Living On the (Paint) Edge(-ing)

Holy crap, you guys, I finally finished painting the hallway trim after like 2.5+ years. There's still a little bit of white trim above the door that I'd somehow managed to miss when I was doing the white trim, but I think all of the blue edging is actually, finally, officially donezo! Gone are the days of our initial paint color mistakes peeking through- a too-light gray, a too-green blue, then a too-dark blue. It was like goldilocks and the four bears. Actually, there might've been a pretty terrible greenish-tan thrown in there somewhere too.... So, five bears? That final blue is Benjamin Moore's Bird's Egg (2051-60), if you're wondering. 

Needless to say, E is still traumatized by hardware store paint sections.... And dreading the baby's room paint-picking process. I'm not involving him until I have it narrowed down to two or three DEFINITE choices this time. 

Anyway! Here are a couple of before and afters (don't mind the iPhone quality- I still can't find the cord that connects my camera to the computer!): 

Ps- we're officially 30 weeks as of today... Holy moly!! Let the 10-week countdown begin!

"Hello (Decor), My Old Friend....

...I've come to talk (and plan) with you again."

Welp, here we are again....

(Heads up: The color in this iPhone pic is super inaccurate. For reference, the current wall color is Benjamin Moore's Stone 2112-40.)

Normally I'd be thankful that E rarely goes into this room except to use the printer, but we have a guest coming to stay with us this weekend so he'll probably be in there helping me get the space guest-ready (we have two bedrooms, so the guest room is going to convert to nursery duty, but we'll keep the trundle bed in there... But right now it's sort of been a storage room since before Passover. Whoops!). Wish me luck with his reaction. ;)

Ps have you seen this?

Not-so-Expedit'd Process

Okay. Here's a little home decor horror story with a happy ending. A couple of years ago, my husband's friend was moving out of Brooklyn and his wife had a post that they were giving away/selling some of their stuff. One of the items was the Ikea Expedit, and I had this lightbulb moment and absolutely NEEDED it for our bedroom. We had been using two mismatched dressers up until that point, which we'd gotten for free right before our wedding. That's a crazy story too. A friend of mine had just graduated from college but was still living in the college dorm in Manhattan when she heard that the college was closing one of their dorms permanently, and therefore getting rid of all the furniture. I know. It sounds fishy but I swear that's what I was told. So she and I rented a uhaul truck and bravely drove it across the Manhattan bridge in a rainstorm to pillage this dorm. And then, somehow, the two of us lugged back two dressers, a coffee table, two floor lamps, and I *think* there was more but now I can't quite remember what it was. And for some reason I remember the uhaul guy's name was Mike and my friend managed to charm him into giving us a discount. ;)

Those two dressers served us well for about 2.5 years but as our home decor evolved, the mismatching of the dressers started to drive me insane (because I'm a crazy person) and another friend of mine got the 8-cubby Expedit for her bachelorette pad and it was awesome because she could see all of her clothes and therefore pick out an outfit before getting out of her nice warm bed in the morning. Brilliant!

I somehow convinced E to go to his friend's apartment, help him unassemble disassemble it, carry it to our building and up to our 4th floor walkup apartment (it might've taken a couple of trips) and then help me reassemble it in our bedroom. And it was awesome. For a couple of months. Until it started to look like this: 

I'd like to acknowledge that while it became a complete and utter disaster zone, things stayed categorized. My clothing was divided into cool colors (actually just green and blue), warm colors (pinks, orange, yellow and also purple), and neutrals (black, white, tan, gray). And further divided by sweaters vs regular shirts. That's 6 cubbies of classification. But it was really hard to keep it folded nicely, especially when I'd have to grab something quickly. Shimmying a single shirt out of the pile was hard, guys.

SO eventually I decided to bring back one of the dressers instead. We'd given the other one to a neighbor when she had her 3rd baby. I found a way to maximize the drawer space on Pinterest (more on that below) and decided to go for it while E was at work a few months ago.

