Upstairs hallway (mostly) finished!

Our upstairs hallway has been bothering me since we moved in. It had floral blue wallpaper, which would have been tolerable if it hadn't been peeling and falling down all over the place. Like this:

Dont mind my thumb.

Okay, so that second one was obviously after we had already started tearing paper down. But the peeling in the top corner was legit and not staged. I wish I had taken more before pictures, but I didn't really plan the destruction... it just kind of came over me in a blind rage, and I started grabbing loose edges and madly pulling paper down without really thinking about taking pictures for the blog. A year and a half of hating that wallpaper just kind of washed over me and sent me into a frenzy. I think I may have blacked out for a minute. Luckily, most of the paper was put up so crappily that it just peeled off in big sheets. When I came to, I was left with a mess of paper scraps, and some absolutely hideous walls.

  

Even Paul got in on the action

 
 

In case all of the giant cracks in the plaster weren't enough fun, we also had a few big holes (I only got a picture of one, sadly):

Gross.

I have to confess, I had a moment - a moment- where I thought, "Maybe we should just put wallpaper back up." It was a dark moment, but it passed. After that, I grabbed the caulk and the spackling and got to work. I used acrylic latex painter's caulk for the finer cracks and the spaces where the moulding met the wall, and spackling for the bigger cracks and dents. (I like this kind because it comes in a toothpaste tube and goes on pink, which made spackling my walls feel like decorating a cake). For the big holes, I used self-adhesive wall patches that you stick on and spackle over. 

Getting there

In the midst of all this, I made two discoveries about my upstairs hallway. The first one is neat: I found two super old keys above one of the door frames, and they still work in our super old locks.

Cool!

The second discovery is less awesome. Apparently, someone at some point in the history of this house loved wallpaper so much, they decided to put it on the ceiling.

More gross.

The good news is, I went a year and a half in this house before I noticed, so I think I can live with it. For now. Because knowing what shape the walls were in, I'm frankly a little terrified to see what the ceiling looks like under there. The bad news is, it looks really stupid where the ceiling meets the walls. Because it's not even. I think I might eventually put up some simple moulding to mask the uneveness, but for now, it is what it is.

We debated what color to paint the hallway for a good long while, and ultimately landed on a really simple beigey-yellow color. The hallway leads into the stairwell, which leads into the downstairs landing (it will all be painted this color eventually), so we decided we wanted something neutral that would tie the whole house together (the stairwell is currently very, very blue).

Barely Beige, to be precise

And then I painted! Hooray! I still hate the ceiling edges and want to put up moulding, but other than that, I'm excited for my upstairs to finally feel nice!

Kitchen before and afters

So this used to be in our kitchen.

 In case you can't tell, those are quaint little churches and schoolhouses, with the phrase "God shed his grace on thee" repeating over and over. Not exactly my personal taste in home decor. This border wallpaper has been bugging me since we bought the house, along with our cracked, pitted, peeling, off-white kitchen ceiling (I really wish I had gotten better "before" pictures of the ceiling), and I finally decided to take care of business.

After the border came down. You can see how patchy the ceiling was on the left.

The wallpaper actually came down pretty easy, thanks to a new trick I learned - fabric softener! You peel off as much of the front paper as you can, then mix equal parts fabric softener and very hot water in a spray bottle. Spray on the backing paper and let it soak for a minute or two, then the whole mess peels off really easily. Plus it makes the house smell nice in the process!
I scraped the peeling parts of the ceiling, caulked the cracks, and patched the pits. I also caulked along the top of the moulding, since it was gapping in some spots. Then I painted it all white.
I was going for a really pale, crisp, icy blue for the walls, because a beige kitchen just depresses me... it turned out a little more nursery blue than I was going for when the light hits it wrong, but it reminds Paul of his kitchen growing up, so I think we're going to keep it. It's better than it was, at least! I'd really like to eventually do something with the cabinets, but that's a project for another day.

Painted Ceiling Tiles

So when we first moved into our house, our downstairs bathroom ceiling looked like this:

Okay, to be fair, it didn't look exactly like that. It looked like the crackly white part of that. The brown showing through is where I tried - and failed - to scrape the cracking paint smooth so that I could repaint it. It quickly became obvious that simply painting the ceiling was not in the cards, so I started looking for budget-friendly cover-ups instead. I found these really neat, rubbery lightweight backsplash panels at Home Depot that looked like a punched tin ceiling, but at $20 a pop, and with a decent-sized bathroom, they definitely missed the mark about being budget friendly. 

