We three kings

This weekend we discovered that our bedroom is approximately three king beds long. That is a king mattress, the foundation spring, and bed frame lined up like very square wise men.

But let's start from the beginning ... which was weeks ago.

One Sunday morning, when we had grand ambitions for the To Do List, I spotted a Craigslist ad for a four poster king and a tall matching dresser. We had snoozed on our last bed opportunity and regretted it, so we called up the seller immediately. Could we come see it? Sure, if we could be there in 45 minutes, because they had places to be. The sellers were 30 minutes away, and we hadn't even finished our coffee.

So, we raced over. I immediately wanted the bed, but Mike wasn't so sure, because he's one of those who has to think on things, as a matter of principle. I like to think on things, too, but once I have considered the information and options available, I can make a decision and act on it fast. Here I was thinking this is a really cool, solid bed for $175, we would be nuts not to get it! But Mike had to do the "we'll think about it" thing and we left.

This drove me batty as we drove around the countryside (not home!) discussing the bed. Clearly we didn't have our Craigslist routine down. I wanted to buy it right then and there, and Mike needed to sit on it. Finally, we were on the same page, so Mike called them back. I only hear one side of the conversation, but I never hear, "We'll take the bed." Instead, he said, "We are definitely interested."

...

...

That is not a yes. That does not confirm anything. Apparently the conversation got sidetracked in regards to the rest of the bedroom set that the sellers weren't ready to part with but would think about and call us back tonight. Mike was hoping for a DEAL!

So we waited.

And waited.

I texted the seller to clarify that, yes, we wanted the bed.

Darkness fell and there was still no call or text.

Finally, Mike called. 

We got the bed! Sigh. Of. Relief.

Two days later, on a subzero day, we hauled out our handy trailer and went to pick up the bed. We like to think ourselves fairly deft at tying things down after hauling boats, mattresses, random furniture, and junk through two moves. But when it's 15 out and a wind at 30 mph, your gloves are pretty much worthless and wrestling with straps, posts, and blankets is absolutely miserable. We cranked up the heat in the car and would thaw our fingers on the dash vents between tie downs. Awesome.

The bed was wrapped in some cushy-paper stuff, some old curtains, and my car blanket.  Improvisation is key when you are on a Craigslist adventure with us.  Unfortunately, we wound up leaving a trail of wrappings behind as we toodled down the highway. I rode in the back, neck craned to watch for any slippage as Mike tried to not be a traffic disaster while still taking it easy on bridges and turns. We had half country highway and half city traffic to contend with to safely get home. At one point a tie down came loose and we had to stop, but the bed barely slipped, thank goodness. I sat in the back and kept an eye on things and got to see the quizzical looks of passersby. In this land of SUVs and pickup trucks, it baffles people that our little ol' Elantra hauls boats and furniture. It is one of our favorite pastimes to see the triple look as we pass by. They really can't believe that my little Hyundai is pulling something.

We arrived home safe and sound with our new bed, which may have suffered some new scratches on the journey. Our neighbors must have got the memo, because just as Mike is trying to back the trailer up the driveway, everyone seems to be coming home or leaving, so we had an audience. Mike's mortal fear is backing up the trailer in front of people and now we had the whole neighborhood watching us.

Anyway, once we hauled the pieces upstairs, we realized something is missing here. We had a four-piece frame: head and foot boards and two side boards. Our mattress would drop right through. Oops. Our bargain bed frame had just become more expensive. We needed a support frame and potentially a box spring to boot. So for a couple of weeks, our bed rested against the bedroom wall while we both went back and forth on what, exactly, to get for the bed. We finally arrived on this metal, springy frame that was supposed to also work as a box spring and seemed to be getting pretty good reviews. It was cheaper than buying a box spring plus Amazon would deliver it for free, winner winner!

The frame arrived on Friday and Mike put it together in minutes. On Saturday, the real fun began.

The bed was easy to put together, the trick was supporting it to prevent torquing as we moved everything into place and screwed the bolts. Our high-tech system consisted of a ladder for the headboard to rest against, the tool box, and me until Mike had everything loosely secured and could rotate through his final tightening.

