The dining room, or how I spent my labor day weekend.

My dining room is odd.  When I bought the house the trim was missing from an entire wall where there had clearly been water damage at some point.  I figured I'd have to spend the next year visiting The Rebuilding Center looking for matching trim.  Then there's the half carpet situation.  The wood floor actually extends underneath and beyond where the carpet ends, but only by 8 inches.

I have a theory about this.  My realtor thinks I'm crazy.

In Portland Maps, under the section where they break down the square footage, there's a carport that measures 140 square feet.  I don't have a carport.  I think this section of the dining room used to be the carport. 

It would explain why I have an electrical panel in the dining room. It would explain why there's wood flooring only in half the room. 

Anyhoosy, the dining room was a bit of a mess.  Paint that didn't meet the corners, missing trim, electrical outlets hanging out of the wall.  That first week I was working on the house my electrician friend Josh came and took care of all the safety hazards.  He cleaned up the bad wiring in the attic, anchored the electrical outlets properly, and did a once-over to make sure I didn't go up in smoke.  One day I was home, recovering from dental work, when I noticed some boards high on a shelf in my garage.

The missing trim! It was all there!  Once I got that up I was motivated to paint the trim.

Once the trim was painted I got the bug to paint the whole room.  I had originally wanted to paint the dining room a steel blue and the living room a deep warm orange.  But I sort of liked having the rooftop painting against the green . . . it made parts of the painting pop in a way I didn't think they would on a blue wall.  So I put some paint samples up and found a pale green I liked.

A funny thing happened at the Home Depot.  The color swatch I put on the wall was a Glidden paint sample.  When I went to purchase a full gallon I asked for it to be put in a Behr base. I figured they'd grab the color coding from the Glidden paint and just put it in the Behr base.  Instead they used the color matching computer program.  The resulting paint did NOT match the paint sample I put on the wall.  It had a sick fluorescent tinge to it.

It was the color of toothpaste!  Seriously:

It made me crazy, so crazy I couldn't stand it.  The next day I went and bought more paint samples.  Two days later, Labor Day, I went back to Home Depot and got a new paint color.  It wasn't as gray as I wanted, but I could live with it.  It's very pretty in the morning light.  At night it almost has a metallic sheen.

 

 

Soon I'll reupholster the chairs with a more vibrant pattern in an orange or yellow tone.  Someday I'll have the floors refinished and extended so I can get rid of that crazy zigzag carpet.  For now the paint demons have been quieted, though I'm sure they'll start screaming again soon.  I never though I was compulsive until I bought a house; now I'm pretty sure I could paint trim for a millennium and I don't know if I'd be in heaven or hell.  I'm learning so much about myself, mainly that there's a lot of crazy in here.  Or maybe that's the paint fumes talking.