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We have friends coming to visit this weekend and I am super excited! The guest room is one of the better rooms in the house so it's not high on our priority list for any major projects, but I have been working on a few very minor additions to welcome all the visitors we're expecting this summer.

This fabulous printable from I Rock So What is a must for every guest room. I'm always a fan of fun typography so this jumped out at me immediately. After downloading the image from I Rock So What, I just opened it in a photo editor, added our info, printed it out, and popped it into a frame I already had. Truly brilliant. Even The Hubs thought it was pretty great. :)

House Tour: Part 4 (Bedrooms + Loft)

We've reached the final leg of our house tour. Yellow walls, same blue ceiling as is in the kitchen. You can't see it in this picture, but there are also glow in the dark star stickers  along the window wall and ceiling.
I must say, I kinda miss the moving box lamp stand. It's simplicity and ruggedness...

There's not much going on in this room, design-wise, because it's one of the better ones, but it will see a lot of traffic this summer!

The bathroom isn't large, but it has doors from the guest room and also from the hall. I love the extra privacy this provides for guests when they visit.

The master bedroom. Eek! We need to get a quilt that fits! And a bed skirt. And some proper nightstands. And... the list goes on and on here, although it's mostly accessorizing as opposed to major construction work.

The walls are beige with the exception of the navy blue accent wall. You may recall from the color palette post that we are keeping this room's color scheme basically the same and coordinating the rest of the house.

The door that you see on the right goes to the master bathroom. It's cozy but, believe it or not, it beats our previous master bath. It has a double vanity, our favorite Euro cabinets ;), and the same eggplant/plum-colored paint that we've seen elsewhere.

Looking at the opposite side of the master bedroom,there is a closet with mirrored doors and you can just barely see (bottom left corner) the steps leading to the loft.






We love the loft! It makes the master bedroom feel like a swanky hotel room with its own living room separate from the rest of the house. By day, this space functions as my office. To the right of the built-in desk is a small door for attic access. During this ridiculously long winter, we enjoyed watching movies at night because it was also the warmest space in the house. In the summer that may be a different story...

Bedrooms and bathrooms and lofts, oh my! This wraps up our house tour. Thanks for joining me.  Now for the real fun: the projects!

House Tour: Part 3 (Main Level)

I should probably be more embarrassed by these photos than I am. On the day these pictures were taken, the house was still decorated for Christmas and we had just begun our basement renovation.  We had been living in the house for about 10 weeks at this point, so the boxes of stuff that belonged in the basement are moved into the living room. (Confession: four of those boxes contain piano music are STILL not unpacked...)

View from Front Door

 This is the view from the front door.

The walls in the living room and dining room are beige and boring builder off-white. I'm pretty sure they haven't painted the stairwells and halls since the house was built. In 1986. Blah. The floors are hardwood that could use a refinish at some point. There are some patches where rugs or furniture have worn right through the finish down to the bare wood but, being solid wood, it's definitely one of the better floor coverings in the house!

Immediately when you walk in, there is a half-bath to the right. It has the original linoleum floor, sink/counter, and toilet. The walls are a deep eggplant color.

Living Room

The living room and dining room are one large open space, divided only by a beam in the ceiling. Yikes, just looking at these pictures with all the mess makes me anxious. I'm so glad we're done with the unpacking phase now!

Dining Room

Yes, dear reader, that is indeed a mirrored wall. Only the 80's best for this house! I dread the day we take those down...

We didn't have a dining room in our old house and we sold our kitchen table when we moved so we've been dressing up the card table with a tablecloth.

These stairs take you up to the bedroom level (photo on L) and down to the basement (photo on R).

The kitchen is at the back of the house. We love the original Euro-style cabinets. Well, sort of. More specifically, we love that an outdated kitchen gives us a functional house to live in while still having opportunities to add some sweat equity!


