house painting

First glimpse of the new house paint…

| Jessica

Robert-the-Scotsman left today after doing the second coat of our old deck and it has come up rather well. He’ll finish off the internal side of the front fence next week and then he’s off on a Grey Nomad trip of a lifetime with his beloved. I’m very pleased with how our deck has come up – it needs replacing in the next few years but for now the wood is still mostly solid. Robert acknowledges he’s not the neatest painter, but he’s done all right for a fella in his 70s. I’m hiring someone else from next week, who I think will be neater and cleaner, but you know, I don’t mind helping a fellow out from time to time. Robert is fast, at least!

As I’ve said elsewhere on this blog, we’re not changing the main house colour just now – super exxie. And it’s still in good condition. But we can change the trim and accent colours. We used Dulux Klavier on the deck floor – it’s a lovely warm black with notes of purple and brown (should be called eggplant IMHO), and Dulux Natural White on all the woodwork. I can’t wait for the rest of the house to be trimmed out in these colours! We’re painting the front door a crazy pinky-lilac for shits and giggles. I think we’ll stop there – the Klavier already looks good against the Celery colour of the house and I cannot WAIT for the beige trim to begone (you can see it on the underside of the deck roof – so very meh). It’s fine on Arts and Crafts houses in, say, England or the US, but this house needs a lighter, brighter touch. We’ll get the silver paint onto the old window hoods too. I’m also rethinking my need to cover the ENTIRE front porch with plants…it looks so nice all bare. Gah! What am I thinking?! My hubby must never know that sometimes I like minimalist moments… 😉 In truth, it’s the best spot for herbs right there, with the most glorious afternoon sun.

Green green green is driving me crazy

| Jessica

Talking colour again. The pretty Taubmans Sweet Clover I selected for the exterior trim DOES NOT WORK. Sure, it’s currently sitting next to depressing kill-me-now dark green but it’s just too muted for me and there’s not enough point of difference. Thank goodness I only bought a sample pot! I’m trying the Klavier as trim and it’s working ok, but it’s not popping the way I had hoped (once again, the beige trim is doing us all no favours). I’m waiting until the white on the walkway and guardrail is done and then we’ll see whether it will look good against the Natural White, and then I might just go a bit wild and try teal or something. Because I cannot live with the depressing nothingness of our exterior! Linseed was not the right colour either – I’ve found a couple of very similar colours in both the Taubman and Dulux colour charts and cannot believe that something so pretty could look so dessicated on our house. Natural White is perfect against the horrible base colour – it’s just getting the trim colour to pop a little more. The two colours at the bottom are Taubmans Sachet Pink and Green Cottage. The green is lovely in theory, but in practice dreary. The bottom aqua is called Hummingbird – a bright pop of aqua that is complementary according to Taubman. I may yet go there.

Here’s a new series of colours that we’re trying. See what I mean about the Celery Green? On its own it’s pretty and bright. On our house it looks dull and tired. Dulux have a lot to answer for for their poop colour of the year, Brave Ground. It’s hard enough to get our house to look excited about anything, then add a poop colour and we may as well give up trying to look even semi interested in life.

We’re going grey!

| Jessica

…Not my hair, which has been going grey for years already, but on the house. I know, completely boring, amirite?! But in truth it looks so crisp against the greenery of our subtropical garden that I can’t really go past it. I’m very taken by this colour from the Dulux colour palette:

Or this one:

Or even Lexicon:

If I put Lexicon against Lexicon Quarter I get a really nice subtle difference but it might be too subtle in the bright sun:

So if I put Lexicon half against purple-based Pensive Quarter it looks lovely:

But I prefer it against the Highgate, which is a more subtle colour too – more true grey, which I like. I team it against a lovely bright navy trim for a bit of pop and a cheerful front door, and we’re set. I COULD go dark grey for the trim and that would be fine but it’s just a bit boring – we’re already grey enough! Passionate Blue is gorgeous and gives off just enough of those Greek colour vibes that I really like:

But this would also work well and sits more along the grey spectrum:

Blue trim is a difficult one to decide as it’s only a small pop of colour and can simultaneously look too dark or bright. Normally everything looks lighter outside and darker inside but with trim it can actually be the reverse, as there’s not enough colour to provide much detail. It also has to not clash with our walkway colour, which will be a dark grey.