Then it was time to go meta and put the frame into the frame. We had considered building the bed around the spring frame, but we were worried that it might not fit and mess with alignment. Midway through the process, we realized we should've videotaped our acrobatics.  So, yes, we dismantled the first bed and built the second without really knowing if it would work. It took some folding and slanting of the spring frame and Mike crawling under the cage to get it all in.

Success! It fit! Then we hauled our mattress onto the frame. And immediately started laughing. We have a bit of an elevation change. Our old Ikea platform bed set the mattress only inches off the floor. Now we had a tall frame, a mattress, plus 3 inches of foam pad, making our mattress about waist height. You just kinda flop onto the bed. It's an adult bed!

We also learned why bed skirts exist. Our bed looks awesome, except for those frame legs sticking out of the bottom. I kinda want to put monster feet on them. OMG, kids, there IS a monster under the bed!! Luckily, you can get skirts for $15-25 on Amazon (which Mike thinks is too high, but they're $40 at BB&B).

Check out some of the details:

The other thing we need to get? End tables. We used some white Ikea sliding shelves behind our headboard on the old bed, but they definitely don't work with this one. It's a long drop from the bed to the floor for books, lamps, water glasses, eyeglasses, etc. Hmm ... Decorating houses definitely creates a snowball effect ... 

We're leaning against buying the nightstands and dressers that are part of this set, because we think it'll look dated rather than elegant. And it would be fun to mix some styles, so I think we're going to look at more contemporary nightstands. Maybe something white, so we don't have to worry about clashing wood?

      

    

The trick will be getting us to agree, especially because Mike is very particular about the legs/feet of furniture. A drawer is a must, I think, because we both had a tendency to clutter behind the headboard on the old bed. It's also insane how expensive these little things can be! We're hoping we'll manage to score a deal like we did with our Menard's living room set ($60 for a solid coffee table and two nightstands!). 

   

Hmm, maybe I can convince him that nightstands don't have to match anymore, and we can both get what we want? They do it on Houzz! What style would YOU choose for our nightstands?

Curtain Battle Royale

Today we went to war. We won some battles, lost others. Earlier this week, I bought a bunch of curtains at TJMaxx, Marshall's, Home Goods, and Garden Ridge. Oh, and Target. Here's a selection below.

If a curtain didn't come in a panel pair, we just bought one panel, just so we weren't buying a bajillion curtains. We wound up with around 15 total (pairs counting as one). As of last night, we were down to the light brown, wove Nate Berkus from Target and the sheer linen grommet (that was the same length as our silvers). Even though the white sheer linen was our original vision, we had become intrigued with the idea of bringing some warmth and texture to the treatments. But try as we might, we just weren't getting it. We wanted the Berkus to be longer and grommeted, but when we found a similar material with grommets, the length issue still wasn't working. And it just didn't look as nice as our heads told us it  would.

I fell in love with these curtains below, but they weren't long enough, and doing everything at 84 inches instead of 96 just wasn't going to fly. As much as I liked them, I couldn't keep at $40 pair of curtains on the hope they might work somewhere else (we didn't find an immediate spot).

We wound up going with the white linens and will use other decorations to warm up the area. We're thinking of re-purposing the kitchen uppers as a reading bench under the window.

Since we had all of these curtains, we ran around the house putting them up in different rooms to see what we liked. We don't want too many drapes collecting dust, but it is a nice way to spruce up a space. The dining room curtains were nice but dark, so we through up the Raw Silk and some patterned sheers - and the space completely changed! 

Pardon the apparent darkness. It's much lighter in here, but my camera was refusing
 to flash due to the snowy light coming in.

The room is still incredibly mismatched right now as a dumping ground and we haven't removed the wallpaper, but we now have renewed interest in the room. It was weird, even though we usually left the navy curtains open, so much more light seems to be flooding into the room. My camera didn't want to show you that, though, because it was so focused on all the light that it kept darkening the shots. Manual settings were overrode.

So at this point, we're batting 4 out of 15. I also grabbed a pair of curtains for the kitchen, which I rather like and Mike is iffy about. It's a point of contention. Much of the kitchen is up in the air.

These also have that linen sheerness to them, and I find them rather cheerful. We're playing around between blues and greens (with a gray base) for the kitchen palette, so I feel like this will give some guidance but still be flexible. Of course, we need to figure out whether or not we're going to paint those cabinets. A decision that probably won't happen until the upper cabinets come down (soon!!) and we see how it changes the feel of the room.

