Our Master Bedroom--Our Masterpiece

You've been very patient:

Ta-dah! What you're seeing is our freshly painted master bedroom. The walls are Sherwin Williams Duration satin-finish (as usual) in Willow Tree. Taking a suggestion from a magazine, we opted to tint the ceiling pale gray, to create a less glaring bright-white effect. It is done in Duration, matte-finish Fleur de Sel, the gray tone that SW recommended as a pair with Willow Tree. The trim is out-of-the-can white. Even though we know that doors are supposed to be satin or semi-gloss, we painted them in the matte Fleur de Sel too. Can you see the difference between the closet doors and the trim? Supposedly, Duration paints are washable whatever the finish...

Here is a picture of our spectacular bed. It definitely feels like one of Ikea's sturdier pieces, in solid birch.

In the end we decided to go with lighter woods to continue the idea we have of using lots of images and materials that look or feel sort of like being in a tranquil forest or a meadow or something like that (ugh, that makes us sound like such hippies!).

It was great timing because the bed that we bought a few months ago, also a Mandal, was honey pine with black drawers but before we built it (and while it was still within our 90-day return window), they replaced it with this birch and white version we liked so much better. The headboard is from the Brimnes line but is so new that it is not even on the website. Unlike the solid birch bed, it is made of particle board and cheap white plastic, but it matched the white of the drawers and was a perfect solution to our problem of finding something that could be flush to the wall and to the bed and not interfere with the baseboards. The cats like it too, because they can cross behind the bed in a perfect cat-sized tunnel. The shelf on top of the headboard is perfect for some reading lamps, too. I still want to put up a little hanging nightstand, so the tissues and clock can be within reach, but this is a great solution for everything else.

The next big issue to tackle is the mattress. We love our current one, which is a Simmons Beautyrest, but we are keeping it downstairs in the guest room. We could try to buy another one just like it, though even then there are about a dozen of varying firmness, so I'm not sure we could get an identical mattress (I can't find any useful details on the label). We've also heard good things about latex mattresses, and Ikea makes one for about $900, which isn't bad. If you've ever had an experience with one of them, please leave us a comment.

Our crowning glory is our Hunter ceiling fan. We got really lucky when we took down the old light fixture to find an electrical box that claimed to be rated to hold fans. The installation took a couple of hours but was a lot easier than either of us expected:

The next steps are to slowly acquire the rest of the furniture we need to complete the room. I am planning to buy a big comfy chair and pretty floor lamp to create a little sitting area across from the bed. We also need dressers in either white or light wood (birch, maple, bleached oak all seem to be useful keywords). Dressers are surprisingly expensive, so we are relying on Craigslist. None of the current Ikea models appeal to us, though one from the 1990s (called the Kurs) would be a perfect fit. We almost managed to snag one used but I guess another buyer got to it first. Don't you think it would have made a perfect match?

Sometimes I feel like this blog is turning into a giant Ikea ad....

A Trifecta of Creepy-Crawlies

(We're still removing drop clothes but never fear, we'll post pictures of our painted bedroom soon. In a meantime...)

I know that houses have bugs. Especially homes with basements and yards. But that doesn't mean I have to like it. Now that the weather is warming up, all the icky critters are coming out of hibernation and invading. Here's what we're up against. If you have any suggestions about ways to prevent or get rid of them (preferably non-poisonous, since we have cats), leave a comment.

1. Stink Bugs

I know they can't hurt me but they lurk in the folds of window curtains and fly at me like they're about to dive bomb me. The cats are completely uninterested in attacking them (hard shell must make them rather unappealing as dinner) and squashing them supposedly makes them stink (I wouldn't have the guts to do it anyway). I can handle them in ones or twos if my vacuum cleaner is handy. They make a satisfying "thunk" when I suck them up. Nonetheless, they scare the !@#$ out of me and I would rather prevent them from entering my house. They seem to be concentrated on the top floor (when I opened the door to our master bedroom the other day to paint, 5 or 6 of them were there to greet me) and I've seen a few on the main floor, so I don't think the basement is their entry point.


2. Spiders
(I was going to post a picture here but just looking at the images made me shudder...)
We've had a lot of ordinary-looking small to medium sized spiders on our main floor lately (D tells me they are small to medium sized. I think they are enormous and horrifying). They like the bathroom a lot, which is unfortunate since I am the first to go in there in the morning and the last few weeks there has always been one or two there to greet me. Most scary are the ones that hang down from the ceiling or door frame, since I can walk right by them (or INTO THEM!) without realizing they are there. If they are on the wall, at least I can keep an eye on them. I've also almost stepped on one randomly wandering around our dining room. It's enough to make me wear hard-soled shoes all the time. D has pointed out that spiders actually kill the bugs I hate so much, but I don't care--I want them out.

