Trimming It Out

One of my goals for the past, uh, year (yikes) has been to get rid of the green trim on our house. I posed about it here, here, here, and here. I knew I wanted it black and bought the paint for it a year ago. The issue was that the idea of LB and I up on a ladder scraping and priming and painting caused me to up our life insurance.  Real talk. We finally found Mario who agreed to paint it for $300. SOLD!

We used the Clark + Kensington Paint in Semi-Gloss Black. I like that I said "we" when I did literally no painting.

The unexpected benefit of getting this stuff painted, was that the wood had seen better days. It needed scraping and caulking and Mario took care of all of that. I also want to pressure wash the crap out of the house/the white paint and get that all sealed, but that's way down on the priority list right now.

Painters who paint with a smile.

I LOVE how classic it looks now.

I am obsessed with the black shutters. They would look better with white blinds (clearly), but one-ish thing at a time. 

The light I ordered also showed up from build.com! It was a little smaller than I originally thought; the swiffer is there for size comparison obviously and not because I was too lazy to move it out of the shot.

But anything is an improvement over this thing.

Voila.

The real benefit of this bad boy is the light output. It is bright as all hell. Our front porch can be seen from the next street over, a copter, an airplane, the freaking moon.

Regardless, I am so glad to have these "small" outdoor updates handled. It's only taken a year.

Ding! Dong! The Poo Brown is GONE!

(Yup. I just used the Wizard of Oz to celebrate our MAJOR house victory). The joy in my heart is overflowing. And not just cause my wedding is less than a month away... The. Poo. Brown. Is. Gone. Forever. All. Of. It.

BA BAMM!

The hallway to the basement had the last remaining vestiges of poo brown in the house and I knew sooner or later (have you been around here for a while?) we would get rid of the last of it with some painting fun.

I rambled on and on back in May about what color choices we were kicking around for that space. LB vetoed my yellow idea and did absolutely, positively, think that I was crazy train.  After that post, we thought we would paint the hallway Black Pepper by Benjamin Moore since we had painted the gym/dumping ground room that color and LOVE it.

But then we primed the hallway and loved how much lighter the white was. Don't freak out... I didn't paint the hallway white. BORING.

We then looked through our sort of ridiculous paint stash and remembered that when we bulk bought the paint for the hallway, living room, and kitchen we had an extra gallon of the Cement Gray by Benjamin Moore. It's light without being white, and can pull sort of purple and then back to gray. We pretty much love it (yes, I was hoping to try something WAY more dramatic and different down here, but the stars/paint colors/time just didn't align).

This was also the first time that we painted a ceiling and I hated it. Not just because my shoulder is torn, although that didn't help, but trying to get a smooth finish was a nightmare. Regardless, the hallway is looking much better than the brown town... ignore the towel at the bottom... I was in the middle of a laundry rager.

Wait a minute. That light looks TOTALLY different than that nasty box light that was up there. That's right folks, in the midst of the hallway painting marathon, we got rid of one of the two fluorescent lights in this house. It used to look like this:

And then LB did this:

I was chanting "RIP IT OUT. RIP IT OUT!" standing patiently and taking pictures because all I wanted to do was install this adorable light. Old crappy flourescent nonsense be dammed. I am freakishly in love with that woven pattern on the light shade/drum (I don't really know what it is called). I might have pet it a few times. Just a few. It makes my little mid-century modern heart palpitate.

Here are the light's less pretty, technical bits.

And when we pulled off that old fluorescent bad boy, we saw some pretty interesting stuff... mostly interesting because I had to get up there and spackle that hole-- We thought about doing a tie-die pink at this point, but then realized that the spackle dries white, so it wouldn't work out anyway.

A little bit of priming, a buttload little paint, a little screwing in and voila:

Here's where the to-do list for the hallway stands right now... and probably will for a while:

• Paint the hallway down the stairs
• Replace the linoleum off the back door with tile or hardwood that we put in the kitchen eventually
• On the large wall straight ahead HIRE SOMEONE to paint a stencil or modern wallpaper--This is getting added because you would see it from so many different angles (coming in from outside, every time you go downstairs. Large art just is beckoning me the way the stencil here is.
• Put in a new light where the fluorescent grossness is currently
• Take carpet off of stairs and have it go the same dark as the hardwoods?
• Get some sort of small desk for my craft area/sewing?

PSSSSST: The Anna Moor giveaway closes at 5 pm tonight! Go to this post to figure out how to enter on instagram!