Does linoleum ever die?!?! It's held up way too well. I have a hard time replacing things just because they're outdated, ya know? If they're damaged, it's not so hard, but these floors are in great shape. The same cannot be said for the off-white Formica counter tops, however. They sort of dip down above the dishwasher and they stain horribly!! I was cooking dried black beans one day and the water that dripped off the spoon stained the counter. Ridonculous, I know. That's not the only stain we've added since living here.


The backsplash and kitchen accent wall are painted in the same eggplant shade as the bathroom. I love dark colors, so I actually don't mind this one so much, I just don't think it's right for this particular house. We'll use one of the lighter shades from our color palette when we repaint. Everything else in the kitchen is beige, but - to keep things interesting - it's not the same beige as the adjoining living/dining rooms. Oh and the ceiling - that is light blue. All of that will be remedied in time. :)


Thanks for joining me again! Next time I'll wrap up the house tour with the bedrooms and loft. If you missed the first part of the tour, you can check out those posts here: House Tour: Part 1 (Layout) and House Tour Part 2 (Basement).

House Tour: Part 2 (Basement)

OK, prepare yourself for a photo-heavy post! These pictures show the house after we moved in, but before we started any major projects. We'll start from the bottom floor and move up from there!

 

Laundry Closet (R) + Stairs to Main Level (L)

As you'll recall from the layout post, the basement is completely above grade, so a big chunk of it is taken up by the garage. This is what you see when you walk in the door from the garage. There's a nondescript closet that houses the washer and dryer, stairs to the main level, and a hallway leading to the rest of the basement.

Laundry Closet + Door to Garage (R)

 Continuing down the hall, there's a half-bath (sorry, forgot to take a picture before we started demolishing it!) across from a utility closet where the heat pump is housed.

Half-Bath

Half-Bath Door (R) + Utility Closet (R)

Family Room

At the end of the hall is a family room with a corner fireplace (missed this in our before pictures, too - clearly, we need to get our act together!) and a French door that opens to a patio.

Family Room

The flat black paint on the walls works wonderfully with the lavender walls of the adjoining hallway - NOT! This area is our first priority. That does it for the basement tour.  More pictures to come!

House Tour: Part 1 (Layout)

We closed on our new house in November, moved in the next day, and left town a few days after that for a two-week midwest tour (which included a family wedding and the birth of our first niece!).  December was spent unpacking and prepping for Christmas and we jumped into our first renovation projects in January.

I'm excited to share the projects, but before we go changing everything I should probably first give you a tour.  We'll start with the layout.  A picture is worth a thousand words, right?  Here ya go!

Lower Level

Main Level

Bedroom Level

Loft (accessed through master bedroom)

For the most part, this is a very standard layout for townhouses in our area, but what is not standard is the lower level/basement (which is not really a basement because it is above grade) and the loft.  This presents a couple of unique challenges: 1) there are a LOT of stairs - we get our exercise :) and 2) we have very little hidden storage.  The single-car garage has a little bit of space for tools and such, but everything else has to go up to the attic.  Up, up, up to the attic.

That's it for today.  In Part 2 I'll give you some actual pics of the place.

The Color Palette

OK, you guys all know how the computer screen's version of a paint color is not at all what the color is in real life, but what can you do?  These blues are waaaay off.  I found that if  hold my head off to the side of the monitor and look at it from an angle then the colors are truer to life.  If you want confused looks from anyone who may walk past while reading, you can try that. :)  Basically, the Aleutian is much more gray than powder blue and the Saguaro is a brighter green, not nearly as close in color to the Tony Taupe, as they appear online.  Disclaimers aside, here are the colors we chose:

Blues

Sherwin-Williams 6244 Naval

Sherwin-Williams 6241 Aleutian

Greens

Sherwin Williams 6179 Artichoke

Martha Stewart 092 Saguaro

 

Neutrals

Sherwin-Williams 7038 Tony Taupe

Sherwin-Williams 7036 Accessible Beige

Trim

Behr 1812 Swiss Coffee

Stain

TBD!  We haven't had a project that has required stain just yet so I haven't selected this one, but once we do I anticipate using the same color on all stained projects in the house.

The Palette in Practice

So far, we've only used the Saguaro, Tony Taupe, and Swiss Coffee, but I'm excited to see how this color scheme plays out through the rest of the house.  It is such a great feeling to think that I don't have that huge decision-making process in front of me before I start each new room and I like that the light/dark options give me some flexibility.  Who knows, though, I could get a sample of one of those blues and it ends up being hideous and I'll be back to square one.  I guess we'll find out!

Selecting a Whole-House Color Palette

 

One of the biggest lessons I learned from House #1 was how not to pick paint colors.  I painted that house one room at a time, selecting colors on an as needed basis.  It went well until the last room and I couldn't find a color that fit both of my requirements: 1) be a color I like and 2) match the other colors in the house.  I ended up with a turquoise master bedroom (why did I save my personal room for last???) that I never liked.

When we moved into House #2, I knew I needed to do something different so I wouldn't paint myself into a hypothetical corner of color selection.  Our townhome is pretty standard for this area, but the layout presents some interesting challenges when it comes to painting.  Although our living space is spread between four (yes, FOUR) levels, each level kind of flows into one or two others through the stairs so I wanted a cohesive color scheme through the entire house, especially for the halls and stairwells that connect all the levels.*  I imagine a house with an open floor plan would present a similar challenge.

Here's the color selection scheme I came up with: We have two bedrooms, so I wanted two main colors and, of course, ya gotta have a neutral.  The Hubs loves blue and we already had a navy wall in the master bedroom (which we liked!) so that was easy.  My favorite color is green, so I selected a green that would coordinate with the navy.  I'm totally digging all the gray walls happening right now and really wanted our neutral to be gray.  However, we also had some beige walls in the master bedroom (which we also liked) and I just couldn't make the cool gray and warm beige of the master bedroom get along so I opted for a beige, very similar to the one already on the bedroom walls, instead.  I was really quite sad about nixing the gray.  During the process of picking colors I even had an unusually vivid dream about a beautiful gray and white kitchen... *sigh*...  House #3?

So at this point, we had navy blue, a sage green, and a light beige.  We're not done quite yet.  I wanted a second shade of each color so I would have six options in total to mix and match through the entire house.  The next part was easy.  I simply took the paint swatch of each of the original colors (I was using one of those giant paint swatch deck things - so handy to have around!) and picked a second shade that was a shade or two lighter/darker than the first.  Since the blue was dark I picked a lighter coordinating color.  The green was light so I picked an additional darker shade from that swatch.  Same with the beige.  Easy peasy!

Finally, I selected a white for trim.  (Thanks, Dad, for making me a white paint snob who can't just go pick up the can of "bright white" trim paint and be satisfied...)

Eventually I will also pick a stain color, but that will be a project for another day!

In summary, this was process for coming up with our color palette house #2.

1. Pick two main colors and a neutral (generally speaking: gray, beige, or white) that all coordinate
2. Select  a light/dark version of each color
3. Select a trim color
4. Select a stain color (if needed)

Naturally, we may come up with other items that need painting (furniture, cabinets, etc.) which may require more paint colors choices, but this should take care of the walls.  I'll share the colors we decided on in my next post!

Do you have any wisdom to share on how to pick a whole house color palette?  I'd love to hear it!



*Note: having so many stairs also makes it difficult to pick a place to stop painting because you either have to stop before you get to the stairs, leaving the area incomplete, or go up the stairs, thereby starting in on another level that you're not ready to work on yet.  Thankfully, I like painting!

I'm back!

Well, I'm back.  Last I wrote, we were residing in the home of generous friends until we could close on our house.  Well, close we did!  In November... and then there was oh-so-much home-conquering to do that I didn't even take a break to document it.  Clearly, I'm not a very good blogger.  My sincerest apologies. :)

To make up for being MIA, you can expect a post on Monday about selecting paint colors for an entire house.  Get excited!