Foster House Color Palette

When we started choosing paint colors for the house I was a little bit overwhelmed.  We were spending SO much money on things I knew I wanted to try to find some paints on sale.  I had read that people were finding "oops" paint or "mistints" for a fraction of the list price at Home Depot and Lowes.  Whenever we were at Home Depot or Lowes I started looking in the paint section when we weren't even under contract yet.  If I found a color I liked I bought it.  

When we finally got into our house and cleaned and kilzed and were ready for color we had to decide where all the colors would go.  That was the hard part.   I sat down and looked at the colors we had: a soft grey-ish blue, a pale green, light blue, silvery gray and a mushroom.  I had some ideas of where I wanted things.  The light blue was for the kitchen, to give it a retro look.  I planned to pair it with a bright red. The mushroom was for the living room.  But I didn't know where the other colors would go.   I decided to sit down and plan it out, with Daniel of course.

 

Side note: I LOVE HGTV magazine. They always have such great ideas! I always feel so inspired. So while I was at Barnes and Noble I read some of one and found some amazing paint ideas.  I didn't use any that they suggested but I love that they have them ALL listed in the back! [Also, sometime I would love to do a colored grout between white tiles. genius.] I did decide from this magazine that I should choose a whole house color scheme so it would be cohesive when/if ever we sold it. :) 

This painting is one of a trio that were given to us for our wedding, painted especially for us by one of my mother-in-love's friends.  (For those of you who aren't catching on to the irony here, my maiden name is Beach...get it now? good!)

I looked at the colors we had and the ones I was thinking about and it was a very beachy/coastal color scheme.  Lucky for me, Labor Day sales were around the corner.  The paint we hadn't already bought we ended up buying on sale in the colors we wanted. 

(all these samples are not completely accurate but are approximate, 

if you want an actual name I can find it for ya!)

What rooms are these colors in? (L-R as follows)

Silver/gray: Dining room

Light blue: Kitchen

Mushroom gray/brown: Living room

Seafoam green: Craft Room/Office

White: Hallway

Sandy Tan: Guest room/book room

Storm Gray/Brown: Master bath

Sunshine Yellow:Guest bath

Silvery gray blue: Master bedroom

We really like it.  It feels homey. 

I'll post pictures of painting each of the rooms when I do updates on what each room looks like now. 

What do you think? Do you see the "beach" in our color scheme? 

love,

Sarah

New door?

So this post is a lot like my sink post, except that this one has a less "happy ending."

This is our carport door. It goes into our kitchen. Nothing fancy. Pretty plain Jane.

This is our front door, it leads directly into our living room.  No entryway or anything.  It has a screen door in front of it that is perfectly darling. 

I am not a huge fan of either of these doors.  They aren't especially "cute" and I don't see them as especially sturdy, although they are functionally safe.  They just stick a little and are "rough around the edges." 

So the same warehouse sale that had sinks also had doors.  So of course I wanted to find out about those. So we looked at several. 

Here is my dad along with a standard sturdy door.  I think it was designed to be hung the wrong way and had a crack in it (thus it was on sale) but dad wasn't too keen on it so we passed. 

Both of these doors are beautiful and amazing! They came with door frames which we didn't need and were slightly off in the size department and the price department.  They were upwards of $400 and $600.  Too much for  a non-essential.  We had plenty of other things that we actually had  to buy. 

Even though the day was a bust as far as the finding and purchasing of a door and/or sink goes, it was a fun outing and I saw a bunch of cool old stuff.  There were old church pew end-caps and a huge octagonal window (Daniel hates octagon windows, "So very 80's.") 

However, any day now (read that as: in a month or two when I have the time/energy) I plan on painting both of the doors.  I am thinking either a misty blue or a happy sunny yellow.  I can't decide.

(following pics from my pinterest)  

What do you think? 

I also think that unless any of you fabulous people reading have a door solution I am going to go with something like this diy adorable door update.  This is a pretty color too! 

While I'm at it maybe we could use scraps or pallets to create fun shutters? Minus the window box. (We are currently plant killers, but we are working on that.) 

Well? I would love your feedback.  This is one of those projects I have had lurking in the corners of my brain but haven't gotten out and done yet. Help me make a choice!! 

If you're new here feel free to read this or this to get caught up!

Plus any of the others! 

Until next time,

Sarah

Ants on fire

          This is a kind of silly post, but if you know me,  I have a fear of ants, and that means this is serious business.  Basically, I was in a car accident one time and ended up covered in ants.   I had about 300 ant bites.  Yes, it was terrible.  But I also had a concussion, so the bites were not a huge deal.  However, the feeling of ants crawling on you (sorry, if you now feel ghost ants on you, I do) is horrible.  If there are several ants on me at once I freak out.  I can't handle that. 