Our front door has this crazy lilac glass inset that we may as well highlight because CUTE, but the colour changes dramatically depending on the light. I took these 3 images within 2 minutes of each other. the first is the interior view and the 2 following are exterior at different angles and light sources:

We could go a cute mint green, or lilac such as these pretty shades below:

Any of these would look fabulous against the grey siding, white timber trim and navy highlights. The painter I’m using (we’ve employed them before and they’re Dulux specialists and very good) has also recommended painting the window hoods silver, which would be good as they would then match the corrugated tin roof, and finally painting the front porch and gantry decking a neutral dark grey (we could replace the decking but it’s much cheaper to paint):

You can see that while a lovely combination, this blue would look too similar against the grey:

Here’s some houses taken from the web that I thought were lovely inspirations for our paint job:

You can see what a difference a well chosen coat of paint makes:

I really am going for the palest of pale greys though:

So there you have it: my colour ideas for our house! Hopefully this can be achieved this year!

So it’s 4 months between posts.

| Jessica

Don’t judge me. It’s not that I haven’t been working on the house: it’s that I hightailed it to Melbourne as soon as my teaching year was over and spent a blissful six weeks just hanging with my homies. AKA my family. We actually like to hang out together. I know. Odd. (Also took the opportunity to redecorate the beachhouse for presents for mum and dad. Which now looks AWESOME.)

Anyhoo. So remember when last year I was moaning about the house being too noisy? Well it still is, but an amazing, wonderful thing happened. My daughter moved out. Yep. She and her partner were handed a house across town and she leapt at it. So she’s been gone since Australia Day/ Invasion Day and guess what I’ve been doing? !

Painting, y’all. Painting. While I wait for the agonisingly long time it’s taking for my iphone to upload its photos to my dear old, tired MacBook (now that’s a design story for another time), let me tell you what I’ve been up to these last few weeks.

At the time I was moaning and bitching about the noise, we got a bunch of real estate agents through to look at the house. Turns out we could get a good price for it, but there is an ever so slight correction in the overheated Australian property market and I think to suggest we’d make $1,000,000 on our little home (and land) is a bit of an overreach. And now we’ve had a bit of a mind change about wanting to sell, because life, the agents keep bugging me and I’ve had to ignore their calls.

And then I went away for a long, long time. So I’m back home, daughter’s out, and now WE HAVE A SPARE ROOM. In truth it’s not really a spare room because my step-daughter needs it, but she has to share with visitors now. Sorry not sorry.

So of course, being one to grab an opportunity when I see an empty room, I PAINTED it. And now it’s beautiful. I’ve complained before about the length of time and effort it takes to paint VJs, haven’t I? Suffice to say, once again hideous. But the result is stunning. The room is south facing, which in Australia means the cold side, but which in hot QLD means the comfortable side. I painted the walls with 3 coats of Dulux Vivid White, and finished the woodwork with 2 coats of Dulux Natural White Enamel. God it looks good. Then, and this is where I give myself the biggest pat on the back, I McGyver’d the ceiling fan. It was an old rattan-inset wooden-bladed thing. Dusty, a horrible cream colour, it had a horrible amber glass light shade and was ERGLY. Parts of the blades were coming apart because old, and really it needed to go. But we can’t afford to do that right now, because then there’s a whole thing with lights and electricity we need to deal with and we can’t afford it. So.

I spray painted it with 2 cans of British Paints White Satin Spray paint. I glued and clamped the dodgy fan blades back together, and replaced the light shade with a simple round white one from Beacon Lighting. Sometimes, I amaze even myself. The darned fan looks like new.

Then, and this is where it all gets a little bit exxie, I bought a double bed for the daughter-of-step (and visitors), and now we have a beautiful guest room decorated in shades of wood, white and blue. It looks amazing. I’m about to decorate with a mirror wall, (no, NOT that sort of mirror wall), in which all our old mirrors and some new ones will be artfully placed on one of the walls to give the impression of even more space in there. I’ve bought a bunch of cheap vintage mirrors in gold plaster frames, and we already have some regular wooden ones, so one whole wall will be devoted to this decorating extremism.

Also in my painting adventures, I finally painted the woodwork in our ensuite and WIR. While it was all given undercoats etc, I hadn’t quite gotten around to finishing it all off. So I used the hottest ever recorded months of January and February to do this. Because I’m a masochist. And because I like sweating into MY EYES. But the effort was worth it (of course).

