Painting the family room has been “next” on our painting list for quite a while. A few weeks ago, I started tackling this project. I’ve been doing one wall per week (it takes a while to tape and move furniture and stuff).

Of course, the first wall I picked (actually one wall and a part of a second) was the corner that Declan has tended to call home for his activities. It was first not only because it had the lightest furniture to move, but also because Declan had drawn all over the walls with crayon. With the original builder paint on the wall, scrubbing the crayon off was out of the question...

The “after” pictures (I didn’t think to take “before” pictures - click on the pictures for full sized versions):





That chalkboard is actually a usable chalkboard - I picked up some Benjamin Moore chalkboard paint. I figured I would try it - at least it looks really nice.

Tags: Declan, Home Improvement

I took some time over this long weekend to clean out the basement. Since moving into our new house almost 3 years ago, our basement has become less and less, um, “clean” as it were. I set out Thursday to do something about that. In addition to freeing up some walking room, the other goal was to take advantage of the dwindling supply of free dumpsters in our neighborhood (the result of contruction being almost complete in our subdivision).

I made great progress, but only got 1/4 of the basement sorted. I found lots of things like pictures from junior high school and high school, documents from my office I hadn’t looked at for 5 years, and, well, junk. If I get motivated, maybe I’ll scan in a retrospective of some of those old pictures. I also tossed all my old college notes (so all thoughts of Aerospace Engineering as a second career are now gone).

I did, however, come across 7 full file boxes that have documents that require shredding. Great. Shredding one box left me with a yard bag full of confetti for recycling, and an overheated shredder which no longer seems to be shredding as well after accidentally ingesting what I think was a paper clip. Sigh.

And I never realized how tall dumpsters were until I had to toss a 30 lb. box of old course notes into it....

All in all, a useful exercise in exercise. And the basement is now *slightly* cleaner.

Tags: Home Improvement

The silence in the last week is because we've embarked on a new project at home - painting. Our house is 2 years old now, and we've decided we're tired of white everywhere. So we're repainting. We started with Andrew's room, and after one week of work, here's the result:



Now if you wonder why it takes a week to paint a room, this is an evening/spare time project, and, I had to do the ceiling. I usually go out of my way to avoid painting ceilings. There was no alternative in this case because during the drywall repair for the typical settling nail pops and such, we discovered that the touch up paint was still very noticeable. Repainting the ceiling was the only way to fix that...

The colors are Hawthorne Yellow and Linen White (from Benjamin Moore). Great paint, by the way. Very happy with the stuff and the local dealer.

Now, we're on to the dining room...

Tags: Home Improvement