New Home, New Projects

Since moving into our new house, we've done a few minor changes to either make the house more leak proof or more our style. Shortly after moving into the house, we discovered there was a foundation leak...and nothing we could do about it except pay to get it fixed.

See the discoloured line on the wall by the bucket? I'm not sure how we missed it during our tours/inspection of the house! The bucket ended up filling to at least 1/3 full during some of the September rain storms we had. After we got it fixed (from the outside), we haven't had an issue since. YEAH! But the discolouration remains.  BOO!

We have installed a new entrance light and kitchen faucet - I wasn't thinking so do not have the before pictures.  You'll just have to trust our judgement that the new items are better than the originals (a light with 3 different sized bulb that had burn marks on it, and a leaky, mouldy looking tap).

Another change that I forgot to target the 'before' photos of, is our first paint job.  An agreement we had made with Lorelei when we started the process of looking for a new house was to let her pick her bedroom colour (within reason).  The painting process took a bit longer because we did a fancy wall.  To be honest, I do not have a complete 'after' photo either...but that is because her room hasn't been very tidy since and we've had so much other stuff going on that we have not had time to work on it yet.

I'll try to get a nice after shot of her room to show the full affect...some day.  But as you can well guess, it is a light blue room with a blue gradient type wall.

One of the things I occupied my time with during Ethan's April, May, June and September hospital stays is to surf DIY (Do-It-Yourself) websites.  One of the neat things I learned was to take a picture of your tools.  However, I only employed this technique with Lorelei's room.  I honestly didn't think of it for any of the other work we did and I discovered something that worked wonders and wanted to share with anyone else tackling a paint job!

As you can see we used your regular tools: stepladder, mallet, paint, drop cloth, sharp knife, rollers, paint brushes, extension for lighting and level for the gradient lines.  The bottom left photo is regular run of the mill painting tape.  The holy grail of paint tape can be found on the right hand side!  On one of my favourite DIY sites she touted the benefits of this tape...and after using it, I am a believer!  It went on well and came off super smooth.  We used the delicate tape (yellow) and it made the lines look great!  You just have to remember to smooth it out really well with a credit/bank/library type card.  Totally worth the extra money!  The regular painters tape came off in small bits and pieces requiring me, on multiple occasions, to tweeze off what it left behind! 

We did make some rookie mistakes though...

And put down the paint can or tray where the drop cloth was not...  Thankfully we're not so attached to the carpet!  Eventually, our goal is to replace the carpeting...it had stains on it when we moved in, and honestly I'm not a huge fan of carpets when you have pets or allergies!

The next room we tackled was Ethan's room.  His room was initially pink, and that just wouldn't do!  We had picked up a bunch of paint chips and I tore off a bunch I liked and taped them to Ethan's walls to see which we liked best.  I really liked the colour we had in Lorelei's room at the old house and wanted to duplicate it so there were mostly orange paint chips all around his room with two different ones that were shades of green.

The first picture shows what the room looked like before we started to get it ready to paint.  If you look really closely, you can see an orange paint chip on the right side of the wall.  For the paint jobs we have done in this house, we have focused a lot on the prep work so that we can get a better finished product. 

Another thing which was inspired by the DIY sites I visited was a temporary bed for Ethan to use when we have night nursing.  Clayton built this little sweetie in our basement using the measurements of a mattress we had.  He did a wonderful job, and it worked well as a spare bed for mom's recent visit too!

The almost finished product of the two projects looked like this:

I guess you can tell that we abandoned the orange room for a different colour.  We still haven't fully set everything up yet but that is because we're working on a bigger project that I will fill you in on shortly...