((I was going to post a picture here of the bites, but lucky for you, I can't find any.  Also, you don't want to see that. I looked up pictures of ant bites and well, it's nasty.   This is Zazzle the friendly ant, popular in parts of Australia, found by me on Google))

Anyways....

Our lovely new home came with a rather large yard.  It's somewhere at 1/3 to 1/2 an acre. [When Daniel mows it, he swears its an acre. ;)  ] So in the heights of August there were several MASSIVE ant hills in our yard.   We tried ant killers and that just caused the hills to move locations.  We tried corn meal/grits.  Nothing worked.  So having a pinch of GA redneck in our blood we decided to burn those suckers out. It was pretty fun. 

 

While Daniel was inside painting ceilings or something I went outside with the old oil/gas mixture from changing the oil/gas out on the lawnmower.  I poured it on the mounds and then lit it on fire.  I did use a long handled lighter.   My parents were there and so my dad came outside to "supervise," although I think he had more fun than I did.  :)

Notice the smoke billowing out of the hole that  I made to our the gas/oil in.  It was really cool to watch, although difficult to capture in my picture.

We let them burn for several minutes before we doused them with water.  We also watched over them carefully.  As you can see these were in the middle of the grass, not in the woods or in the mulched garden area. The grass didn't catch fire because it was green and actively growing.  However, when the fire got close to edges I poured water around the edge to give it extra protection.  

**note:  I do consider myself a responsible adult.  Having two people however, is advisable.  Have a hose handy and make sure you aren't burning near pinestraw or any very dry grass.  Also, a no-brainer but don't try this close to the house.  Be smart people.**  

So, has anyone ever tried something like this? Do you have any helpful hints for getting rid of ants?  I am sure we will have more this year!  I want to make sure we can play safe in our yard with our dog!  Let me know your tips and tricks in the comments!  

Love,

Sarah

Here's my soapbox

       I'm just going to put it out there.  Don't smoke.  Please, there is tons of research out there saying it kills you, slowly.  With all the knowledge people have available about how bad it is, I honestly have no idea why people even start smoking.  It always kills me when I see a kid (you know, the ones who hopefully are at least 18 but look 15 or 16) smoking.  I think to myself, "don't you have anything better to spend your money on?" If you smoke to calm your nerves you could probably cure that problem with counseling or Dr. visits that would be cheaper than the 10+ years it took you to figure out you should never have stopped smoking.  

(image from Google)

        I love you all, even if you do smoke or have in the past, but please do yourself a favor.  Do your spouse or significant other a favor.  Do your children or future children a favor.  They love you and want you to be around for as long as possible.  It's not too late.   Our bodies are amazing and they can "heal" from smoking, it's possible.  

        I am sorry if anyone reading this feels I am speaking rudely or out of turn.  It comes from a place that cares about the human race and the health of others.  I saw what it did to my great-uncle who died of lung cancer.  It was tragic. 

        So, the secret I have been hiding about our house is that the lady who lived in our house before was a heavy smoker. dun. dun. dun. She smoked inside and we had to clean away the evidence.  It was nasty.  [If you must smoke, please go outside!]

OK, I am done.  Now I will show you why I feel so firmly about it.  Photographic evidence. 

The dining room-before.

These photos are from our dining room. It was where I started cleaning.  We scrubbed the baseboards, walls, windows, doors and trim with a TSP, vinegar and water solution.  When there was a tough spot we used baking soda to have a little grit.  What is TSP you ask? It is Tri-Sodium-Phosphate.  T.S.P.  It was the chemical that we read will get rid of strong odors (smoke) and strong stains (tar and nicotine build-up).   We found it at Home Depot.  

These are pictures of the cleaning process.  You can clearly see where I cleaned on the baseboard vs. where it hadn't yet been cleaned.  In person it was very clear on the wall too.  You might be able to see it above, but you might not.  Just know it's there.  I know, it's disgusting.   The dirty part was sticky and so dust and dirt was very good at sticking to it. [No wonder lungs get so dirty, that's the same stuff that gunks up a smoker's lungs]

This picture I took while I was scrubbing and wiping the wall.  You can see after I applied the TSP/Vinegar solution how the walls were "weeping" the nicotine and tar.  If you ever have to do this project start from the top and work your way down.  If you do it the other way you will end up doing it twice!  I know from experience. ;)  

This is what my water bucket looked like after about 10 minutes.  After about an hour it was quite a bit darker.  It was so satisfying to dump it out! 

 My arms and back were so sore the next day, so very sore.  It took a ton of "elbow grease" to get these stains off.  We did this in every room of the house.  Every wall all the trim.  It was disgusting.  However, we did, eventually, get the smell out.