But nothing's ever easy. I thought I was going to be able to super easily scoot the Expedit out our bedroom door and into our guest room, but no. I was wrong. Oh, was I wrong. You see, there's this little nook right outside our door, and the shelves couldn't squeeze through. So I grabbed a screwdriver and got to work taking the door off it's hinges, thinking that those couple of extra inches would help:
But guess what. They didn't. I don't know what I was thinking, or why I didn't measure:


After that, I sat on the floor and cried a little. #noshame The worst part was that I got it jammed in there so it was stuck, and I couldn't even get to the bathroom which is directly outside our bedroom door. Eventually, I  sucked it up and decided to disassemble it, which was nerve-wracking because if you've ever owned Ikea furniture before, you know that as great as it is for a while, it's not really meant to be taken apart and put back together 20x. And it's not usually a one-girl kind of job. It had taken E and me, working together, a REALLY long time to assemble that first time, so I was really shaking in my boots. But I'd already come so far!

This time, I actually gameplanned. I unscrewed the top, and then I kept the 4 cubby dividers and their shelf together each time. I left the two side pieces attached to the bottom. Then I carefully dragged that "frame" in to the guest room. I wasn't sure it'd work because of the same problem (the nook) but without the top attached I was able to maneuver it enough to successfully get it through.

You're going to have to bear with me for the next couple of photos. Just look at the shelves, not the paint, mess, etc.

This was the method to my madness: I propped the "shell" up between a stack of boxes and a chair with stuff piled on it to weigh it down.

Then, for each row, I took a couple of buckets, propped up the vertical pieces, and then laid the big horizontal shelf down and shimmied all of the little wooden pieces into place. The Ikea directions explicitly say you shouldn't do it this way, but it worked for me. 

It took awhile (actually, it took way less time than the first time we assembled it) but eventually I was able to screw the top back on and we had a success story!!

Here it is in it's final (hopefully) resting place on a different guest room wall. This poor shelving unit has been through a lot, guys. Right now it's just holding some miscellaneous books (Oh, right... I got rid of an old bookshelf that day too. It was falling apart. For real!) and a bunch of hoarded back-issues of Real Simple. I want to get canvas cubby boxes for the four top cubbies but I haven't decided on a color yet.

Ah! And if you're wondering about that folding method I was talking about, check out this post from Pinterest/Buzzfeed that I used for inspiration. So far, months later, it's holding up. It's a game-changer.
:)

Also, for reference (because these iPhone pics are a bit wonky in the color department, here's a list of our paint colors, although some of them are color matched using Behr paint):
Bedroom: Solitude AF-545 by Benjamin Moore
Guest Room: Stone 2112-40 by Benjamin Moore
Hallway: Bird's Egg 2051-60 by Benjamin Moore
Living Room: Galveston Gray AC-27 by Benjamin Moore (more on that here)
I actually have an upcoming post on this!

Jim Morrison Might Be Proud...

Still here! Haven't forgotten about this. I have a bunch of photos of projects from the past month or so that I just need to sort through and write about. And, I guess, the biggest news is that we started seeing our RE again after a year+ long break. I'll save that post for another day (/month? haha) and keep this one limited to The Doors. Or, really, the door. Our front door. I don't know if I ever posted this "before" pic (from my Instagram, haha), but this is what our hallway looked like....

I have no idea why our front door is open a crack here...

Don't get me wrong, I love this shot. That's our "Family Tree" frame wall over there. And our West Elm runner that I'm thankfully still madly in love with. Note that this was before we I painted the off-white molding white. Such a good move, btw. But we had this leftover quart of paint (Benjamin Moore's Dolphin at 75% strength- I know, it's shocking that an attempt at a custom color didn't work out... ::sarcasm::) that I'd bought while trying to find the right gray for our living room (more on that here) and it was burning a hole in my... storage closet? Long story short, I decided to paint the back of our front door. So I tested it out on the peep hole (I always feel super dirty saying that- is there another word for it??) and it stayed like that for, oh I don't know, 3 weeks? Thankfully, my husband never even noticed it or he would've realized I was up to something and tried to stop me. ;) Here's that look (let's ignore the fact that I still haven't painted that off-white trim a the top of the door):

Yep, those are shelves from a discarded book shelf still waiting to be brought down to the garbage area. 

The other day, a friend texted me a photo of her newly-painted black door, and that lit the fire under my tush. When E ran out to do a couple of errands, I whipped out the paint and a brush and went for  it. Here it is after one coat (yikes):

I was about 1/2 done with the second coat when I heard E coming up the stairs... womp womp. I  opened the door for him (chivalry ain't dead) and told him to come in very carefully. He was surprisingly a bit wary of this project, pre-completion. But once that second coat got up there and everything had dried, voila:

I'm a little obsessed. I started referring to it as "Industrial Chic" bc it kind of looks like a metal door. Which is slightly ghetto but in a cool way (just go with it). I kind of want to marry it. And just for kicks, here's a new version of that Instagram pic:

A few other discrepancies between the new and old views aside from the new door color: the entryway table and art.