The NEXT thing I did, because my daughter moved out and we gave her all the crappy stuff under the house we no longer wanted; well there’s this thing in Australia we have called the nonburnable rubbish collection (AKA the hard rubbish collection, AKA the “we collect your shit so you don’t have to take it to the rubbish dump” collection). Yep, you guessed it. I’ve been clearing out the basement. When I say basement, what I mean is the ground floor of the house that is open to the elements and only has timber battens protecting all the stuff from the weather, thieves etc. It gets wet, and dusty, and dirty and all the things are not really protected.

We offloaded 2 broken fridges, some old broken chairs, a bunch of old electronic equipment, heaps of broken Ikea shelves and stuff, and then I cleaned nearly all the corners under our house. And swept the concrete. And now I feel lighter and cleaner. It feels SO GOOD, y’all!

I have to reconfigure my workspaces under there (I have 2 workbenches: 2!), and clean up some more bits and pieces, but OH BOY was it good to finally do this.

So in the next few weeks, I’ll be painting the ghastly 2nd bathroom a fresh white, cleaning out and painting the Oh Jesus room, and painting the rest of the house interior. Only 5 rooms to go, and the entire ceiling.

Oh yeah. Remember how I fell off that ladder last year and had a cry? Well, we offloaded that old thing and bought a brand new 2.4m ladder with paint tray, and a trestle board. Imma painting the ceiling now. Even though I don’t want to.

Y’all, my iphone and MacBook have decided that uploading 700 photos all at once is a bit difficult, so I’m going to suggest you take a look at my Instagram account, @brivegashome and you’ll see all the great photos there of my house and such. Because it appears the world will end before I get to upload any pictures from my phone!

Have a great week and I’ll be posting more frequently now.

Cheerio!

Jess

A blessed break

| Jessica

Christmas has come and gone and I’ve taken the opportunity to have a blessed break from painting. There is nothing fun about house painting except the end. And even then you start cursing the little bits of dust and grime that so quickly build up on the horizontal surfaces. Get away, you spiders! 

We’ve had to wait for a shower screen, but all should be finished by the middle of January. It’s a good time to rest, reflect and plan the next painting foray. I want to finish off the master bedroom now. Yesterday we saw some paint on special at Bunnings and we bought 20 litres of Dulux low sheen acrylic Antique White USA at 60% off! I was kind of dreading the cost of repainting the interiors because 15 litres of quality paint in Australia costs $209. We saved ourselves $130! I still need to buy the ceiling paint but we’re going with a Vivid White semi gloss because of the VJs so I can’t buy the special sale ceiling paint which was practically free. The amount bought should see the entire interior painted with at least one coat each room. I’m using brushes, not a roller, so the coverage is better. 

As a reward for savvy shopping we bought some house plants and ceramic pots for the bathroom. The picture window is giving me ever so slight conniptions but there’s an excuse for house plants if ever I saw one:

  
They will provide an extra touch of privacy, and they will get plenty of water as they’re in the shower bay. I’m pretty chuffed. Now to keep them alive. 

And here’s a reminder of why I love this house:

  
It was Boxing Day (maybe Xmas arvo) and our dining room was suffused with the most beautiful light. Recently I removed the ghastly privacy curtains to clean up the space and it has really made a difference to the lines of the room. The photos don’t do it justice but our little room looked like a golden jewellery box. I made my husband get up off the bed and take a look too, and it was a wonderful reminder of why I fell in love with the house. It’s the light in the afternoon. 

  
I hope your Christmas was as light filled as ours.

Happy New Year and I’ll see you after I tackle the Oh Jesus Room.

Procrastination 

| Jessica

So close and yet so far. I’m putting off the inevitable by lying here writing a blog post about putting off the inevitable. Sad, I know. I need to finish our WIR and ensuite. I need to finish painting them. When this is done we can put our clothes in the WIR and turn the Oh Jesus Room back into a proper working space. 

I know this. But I can’t bring myself to get up yet and do it. Probably because painting is boring boring boring and I’ve discovered my work with gap filler in the WIR leaves a lot to be desired! I need to sand back some of my bodgy work and do a topcoat. Then I can paint the woodwork. There’s really very little to do!

Oh, ok. Here I go. In the meantime here’s a picture of the guest room I dressed yesterday. 

