‘done’, never to be touched again.  How about you?

Today we’re moving on in our house tour to the one and only bathroom in the house, which is just off the kitchen next to the pantry.  In other words, a long way from the bedroom at 2 a.m.

Well, technically it’s a long way from the bedroom at any hour, but it seems especially far in the middle of the night.

That’s probably the biggest ‘con’ to living in an old house.  I don’t mind not having a dish washer, or central air, or an attached garage, or laundry facilities on the main floor.  But we sure would love to have a bathroom upstairs.  We looked into it once and we simply couldn’t justify the expense.  When we consider expenses like these we think ‘how many trips would we have to forgo to have a bathroom upstairs?’, and in this case it was at least 4 or 5.

So instead we make do with the world’s smallest bathroom.

I ended up having to recycle some photos for this post that I took way back in 2014 when my blog was new.  The weather has not been cooperating around here lately.  It’s been rainy and gloomy and generally not conducive to getting photos of a small dark bathroom.

But I haven’t changed anything in the bathroom since then, so good enough!

Much like many of the rooms in our house, this one has seen a couple of different looks over the years.  When we moved in it was wallpapered in pink and blue and had some hideous square stick-on linoleum tiles on the floor.  We swapped out the sink and toilet, added the wainscoting and re-wallpapered in a Waverly pattern of purple and green violets complete with a matching border.  Come on, I bet some of you remember when Waverly was all the rage.

Eventually of course all of that wallpaper had to go.  We took it down, had the walls and ceiling skim coated, re-painted, added a heated floor (absolutely one of the best things we’ve ever done, and not terribly expensive at all) with ceramic tile and some new light fixtures, all around the same time we re-did the kitchen.

The only things that have remained from when we moved in are the tub and the mirrored medicine cabinet over the sink.

I’ve debating changing the medicine cabinet out, but I’m glad now that I’ve kept it.

By the way, those light fixtures on either side of the mirror may look like they could be original to the house but they are reproductions from Rejuvenation.  If you have an older home and are looking for some period style lighting, be sure to check out Rejuvenation.

The tub sits in an arched alcove and I imagine it would be rather difficult to find a replacement of exactly the right size.

The shower curtain came from H & M Home.

You have to get creative about storage in a small bathroom.  We have one tiny linen closet plus the medicine cabinet and that’s it.  So I keep my makeup in that old metal tin, and makeup brushes and q-tips are in those galvanized containers hanging on the wall.

The wall mounted soap dish came from Restoration Hardware.

We use an old stenciled bucket for trash.

I debated even including a post about the bathroom in this Wednesday house tour series.  There just isn’t much to show.  But if nothing else, maybe it will make the rest of you feel pretty good about your own more sizable and luxurious bathrooms 😉

Be sure to check back next Wednesday when I continue the tour of our house with the master bedroom!

In last Wednesday’s post you saw the door to our pantry.

Despite the signage, that door doesn’t really lead to any public phones.  I got that sign at Junk Bonanza many years ago and it’s been on the pantry door ever since.

It also doesn’t really lead to a pantry.  Instead it opens onto the stairs to our basement.  But there is a 12″ or so ledge around two sides that we’ve taken advantage of by adding some built in shelving and calling it a pantry.

Once again, let’s start at the beginning though.

Oh boy, right?

Yep, this is where we started.  How embarrassing is that?

At that point we had a solid door.  It could be closed so that no one could see this awful mess.  Closing the door is also a good thing because in the winter it blocks the radiator when open.

But as you can see, we have a window in this space.  And closing the door resulted in shutting out the light it allowed in as well.  So we decided we needed a door with a window to allow the light into the kitchen, and that also meant we needed to make this space presentable.  It would no longer be out of sight, out of mind.

I found the door on Craigslist.  It had to be cut down just a tad to fit our opening.

We then embarked on the big clean-out.

It was still looking pretty shabby once everything was removed.  That’s when we hired our friend Ben (Ben also did all of our sheet rock/archway building work in the kitchen … oh, and he has also painted our exterior as well, and he removed all of our popcorn ceilings on the main floor) to skim coat the walls and ceiling.