After doing some research online, I found this really cool site - antiqueceilings.com - where you can order thin styrofoam panels that have the exactly same look. At a paltry $2-4 per panel I was able to get enough panels to do my entire ceiling for $40 (plus shipping). I opted to get the plain white panels since they were cheaper, thinking I would save myself some money by painting them myself. In retrospect, it would have been well worth it to save myself a huge amount of time by buying them pre-painted, but since I didn't, I'll walk you through my process. 

When I first opened the box, I was a little disappointed and nervous about how they'd ultimately look on my ceiling - I was expecting something a little more substantial, but these puppies were thin and kind of sad looking on their own (pictures unfortunately not available). I figured they couldn't look worse than the hot mess pictured above, at least, and decided to give them a shot. The nice thing about their thinness is that they weigh almost nothing, so some Loctite was all I needed to get them up. Once they were up, the disappointment vanished:

Please ignore our sad lack of moulding.

And that's pretty much how they've looked for going on a year now, until I finally got frustrated with their unfinished quality and decided to dive in. For the detail-interested, I'm using Martha Stewart Metallic Glaze Specialty Finish in Black Coffee for the color, and Behr Premium Plus Flat Interior ceiling paint for the highlights. 

So to start, I kind of smoosh the paint on, focusing on getting it into the crevices, which is where I want the darkest shadow. I focus on two-three segments at a time, to prevent the paint from drying too much before I can move on to step two.

Step two involves using a rag to smear the paint around, wiping most of it away from the flat and highlighted areas, trying to leave some dark bits in the crevices to keep it looking antique-y. 

Last step is using a sponge to drybrush on the highlights on the raised portions. Home Depot had fancy ~*~sea sponges~*~ for almost $10 a pop in the painting section, but I opted to go old school with this bad boy for $2 instead:

Works just as well, if not better! So in the picture below, you can see all three steps - the white at the top is untouched. The middle row is just painted and needs highlights. The bottom row nearest the wall is finished.

The nice thing about an antique look like this is that it doesn't need to be perfect - you want it too look kind of scratched up and rough, like it's been hanging around for decades. Even so, it's still taking considerably longer than anticipated. I definitely recommend the pre-painted tiles if you're looking at taking on this sort of project yourself! 

Raised Garden Beds

With the recent heatwave we've been having in Iowa (it is THIRTY-THREE degrees outside as I type), I've been having literal dreams about gardening, and so reasonably decided that my first post should be dedicated to my first garden at our new place (also my first garden ever).

Our small yard was originally one of the selling points of the house for us (we're never outside anyways! less to mow!), but as soon as I started trying to find a sunny patch for a garden, I realized how little usable yard we actually have, considering the location of our giant shady trees and the neighbor's privacy fence. My sister gave me this book on square foot gardening, and I decided to build two 4x4 raised garden beds on the south side of our house.

Home Depot had these landscaping timbers on sale for something silly cheap, so I loaded up the cart (there's a special place in heaven for the guy in lumber who didn't bat an eye when I asked him to cut 8 of them in half for me so I could fit the 4-foot segments in my Hyundai Accent). When I got home, I realized I didn't have any six inch nails lying* around, so it was back to Home Depot.

Once I got home with my monster nails, I quickly discovered that my tiny pink hammer that I've had since college was not going to cut it (pound it?), so it was back to Home Depot for the third time, where I acquired this beautiful bad boy:

My first child

I nailed two segments together to get the height I wanted, then nailed four of those two-piece segments together to make simple frame. If you're going to do this, I highly recommend assembling everything on-site, as those timbers get h-e-a-v-y once you start nailing them together.

"squash" trellis, with bebeh plants

First bed, complete!

I tilled the ground under the bed, getting all the grass out, then filled with a mixture of hummus, manure, and basic garden soil (I don't remember the exact ratios offhand, but it's easily googled if you care). I've been composting this winter, so I'm excited to have a little something extra for my plants next summer. The nice thing about using store-bought dirt was that, though expensive, I dealt with hardly any weeds all summer.

I also decided to try my hand at a squash trellis, to help my squash plants grow vertically - I used some old trim that we inherited with the house to get a basic structure together. I can't say it helped much with the squash, which ended up getting ripped out after being destroyed by awful, awful squash vine borers (awful), but it was great for the one tomato plant that ended up taking over the entire 16-square-foot bed.

Ugly bushes, after

Ugly bushes, before

 The two beds were definitely good for a beginner's first summer garden, but I'm already dreaming of the holes I'm going to rip in our yard this summer to plant mooorrrree prooodduuuceee. We already had a few bushes ripped out last summer by an awesome friend and a chainsaw (thanks, Pam and Chris!). It's too bad I can't cut down a 100-year-old tree...

To close, I'll just leave you with a bunch of pictures of green things. Only 65 days until spring!

*There might have been a 10-minute discussion in my house on the proper usage of laying vs. lying. I'm still not sure I got it right. If I did, credit to this thread.