I smile at the door practically every time I walk by, even from way back here. It's actually a little worrisome. I was thinking about painting all of the doors this color but I think I'm going to hold off on that now and just let this be the star of the show. Hope you like it as much as we do (because EE is sold on it now too!).

Off-the-Wall with Off-White

I'm going to start this off by confessing that we've I've painted parts of our hallway walls at least 5 different colors. It's totally embarrassing. It started with Shakespeare Tan 228 by Benjamin Moore. I thought it'd be a nice beige, but as soon as I got the first bit of paint on the wall I realized that (at least in our sunless hallway) it was way too green. It was like a puke greenish tan. It was terrible. It was my first of many paint-oopsies, and for a few minutes I was too proud to admit it was disgusting, but by the second small wall I knew we couldn't keep it. I actually just recently gave that gallon away on Craigslist. Next we moved on to Smokey Taupe 983, also by our good friend Benny. At the time, my thoughts were that it wasn't "enough of a color". Or maybe it was too cold. I'm not sure, but it didn't make it on to many walls before I gave up on it too. After that, we moved in a new direction-

-no, not those New Directions... but let's take a moment to say RIP to Corey Monteith/Finn. Judging by my fb feed, last night's tribute episode was a tear jerker.

I decided to go blue. Labrador Blue 1670 or CC-740 (I think they're they same but who knows). I loved the color anyway, but then I found out it was the color used in the Dunphy home on Modern Family. Whattup. There was no going back. We actually finished the whole hallway this time. Buuuut it was super bold and dark- not at all like the pale blue it is on the show.... Sad face.

It was around that time that Hubbs and I went on vacation to Acapulco (that's a story for another time) and fell in love with the calm blue-greens that we saw everywhere. We came back and I was on a mission to find the right one. Long story short, it was the precursor to my 50 Shades of Gray shenanigans, and we painted about 100 blue/green/aqua sample in the hallway before choosing Olympic's Sea Sprite C61-2. And then we realized that our hallway has totally different lighting in different parts of it (there's some turns and parts of it get a trickle of light from the windows in the kitchen and living room, while other chunks are tunnel-like and others just get no sunlight whatsoever), so colors look COMPLETELY DIFFERENT in each section. So while Sea Sprite had been perfect over by the living room, our entryway was super duper green.  Ruh Roh!

Here's a photo where you can see the original off-white, the current color (Bird's Egg by BM), and at least two other colors (the greenish sea sprite and darker labrador blue)... what a hot mess:

Which brings us to the point of this post, because that pic also shows what I did last night. All of the trim and everything from the chair rail down plus most of the ceilings in our apartment are off white. All of the walls were off-white too until I painted them 28x each. Off-white is far from terrible. It's not bad at all. It's just boring and kind of makes everything look dirty. NBD, really. But this is me we're talking about. The painting nut. So over the course of about 4-5 hours, I painted it all most of it white. Behr's Ultra Pure White (off the shelf) in semi-gloss, which I'd bought about 2 months ago (and then couldn't find for awhile).

To cut to the point, here are some before, during, and afters...just try to ignore the dustballs and our sad-looking hardwood floors, mmmkay?:

To the right of our front door (when coming into the apartment).

The right-hand turn once you're inside, leading to the breakfast nook (that's our pantry door) and kitchen. This is where I began painting.

The same spot, just painted white. Obviously the next step is to finally cut-in with the blue paint. A step I clearly never got around to. For the past year.

Before and after of the hallway connecting our bedroom, the bathroom, the living room, and the guest room... I'd previously painted the border, but not the inner part, below the chair rail:

This is looking toward our front door; there's usually a West Elm runner here (see the photo below). The left side is partially painted, the right side is done.

My favorite shot. :)

And there we have it. I only had a quart of paint, so I'd like to get another and do a second coat in some places. And paint the baseboard in the breakfast nook. And kitchen And do below the chair rail in the living room. Uhhh yeah we'll see if it takes me another year before any of that happens....

