Baby Schmich's Room

Today is officially our due date, so I thought I'd share some photos of the baby's room. It was the guest room that we so lovingly finished in November.


Now all we need is a little kiddo. C'mon, kiddo!


The rug is from Pottery Barn, the Together print from petit collage, the tree over the mantel was painted by my sister, the quilt on the rocking chair was made by a dear friend, and the one on the bed by my great-grandmother. All the furniture is either Ikea or craigslist.

Laundry Room

I suppose part of living in an old house is having a dank basement. Ours certainly is. It doesn't help that it's leaky and the walls need to be patched and painted and it constantly fills up with junk no matter how many dumpsters we fill up. We could have spent the whole summer just fixing up the basement.

Our basement is also where the "laundry room" is, which, up until recently was a scuzzy lineoleum-covered platform with an ancient, rusty, scuzzy washer and dryer on top. Usually our clothes came out moderately more clean than when they went in - enough that we were able to put off a new W&D for about 2 years - but it was seriously NOT a pleasant place to wash your skivvies.

So with a sweet little Schmichbaby on the way and the prospect of washing all those tiny, cute, sweet little onesies, not to mention cloth diapers, "Buy new Washer and Dryer" quickly made its way to the short list of things to get done this summer, pre-baby.

And let me tell you, I was secretly pretty happy to be able to pull the Pregnant Card and not have to work on this, because it was a DISGUSTING project.

Here's the platform after the old W&D were moved off. They're hanging out stage left:

Mold, filth, and scuzz. Awesome.

Ben started ripping things apart:

He was so into it, he even ripped out this stupid under-stair closet that had been bugging him (the beige bit, etc):


Post- ripping:

Then he swept and swept and shopvacc'ed and swept. And filled 8 garbage bags with DIRT.
But the results were worth it:


We imagined that we'd have to replace the platform to keep the floor level for the lovely new W&D, but it turned out the concrete floor wasn't so bad, and uh... we were running out of time.

Ben moved the new W&D into place, hooked up the gas to the dryer, and even routed the washer drain into a major drain pipe without incident. The nasty old shop light was replaced with some brighter spotlights. We even put a rug down and bought a new laundry basket AND switched to baby-friendly laundry soap and dryer balls.

The results? I think you'll agree they're pretty great.




It's awesome. It is so awesome. This update has already completely changed our lives for the better. The new washer and dryer (Samsung HE - blue! we got the blue ones!) are incredible and beep and ding and have settings especially for towels and actually clean our clothes. (We've washed almost everything in the house - the rabbits are watching their backs). And going down to do laundry isn't nearly as unpleasant. It's bright and, though still a bit dank of course, at least cleaner and much much much more pleasant.

Oh yeah, and helping along this Before-and-After masterpiece is the fact that we got a new camera! We've been cursing our old crappy point-and-shoot for years, and finally did some research and got a wonderful new one, a Canon Powershot SD1200. It's. Glorious.

One man's Before is another's After

Oh my. The "Before" bathroom photo in this Design*Sponge post looks an awful lot like our "Afters."

Isn't that funny? I mean, I do prefer our Afters to the ones in that post - a modern bathroom is just not in the style of our house. Plus the cuckoo clock is a touch silly, don't you think? I mean, really.

Bathroom makeover

Sigh. Isn't it pretty? I am completely in love with our new bathroom. This room has always been full of fun old house potential, but so mucked up and full of gross that things were pretty discouraging for a while (Before photos). Look:

The elements are there, but the room was always way too dark, especially with the (#$%@ swirly!!) ceiling painted the same color as the textured walls. With the dampness and dust, crud would settle in the ridges in the wall texture, too, which was supergross.

So when I came home from a business trip and Ben had skim-coated and primed the walls as a surprise? OH MAN. Best ever. Even just having them an unfinished white for a few weeks was like heaven. But then he went and finished up the job right before we had some family visit last month, and the results are fantastic.

The walls got a double skim-coat and are painted Bamboo Mat, from Martha Stewart's Valspar line (lesson learned). The trim and newly-smooth ceiling are our favorite Chef White, also Valspar. We moved the green cabinet out, which freed up a lot of space, and Ben got rid of the weird medicine cabinet that was lurking behind the door. We replaced it with this nice one from Lowe's.


He also took out the small, shabby mirror that was hanging over the sink and, for now, we've just hung a plain ol' one that we found at Construction Junction. Someday we'll have a custom one made for the space, but for now it's just really nice to be able to see yourself.


You know what else helps with being able to see yourself? The lovely overhead light that replaced the utterly useless and painfully hideous Satan's Tungsten Butthole that hung there previously.

Before:


After:

There are still some details we'd like to work on someday, but for now it's so so SO great to have such a bright, clean space.

