Never Before Seen Footage

I'm going to squeak in one old blog post before the end of the week, and one with never before seen footage to boot!

You see, I inherited this fireplace mantle from our next door neighbor Mrs. Harriett before she moved into an assisted living facility. We so miss this sweet spunky lady and this little treasure she gifted us with brings back very fond memories of and with her, but we do love our new neighbor!

Long story short, the old computer died and with it the pictures that showed the husband and I spending days stripping this beautiful late 1800s fireplace mantle with the heat gun from layers of mostly bright frog green paint were lost. There is some lovely detailing on the mantle along with some beautiful wood grain that really deserves better pictures one of these days!

Anyways, we put in a lot of time cleaning up this baby and in the end it looked like this in its new spot in our master bedroom. It provides a nice counter 'weight' to our bed directly opposite and a simply great focal point on a wall that was simply plain boring aside from the batten and board treatment I'd given it before we moved in.

It's just a mantle, no actual fireplace, so we covered the opening of the firebox with a panel that we painted black for now. Maybe we'll add shelves for candles or something like that. Later.
However, with the black panel in place it did all look a bit too stark, and the black panel to wood ratio was off. Of course, since there is usually a band of tile surrounding the fire box!

So I went to the orange box and poked around the rile section for a bit until I scored a couple of sheets of this variegated cream and latte mosaic tile. At just $5 a sheet these were a steal, very much in keeping with the type of glazed tile you would see in an original, and fit the overall color scheme of our bedroom. Neat! I also grabbed two small buckets of pre-mixed adhesive & grout in a soft almond color, and went home.

This was an incredibly quick and easy fix. I cut the mosaic tile sheet with a pair of household scissors into wide strips, then spread some adhesive, placed the tile, and so slowly worked my way around the opening of the former firebox.

Oh look! You can catch a glimpse of "The Green" - that's the color the whole fireplace mantle was painted. It was very bright ...and very very green.

After letting it dry, I used the same stuff for grout, and then touched up the paint along the edge where board and tile meet. Done!

Re-Nesting

Alright, I'm done waiting for nicer weather to take better pictures. It's been overcast and dreary for most of the day all week long with gushing rains in the afternoon and while I'm not big into photoshopping, staging, white-balancing and otherwise prepping photos (as you may have noticed) and tend to serve them straight from the camera, this weather has been a real downer.

Our Ugly Duckling is lots, but it is -not- dark, it's not gloomy and it's a shame when your pictures make it look like it is. Bah!

Anyways, this will have to do. And since it's - of course- not completely done, there should be better pictures in the future.

I - hold on to your hats - repainted the master bedroom.
No kidding.

This is what it looked like before:

 

[Oh lovely teal, how I adore you ...]

Lovely lovely teal above a crisp white batten and board - we loved it. Unfortunately, it didn't flow. Our master suite wasn't 'sweet' and bedroom, dressing room and bathroom didn't come together as a unit but always struck me as a collection of adjacent rooms. I rambled about it in more detail here.

There's even a mood board so you can see where I was hoping to take the rooms, bit by bit.

The husband wasn't at all convinced - Getting rid of our lovely teal? - especially when I told him I was planning on going all Southern on the room and giving it a light turquoise ceiling, just like the porches you see here in the south.

God bless his heart, he indulged me and let me have my way, so one weekend I broke out the paint brushes and rollers and got'er done!

 

[After: Our bedroom gone south]

I carried over the same beige "Cultural Colonial Beige" that I'd already used in both the dressing room and the master bathroom for continuity. It's really a sweet beige, more an off-white, and much less yellow and with a soft greyish tint to it than it appears in the pictures.

The ceiling I painted a pale robin's egg blue. I wasn't quite sold on it at first and really, I was worried that the ceiling would appear lower than it is, but 'lo and behold, I'm loving it and man, does it give the room height. If you ever wondered how much of that "let the eye travel to make things bigger/taller/etc." - it is SO very true.

Our whole bedroom feels so light and airy and more open, I'm so glad I made the switch. The husband is just as enamored with the new look! For the win!

I discovered these lamp bases and shades at the blue box and picked them up for a steal. They are taller than our old lamps (heh ...there was really no way you could go shorter, really) and they work so much better in scale and looks.

