Finally Painted and Ready

With more than enough paint finally at hand (the original quart plus one gallon), it was time to get down to business. Fortunately, despite the prominent "NOT RETURNABLE" on the can, Home Depot took back the incorrect color and gave us our money back. Still though, whoever thought having Foxglove and Foxgloves should be fired...

As I mentioned last time, this was my first time getting to roll the paint. And not just roll. This was a one-woman job. I cut in and then rolled each wall, hoping to get the paint in place relatively promptly to avoid any weird blending lines. D was here for moral support and picture taking. The children were here for complaining that they wanted to help and then not wanting to actually help (they did paint a bit, but only in the space that eventually was going to be rolled over, to their dismay). You can see their handiwork along the side walls in the second picture:

And within a few hours, it was done! It involved some contortionist moves in the corner near the ductwork, but ultimately, a pretty rewarding and quick job.

But of course, it is never *that* quick. I still had to do the trim and the door, a boring necessity to make it all look white and new. Despite my annoyance at painting glossy trim, I did get a brief thrill when I realized that this may be the last odd custard color left in the house that was so prevalent when we bought it. Begone, yellow!

Next up, with D's help, was to replace this exposed CFL light. Part of me wanted style, the same out-of-place flair that we applied to our bedroom closet. The rest of me just wanted a covered lightbulb so that I didn't risk shattering it and spilling all kinds of hazardous materials all over our sheets and towels.

We agreed that I could finally get something similar to the crystal chandelier I had wanted in the dining room. Because why not? We found a cute one at Target and considered whether or not we could add the pull chain just as we had done in the bedroom. When it arrived though, I realized that even though it was a flush mount, it would occupy too much real estate near the ceiling where we wanted to put some tall shelves. No problem. We used this as an excuse to upgrade our guest bedroom light (that we inherited from the previous owners) and put that light in the closet. Here's the original ceiling light. Not bad, but pretty blah:

 Here's the new crystal one in its place:

And here's our closet! It's not quite as swanky as I wanted, but it's much safer now that there are no exposed bulbs and this swap let us put the crystal light where we can appreciate it more.

Last in the closet series, a post where I'll finally tell you what we ended up doing with this space, now that it was painted and ready for use.

The Rules of Painting

Continuing on our closet adventure, we reach the fun part. After months of taking down hardware,  spackling, sanding, and caulking, it was time to paint! Painting, while not the most enjoyable activity, is for me one of my favorite home improvements because the drama is immediate. The whole space changes within just a day or two.

Step one, not pictured, was to paint the ceiling. After not painting for several years, I forgot our painter rule #1: use good tools. I started out using no tools at all. As I started gathering up our painting tools, scattered around our basement since our last paint job almost three years ago, I realized that our paint roller tray was covered in rust. Probably not a good thing to ix paint in. I also couldn't find any stirrers or paint can openers, even though I knew we had many lying around. So we sent a runner to the store and ended up with a paint tray that came with rollers and brushes. I should know better. I do know better. But it was so temping to just open the kit and go. So rather than use my much better Purdy brushes and rollers, I used the cheap ones that came in the kit. Big mistake.

It probably isn't noticeable to anyone but me, but the ceiling (my first foray into painting for years) looks too textured now, because the roller nap was cheap and a bad fit for our smooth ceiling. But hey, it's a ceiling and it is now white rather than light yellow. And after I pulled yet another brush bristle off the edges where I was cutting in, I finally remembered to seek out our good brushes and dump that one in the craft bin for the kids.

Another fun side note about this project--this is literally the first time I've ever used a paint roller. Yes it's true. After painting an apartment and then a whole house, this is--to my knowledge--the only time I haven't been just the "cutting in" person. D has always done the rolling (see examples here, here, and here.) Since this has always been "my" project, I did it all. And so, ladies and gentleman, after about 15 years of painting, I felt the reward of rolling. (Seriously, it's so much more fun. I'm not being sarcastic here at all. All that painful cutting in for such small payoff and then roll and BAM, new look.) So first, the ceiling. A lot less fun and a lot less payoff than the walls, but it was a start (moving from vaguely yellow to slightly-too-bumpy white--not quite the drama I was looking for).