So the day started out well. Bedroom curtains done (minus the decision on shades down the road), dining room curtains surprising done, and kitchen curtains done(?). The rest of the done kind of spiraled down from there. We thought curtains were wrong. Oh ho! No. Rugs bring a whole new form of torture.

Next up: Battle of the Rugs

a few steps behind, but leaping forward

When we set out to repaint the master suite, I kind of thought of the project as painting a box. A really big box, sure, but a box. But it seemed like a simple project, with some extra work on the trim. The bath and shower rooms would add to the complication, but I figured we'd be done with the painting portion of updates.

Ha.

As of Saturday morning, we had 3 walls second coated, one wall one coated with some spots needing cutting in, baseboards painted, and the shower room caulked and de-wallpapered. My ambitious timeline? Blown. Out. of. the. Water.

There are several reasons for that:

1) Work & sleep

2) Family & friends

3) Keeping our sanity

4) Our own mistakes/inefficiencies

None of these are bad reasons for skipping out on project time, and I need to remind myself of that (while still keeping us on task). Mike has been, ah, diligent about making sure I don't burn us out. This isn't an HGTV weekend makeover. We don't have a full crew of contractors overhauling a room (and those rooms are often not completed for the big reveal). This is our home, and we'll be here for awhile. What's the rush? We've only worked in the house a couple of work nights and cut ourselves off by 7:30 to give us time to clean up and drive back to the apartment.

So, to help us make some progress, Mike's dad came over on Saturday morning to prime the wallpaper-free shower room. By the end of the day, we had all the bedroom walls painted, the baseboards caulked, and half of the touch-up work done.

Two walls of the upper trim still need a fresh coat of paint, the trim on the doors and windows need refreshers, and I plan to recaulk and touch up the trim on the fourth wall (where the lamps are in the before shot). But I think I'll just touch up and caulk and visit with the other trim later.

Meanwhile, Mike's dad knocked out the shower/toilet room with two coats of primer, and it's totally transformed the space. It's too tight of a space for a good shot, and we have a step stool in the shower, so I didn't try to squeeze in there for the progress shot.

Before. How about that green/gray and beige wallpaper?

Primed

We went ahead and primed the trim, since we know we'll be painting those whites, but we held off on the cabinet over the toilet and the window until we decide if we want to paint those or not. They are more involved, project wise, and we figured the window would be a summer project. We forgot to tape off both woodwork and it didn't matter - Mike's dad cuts a clean line!

Buckling down, Mike and I decided ton Valspar's Gravity for the bathroom paint. We sucked it up and bought the kitchen and bath paint for its moisture resistance, and while it's significantly more than regular paint, we figure it's a small enough space that we're hoping one bucket outta do it. The Olympic kitchen and bath did not register the VOC content on its bucket, so we went with the Valspar zero VOC. Online, Olympic does list their kitchen and bath as zero VOC. Oh well. Shoulda put it on the label, folks. But this will also give us a better idea of the two paint brands, and we figure the shower room is where we should get the "better" stuff.

Meanwhile, we've got the rest of the bathroom taped off, the old swatches primed, and we're ready to rock out the bathroom! Well, at least Phase 1.

Accent troubles and lessons learned

The master bedroom is not yet complete. The original plan was to paint 3 walls in Olympics Cozy Corner, which Mike is rolling in the above photo, and then paint the fourth wall, the bed wall, in Admiralty (the dark swatches). The colors do look fantastic together, and we felt the oversized master was a great place to go bold. But as we threw on a bigger swatch to see how we still felt, and feeling the walls coming in with the new paint, we had reservations.

1. The room is already darkening, in a good way, so would this uber dark wall have an adverse effect?
2. Cutting clean corner lines is difficult. Any mistake is going to be shouted out to us. Every. Single. Day.
3. Coordinating furniture would become more complicated.

It was the latter two issues that gave us the most pause. If we didn't like the accent wall, we could always prime over and paint. Yes, it's time and money, but we were willing to try it out. But the more we inspected the corners and thought about how we'd have to decorate, we felt less and less excited about Admiralty. We may still incorporate that color somewhere, even in this room, but we didn't want all of our decorating and furniture decisions to be dominated by that wall.

