the green room : update

We've finally settled into the Green Room, though we've yet to really decorate it. This weekend, we hope to rearrange the Blue Room and continue work on the basement. In the meantime, because I receive enough emails asking for updated room pictures, we're showing you the current state of each room.

And while we definitely want to get that whole Cottage Living or YHL finished look in each space, we're glad you understand and are interested in the process it takes to get there.

One last note: we're hoping to receive more "before" shots from the buyer agency. We thought we had them all so we didn't think to go through and take more shots of each room before we began working on them.

the Green Room. This is what it looked like in October:

We sanded every square inch of the space:

With the shards to prove it:

Painted and primed. or primed and painted. It really should be the latter.

Hawk detailed/"cut" every corner and border both low and high, while I rolled. We took the lovely lavender to a soft, natural green.

 And we removed the tape.

We found this desk at World Market back in July '09. We love the chair and how the whole piece has a simple and classic style.

And here is where we are today. The light pours in, things are organized though mismatched, and it no longer smells like paint. We positioned the desk so that it extended into the center of the room so that our pieces were not pressing against each wall with a gigantic whole of nothing in he middle of the room, and so that the desk user could see out one of the windows rather than face a blank wall. 

We also store Hawk's musical instruments in this room. I would like to do so with more gusto, but we're not sure how to work that out yet and keep the instruments from falling into harm's way.

We'd like to repaint this bookcase, which my dad and I assembled and painted yellow back in 1986, and which I painted green over the yellow back in 2006. 

We are thinking that the same Alabaster by Sherwin Williams that we've covered the ceiling and all trim with would be perfect. We both like the idea of a lot of white furtniture in the spare bedrooms. With white backdrops, we won't have to worry about mismatching pieces (like that new file cabinet we purchased that doesn't work at all color-wise), and we can add pops of color through other fabrics and pieces and maintain the freedom to change them out whenever we want.

So there you have it. The current state of the Green Room. For better or worse, though we think better.

Happy Thursday!

icj,

~j

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it's all in the way you look at it

Well, no, it's not.


Since we purchased this home, we've learned a great deal about lighting. More than any other material, paint changes from light to light. And we're not just talking daylight to nightlight. We mean that paints can practically jump colors from location to location.


Mom Hawk paints a lot. A lot. Her house, her friends' houses, and now her family's houses. So she knows a heck of a lot about looking into the light. When we were trying to decide which color white to choose for our ceilings and trim, we thought it would be a cinch. She had some extra trim paint from her house, so she brought it over and began to paint one corner of the ceiling. When Jen returned, WOW. It looked yellow. Not white, yellow. And yet in her home, it pops a bright white!


Our favorite youngsters, Sherry and John, were the first non-family members to give us an idea of how important it is to see paint chips throughout the day, at the angle you'll paint them. So if you're painting on the ceiling, you have to tape it to the ceiling:

younghouselove

So one Friday afternoon, Mom Hawk and I (jen) grabbed up all the white paint chips (a.k.a. color stack) from the paint stores and ran around the house in different lights trying to figure it out. We chose a very happy, clean, muted, eggshell sort of white: Alabaster from Sherwin Williams. We also took her advice and grabbed the semi-gloss version (also what YHL discovered after a few tries).


Remember a few weeks back we mentioned how the green room was transforming here? And how I matched the wall? 

Remember how we complained about this light?

Yuck yuck yuck!

And it made our green room look like this?

Drumroll, please....look what a distortion it causes compared to natural light!

That natural light shot has not been adjusted in any way other than to add our tag. Here's another angle:

And the natural reveal!

Crazy, isn't it? I find that with that nasty light, we rarely enter the Green Room. But in the daytime (when we're home during the day) we keep ducking in to take a look because it's so light and inviting.

And it isn't just about taking a photo during the day vs. night. It's really just a bad light! So to eliminate any further issues when we change it out, we plan to purchase a few, test them, test different light bulbs in them, and only then make a real decision.

Thank you for being patient with our lack of posting this week! We're back in full swing.

icj,

~j

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