  
I’m hating the pine furniture. My mum made it and if I paint it it might look crappy. I’m tempted though; the white oil paint I bought is a perfect colour and I could change the pine handles to something else more on trend. The sofa bed is hardly on trend and it has faded badly in the West Wing in the 2 years we’ve owned it. But it’s useful, so it stays. I need to wash the cushion covers and hang some art work and get some curtains/ blinds on the windows. Then we’re done! (Well, ok, I need to finish off oil painting the windows and French doors but there’s a whole lotta prep stuff I need to do before I can, so it’s on the “to do in a million years” list.)

DH and I already love this room so much it’s becoming a multi-purpose space. My stepson is quite neat and tidy and he is unlikely to create much personality in the room, so when he’s not here it may well become a sitting room for us. And it will definitely do double duty as a guest room. It’s so bright and friendly. My old teaching studio. Vale, teaching studio. You were useful once! 

Finishing off the interiors

| Jessica

It’s still a little way off before we can declare the renovations fully finished but there are signs that it’s close. John the builder wasn’t here on Monday, which gave me the opportunity to do some filling, sanding, undercoating and topcoats. The East Wing is now a pristine white, and it only needs some window painting for it to be complete. Even the woodwork and architraves are mostly done! I’m a little worried about the gorgeous but messy French doors. They need a proper strip-back and clean, and they’ve already been hung, so it’s unlikely this will be done properly. I’ll be scraping back paint off windows and sanding them back for months yet.

The WIR needs its louvre windows (we’re having half clear, half etched and the etched ones aren’t finished yet – or maybe the factory lost them), and then a couple of patching jobs and some architrave. The ensuite just got its window frame finished on the outside, and the vanity finished off. There are some repairs needing doing to some broken tiles (apparently it’s normal for tiles to be broken when fitting ceiling beading – the staccato pounding of the nail gun breaks them), and then some finishing off with silicon. I need to sand back and paint the beading, then the whole ceiling gets a topcoat or 2 (even though it already has one) and then I get to tackle the wood trim, the door and the windows. UGH.

The lads have taken off while we wait for the shower glass to be ready, so it’s painting time for me.

Dulux Vivid White on the walls is great for the outside rooms because it is so bright and clean, and considered a “pure” colour. However, I’m choosing a warmer colour in the interior rooms, as they don’t get all that much natural light, maybe Antique White or Lexicon. I’ve chosen Dulux Natural White in oil for all the woodwork. It covers amazingly well, once the woodwork is undercoated with Dulux 3-in-1 Primer, Sealer and Undercoat in Vivid White. Mostly it just needs one coat on the new wood.

I’m feeling a little trepidation regarding the front windows. We have a small problem. Some of them are old and crusty, and need a lot of preparation before painting. They are also rather delicate, so I can’t use too much force on them. One even has a cracked window pane that I can’t really replace because the glass is so old and delicate it’s not readily available. Therefore ALL the panes will then need replacing. On ALL the windows in that room. Laminated. Not cheap.

In truth, I’m dreading the precision work. I have a lovely little brush for the woodwork but it’s really hard to get a clean line without brush strokes mucking up the vertical and horizontal joins, and getting paint on the glass (which I think is pretty awful, unlike the former occupants of the house, because there is so much crusted paint on ALL of the window panes that it will take until hell freezes over for me to do them all. Even DH has offered to help). So I’m kinda putting it off until I gather up the nerve!

So, for now, it’s back to Bunnings for more Dulux paint. But while you wait, here’s a little picture of the near-finished vanity. All it needs now is the mirror and some bath utensils. We even have the towels! For soft furnishings: Freedom Furniture for the patterned towels and baskets. Adairs for the white and charcoal towels. They are so new I haven’t even removed the store labels.

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I’m off to Pillow Talk for the bathroom accessories. We decided that the gorgeous amber/brown bottles of Aesop work perfectly on the vanity but I can’t bear the cost of replacing Aesop products (SO expensive), so we found these instead:

muse bathroom accessories

So lovely! And of course I found my white orchid is, of course, alive and well. It goes in too. Finally, we need to choose a toilet brush holder (tried my cream and black Victoriana one, doesn’t work at all, too busy) and a bin. For the bin I’m thinking a natural woven grass with white base. For the toilet brush: ugh. Probably a charcoal or dark one for contrast. Not yet decided. Too much white will kill the look.

So why finish off this room? Because I want just ONE room in the house completely renovated and finished. Once the accessories are in, I don’t want to touch this room for a VERY LONG TIME. Also, it means DH and I have a great bedroom retreat (not that the bathroom is somewhere to retreat to, but you get my drift). I have to finish the painting in the bedroom (a whole ‘nother story), but once that’s done, hey presto. Only some plantation shutters to install and we’re done.