3. Ants

I noticed some of our honey, hardened over the winter, had left a residue in our spice cabinet and attracted a few ants. Even though I cleaned it up and scrubbed out the rest of the cabinet, counter, and sink, we have a few ants crawling around our kitchen sink all the time now. I can't figure out where they are coming from--thankfully, there are so few that we don't have a marching army. They are definitely concentrated in our sink with a few stragglers on the wall and window behind the sink. Is it possibly they could be inside our sink/garbage disposal? It's probably more likely they're getting in through the window. I thought I remember hearing all sorts of organic ways to get rid of them but now I can't seem to find any of them.


That's not actually all the creepy-crawlies we have, but if I included the others, I wouldn't get to use the awesome word "trifecta" in my title. Though we haven't seen them yet this season, I expect the following will be joining our family shortly:

Spider Cricket (alson known as a camel cricket or cave cricket):

Again, I know they can't hurt me but they are the reason I live in fear of the basement and always turn the light on when I go down there. I know they're getting in through the crawl space and other spots that aren't well sealed, but we can't figure out how to seal them. Fortunately the cats like these little guys (we see a lot of detached legs on the carpet down there) but if I'm alone in the basement, I am too squeamish to squish one--especially because they like to jump at me.



Tiger Mosquito (what is it with animals pretending to be other animals?)

These big guys can bite through clothes--even denim--and can't be stopped with bug spray (either the lawn kind or the skin kind). Since mosquitoes seem to consider me a tasty treat, I will probably just stop doing any yard work or gardening once these critters wake up. I am trying to convince D to buy me a completely screened in patio like they sell at Lowes, so I can go outside occasionally.


Post your solutions to these disgusting animals here. Hopefully the pictures did not cause too much distress. Believe me, searching for them on the Internet was no picnic for me. Oh the things I suffer through for my blog.

A Little Suspense

A warning up front: though the room is painted, messy floors and cloudy days have prevented me from taking a final picture. So what you get are the pictures leading up to, but not including, our painted master bedroom. Stay tuned for the finished product.

Here is the "before" picture, prepped and ready to go. As usual, we washed the walls with a phosphate-free TSP cleaner (an odd name, given that TSP stands for tri-sodium phosphate) and protected the floors.

Note the--as D called him--"beached whale" of a cat enjoying the paper and drop clothes on the floor.

Another "before" picture, this time of the alcove, featuring beached whale and his brother.

Next came the priming:

Then one of my favorite parts, picking the paint color:

Don't adjust your monitor--these colors are remarkably similar. I couldn't really even see the difference between the two swatches on the bottom.

Up for consideration were three from Sherwin Williams. From top to bottom are Clary Sage, Coastal Plain, and Willow Tree. I won't tell you which one we picked, so the next post will be a surprise. Not that it matters.

That's all for now. Oh, and Home Depot had a huge sale on mulch:

The Hallway!

It's about time to post pictures of our finished hallway. Today we finally touched up a few spots and screwed on an air conditioner intake vent but other than that, it's been done for a while.

You may remember that it started out entirely yellow, with cheapo light fixtures and separating drywall. Here's a picture of the corner between the bathroom and master bedroom. You can see the dark lines where the walls are separating.

So we spent one whole evening plastering up the drywall where we could reach it and another evening sanding and wiping the dust. We learned that you are supposed to prime over plaster to make the surface look the same as the wall, so even though we didn't prime everywhere, we did put it on over the edges we fixed. Here's the wall going down the stairs. You can (sort of) see the white along the edges.

We removed the fixtures to be able to paint the edges. We were planning to replace this directional light that shines down the stairs, but it looked complicated and is not in a standard electrical box, so we put it back when we finished. We did replace the little gold bubble light behind it though.

Because we were painting edges high up on the stairwell ceiling that we couldn't reach, we bought a wide variety of tools from Home Depot. We learned, after searching a few stores, that corner edging rollers are made from super cheap foam and padding and that high quality ones simply are not available. Surprisingly though, they did a better job than we expected.

 

You can see the gray we painted on the lower half of the hallway, as well as the Ikea coat hangers I mentioned here and the matching brushed nickel switch plates.

We ended up replacing all of the hardware that held on our handrail, since the old ones were in a dingy rusted brass and we went with nickel for everything else. We also added two more, so that the handrail is more secure.

And even though the color is all strange and you can't really tell that it's white, here's the upstairs view. You can see the new light, new thermostat, and (if you squint a little) our new door knobs. In keeping with my apparent obsession with replacing random brass-colored hardware with nickel, we replaced all our door knobs too (which ended up being quite a project, since the new ones didn't fit neatly into the holes left by the old ones).

We managed to hang a few pictures but haven't yet figured out what's going upstairs. We know we want to hang a lot though, because white really isn't our thing and it looks pretty sterile right now. Hopefully lots of colorful paintings and photographs will solve that problem.

Today we also tried to fill in our sparse lawn with more grass seed and spent the afternoon aerating and seeding. I have some before pictures but I'll wait to post them until I have (I hope!) some nice "after" ones too. We also set an ambitious plan for painting the master bedroom and should be done with that by next weekend.