Painting! So much painting!

Sometimes I like painting swatches better than I like painting entire rooms or walls. But then sometimes I paint too many swatches in random places and our house starts to look like an outward manifestation of my mind and it. is. not. pretty. So I have to repaint. All of this is to say, I painted the hallway!

The original yellow, which wasn't so buttery looking IRL.

Because I am a terrible girlfriend, I removed the one paint color that Greg really likes in the house: the yellow in the hallway. (I know you're thinking it looks pretty but it was a high-sheen paint that made me feel queasy in artificial light.) When asked why I would want to repaint it, I told him, "It doesn't fit with our color story."

"I don't even know what that means."
"Just trust me."
"I like the yellow."
"I hate it. It's too shiny, too matchy with the bathroom floor."
"How about orange?"
"With a pink, yellow, and purple bathroom adjacent? No way. Any other requests?"
"Black?"
"Go to hell."

See? Terrible girlfriend! Instead I chose the same off-white from the kitchen. It's clean, it's neutral, and we can easily paint over it later when we find a color we both like. It we're being honest, it barely looks different but it makes me happy. It helps that I painted with an eggshell finish.

I saw a very pale blue (Benjamin Moore Whirlpool) on Making It Lovely that I wanted to use in the alcove between the kitchen and the hallway. I'm still on the fence about it--I think it makes the floor tiles look yellow. The upshot was that we realized how much more light reflected in this space with a lighter paint on the wall. It could have a little to do with the fact that we finally washed our kitchen windows, but I think the paint is helping. Before it was a french blue color that was actually very pretty.

Before

After

In certain lights this color reads white but in the bright morning sunlight that streams through the kitchen window it's a very pale blue. I picked it up from Kaleidoscope Paint and I think I paid more for my first car than I did for this paint. It's low VOC but, shitballs, was it ever expensive. I'm not sure it was worth it. The trim paint I used was Benjamin Moore Aura (Snowfall White with a satin finish) and I would sell my first born for this stuff. It's dreamy to paint with. I want to bathe in it (not really. but sorta.). I'll definitely use it again.

And then we're going to put in some baseboard. Really.

Sludgestorm!

Our rain garden is like a giant slurpee right now.

 

My poor Cryptomeria japonica was bent over with snow, like someone was pulling its ponytail from behind. We're going to have to restake it and give it some TLC this spring. Stupid snow isn't even sticking around. Hrmph.

Little things: the kitchen window

I painted the kitchen well over two years ago but I never finished painting around the window. I wanted to do a thin stripe of orange or some other funky color . . . but I couldn't find the right shade. So I ignored it and we endured this view for two years.

It didn't help that a former owner had sloppily glopped paint on the outside of the windows, obscuring the view inside.

I finally just said, "fuck it," painted the inside white and the outside trim with the color from the basement and called it good. Greg took it to the next level by scraping the outside paint from the windows and Windexing the glass.

Oh my god, it's like looking outdoors in HD, you guys. The amount of extra light that comes in to the kitchen now is staggering. We were both conflicted about cleaning the windows because we don't want birds flying into them, but then we realized that we have a bird feeder that has yet to be visited by a single bird and that we're probably okay. I have tried so hard to be the crazy lady with all the bird feeders but the birds aren't playing along.

Next up: replacing that awful light fixture (the installers did something VERY weird with the wiring or this would be done already), escutcheons on the faucet, and repainting the kitchen door. And maybe washing the rest of our windows.

On Battlestar Galactica

A lot of people make fun of my Battlestar Galactica posters in the living room but I never listen to them. I hope those people are ready to eat crow. Frakking crow.

If you have the fancy cable look for our house this weekend on Portlandia. The full episode they shot in our house doesn't have an air date that I can find (the sketch they shot here was called "Adult Babysitter") but our exterior is used in this weekend's skit about a couple obsessively watching Battlestar Galactica.

The interior shots are of someone else's house. Can we all agree now that BSG is awesome and there's nothing not-awesome about having posters of the show in our living room?

So say we all,
Heather

I think I'm going to have to declare this a garden oops

Planting a Mexican Orange here seemed like such a good idea. It's evergreen, pretty, and full of good-smelling flowers. But sadly, the color is all wrong for this area.

Screaming yellow Choisya ternata 'Sundance' in late November

Neon yellow just isn't playing nicely with the rust and orange here. I need a small, evergreen shrub that will play nicely with this warm color palate. I'd love to put in a Fothergilla 'Mt. Airy' but it's deciduous. But look how pretty. So pretty!

Image yanked from here.

I kind of want to plant it anyway. But I need evergreen elements! Maybe another daphne? Or maybe an Osmanthus delavayi? I was hipped to it by Loree and made sure to pay attention to it when I visited the Chinese Garden with my parents. Or maybe I should finally give in to Oregon grape. This is the corner that we look at from our bed, so whatever goes here needs to be beautiful in every season.

The Choisya is going to move to the other side of the yard where it will get morning sun and a reprieve from the hottest part of the day. This supposedly leaves them less screaming yellow. And you know what? I KNEW that it would turn that color in full sun and I planted it anyway, thinking that it would magically behave differently. Like if I loved it enough it would just caramelize or something? It's this same kind of thinking that makes me plant all of my shrubs too closely together.

And I think the Lonicera nitida 'Baggensen's Gold' is gonna have to go somewhere else, too. It's just not the right color even though it's going to be a pretty little shrub.

One of you knows the perfect plant to put here. Come on, give it up already. Lend a fledgling gardener a hand.

Happy new year to ME!

My hellebores are blooming! Oh happy day!

And then this happened. I'm assuming these are hyacinths that I planted last fall.

Though I'm kind of wondering where the rest of them are . . . it looks sort of dumb to have two random bulbs in a sea of brown.

And my daphne is forming buds!

Is it time to start gardening again? How about now?

2012 is going to be the year of little things

When I was looking for a house to buy my friends were knee deep in renovating their entire house. I was taking a tour of their kitchen remodel and my friend showed me how, three months later, they still hadn't glued on the countertop backsplash. He told me, "This would take me an hour tops but it's these little things that never get done when you own a fixer."

I swore I'd be different.

And yet, here I am, two years after I patched that mystery hole in the ceiling of my kitchen and I still haven't textured that spot or repainted the kitchen ceiling. My hallway vestibules still haven't been painted, even though it would probably take an hour to complete. My kitchen window sits unpainted, with forty different test colors ringing it. There a small hole in the baseboard of the bedroom that needs to be filled.

So this year I'm going to focus on the little things. I'm going to hang curtains. I'm going to look into toe boards (we have none in the house). I'm going to finally paint the kitchen door and the kitchen window and that spot above the door that never got painted for reasons I no longer remember.

And we have a couple of big things coming down the pike: we're going to replace the front picture window that is rotting and get the house painted. And I'm going to start landscaping the front yard, including another rain garden. I'm really excited.

Happy new year!