Also, it means that the East Wing is completely done as well. Then, only 6 rooms to go. SIGH.

 

 

 

I can’t even.

| Jessica

So tired. SO, SO tired. I spent the weekend filling holes and sanding in preparation for painting the East Wing. Yesterday I gave the East Wing its first undercoat. I’m so wrung out I can’t even think, let alone walk around. I removed the huge sofa so that I could roll the ceilings and walls, put down my drop sheets, and went hard for 6 hours. Now, this doesn’t sound like much, does it? Except I’m an oldish, slightly unfit lady who has to smoosh paint into the VJ grooves with nothing more than brute strength and a tricky roller position. I’m all done in. And of course the muscles around my right shoulder have decided to cark it!

I’m about ready to kill the owner of the house for wanting VJ mdf sheets. The painter now has to fill every single little black triangle left by the groove with acrylic filler, which is a horrible job the painter has NO skill in. Given that the painter and the owner are one and the same, I’m shitty at myself for giving myself more work to do. Gah.  However, the owner thinks the VJ looks amazing. The painter reluctantly agrees, nursing her tennis elbow and cursing.

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Yesterday I completed the second round of cutting in with the undercoat and cleaned up some patchy areas, and now it’s only the acrylic filling and top coats to do in the East Wing. Then I have to decide on paint for the wood trims and architraves. Do I go with proper oil paint, or do I go with aqua oil paint (which is a big furphy, it’s just water based paint, and in no way looks or feels like oil paint)?

The lads are busy at it today putting in the windows. It’s starting to take shape but I don’t really like to work with them around. Mainly because I think they’re quietly laughing at my povvo attempts to cut in, but also because I’m concerned I’m getting in the way. They work fast and consistently, and are out of the house at about 3pm, so it’s best if I stay well out of harm’s way.

The weekend is looking a little dicey – we have family functions to manage, so I’m not sure if I’ll get to paint. However, I am all set up and nail filling, sanding or cutting in is certainly something I can manage if nothing else! And it’s a good opportunity to prepare a couple of areas I’ve pretended don’t exist, such as the new proper wooden VJs in our bedroom.

Like every building job ever, it’s the little things that remain unfinished. An architrave here, a window there. In every room being worked on. There is nothing that is fully finished! I’m keen to get the painting finished in the ensuite, WIR and the East Wing, because this gets a lot of clothing out of the way, and a lot of crap in cupboards. It means DH and I get to use our new bathroom (huzzah!), and there will be at least 2 places without dust everywhere.

However, this is the dragging time. The moment when you think “when will this ever end?” And we’ve only been going about 4 weeks. I should be patient!

 

 

 

I’m thinking vivid white.

| Jessica

IMG_2685

Seeing this warm grey wall, I’m happy to go Dulux “Vivid White” on the walls. Beige, Dulux “Sand Dune” or “Hog Bristle” bring out too much brown, shown by the unpainted VJs at the top. I want to emphasize the grey. We’re going chrome fittings for everything, and warmth will be provided by the Blackbutt topped vanity unit. The grey tiles will have white grout, the white tiles will have a pale grey and the floor tiles dark grey. (Poor tiler – he had seen a bit of The Block on the TV and the floor tiles were the same – except they used it on the wall and used dark grout. He thought this was good somehow, and instead of listening to me saying repeatedly “pale grey grout for the white tiles, white grout for the grey tiles, dark grout for the floor tiles”, decided he wanted to add his own sartorial choices to the plan. I had to put him straight. Dear fellow.)

I’m a fond user of Dulux products. I use their 3-in-1 primer, sealer and undercoat, which has great coverage. One coat on already primed walls is usually enough, two coats on untreated wood. I’ve done a check on what I need and there’s plenty! I’ve just bought 4 litres of Dulux bathroom and kitchen semi gloss in Vivid White. This paint apparently resists mould and humidity, which will be important in this bathroom, as the view will be to the West and quite hot in the afternoon.

* (later this afternoon)

Having a look at the wall below, I’m particularly thrilled with the white grout. The grey really pops. It’s stronger and darker than I expected. I think the pale grey grout will look great with the white tile and it won’t be long until the whole room is basically done and I can get started on the painting. Best to do it before the fittings go in!

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