Then the gods were especially generous and allowed an 75% off Sale coincide with a nicely padded home decor budget and - Tada! - I managed to pick up this chevron rug at Rugs USA in the 8x10 size for a whopping $80. Perfect! It's fun and funky and will hold up nicely to our Zoo and the occasional drywall dust.

Yep, I'm loving it! There is, of course, the issue of a new headboard, new bedding, painted doors, and crown molding, but we are really digging our new nest. How about you? Have you re-nested lately?

In the Mood

... for more mood boards!

Yep, you heard that right. More mood boards!

On the quest for a more cohesive look for our sweet master suite consisting of bedroom, dressing/walk-through closet and bathroom, the husband and I have been digging through various sources of inspiration such as a slew of catalogs from Pottery Barn, Ballard Design and Restoration Hardware, board after board on pinterest as well as movies, TV shows and of course the creme de la creme, other DIY and House blogs. Well, okay, -I- have been trolling these sources and then presented the husband with my findings for a final "yay!" or "nay!"

In the end, both of use seem to gravitate to a style that can be best described as "NYC Loft meets Farmhouse Charm" or "Restoration Hardware goes Country"... heh!

With that in mind, both dressing room and bedroom - so far white with lovely dark teal accents - got a quick and rather simple make-over: off-white/light tan for the walls, white trim, black window casings to up the industrial feel of the ugly 80s aluminum windows we are not yet going to replace, wood and wicker and touches of vintage brass.

On Pinterest - the mother lode of all things inspiration - I discovered a lovely pin utilizing a screen door to separate rooms and LOVED it so we'll be doing that for our bathroom (possibly adding opaque plexiglass for privacy in and on the 'loo).

Dressing Room:

dressing room by littleoldhouse on polyvore.com

To-Do:
- paint walls off-white/tan
- lay dark cork floor
- re-upholster existing bedroom chair with linen
- add rug
- add light fixture (love those gilded accents; maybe I can create the look on a natural shade?)
- add wicker hamper
- install screen door to bathroom

Master Bedroom:

Bedroom Take 2 by littleoldhouse on polyvore.com

To-Do:
- paint walls above batten and board off-white/tan
- re-upholster headboard in linen/burlap
- new curtains (have idea - will diy)
- add rug
- find bigger, brassier lamps for night stands
- get a tripod lamp

Quicky curtain tune-up

While most people seem to leave their master bedroom for last, we started working on it fairly early into our whole renovation of the Ugly Duckling, installing batten and board (here, here and here), giving it a fresh coat of paint and shortly after moving in, adding curtains for a more finished look (here).

That doesn't mean the room is done, but it was cute and cozy and we are still loving it.

There was just something about the curtains that needed fixing. You see, I like it when curtains puddle on the floor. Not a lot - not a heaping pile of a puddle - but a little puddle hinting at a just a bit more fabric than necessary.

Our bedroom curtains, however, were puddling just a bit too much which made them look messy and unfinished, not to mention having to squat down to tidy them up every time we opened and closed them. And we do that a lot, well, at least for the one window that is in direct line of sight with our backyard neighbors.

Two words:
Liiiight Shoooow. (Or Peep show - pick one)

With the husband having to work, Little Man busy creating fantastic Lego creations and the laundry battled successfully, I decided it was now or never to hem this unruly lot of curtains.

[Before: You see the puddly mess?]

I straightened them allowing the curtain fabric to fall flush against the floor before easing the fabric out along the floor and then snipped along the line which - with a half inch allowance for the seam tape - would make the curtain touch the floor.

[In-Progress: Not my fabric scissors but they are sharp!]

I then ironed on the hemming tape


peeled off the protective paper covering


folded over once and ironed it to bond the fabric to the hemming tape.


Done!

[In-Progress: Curtain on the right has been hemmed to its new length;
curtain on the left is still the original length. See how differently they drape?]

Rinse and repeat for two curtains each on three windows (well, two. One is a door disguising as a window. Remember?)


So much better. I can now open and close the curtains without spending any time arranging the train on the floor. Makes you wonder why I waited this long ...

