New York Renovator

I’m STILL working on a schematic for the electrical and plumbing for our Kitchen Renovation, well, actually, I haven’t started it yet.. :-S … but I can’t help flipping through the home magazines and color swatches, trying to envision what color my kitchen will be.

I hate white. It WON’T be white!

When we moved here, everything was painted white– the siding, the exterior trim, the porches, the rails. And the inside was all white– the walls, the trim, the doors. It is so ugly! Why do people use boring old white on everything! I like color. I have a study that is sage green, and a dining room that is red. And it’s mighty pretty.

Red is very bold; done poorly it will look garish on plaster walls. But my dining room has four windows, six doors, and a stairwell– it’s a busy room! I needed a bold, solid color to reign in the chaos of it all, kind of like acne treatment for the bumpy plaster and confusing mass of doorways. The trim is a super-glossy white. I like it.

My Entry Hall is green, red, and beige, with acanthus leaves on the wallpaper border. The kids are standing in it, here:

Because my home is Greek Revival, I’d like to stick with a general “Greek” theme, or at least a more old-fashioned kind of scheme. I painted my Living Room beige after we renovated it. I’ve never been fond of beige, but I like the luminous, light-filled look for the room.

(I intend on replacing those old curtains with longer drapes in a brown/red pattern).

So I’m thinking of painting the kitchen red. My daughters are not keen on it– they think the room will be too dark with red. But the cabinets will be beige (like maple or a light oak color), and we’re going to add another window in the room… is red too unconventional for a kitchen? I don’t want green, and the cabinets are already beige….

Anyone have any ideas? What colors are your kitchens? Do you like them? If you could have your kitchen in ANY color, what would it be?

This house was built in 1855, and it has seen very little renovation since then (except for a horrifying kitchen redo in 1970 and a tsunami of wall paneling from the 1960s). I like to open up the walls and ceilings, here and there, to see what’s behind. (Any excuse to ditch that lousy wall paneling)

A few summers ago, I took down the sagging, water-laden drop-ceiling panels from my garage (we’d sprung a leak in our garage roof that year), and found an old tin ceiling above. Wow! It was beautiful!

Unfortunately, very little is salvageable. It has a lot of rust and water damage. I peeled off a few panels but they cracked when doing so. So far, most of the old tin ceiling remains in place; I’ll probably take it all down when I renovate the garage into a family room or something.

The garage used to be a kitchen, way back when– before they had cars, lol. There are still remains of the very old wallpaper from the late 1800s behind the 1960s paneling. It’s like stepping back in time! There are several layers, and some of the old wallpaper is flocked, or has gilded, hand-painted flecks, and such.

I like the tin ceiling effect. I was disappointed that I couldn’t reuse the pressed tin from the garage. I have a very large dining room, and I wanted to “do up” the ceiling with tin. But the tin is way beyond my budget. I got this bright idea to use textured wallpaper on the ceiling, to simulate pressed tin.

I did this several years ago (WHAT A JOB that was! You think it’s hard hanging wallpaper on walls, lol! Try a ceiling! It will burn fat faster than you can say “Leptovox.” Thankfully, ithe job was made easier when I got some helpers involved). So several years later, the wallpaper is holding up remarkably well!

My dining room is a beautiful, warm ruby red. The deep dark color helps to stabilize the room, because this room has four windows and six doors. It’s a busy room. I painted the wallpapered ceiling with just a whisper of pink paint. The room glows.

That green garland you see is my makeshift crown moulding (which is on my To Do List yet). The garland is wrapped around the perimeter of the room to hide the ugly wallpaper seams against the top of the wall. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than nothing. And it’s cheap!

So if you have a hankering for those nice old pressed tin ceilings but can’t afford to cough up the big bucks, try textured wallpaper. I just love the effect, and everyone comments how nice it is.

I had guests a week ago and got another compliment about my upstairs bathroom. Everytime I show a guest the bathroom, they touch the wall and ask, “Is that wallpaper or paint?” I just love it when they ask that.

Click the photo for a larger view.

I love stripes on walls. But I don’t like wallpaper too much because it’s so difficult to install and so expensive. And in a bathroom, a room where moisture builds up, wallpaper would not stay very long. So I decided to paint stripes on my walls. If you are interested in reading about how I did it, see my post here. It’s not hard, but it is more time consuming than rolling plain old paint on the walls. But I think it has made all the difference. It gives my bathroom a really classy look.

You can go with big fat stripes or stripes that look like they’ve been on diet pills, heh heh. (Good one, huh?) The technique is basically the same. And you’ll never have to worry about curling or peeling wallpaper again!

When we first bought the house, the first thing I did was paint all the rooms. The house had been freshly painted before we bought it, but the walls were white AND the trim was white. And large sections of the flooring was splattered white, too. :-p White is SOOOO dull. I rarely use it, except for trim when my walls are dark. I just love ruby red walls with pure white, glossy trim, yum. I did my dining room like that.

When I did the kids’ rooms, I tried to make things little fun. For the boys’ room, I painted the walls a light color (white with a pink hue, for warmth) and the ceiling a sky blue. I made fluffy white clouds on the ceiling by mixing white paint with some water, and dabbing the paint on the ceiling with a dampened sea sponge. It really came out great. And then I painted yellow glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling. After 10 years, the stars still look great, and they still glow!

Glow in the dark paint is found at craft stores, and I think home improvement stores carry it now, too. I bought a few different styles of craft sponges in the shapes of stars. All I had to do was dip the star sponge in the glow in the dark paint, and dab the ceiling with the sponge. I used craft paint, which was a little watery, so I painted over every star twice. The yellow is a light yellow. It’s hardly noticeable during the day. But every evening when we shut off the bedroom lights, the stars light up. It’s really neat and the boys love it.

The nice thing is that the stars do not remain glowing all night, so they don’t disturb sleeping. The stars glow for about 3-4 minutes. Another things is that the paint needs to absorb light in order to shine it when the lights go off. We usually keep the curtains open during the day, anyway. But if you have a dark room, the paint might not work as well.

It’s a really easy and inexpensive way to add another personal touch to the kids’ rooms.

Photo of wall courtesy of Maps and Moons at Flickr.

I love paint! When I first moved to this house, the walls, trim, and even parts of the floors had all been painted white. Talk about ugly! So that was the first thing I did, paint everything and add some color.  I added some bright colors to my walls and trim and spruced up the place very inexpensively (as compared to a gut-and-remodel). I even tried some painting techniques on some walls– lightly sponging diluted white paint onto yellow walls; blotching greens and reds for a different room.

Paint can save a ton of money, and it’s the least expensive decorating activity I know. It won’t save enough for Las Vegas vacations, but it’ll put a dent in the decor budget! So I’m always looking for cute new ideas to tide me over until I can get new walls, lol. I saw “doodle wall art” at My Insanity and was floored. Isn’t that beautiful! What a great idea, and doodling is “in” these days. Plus, when you grow tired of it, just paint over it! Love it!

Photo is from My Insanity, too. It’s a great blog to peruse for neat little things like this.