EvY at HomE

The final room to be painted was the largest and most obnoxious to paint. BUT WE DID IT. I meant to take better before pictures but the kids were mid play so this what you get. One thing I hadn't planned on was that I had been charting the kids's heights on this wall so Matt relocated it to their closet. The other rooms in the house I did myself ('cause I like to paint, Matt was on kid duty) but this time I had to recruit Matt or else I would have been there forever. As it was we were up until about 2am one of the nights because we could only paint it at night since it's a common room the kids are in. It took us two nights to complete which was not too bad considering but we could have done it faster if we could have worked in the daytime. This right here was the last sliver of that crappy paint of our whole house. Literally every room in our house had been painted this color that I have been painting over slowly over the past 7 years. BYE BYE CRAPP...

So... we took a down day to figure out what I wanted to do with the structure before they put the ceiling on it. I went outside and took a few pictures of it empty and put it on my computer and started mocking up various versions of it to show Matt.  Originally I was going to keep the joists the natural color and paint the planks white to look like a shiplap ceiling. BUT, I wasn't wild about the color of these joists and deciding to stain it a wood color would add an element of picking a wood color and I was terrified of that.  Somewhere along the variations I talked out loud to Matt that the real star wood was the pine planks as they were and that maybe we should go for a scheme where the planks stay natural.  I talked to Eric about it who in addition to being a genius is a director of photography by trade and knows about color and light so he said ok here, let's put the plank next to the fence that is the color you're thinking of painting the joists and see what it look...

Matt and I have plotted building a patio cover/shade over the backyard couch for a long time. The thing most lacking in the backyard when people come over is some substantial shade. We usually huddle around the dining table umbrella or the kids area umbrella but living in the valley means we need some serious shade if we intend to spend any amount of time out there. And being as we're in a pandemic and spending a lot of time at home, improvement projects are actually valuable. We thought about just sinking some simple posts and putting up a sail shade like the pic below but Matt said if we're gonna do it, let's do it with a more permanent solution.  As I mentioned in this post  the patio cover that was most inspiring to me was this one below. And I looked at a ton of iterations of patio covers on pinterest. I sent it to Matt's dad and our tenant Eric and both were excited to have a project and signed onboard to be genius and labor. Over the course of the past f...

One of the projects I meant to do that I thought might be a long shot to accomplish in this pandemic would be painting the play pen fence. BUT, since Matt's mom was watching the kids and the men were already outside,  I decided in a fit of outdoor solidarity to go ahead and paint it. This is it before I sanded the posts and tops.... And this is after! I painted it the color that the original inspiration patio cover picture was that of Sherwin Williams Black Alder . I thought it would be more black but it turned out to be a green/gray that looks like metal in the shade and just super slick and cool and very us.   Almost too cool. It made everything around it stand out so much nicer.  It was definitely a project that was a lot of work and tiring but sooooo worth it. Alexa helped me near the end for awhile and I was grateful.  The next mini project will be to paint the trim on the shed. I tested the window as you can see above and once the rest of i...

The first time we saw the house in 2012, the following sign was on the door to the master bedroom. ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK DANGER. To say that we saw potential even when this was staring us in the face says a lot about Matt and my mental state. Optimistic or fools, who knows! But what more did we need to know? It was literally the only house we looked at in Burbank that had a master suite with a bathroom and big closet. When they flipped it and we went back to look at it, there was no hole in the ceiling and they installed carpet instead. Which we were cool with.  As I'm writing this little retrospective, it's crazy to see how slowly this room has taken shape which has sort of been the case with a lot of rooms in the house. We could only buy a few things at a time and neither of us wanted to settle for temporary things in our bedroom and I'm so glad we never did. I had a design board from the beginning and we didn't waiver from the plan.  Seeing these bo...