Monday, 11:30pm

The bathroom is almost done, and it looks so so so so good.

The Studio

Posting about the "final" guest room made me realize that I never posted the After shots of the second-to-the-last guest room we fixed up. Known previously as "The Checkered Room" or "The Room Full of Junk" or "The Room With The Giant Scorpion on The Wall," we now tenderly refer to it as "The Studio."

Here's a pretty gnarly Before:


With an appropriately charming After:


Pretty freakin' cute, huh? The quilt-top on the bed was made by my great-grandmother. You should see the insanely tiny, perfect little Swiss-old-lady stitches.

Originally we were going to put a little bed in the nook right by the window, but it was November and the cheap windows are kind of drafty. Instead we're thinking a comfy reading chair and a small bookshelf.

The floors are still covered in stick-on black and white tiles, but we're not quite ready to tackle taking them off and dealing with what's lying underneath. Hopefully the floors are as cool as in the other third-floor room, but you never know.

And this is our makeshift door until we figure out who the lucky winner is that gets to fit, strip, and refinish one of the doors that's gathering mold in the basement. It's just a canvas drop cloth that has cute ribbon tied through its grommets and around a spring-loaded curtain rod. It does the trick.

Guests in the Attic

I have been thinking of Aqua lately because of my recent last-minute makeover of our last guest room. Before my sister and a friend stayed with us to attend a wedding a few weeks ago, I got it into my head that I'd paint our third and last guest room, the cute one on the third floor in the front of the house that has a charming view of our garden. It was already a sweet little room. Great light, awesome vaulted ceilings, very cozy:


But kind of...granny. I'm not sure you can quite appreciate from this photo that the walls were sponge painted in two shades of pink, ("Mama, mah colohs are Blush and Bashful"). That gave it a kind of creepy flesh-like color.

I figured that I could bang this room out over the course of a few weeknight evenings, and hey - we even had an extra gallon of the reject color from another guest room. I slapped some up on the wall to see if it would work (you can see a few test strips in the photo above). It didn't. So we dumped our bag of paint chips out onto the floor and picked one that looked sort of pale greenish-blue. Carolina Aqua something.


It was also not quite right. Here's half the damn room painted in it, since I was just so determined to get this room done. But it's a little anemic, no? We, apparently, are completely unskilled when it comes to picking room colors. So we went back to that old maven of good taste and style: Martha Stewart. Her paint line at Lowes has not disappointed us yet. And we also stopped mucking around with wimpy pastels and pulled a real Crayola out of the box.

As Jason would say, BAM!


It's called Tulip Leaf and we like it a lot. The trim is Valspar's Chef White. We got rid of the granny rug, too, and for now the floor is just bare. This is great because these floors are so cool and old and attic-y anyway.

It's interesting to look at the progression of colors for this project: Blush&Bashful, Blah, Meh, and BAM!


And so many lessons learned!: We do not like pastels. Lowe's "Historic" line is totally unreliable (and questionably historic). We are strangely attracted to aqua. And Martha Stewart wins again.

Aqua

I lost track of where these came from, but it's a good bet that they're pulled from Desire to Inspire.

Colors

Spring keeps trying to break through, despite the unacceptably gross weather. I've not quite got my blogging mojo back, so in the meantime, check out THIS post full of pretty pictures from Design*Sponge. I really like the fresh color combinations and light in all of them.

Starting Seeds, 2009

Last year's from-scratch seed starting venture was relatively successful and a lot of fun, so this year we decided to get a little more official. I had in mind a setup something like this one, but still done cheaply. What we came up with is this:

The shelf is a simple wooden one from Ikea, that we figure we'll put to good use in the basement or workshop once it's outlived its time here in the Scullery. We couldn't find plug-in fluorescent shop lights that would fit these shelves (30"), so we settled on some of those cheap metal task lamps attached to clamps. We'll also use these for lots of other projects. We took the clamps off and they're hanging from little teacup hooks. To adjust the height of the lamps, I attached a rubber band. High tech stuff here.


It's not totally ideal - the coverage is not as consistent as I'd like, so I have to kind of shift the flats around (oh! another upgrade - plastic flats and peat pots!) to get things to grow straight, but it's a huge improvement from my single ghetto lightbulb from last year.

And here's a sampling of the stuff we planted:
Peppers: jalepeno, anaheim, banana, jingle bells, poblano
Tomatoes: san marzano, sungold, yellow pear, jaune flammee, black cherry
Basils: lime, purple ruffles, lettuce-leaf, cinnamon
Flowers: cape daisy, african daisy, sweet pea, california poppy, peony poppy
Etc: cucumber, watermelon, tomatillo

They're labeled with little Post-It tags: