About 2054 Miles

In February 2007, my husband and I packed up all our belongings, drove 2054 miles and moved from California to Iowa. This blog is about my and my husband's adventures, which mainly now feature our two boys- 5 year old Rex and 3 year old Wyatt.

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Shelby
Iowa, United States
I have a wonderful husband and two awesome little boys. I love being able to stay home with them and am always trying to do something to our house.
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Showing posts with label painting. Show all posts
Showing posts with label painting. Show all posts

Monday, July 2, 2007

Another Busy DIY Weekend

No VIP treatment this weekend- it was a weekend of hard work and a lot of progress. We had planned on priming (with B-I-N) the kitchen and getting that painted but it was such a beautiful weekend that we just had to be outside. That worked well considering we had 3 ugly stumps in our front yard left from juniper or cypress bushes that I cleaned out a month or two ago. You may remember the post about my adventures in trimming those.

Now it looks like this!



It's not the best picture but it looks really nice. We are going to put some wood chips down still but we need to find a pick-up truck to borrow for that. So we finally got around to painting on Sunday night, but only the primer coat. Tonight when we got home from work, we got the first coat of our Soothing Aloe paint. It looks really bright in the picture I took below- it really doesn't seem that bright when you are standing in the kitchen. I think getting on the cabinets and window coverings in there will tone it down some too.



We needed some color in the house so I'm loving it and think it's going to be great for us. Make life sizzle!

A final comment- we've been using the Valspar paint from Lowe's and have been very happy. We couldn't find a green that we liked with that brand so we went ahead and got the Olympic brand paint in the Soothing Aloe color we liked. It is not good. It does not go on the walls as easily as the Valspar. I didn't think there could be that much difference- how different can paint be? Well, it is much harder to work with but the color is great and it seems to look good on the walls once it dries. And anyone wanting to use B-I-N should be aware that it is extremely watery and does not have the consistency of paint at all. It is also very, very stinky. Those are my observations on paint for the weekend :o)

Thursday, June 21, 2007

Weekend Review (aka "The Curse of the Enamel Paint")

Apparently I'm not one to learn from past mistakes. While I build up to that part of the story of our weekend, let me go over some other things first. We have been super busy this past week with the cabinets arriving and trying to finish up other things too. This weekend we decided not to touch the cabinets and, instead, we'd just tie up the loose ends with the yard and painting. I've been meaning to paint the bathroom white and this weekend I really wanted to get that done and over with. It had a rose/mauve color with green tile and brown/neutral floor. Just too much going on. I had all my painting and priming stuff out for the bathroom when we decided to paint a bedroom that we hadn't planned on painting. In fact, we had probably been in that room a combined total of 5 times prior to this weekend. It was just kind of a no man's land. It is the bedroom that we intend to convert to the master bathroom and had no plan for it in the meantime. The bedroom was a bright yellow and had some yucky carpet in it. Rob got all the carpet, pads and tack strips up and it was looking so good that we decided to use some of that primer I had out and some of our extra "Churchill Hotel Vanilla" paint and just get the room looking good.

Before:


After:


You may also notice the furniture in the room now- we picked that up at a yard sale on Saturday and the room is ready to go now. Well, I suppose we still need a box spring and mattress to go with the bedroom set before we have anyone stay over...

I think I'm ready to finally talk about how I sometimes don't learn from my past mistakes. I had a little, okay HUGE, problem when I painted the kitchen in my old house. I didn't know the difference between enamel and latex paint or that it mattered if you painted one over the other. After I painted bright red latex paint over the existing enamel paint and it started peeling off like a sunburn, I learned the difference really fast. When we were getting ready to paint the bathroom in this house, I was pretty sure the paint in there was enamel so I asked two different people, on two different trips to Lowes, what to do to ensure I didn't have the same problem again. Both people told me to sand the paint to get the shine off, paint a coat of the Valspar High Hiding primer and then paint the latex white paint on. After three coats of paint (1 primer and 2 paint), we peeled off the tape and the same thing happened! We scored the paint too before we peeled the tape off so that was not the problem. It turned out to be not nearly as bad as the kitchen incident and I think we were able to save it. However, as soon as we peeled that tape off, I remembered what to do to prevent this from happening- something I had learned from a professional painter after the first disaster. So for anyone out there needing to know what to do to paint latex over enamel, you use BIN. I did that in the kitchen to fix my mistake and it worked great. Anyhow, here are some photos of the bathroom:

Before:


After:




We got a new shower curtain that has a bamboo print and also bought a little bamboo plant for the bathroom and that really brings the green and brown together. Now it actually seems calming and peaceful instead of wild, mismatched craziness!
 
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