So, all corners and walls will be "Cozy."

But in this process, we realized we are doing things reverse order. What we should have done was paint the trim first. Why? We could tape a little above the trim, caulk in the gaps, take up the tape, and then not really fuss over clean lines, because we'll just paint over mistakes with the wall paint. By doing the walls first, we have to basically prep twice. And progress has slowed. Now we have to allow the walls to cure enough that we can tape over it in order to caulk and paint the trim. 

Lesson learned? Paint your trim before your walls. Grumble.

Wallpaper Strikes Back!

Well.

The day started with the grand plan of finishing off the master bedroom and hopefully caulking and/or priming the master bath.

We got rolling:

Olympic's Cozy Corner - Less purply in real life. We loooove this color.

We paused before doing the fourth wall (the bed wall), because we were going to do an accent wall in Admiralty, a navy blue, but as will be discussed in a later post, we eventually decided against it. But we needed to let the swatch (around Mike's head in the photo) dry before priming over to continue on with the wall.

So, we decided to get going on the shower room, which had been stripped of its wallpaper all the way down to the wallboard.

Or so we thought.

Mike had the misfortune of delivering the bad news. There was still a layer or two (or three) of wallpaper glue. We'd let the room be for several days, and in that time, it seems the walls decided to show their true colors, or rather their scales. I probably resembled a cartoon character with steam coming out of my ears. Lucky for me, Mike took on the challenge, since he is basically a wallpaper whisperer.

With just a sponge loaded with warm soap and water, Mike gave the walls a good bath and scraped with a plastic putty knife. He could get big, long peels when he hit good spots.

Have to say, ladies. Nothin' hotter than a man conquering wallpaper glue with a smile! And, yes, that peeling stuff is all glue.

The wall is basically a schizophrenic nightmare (apologies to anyone actually suffering from the condition). Along with the basic wallboard, there are areas with paint, along with glue and wood stain (whenever there is woodwork nearby). But it's like there are 2-3 different types and/or layers of glue, like it was applied differently at different times ... but there was only one layer of wallpaper. Plus, you have the random swaths of paint. Perhaps the original builders/owners couldn't decide between beige and wallpaper? Whatever.

On the bright side, while sopping the walls, we've managed to clean some of the dirty grout on the floor tiles. We're leaving the fan running all night as a moisture precaution, since we are concerned about soaking nearly bare walls and it dripping down in the cracks between the trim and the wall. Mold, anyone? I do have a mold treatment/prevention spray that I've done around the cracked shower grout, but that won't get behind the trim. I think we are going to make sure everything is dry before we start slapping caulk and primer around.

Speaking of caulk ...

Along with wallpaper glue bringing things to a screeching halt, I had a bit of a "d'oh!" While Mike was battling glue demons, I decided to try out a little DIY trim trick on the no-longer-accent wall. Our trim is not in fantastic shape. There are gaps between the trim and the wall that paint can't fix. A favorite DIY trick is to lay painters tape in two very close rows to make a clean line to smooth caulk in the joints between the wall and trim. If you're painting trim white, this also creates a crisp, clean line to make that whole cutting in thing a lot easier.

I'd already purchased some tub and tile caulk and figured it'd work just as well on the trim. It went pretty slick. As per other DIYers, I taped off, squirted it on, and then smoothed the caulk out with a wet finger and pulled off the tape while it was still wet. It looked fantastic and was a salve to the wallpaper burn. 

As we packed up for the night, I suddenly realized all my gaps were showing again. o_0

Cue Luke Skywalker screaming NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!

I ran my finger over my disappearing work. The caulk was there, smooth and beautiful, soaring over the offending gaps. Then it hit me.

I'd used paintable but clear drying caulk. 

Bugger.

It's not the end of the world. We're painting the trim anyway and can now paint over the gaps, but we'll need to tape again to keep that clean line. Sad but true. So, we bought some white caulk on the way back to the crash pad to use on the rest of the trim, and we can still use the clear caulk for filling in cracks in other places before painting. Not all is lost, and now we know it really does dry clear. 

So, today was definitely a setback, but we learned stuff. I guess that's how it goes. Grumble.