Then it was on to the REAL painting. I already knew that I wanted a color, despite this being a closet (I have a history here--see my lovely aqua walk-in bedroom closet). I thought I would go for a super light, almost-white purple. Here were the swatches we selected from Home Depot.

Do you have a favorite? Here's where we broke painter rule #2: don't let a kindergartner pick your color. I would probably have picked the one on the lower right or any of the pale ones along the left. But those were too light for my kid, who'd come to the store with me with promises that she could select the color with minimal parental veto. So she chose Foxglove, on the back right. It was on the same scale as the one I preferred just below it--just one notch darker. Her sad little face when I tried to convince her to go lighter made me relent. Foxglove it was.

Then I broke painter rule #3: buy all the paint you need. I somehow believed that one quart would be enough for such a small closet, especially when I saw how expensive the paint base was. And so we came home with one quart of paint. I thought I was ready to go. Then we did some math for square feet of wall space vs. what the can said it could cover. Suddenly we weren't sure. And I definitely did not want to run the risk of having to buy a second can when halfway complete, given that dye lots aren't always consistent and I might not be able to just start on a second can seamlessly.

So armed with a picture of the first can, Grandma went to the store to buy a second can before we started (that way we could mix the paint before beginning, to even out any color inconsistency). What did the paint department employee send her home with? Take a good look and see if you can spot the problem:

Apparently Behr paint comes in Foxglove and Foxgloves. Both valid colors for their Marquee line, both purplish (i.e. not particularly noticeable if you're not paying attention) and both very different. In addition, Foxglove (no "s") had a one-coat guarantee but Foxgloves (with the "s") did not. We discovered this difference, of course, roller and brush in hand, dressed in paint clothes and ready to go. *Big sigh.* It was off to the store again.

To be continued...

3 Years Later

This year, I made it a goal to clean out the upstairs linen closet. It was never pretty, but the addition of extra duct work 4 years ago made organization pretty much impossible. I've had a goal of figuring out this space since 2017 at least (and probably unofficially for even longer). This is how it usually looked:

This is no exaggeration. Because of the extra duct on the right, we couldn't get to the back easily. We'd already pulled off a few of the shelves so that we could squeeze into the back if necessary, so we lost shelf space, and what we kept was so high that I could not reach it easily. So the things we use most just sat in huge piles in the front. And the rest of our extra towels, sheets, shower curtains, pillows, and blankets were just piled up any way they would fit. Even though I didn't have to go in there often, it really bothered me.

The obvious first step was just to move all the linens. It was no easy feat finding them a long-term temporary place while I slowly worked on this project, but we split it up into the two closets in the guest room. It quickly became evident that we had too many extra pillows:

We got rid of a few of the oldest, as well as some towels that were not really necessary. So we were left with this empty closet. You can see the extra shelves just sitting on the floor.

While we've used shelving systems like this before (the toy closet in the office and the shelves above our TV), it was a bad fit for such a tight space.

In the back, above the horizontal duct, was a closet rod and a wire shelf. After some discussion, we decided we should take it all down and start fresh.

This was a project that J (that's me) did almost all alone, taking hidden hours here and there. So I began removing shelving in March. A little elbow grease and then carefully carrying the shelves down the stairs, around some tight corners, and to the curb where I'm sure they found a new home.

After a few days of removing hardware, the really slow part started. The walls were a MESS! The shelving screws were installed in molly bolts. The vertical rods left ridges in the paint. The duct work installation clearly had put a few extra holes in the drywall. The walls and ceiling were separating from each other. It was bad. So I spackled and sanded, sanded and spackled. I spread caulk in all the corners. It was slow going, between waiting for layers to dry and waiting for opportunities to sneak upstairs (but not when the kids were asleep because it's right outside their bedroom). This stage took literally months. In the end, what I got was not perfect because--let's face it--this is a closet, but at least moderately even walls that have no giant holes or dents.

Here's a before and after for the caulking. You'll have to trust me on the spackle--it was too hard to photograph.

Stayed tuned for the next installment, where we reveal paint colors and further plans. (Spoiler alert: I waited until this project was totally completed before blogging it, so if you're someone who likes to turn to the last page of the book then I'll tell you that we are very happy with the final outcome.)