Sure, I want to get blinds (match stick or bamboo or similar) if I can find the proper length at a decent. Our original windows are an odd size and rather tall and the standard sizes are usually about 10 inches too short. Then again, the cats would love the peekaboo feature by the window sill, I'm sure.

flowers in the window

Do you pin?

I started pinning just two weeks ago and just love the wealth of ideas, creativity and inspiration packed into one central spot on the 'net! Naturally I poke around on pinterest for ideas to pretty up our Ugly Duckling. One such picture that caught my eye was this one. Can you guess what exactly it was that piqued my interest?

[source: houseobsession.wordpress.com]

Yes, the original molding is beautiful. The door frame is fantastic and the color scheme is so soothing and sweet. An over all lovely lovely room. What I really really love though is the hanging basket with the gently trailing vine in the window. No kidding!

So I stole that idea for our master bedroom 'cause I can! On our old porch we had two hanging baskets with fern. Those two poor ferns did not survive the combination of past winter and remodeling-induced neglect and so all that moved with us to our new residence were the empty baskets.

[Before: Sad empty hanging basket]

This was also a great opportunity to introduce a pop of color to our bedroom. After debating for a few minutes in front of the spray paint rack at a local home improvement store I decided to go with yellow (apple green was a strong contender though).

[The chosen one]

Just a few light and even coats of paint later my hanging basket looked like this

[mellow yellow basket]

Once it was completely dry - which took longer than anticipated on this humid day - I cut a new liner from a white kitchen trashbag to make sure no water would dribble onto my new curtains and the wood floors in my bedroom and relocated some sweet potatoe vines.

[New liner]

[Sweet potato vines]

Sweet potatoe vines are happy campers, even for people with a less than green thumb. They'll grow anywhere anytime and have a cheerful light green foliage. It's also really easy to multiply the number of sweet potatoe vine plants you have but simply cutting off a piece of vine and plunking it into a pot with water. 2-3 days later your cuttings will start sprouting roots and you're set to plant new plants (which means all you ever have to do is buy one single sweet potatoe vine plant to cover your entire yard with it).

[After: mellow yellow planter hanging out in the window]

I'd screwed a hook into the ceiling to hang my planter earlier and with a little help from the stepladder my sweet potatoe vine ended up gracing my bedroom window in no time. Love it, love it, love it! I think it should hang a little lower but that little touch of green is making me really really happy!

Intermission:

When we last left the Master bedroom, things looked cleaner (freshly painted window trim) and more finished but still a ways from being completed.

[Another not-staged photo. Yes, that's a can of paint on

my night stand. What? You don't keep it there? Weird ...]

One day, while shopping at a local department store, I ended up in their fabric department. It's a far cry from what it used to be after years of downsizing and changing to more of a quilter's corner than a general fabric aisle but I simply like fabric and you never know what you'll find, right?

Ready to call it a day and hit the cash register, I spied this at the last moment peeking out from underneath the $1.50/yard fabric.

[Score!]

A simple and sweet white fabric with tealy blue dots woven into rows. This might be just right for our bedroom windows. I hmmm-ed and haw-ed over it for a bit, especially after finding out there were only a mere 11 yards left on the bolt. That meant that in order to have enough fabric for 2 panels for 3 windows I'd have to cut the bult in half lengthwise. Well, to make a long story short, I grabbed the bolt and brought it home.

After a quick stop at "Fred's" (which is sort of like a Big Lots) where I discovered oil rubbed bronze curtain rods for a whopping $6 each and a quick stop at the blue box to pick up some curtain clip rings ($4.95 for 14 small ones), I went home and whipped up some quick curtains. I did not hem the selvage edge - the little fuzzy fringe tickles me pink every time I see it!

[Close up and personal]

There you go - it's amazing how curtains make a room look and feel much more of an actual room and so much more civilized! I'm still planning on installing matchstick shades or similar wooden shades - not so much for privacy since we're "up in the trees" and have no concerns in that regard but to add some texture and to finish the look.

Light!

Here's a quicky for you to tide you over until my brain has recovered from too little sleep and too much excitement (more on that later) and functions well enough to write a bigger post. That also requires getting my rear end into gear and -do- something more worthy of a post than emptying out half a dozen moving boxes (in the frantic search for a missing library book - joy!).