Once You Pop, You Can't Stop

Okay so if the suspense hasn't killed you by now, you're probably my Facebook friend and know the results of Paint Indecision 2013. We finally went for it. We picked a color. Are you ready? Remember, it was between Benjamin Moore's Dolphin AF-715 and Benjamin Moore's Galveston Gray AC-27.

And the winner was....
.
.
.
.
.
Galveston Gray (!!!):

We went with the lighter of the two choices. I wasn't sure it could hold it's own against the Benjamin Moore's Bird's Egg 2051-60 in the hallway, but it totally does. E repeatedly let me know that it was ultimately my decision, but that he thought that Dolphin would be too dark. That kicked my anxiety into high gear, and although I loved Dolphin and was leaning towards it the entire time, I just couldn't go through with it in the end. Galveston Gray is a nice, toasty gray. It's the same tone as Studio Taupe, but more gray than beige on the greige scale (Studio Taupe is the opposite- more beige than gray). For the sake of full disclosure, it's still a little bland behind the beige couches in some lights (I wish the couches "popped" more) but it's definitely better than before, and I love it with everything else in our living room. It's part of BM's "America's Colors" collection, and I'm guessing it's named after Galveston, TX, but I'm not really sure what's so greige about Texas. I'm a New England girl, remember?

Here's a sneak peek:

My warrior of a husband worked an overnight shift, went to grad school, and picked up a gallon and a quart of this bad boy from Home Depot "on his way" home for me. Okay, it's not exactly on his way. It's pretty much out of his way, actually. Which scores him even more props.

I'm not sure why, but we usually get our Benjamin Moore picks color matched to Behr paint+primer in one. I used to think it was because I liked the Behr coverage/application more, but people always seem surprised when I tell them that. So I'm piecing it together that it's actually a combination of Home Depot's hours being way more convenient (open till 10 or 11pm) than those of the smaller hardware stores that sell BM paint (which all close by 7pm) and the fact that BM "sample" sizes are like $6+ each vs getting a color matched to a Behr sample size costing $3-4. I'm sure the Behr gallon is also cheaper than the BM gallon. So that's probably why.

Then on one of his next overnight shifts, (the night before Yom Kippur actually) I hit my breaking point of not being able to handle the patchwork quilt of paint swatches on our walls (see here) and decided to just do the edging. That way it'd be easier when I decided to do the full walls... I'd just have to move all of the furniture to the middle of the room and go for it without worrying about details.

Yeah, but that didn't happen. Once you pop, you just can't stop.

Ok, this might be TMI but it happened to be really hot and humid that night, and I don't think I've EVER sweat that much in my life. Someone should make a DIY Workout video. I literally thought I was going to pass out (I'm sure it had nothing to do with the paint fumes).

Anyway, this little Brooklyn apartment living room of ours is feeling more and more "us". E walked into the room the next morning and said "It feels so much more home-y!" BOOM. Those were the exact words I was looking for. BTW Our new theme for the house is somewhere between "Urban Lumberjack" and "Urban Hobbit Hole". Yep. I've clearly given this too much a lot of thought.

I'll post some photos of the actual room tomorrow (or "soon"), but first you should know that I've been at it again with my poor poor photoshop skillz. No, it's not even photoshop. It's from "Instacollage" on my iPhone. I'm hanging my head in shame, don't worry. But this, my friends, is our current collection of paint colors in our apartment.

The guest room might get repainted with Behr's Studio Taupe at some point (we have a bunch leftover from our first living room painting experience- and I love the color, just not in the living room) but for now it's Stone, which is a gray with purple undertones. And after this super uncomfortably hot painting experience, it might be awhile before I tackle a paint job again. 

Regardless, I'm actually pretty pleased with the combination. It honestly goes together better in the photo than in real life, but we'll roll with it. And speaking of rolling, I'm out of here. Hopefully I'll get that next post up tomorrow!

50 Shades of Gray

Yeah, I went there. No, I haven't read it. I don't even know much about it. Okay, fine. I saw one parody.

And honestly, the title is actually a low estimate of how many shades of gray I've considered for our living room. Like maybe multiply "50" by 3 and we'll be closer. I'm not joking. I'm that much of a crazy woman. And by the end of this post, you will all have lost any respect for the decorating abilities that you *thought* I posessed. Spoiler alert: It's all trial and error, baby.