Once they were skim coated, I repainted.

It was already looking so much better.

Next I shopped around for more attractive shelving for the space.  I was limited to the 12″ depth of the ledge though and I just couldn’t find what I wanted anywhere.  Enter our favorite handyman/neighbor Ken.  He custom built shelving to fit the space and to suit our needs.

Now, here’s the thing.  As you move into the pantry, you’re also going down the stairs into the basement.  So we can’t actually reach the things on the top of the shelving unit under the window, or the things on the top right shelf or very top of the taller units.  They are just for looks.

Well, let’s be honest, there might be a few more items in here that are really ‘just for looks’.  This is the perfect spot for displaying a few of my non-collections like the bluebird china, vintage scales and flour sifters …

and don’t forget the vintage tablecloths.

Uh, that’s a lot of non-collections, right?  I guess denial is not just a river in Egypt.

But I also like to use awesome vintage (or maybe not so vintage) containers to store mundane, but more practical things.  The taller breadbox holds the cat food, the smaller breadbox holds Keurig coffee pods.  The other vintage breadboxes hold Kleenex.  The enamelware bucket holds cleaning rags.

Vintage locker baskets hold paper towels and toilet paper.

The wall opposite the shelves, which I practically have to do contortions to photograph, is painted in black chalkboard paint and contains a message that I try to live by.

That wall also houses the light fixture.  I swapped out the plain glass shade that was on it originally for this fabulous vintage one that I found at a garage sale.

The pantry was the absolute last space in our house that we tackled.  We’d redone every other room, and some twice, but we didn’t get to this one until we’d been in our house nearly 20 years.  It was so easy to just shut the door and ignore it.  But now that it’s pretty, it’s one of my favorite spots.  Especially in the evening when the sun starts going down and it floods the pantry, and now the kitchen, with light.

Do you have a space like this in your house?  You know, that one area that you’ve been neglecting for a really long time?  Please tell me that we’re not the only ones who took 20 years to get something done!

The room that we call the piano room was originally intended to be a formal dining room.  In fact, we did use it that way for many years until we became the proud owners of a baby grand piano when one of my co-workers moved away and needed to get rid of it.

I had grandiose plans of learning how to play, assuming that naturally I would become some sort of jazz pianist in my spare time.  You know, all of that spare time I have that isn’t spent working, gardening, garage saling or painting furniture.

Yeah, you get the idea, that never happened.

However, I did discover that this piano makes the perfect surface for things I do spend time on like painting stuff, or wrapping presents, or folding laundry, or even mixing drinks.  So it has become a fixture in the room and I can’t imagine anything else that I could swap it out for that would be as functional and yet still attractive.

Over the years this room has seen quite a few looks.  When we bought the house it was wallpapered in a very bland wallpaper.  I’m pretty sure the previous owners felt that wallpaper was an easy way to cover up a flawed plaster wall, but they didn’t feel that it needed to be decorative.  I replaced that wallpaper with a white on white damask patterned wallpaper that was very trendy at the time, but that was back in the early 90’s.  Later that wallpaper came down and I tried a multitude of different colors on the walls; mustard yellow, red, and grey to name a few.  I didn’t love any of them, and somehow despite its gorgeous trim, built in bookcases, and stained glass window, the room always managed to look rather boring.

I finally landed on horizontal stripes about 8 years ago and I painted them in shades of green the first time around.

I loved the stripes, but the colors weren’t good at all.  Especially since this room contains the only blank wall in my entire house that is suitable for staging furniture photos.  So I then exchanged the green stripes for grey and white stripes.

The colors were definitely better, and I loved the way they looked.  But eventually I got tired of seeing that striped wall in the background of so many of my furniture photos.

So a while back I repainted just that wall white.

That brought me to last winter when I decided to tackle redecorating my living room and piano room.  I broke the project down into what I thought would be manageable chunks.

