Bedroom - Part 1

The transformative power of paint in the dining room has led me to move on to the next room on my 'hit list': the bedroom

Again with the blah beige :(

But now that step one in the makeover process has been completed...


Bye bye beige! And as with the dining room, I think the new colour on the walls makes the floor and mouldings look pretty spectacular. LOVE it.

Part 2 coming soon!

Signs of Spring

Look what I found, peeking out of the ground beside my house!

(I actually hate these things (hence the obvious lack of care around them) - they're tiger lilies, and the place is overrun with them . But still. SPRING!)

Buds on the lilac bushes, and a brilliant blue sky.



Birds everywhere (all of whom managed to elude my camera)

And yes, even the inevitable garbage in the brook, waiting for me to get out there and do some Spring Cleaning (remember garbage day last year?).


Even though the yard actually looks pretty desolate right now.


Even though I know that we probably haven't seen the last of the snow, yet.
Even though it's technically still Winter...

Spring is definitely on its way!

Fine Dining

Ok, here we go. If you've been following the progress in my dining room in the last couple of posts, today's the big day. Here is what my dining room looked like before I moved in:


The door on the left is a small closet (yes, in the dining room), lined with vintage wallpaper. I'd show it to you but it's currently busy serving other customers fulfilling its storage duties and is not feeling very photogenic.

As with EVERY OTHER WALL IN MY HOUSE, the walls were beige. There's nothing wrong with beige, but believe me, living in a beige bubble eventually starts to wear on a person!

And that light fixture is woefully inadequate. But don't worry, I have some ideas for sprucing it up to eventually use it somewhere more appropriate.

And finally, the moment we've all been waiting for... the 'finished' room:


I should note (before someone who knows me comments below!) that I very rarely actually use this room as a dining room. It's usually my 'office', and that armoire in the corner is full of office-y things like my printer and office supplies. So I set the table just for you - it would hardly do to show you a picture of it with my laptop on the table, now would it?! :)

As I mentioned the other day, after the painting was done I was ready to swap out the old, undersized light fixture. This pendant is something I made a couple of years ago, it used to hang in the dining room of my last apartment:


I originally used a lamp kit to light it, but now that I'm in a house, I hard-wired it in.

I first found the idea for this light via ReadyMade, but the instructions are on Instructables. The light is actually a Danish design from the early '70s called the IQ Light . (If you go there and look at all the variations, I think mine was the 80 piece version - so if you're thinking of making one of your very own, be prepared for blisters!!)

That's it for now. I still have a few other projects lined up for this room (a piece of furniture I want to make over to use as a sideboard, some desperately-needed art/mirror/whatever for all those bare walls...). And I know there are a lot of shades of wood going on here, but I'm working on it! For one thing, the table and chairs have had many many lives in many different places, and the chairs at the very least are coming to the end of their lifespan, so I may have to do something about that one of these days.


Any thoughts? Comments on the colour? Suggestions for those bare walls?

Progress - and a quick peek

Hello! It's been awhile. You'll have to excuse my absence, but ever since my last post, my days have been consumed with addressing the problem I found there. I spent the entire month of February, it seems, with a scraper in my hand. Eventually, those walls I showed you ended up like this:



Hallelujah. Maybe I'm crazy. Maybe I don't know what I'm doing. Probably a little of both. But once the scraping began, there was no easy way to end it. I definitely didn't want to just patch over the problem and get on with the painting, because I didn't want the new paint to peel right off. So I carefully scraped the two walls back to the bare plaster, to start with a 'clean slate' (these two are exterior walls, the other two dining room walls didn't have the same issues).

And now, as of yesterday, the painting is complete! Here's a sneak peek of the colour:


I think it looks pretty grey in this pic, but it's actually a greyish green by Behr called Verdigris. I'm about to replace the light fixture, so stay tuned for full room pics tomorrow (provided the light swapping goes off without a hitch!).