It started back in 2011. We were moving into our THIRD apartment in the span of just over 2 years. We loved our first one-bedroom apartment, but found a two-bedroom for less money per month, in a building where a bunch of our friends lived. It was in a sketchier neighborhood, but we jumped on it like white on rice (what?!). Less than a week later it was broken into and we were robbed. COOL! We somehow lasted 8 more months there, but one day I snapped. We started looking for a new place that night, the next morning we went to look at an apartment, and by midday we had signed a new lease. True story.

We really wanted to mark this place as a fresh start, so we asked for permission to paint from our landlord. The exact words: "I wouldn't do, say, 'burnt orange' or anything, but otherwise yes, you can paint." GREEN LIGHT!

Turns out, I had no idea what I was doing. The only paint-picking experience I had up until then was picking my room color when I was a kid. I'd go to the store with my mom, I would point to a color I liked, and that was it. There was no bringing home paint chips and seeing what they looked like in different lights. There were no paint samples that you painted on walls to compare. There was no process, you just did it. So... that's what I did this time. I went to the store and picked out this awesome "greige" for the living room (Studio Taupe by Behr). I was so in love with it that I wanted to paint the whole apartment that color. E, thankfully, stopped me. Because that would've been weird.

Then we moved our furniture in. I don't think it hit me for awhile, probably because of all the excitement of moving, but as time went on I realized that this paint color was mighty similar to the color of our couches. And once I saw it, I couldn't unsee it. I've been searching my computer for a photo, but the best I can come up with is this:

It's doesn't even look that bad there. In real life the color has more brown undertones. The couch and walls just look bland together. Side note: that rug kicked the bucket awhile ago. Even though it was way too small for our living room, I miss it because it really tied the room together.... OMG!!!

My life is now complete. I can't believe I just worked that into this blog. YES. 

ANYWAY. We I started looking obsessive-compulsively searching for "the perfect gray" back in March or April. Yes, it's been that long. I tried Benjamin Moore, Behr, Martha Stewart, Glidden... I'd have added Sherwin Williams and Olympic and Valspar into the mix too but Lowe's is harder to get to while carless in Brooklyn (we I learned that lesson while doing this same exact process for the hallway). Even Home Depot is a pain(t) in the tush of a trip, but sometimes a girl needs an excuse to head to Manhattan. ;) We hung up paint chips, painted paint samples, conducted extensive Pinterest, Houzz.com and google image searches. I've literally probably lost weeks of my life to this quest... Just take a look. This is only a small selection-- most of this process took place before I had considered starting Fruitful Furbishings, so I didn't document it. But prepare to be shocked and appalled.

Here's the earliest photographed stage. At one point there were way more paint chips taped to the wall and they were admittedly all roughly the same shade of gray. I'm already hanging my head in shame: 

Stage two. We had it narrowed down to two colors. Zinc #MSL267 by Martha Stewart, Dolphin AF-715 by Benjamin Moore. But then we I still couldn't decide. So I started tapping into our previously vetoed paint chip and paint sample supply. In the first photo, the top right is MS Zinc, the top middle is BM Dolphin, the top right is BM's Dolphin at 75% strength (oh yes I'm serious), purple-ish one on the bottom right is Stone 2112-40 by Benjamin Moore (which we had bought for the kitchen, hated it there, and then used in our guest room), and the light one on the bottom left is Galveston Gray AC-27 by Benjamin Moore: 

 Stage 3. We narrowed it down to two very different looks. Dark: Dolphin AF-715 by Benjamin Moore and Light: Galveston Gray AC-27 by Benjamin Moore. I painted over the majority of the other paint samples (missed a small block of MS Zinc in the 3rd pic). Please excuse miscellaneous items and dust balls that made their way into the shots. And the blue paint chip stuck into that frame is our hallway color, Bird's Egg 2051-60 by Benjamin Moore, and there for reference.

 

I couldn't decide- I could honestly go either way but it's two totally different vibes. My husband is adamantly pro-GG. So I did the mature, well thought-out thing. I posted a photo on Facebook and asked my friends to decide. I'm not kidding. There were a few votes for one wall dark and three light walls, but one of our walls already has faux brick detailing so I thought the combination would be too much. There were also rogue votes for blue, green and burgundy. 

In the end, team "Dark" won the Facebook poll 27-17. 

But which did I we actually decide to go with? You'll have to wait and see. E's at Home Depot right now.... I know, the suspense must already be killing you.