1.  repaint the insides of the bookshelves in the living room
2.  repaint the living room walls
3.  replace the living room furniture
4.  paint the baby grand piano
5.  replace the ceiling fan over the piano
6.  repaint the piano room walls

And actually, I did pretty good right up until I got to item no. 6.  That’s where I completely got stuck.  Mainly because my original plan was to just finish painting out the stripes in the rest of the piano room with plain white walls.  However, in the back of my mind I knew that wasn’t going to be enough.  The room needed something more.

I toyed with the idea of faux ship lap.  That worked really well in our master bedroom.  But ship lap felt just a bit too casual for this room and its baby grand.  Then I came across a picture of board and batten and realized it would be perfect.

I’m not going to attempt a tutorial on how to do board and batten.  There are a million of those out there, all done far better than mine would be (just google it, or look on pinterest).

I can tell you that it cost around $90 for the wood.  We used solid Aspen rather than cheaper furring strips because it had a nicer, smoother finish.  The wider boards are 1/2″ x 4″ x 6′ and the horizontal trim board above that wider board at the very top is 1″ x 2″ x 4′.

I played around a bit with the distance between the vertical boards.  I didn’t want any of them to end up in a corner and I didn’t want to have to cut around any electrical outlets or other obstructions.  We ended up keeping them 20″ apart.

  The paint cost another $80 or so, but I have lots left over for other projects.  So for less than $200, this made a huge impact on the room.  At least I think so.

I must point out here that we definitely could not have done this project without our handyman/neighbor Ken.  He had all of the necessary tools, and he had the know-how.

I opted to go fairly high up the wall with the board and batten for two reasons.  The first is that I wanted to carry in the dark grey color from the living room walls at the top, but I wanted to keep that to a smaller segment of wall.  The second reason is so that I can still do furniture photo shoots in here and easily crop out the dark grey (as long as the pieces aren’t really tall).  You’ll see an example of that on Friday when I share my latest painted piece of furniture.

The top of the board and batten is at 6 1/2′ tall.

I knew using the dark grey at the top of the wall would really make our pretty window frames pop.

We didn’t add any vertical boards to that entire east wall.  The angles of the wall make it feel consistent though.

This project was a bit more work than I thought it would be.  I took a week off at the day job and figured I’d have lots of time for other things plus this project.  Instead I just barely got this room done by Friday.

I painted the walls, both top and bottom.  Then I sanded and painted all of the boards (before installing them).  Then it took an entire day for Ken and I to install the boards.  Then I filled nail holes, patched seams and added a 2nd coat of paint to the boards.  I painted the chair to match the piano.  I also painted the bookshelves under the window.  Phew!

Luckily I didn’t need to repaint my pretty pale blue ceiling, and we already had both the ceiling fan project and the piano painting project completed.

We took care of some final details on Friday like changing out our thermostat to something a little fresher looking and hanging things back on the walls.  I also painted all of my switch plates.  They were an oil rubbed bronze sort of color so I just gave them all a quick paint job with some basic creamy white spray paint.  I didn’t want them to stand out.

I moved some things around a bit.  The yardstick shelves with my non-collection of vintage alarm clocks went into the living room, while the window framed black and white photos came out here.

I moved my aqua McCoy pottery into my pantry and opted to keep these shelves monochromatic like the living room shelves.

A couple of things stayed in the same spots, like my French subway sign scroll and the black suitcases on top of my Specimens cupboard.

So, instead of six weeks it actually took just over 7 months, but I am finally done with my redecorating plan.  It would have been so much easier to just wave a magic wand, if only I had one.

But it feels so good to finally be able to check this last item off the list.  I’m not sure which room I’ll tackle next but I’m sure I won’t be undertaking anymore redecorating projects until 2020.  I have a trip to DisneyWorld with my sister coming up in October and then the holiday season will be here before we know it (I know, scary, right?).  In the meantime, I’m back to furniture painting.  So be sure to stay tuned!

