Saturday, March 6, 2010

American Foursquare Remodel 15 - Spare Bedroom to a Sitting Room

I decided to make one of the bedrooms a sitting room - perfect for the TV that I don't watch. And maybe for the antique trundle Singer sewing machine I recently acquired, once it's refinished and refurbished.

Two matching love seats were left in the house. The colors and style are not my current taste, but the love seats are in good enough condition for now.

The walls started out as painted wallpaper. I remember the original paper in here - a dark juvenile print with galactic spaceships, astronauts, stars and planets. Cartoons, really. Awful.

So my parents painted it pale pink. Like the bathroom. Softer and more subdued for a bedroom, certainly, but not quite right for a sitting room.

 

The right way to do this room would be to strip the painted paper, of course. But it was in pretty good condition (visible wallpaper seams notwithstanding). So I decided to simply paint it. Brown, LOL. 

Actually it's called Cardamom. I first saw the swatch in Home Depot as a Behr paint, but decided after a friend's recommendation to take the swatch to Sherwin Williams, who matched it perfectly. Sherwin Williams has a fun online gadget - upload a photo of your room, and paint it virtually. Great tool, especially useful to avoid a $40-a-gallon mistake. *gasp* Not that Behr was that much cheaper in price. Anyway, I found the tool after picking the color, but I have had fun playing with it. 

I used Behr Premium Plus interior paint for the living room and den ceilings (Cream Silk) and living room walls (Caraway - you know from my photos that it's a deep green, whatever hue this swatch depicts), and have been quite happy with the paint quality. I have two more gallons - Premium Plus Ultra, which is supposed to have primer already in it - ready to go for the hallway and staircase, in Chianti (a burgundy red, although this site's swatch looks more icky rust on my monitor). Behr is available at Home Depot, whose hours are more convenient for me. But Sherwin Williams was suggested as a "better" paint, so I tried it.

I do like the plastic jug Sherwin Williams uses. Duration interior with a satin finish worked great... after three and in some places four coats. Really. That was disappointing. I expected for the price it would cover better. Maybe it's because I was applying it over painted wallpaper. Maybe it was the deep color. Whatever, I was not particularly impressed with the performance. But I do like the color.

Once again, I wanted a picture rail installed. I had it placed about 9-10 inches below the ceiling to accommodate a wallpaper border someday.


 



As I did in the parlor, I changed out the plastic outlet covers for wood ones, then painted them to match the walls.

 


These walls are screaming for pictures or something. That's the final step, yet to come. I have a collection of framed family photos that might make a great wall mural... 
 

The rug comes from a past Rhode Island PBS Spring Auction (and buy the way, the 2010 auction is online beginning April 1, and televised April 26 - 30. And yes, the misspelling of buy/by is intentional).

 

American Foursquare Remodel 14 - Parlor

The parlor was the first room painted - even though it's almost the last story told. There is so much that still needs to be done in this room and the whole house - the decorative details that makes a house a home - but it's getting there slowly. Very slowly it seems.

Here are the before pictures. The beautiful lincrusta frieze was hardly visible, painted the same color as the walls.

 
  
  
  


I can't rightly call these "after" pictures; more accurately, they are 'tweens, with more to follow as I unpack all those fragiles still safely boxed, and put the room together.

  

  A view of the picture window before the new wood trim.
  


The beautiful new trim that matches the original casings elsewhere in the house. An earlier blog discusses the trim work.


I replaced the outlet covers with wood ones, then painted them to match the walls.
 


A few decorative details added. I resist taking a full room view, though - still too many misplaced furniture pieces, boxes, ladders, tools around, ha!


This is a statue of Our Lady of Fatima. My parents brought it back with them from their visit to Fatima, Portugal, many years ago (I'd have to really strain to remember the year, it was that long ago). She always had a lot of religious meaning to my parents - Our Lady of Fatima, not the statue! And I was raised in that tradition. But more than that, it's a beautiful sculpture as well. At the time my parents died, neither my brother nor I had room for such a large piece. We were going to donate her to a church, but I never got around to doing that. 

Now that I'm in the house and living with her *smile*, I can't just give her away. I figure I've acquired and am willing to display lots of beautiful women statues (like the Guiseppe Armani on the mantel) without giving it any more thought than perfect placement. So why not this one, too? Because it's religious? Absurd. So this beautiful piece of Portuguese religious art has a special place on the window ledge in my new parlor. : )


Link to the latest pics (September 2010)