This is what our ceiling light in the master bedroom looked like until a couple of days ago.
Bare bulb - Niiiiice!
Somehow a handful of the Duckling's ceiling lights ended up with their covers missing. Why? Your guess is as good as mine and I keep drawing a blank. Anyways, this is Florida and the fan feature wins over light feature.
Hands down.
10 months of the year.

Oh, the light did work. It just looked ....well, unfinished and needed -something-. Blue Box store to the rescue. The blue box store has a rather surprising and stylish lighting aisles and a great selection of lamp shades.

That's where I found this baby here in teal and turquoise and silver for a whopping $14.99 Not kidding, it was really that inexpensive. I picked up a bulb clamp and a finial which in the end I didn't use. Three pieces of wire and 30 minutes later, the view had improved by leaps and bounds

Much better :o) My only regret? The design doesn't have a bit of yellow in it. Maybe I'll fix that with a little bit of acrylic paint at some point but for now I'm really liking the new look while still able to enjoy an indoor breeze without having to let the mosquitoes in or the dry cool air out.

Now you see it ...

Like pretty much every other room here at the Duckling, our master bedroom is a work in progress.

So far we've added batten and board and painted the room: a crisp clean "Pure White" for batten and board and the ceiling and the delicious dark teal-y blue "Shaded Lake" for the upper part of the walls. Then we moved in and crammed everything and the neighbor's our cat into it and progress came somewhat to a stand-still. I still have to paint the trim around the windows and that was a thought that preoccupied me a quite a bit.

[Before: Big brown exterior door right next to the bed]

You see, our master bedroom has the weirdest door to window ratio and configuration. It has two windows and four doors, spread out over three walls in the most imbalanced way possible. The only wall suitable for our bed has a window and the door to the outside staircase. Talk about wonky. While we do like and sleep well with the current furniture arrangement, my sense of visual balance has been suffering mightily.

Since for now the exterior door is staying where it is (maybe to be turned into a window or perhaps a door with a glass inset at some point or to be closed up for good), some decent camouflage was called for. I'd seen people "fake" an extra window for symmetry by simply hanging window treatments against the wall and thought this was a great idea but I wanted to take it one step further.

I made the door vanish!
[After: Now you see it, now you don't!]

I simply painted the door to match the walls giving its lower half a coat of Pure White and the upper part a coat of Shaded Lake to help the door play chameleon and blend into the background rather than hogging all of the attention. So so -so- much better!

Now I need to find some quiet time to whip up some window treatments, install the hardware and dress up two windows, one real and one fake. Oh, and paint window trim. Argh!

All batty

Remember the faux batten and board treatment for our Master Bedroom? I think the last time I showed you an update it looked like this

[In Progress - and yes, the patchy cow-print trim is driving me batty]

Since the trim isn't painted yet and I can't with good conscience expose you to more patchy trim here's a current shot from the opposite corner. Every seam is caulked, the boards are painted with semi-gloss Ultra White and I even got around to painting the base molding to match. Yay me!

[After]

I'm so in love with how it looks, I'm itching to add it to another room. Muhahaha ... and since I'm the one who works part-time, there's very little husband can do to stop me, right?

Batten down the hatches!

Over the weekend I continued my faux batten and board treatment in the Master bedroom. The husband was off camping with the little man at the Greater Jacksonville Camp Out enjoying some quality man-to-man time while I got to mess around at our Duckling house scot free!

No, I didn't paint anything in forbidden colors aka colors not mutually agreed upon or get a head start on flooring the laundry or the dressing room since negotiations are still on-going. Nooo! I got the big girl pants and the tools and continued working on the batten and board in our bedroom.

Ingredients:

• furring strips
• liquid nails
• brats
• paintable caulk

[In-progress: Chair rail is up]

First I installed the chair rail part. I measure each piece, cut it and after spreading a decent amount of liquid nail on the back put it in place using a level to make sure that each board is, well, level. Nope, I didn't bother with mitered corners. I simply butted the edges and caulked right over it. I know, I know, it's not that hard and I promise I'll get to mastering mitered corners soon. I did, however, miter the bottom corners of each batten so they wouldn't jut out so much from the base board.