Yesterday my handyman/neighbor Ken and I worked on a project in my piano room that is almost finished, and I’m so excited to share it with you guys.  I’m planning to have that room ready for next Wednesday’s room tour.

In the meantime, before I get to today’s room tour, I have to tell you all that we’re feeling pretty fortunate here at our house.  We had a ferocious (Mr. Q’s word) storm blow through here on Monday night and the maple tree in our front year came down.

I’m a bit bummed because this tree had finally gotten to the right size to block the street light from our bedroom window.  I also really enjoyed listening to birds singing in this tree in the early morning hours.  However it missed our front porch by about a foot, which is incredibly lucky.  It didn’t do any damage at all except to one little corner of my front garden.

As you can see, there are plenty of bigger trees around our house that would have done much more damage if they had come down.

Not only that, but when we got up in the morning there was a tree service company working a block over so I asked them if they’d look at my tree too.  While they were at it, I also asked them to take down the pear tree in my front yard.  It didn’t do well over last winter and was looking pretty sad (you can just see it to the left in the photo above).  I had been thinking about having that one cut down anyway.

They had both trees down, everything hauled away, and my entire yard cleaned up by 9 a.m.

So although our front yard feels a little barren now, and we feel a little more exposed,  we’re definitely going to have fewer leaves to rake this fall.  Overall we are counting our blessings because this certainly could have been much worse.

  OK, on with today’s normally scheduled programming.  We are heading inside to tour a branch of a different kind, the q branch.

This room is directly off the piano room and I have no idea what purpose it was originally meant to serve.  Possibly it was just small sitting room all along, or it could have been a very small main floor bedroom at one time.

We’ve tried a number of different looks for this room.  It once housed my dollhouse, which basically took up the entire space.  Then we turned it into a small dining room, which we never actually used.

Now it is the q branch, or my study, and it gets more use than it ever did before.  I last redecorated this room back in January 2015 (oh my gosh, can you believe that was over four years ago!).  Mr. Q is the one who thought it should be called the q branch.  If you’re not a James Bond fan, the q branch is the fictional research and development segment of the British Secret Service in the Bond movies.  Clearly it was the perfect name for the room where I write this blog.

The biggest change to this room since I originally finished it in 2015 was the addition of my giant English cupboard.  I purchased this via Craigslist back in August 2017.

When I brought it home the inside was completely empty, but handyman/neighbor Ken kitted it out with shelves for me and then I painted the inside.

I was on the fence about whether or not to paint the exterior at the time, but now I’m really glad I didn’t.  I love the patina of the bare wood.

I only recently moved my stack of vintage suitcases into this room (and clearly I need to move my paint brushes up a bit on the wall).

They used to be in the dining room.  I think they fit better here though.  Some of them house my vintage Christmas ornaments, and some of them are just empty.

The opposite side of the room contains my rooster cupboard.  It is painted in Miss Mustard Seed’s milk paint in a coat of Flow Blue over a coat of Artissimo then finished with her antiquing (dark) wax.

This cupboard is one of my favorite pieces.  I love the chippy paint and that fabulous rooster grain sack that I used to line the glass doors.

The room does feel a bit ‘cupboard heavy’ though, with two cupboards in a fairly small space.  They are really great for storage though.  Some of you ask how I can bear to part with some of my pieces, well, this is one that I just can’t seem to let go of.  I do wish I had a better spot for it though.

My giant ‘q’ still hangs on the wall above my desk.

My sister gave this to me for Christmas several years ago and I gave it a chippy paint job.  I think I’m going to re-do it soon though, I have another idea in mind for it.

I’m realizing now that I could have done a much better job staging this room for these photos.  A professional would have hidden all of those cords coming down behind the desk, and straightened out the lambs wool throw on the chair.  Maybe found a cuter mouse pad too.

But this is real life guys.  This is where I sit in the early morning hours writing my blog posts and editing my photos.  There are cords, and messes, and usually a cup of coffee next to that unattractive mouse pad.

I hope you enjoyed today’s tour.  Be sure to check back next Wednesday to see what Ken and I were up to in the piano room!