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:

Hey Stranger!

Today is a lovely, sunny, warm day in Pittsburgh, and I am sitting in our kitchen-den, sipping an espresso and eating some greek-style green beans.

Well, lah-dee-dah, you are saying to yourself. Three months with no posts and you finally show up to tell us about your lunch?! Shenanigans!

Shenanigans, indeed! But I'll take that finger-pointing and turn it squarely on the completely freaking brutal winter we had this year. The Schmich Schack was on hibernation lock-down, and almost literally, there was nothing to blog about. Unless you would like our opinions on Season 8 of American Idol, or how to stay fashionable while wearing nine layers of clothing, or a daily post that goes something like: "It is -10 degrees outside. That is an absence of degrees. That is none more degrees."

Well, okay, so that is not entirely true. We've done tons of planning these past few months - we are on the brink of many exciting projects. We even rearranged our bedroom.

And there is one ongoing construction project that we're pretty proud of:


Yes, indeed, that is a tiny little Schmichperson. He or she (we don't know which yet) will arrive sometime in mid- to late-August. And we're pretty freaking excited about it.

Of course, having a tiny, delicate little bean of a human being inside of you will make you reconsider projects involving fumes, particulates, or aliphatic hydrocarbons. Unfortunately for the Schack, most of our outstanding indoor projects involve those very things: painting, skim-coating, improving some of the wood trim, etc., and these will have to wait until we can open the windows up wide and let in some fresh air.

But like I said, there are some exciting plans underway. I'll get back on the blogging horse and let you in on the details soon!

A study in contrasts

Remember that completely gorgeous kitchen I showed you yesterday? Well, apparently our kitchen got jealous of all the attention and compliments being lavished on the Bungalowcious kitchen, and in a desperate and rather unattractive bid for attention, the sink threw its p-trap on the floor in a huff, refusing to deal with our dirty dishes until we stopped taking it for granted and said something nice about it.

So. Hi there, Scullery. You uh... Hmm.. Your walls are so neutral! No? Your exposed outlets are so rustic and manly! Huh. I can barely see the earwax-colored mastic oozing out of the cracks between your cheap tiles in this photo! Still no good? Well, despite all of the abuse you've received, you're still pretty functional. There. I'm done. Time to pick up a new p trap.

Beautiful Kitchen at Bungalowcious

Drool....Go check out the descriptions and the awesome Before-and-Afters at the blog, Bungalowcious, and the Flicker set here.

Holidays: It's on.

The Schmichmas '08 season officially began this weekend, when we bought our tree. The hippie tree farmer that sold it to us told us that it's a hybrid between a fraser fir and a balsam. It's soft and smells lovely, so that must be a good thing. We started decorating Saturday night with cocoa while It's A Wonderful Life was on and finished Sunday morning over coffee and Meet the Press. (You know I'd never watched It's A Wonderful Life from start to finish? It's a really good movie! duh, right?)

We are attempting to make as many of our Christmas gifts as we can this year, and after I finish one last $#%* presentation for school/work, I am ready for some full-blown Holiday Cheer (tm). With marshmallows.