[Applying liquid nails]

This was really the super easy part even though I discovered that either it was measuring with the Little Man or my difficulty with anything non-metric that caused me to end up with a 3 foo gap. I guess one trip to the blue box is in order.

After that I started with adding the battens to the trickiest part of one of the walls: tucked between the door and a window there is a light switch and an outlet. I decided that the spacing between my battens needed to be based on what worked for this part.

[In-progress: battens in place]

After I'd positioned those first two starting battens I used a piece of board to help space the battens in the correct distance from each other. There are a few spaces where I had to veer from that first course, tweaking the distance a bit so it corresponds better with the architectural features (doors, windows, etc) in the room than slavishly following a set measurement. It looks much more balanced that way. I caulked along the seams between the rail and the battens and everything is now ready for paint!

That is if I can make up my mind whether I want to add short battens underneath the windows ... What do you think?

Batten & Board Prep

For the bedroom, husband and I have been oogling batten and board as a possible wall treatment. We both like how it's equally rustic and chic, casual and elegant and how it would harmonize with the existing architectural features.

Here's how other bloggers have tackled this project:
The Casabella Project
House of Smiths
Pancakes and French Fries
It's the little things
etc.

Technically, we're not really doing a batten and board treatment on the walls. We're skipping the board part, just adding the battens which were traditionally used to cover the seams between the boards, and calling it a day. So, here's what the bedroom looked at the beginning of the project:

[Before ... or is it In-progress? Master Bedroom freshly painted]

We divided the walls in our bedroom on the same height as the window sashes, painting the lower, bigger half in Behr's Ultra Pure White in semi-gloss and the upper half in Valspar's Shaded Lake.
One of the bloggers recommended furring strips for this project and since they fit the bill (cheap and easy) that's what I picked up: several 1x2s and 1x4s. They are raw wood and of course needed to be primed and painted. I chose to prime first, then install and finish painting them along with giving the walls their second coat.

Let the priming begin! Here the boards are laid out in the Masterbathroom. The 1x4s are already primed, the 1x2s are in progress. In order to save time priming them on three sides I simply scooched them together into a tight bundle which allowed me to prime whichever side I was priming on all of them in one fell swoop!

All primed! Stay tuned for Batten & Board: part two of the Saga!

Now that the Little Man's Cave, the guest bedroom and the hall bathroom are finished (except for furniture and assorted "stuff"), it's time to move on to the next room: the master bedroom.

[Before: Look, more bland paint!]

Yes, there is an exterior door in our Master bedroom. It's all part of the Duplex package; an upstairs rental is required to have a second form of egress thus there's a small staircase to the side of the house leading up to this door. You know, if we don't remove the stair case we could even turn it into an ittibitty balcony if we want to. For now, we're going to pretend it's simply not there. I have plans to fake a window in its place by either stretching curtains over the entire wall or mirroring the window to the right.

Another plan of ours includes adding batten and board (well, the slim version without the board). That's why I painted the lower half of the walls in Behr's Ultra Pure White in semi-gloss.

[In Progress: lower half painted a crisp white]

Having lived in beige (or swine colored) rentals for the past couple of years, both the husband and I wanted -color-! I brought home a couple of paint chips and we zoomed in on Valspar's "Shaded Lake".

[Valspar "Shaded Lake": Delicious!]

I couldn't wait to see that color on the walls! When I finally met my trim and closet painting quota I broke out the fresh paint rollers and started on the first coat. Nope, I couldn't even wait long enough to consider using a tinted primer. I simply rolled it on and fell in love all over again. It's a incredibly deep rich blue with a hint of green, without being an actual turquoise.

[Love on first coat]

Now the room has definition! The trim work stands out beautifully against the rich blue and the color invites the eye to travel around and up adding height and space to the entire room. It's amazing how such a simple paint treatment can do so much for a room.

[Frog tape in action]

Next I'll need to take a couple of measurements and head over to the blue or orange box to get some MDF board for the batten treatment. Stay tuned! Since we're expecting our kitchen this week we're going to stop everything else to screw our kitchen cabinets together. Wish us luck!