***I think it's worth it for you to know now that we painted all of these surfaces after cleaning them.  We cleaned them first because the paint wouldn't have stuck to all that dirt and we wanted to get as much of it out of the house as possible so that it wouldn't "leak" out later [we heard that happens sometimes.]  I will post later about using Kilz on the whole house, but for now know that painting all of the surfaces was vital to getting the smell out.***

We used another crazy trick to get the smell out.  I read that bowls of charcoal would absorb the odor.  Well, we didn't have bowls so I put a few chunks on napkins/paper towels all around the house and in all the cabinets.  All our helpers and visitors asked if we had a giant rabbit. hahaha. Curiously, we are still finding them here and there.  Our dog had one in his mouth the other day, hopefully he didn't swallow any! (eeek!)

Well that's it. That's how we got the smell out of our house and my soap box (I promise you won't have to read many of those.)  See ya next time! 

Love,

Sarah

Jumping right in...Our Adventure with DryLok

Today I want to start telling you the story of our renovation process: Moisture proofing the basement.  Are you all jumping up and down with excitement? Yeah me neither.   To be honest, this whole blog is probably going to be a little boring at first, but I want to keep an accurate record and some people actually asked about this so...here it goes.  

First there are some things you should know about us:
Daniel, my husband is a very hard worker, go get 'em, don't rest until it's done or he's burned out kind of guy.  While,  I on the other hand, am a work on ten projects at a time slowly getting them all done.  Daniel is a very time focused man.  If it was up to him, we would never be late.  Which of course means that I am the one who makes us late 90 out of 100 times, the other 10 are reasons out of our control. ;-) 

Now that you know those things about us, you can imagine the frustration we both felt over the course of this renovation.  Our first project was hard to decide on.  Where do you start in a house where EVERYTHING (this is really only a slight exaggeration as you will see) has to be ripped out or painted and cleaned?  Well, we decided to start in the basement.  We figured that we could do what we wanted to the basement and then store stuff down there and move our stuff slowly upstairs as the rest of the house was ready.  As often happens with best laid plans, none of that happened, but more on that in a later post.  

First of all, I regret to inform you that for this particular project, I don't have actual photos of us doing the work.  However, in the picture above you can see the white strip of paint around the bottom of the cinder block wall?  THAT is our first project.  It's this fancy stuff called DryLok.  We found one gallon of it at a yard sale for free along with some other fabulous things including our kitchen light! When we started using this stuff we learned 4 things: 1) It's smelly. ewww. 2) It's thick and the cinder block is greedy when you apply it. 3) this was going to take much longer than we thought and 4) we were going to need quite a bit more.  We had several options: 

a gallon? 

A big bucket? 

  

a different brand? 

I had done a little research on this stuff.  DryLok blocks moisture from coming into your basement, specifically through concrete/cinder block walls.  It's called masonry paint.  The big question was: Is this stuff worth it?  Did we really need it?  We sort of agonized over this.  We didn't want our basement to flood or be damp.  It is "underground" on 2 1/2 sides, but it's not in a flood plain or anything so do we even need to worry about it? Looking back, it definitely wasn't the biggest decision (wait until we get to stain color, eeeekkk!)  This stuff was rather expensive though, as far as paint goes and we had JUST made the biggest purchase of both our lives so far.   So being a "thrifty" (read that: cheapskate), I looked on craigslist.  I found some for $10.  YES!  We bought the rest that we needed.  

****For lack of pictures let me tell you about our basement.  It is a large rectangle.  There is a door at one end and a crawl space that runs the length of one side.  It is open except for support poles here and there and the stairs that come down from the main floor.  One of the shorter walls has a door and the other is solidly holding back all the dirt.  The long wall along the back of the house is mostly windows that are underneath the back deck and about 1/3 holding back the dirt.  The long wall along the front side of the house has a crawl-space going along the length of it so not much of it is actually holding dirt back. ****

The plan was to do all of the basement walls, but once we found how difficult it was to apply properly we opted for the whole wall that is all underground and then about 1/3 of the two long walls. The rest of the way around was mostly the bottom 2  or 3 rows of blocks.  We do plan to finish painting the rest of the basement walls with something other than drylok "someday" (I am beginning to become wary of the elusive someday, because it never gets here!!)  

Here is a sample picture of what it looks like to apply drylok, notice she is using a high nap roller.  This means that there are longer strands on the roller so it can hold more paint and reach all the crevices. (photo from Google)

*Sorry, for the lack of interesting and eye catching photos.  I think I kept track of most of the other projects we did.  Also, I will check with Daniel and see if he has better photos of the drylok project.

 

**My husband would like to point out that proper application of drylok involves etching the walls first, which calls for another product (etching power etc.).  This is tough to do because it is hard to wash cinder blocks without a hose. (Both pictures below are from Google)

      

***David my brother also helped out by doing some minor patching along the floor.  I don't have pictures of him doing it but here is a picture from the internet (Google search) of someone else doing the same thing.  We got the product (drylok fast plug) with the drylok we bought from Craigslist. 

So do you have any questions I didn't answer?  Do you have experience with this stuff?

I would love to know! 

See ya next time,  

Love,

Sarah