Berry's Mom Gets Ambitious

With this blog post I'm expanding my blog horizons beyond knitting to home improvement.  There's absolutely nothing authoritative about my talents in the field of home improvement, but I thought it would be fun to chronicle some of my projects as I work my way up the learning curve.

We bought this 1920-ish bungalow after it had been flipped by a real estate investor.  He did a very good job of making it appealing and attractive.  It was freshly painted inside and out, all new windows, refinished hardwood floors and new carpeting... nothing not to like, right?  But I've been feeling as though we live in a nice rental, and I've been itching to make it reflect us and our tastes

Unfortunately I don't have photos of the whole house in its "before" state, because we've done quite a bit to it already, mostly along the lines of adding cupboards and shelves, changing the colors in the bathroom (our Feng Shui consultant said we should have red at the back of the house), and a LOT of work already in the yard.  Most of this work was done by Duane, and I hope he will blog about it some more.  But since this is my blog, I'll write about my projects, starting with my study.

When we moved in and just stuck the furniture where it would be out of the way, my study looked like this.  Fresh paint, odd light fixture, pocket door into the bathroom with its unspeakably ghastly round mirror over the sink.

That mirror has been replaced, though we haven't done much else to the bathroom.  My attention has been focused on making my study into A Room of My Own -- that is, when it hasn't been focused on a million other things for the past six months.

Here's the view looking in the other direction.  Sweet eyebrow window facing west (full glare in the afternoon, but charming) and strange little indentations about 30 inches from the outside wall.  This is the office furniture that I brought from Carlisle, where my home study was a lot bigger and I was doing a lot more work, thus needing a big desk.  It's way too big for this room, but it was functional for a while.

Here's another view of the nook, actually taken when the DIY project had begun by removing two of the little triangular shelves.  Because of the roof angle,  it wouldn't make sense to extend the top shelf , but Duane made the two lower shelves go all the way across the space.  These will be used for something to do with knitting, I suspect.

And of course -- ta daa! -- the room has been painted!  I found that blue color terribly cold over the winter, especially since this room isn't tied into the central heating system of the rest of the house, and is heated just with a built-in electric wall heater.  My two primary goals with this room were to furnish it with appropriately-scaled furniture, and to warm it up and make it feel more feminine.  Okay, three goals.  The color I chose is Benjamin Moore's Haystack from my favorite paint store.  I am going to become best friends with Dimitrios The Paint Store Guy, I can tell you!  this is an eggshell finish in a low VOC paint.

Actually I didn't do all that good a job. Duane has been the very model of restraint in not telling me how to do it better, since I insisted that I want to do this job all by myself.  (I know I sound like a five-year old.)  so there are a few splotches of yellow paint on the white ceiling, and the brush marks where I cut in along the edges show a bit.  But all in all, it's not bad, and the flaws will disappear (she says hopefully) when the furniture and art is in place.

Stay tuned for further chapters in this gripping saga!