Category: House

All baseball and soccer practice canceled for today…. Blake and Markus are catching up on some gaming not much time for that recently.

It has been a while since my last post but I a determined to improve. The last project in the house was out play room for the kids. On the long run we want a nice wood floor and possibly even redo the wall right under the roof but that is a major project and needs time and money both of which are not available in abundance these days.

So, I looked at the situation to see what could be improved with some time and some money and it struck me: the wood paneling and all the build-in furniture are all super dark stained wood. The dark color combined with the small windows in those two rooms takes away all the light. This is why I thought let’s lighten this room up and just paint over the dark stained wood in white color, typical New England style and much against all I learned from my father, to leave the wood in it beautiful natural color. To set some nice accents and as those are the future rooms for our oldest Ana and I decided to paint the window frames in a strong color. We choose green for the back room and orange for the front. In the front we were also going to paint the build-in shelve in orange, it had this really awful color: a light red going towards pink, how could anyone choose this color in the first place?

Anyway there we were, the painting was painful, the grooves between the panels clearly require a brush and no rolling and the dark color clearly required two passes for a good fraction even three passes were required to avoid the dark color to come through. Painting the doors for the build-in shelves was dreadful with all the blind style which has remarkably many spots you can miss :-).

The first real hick-up though was the choice of the green color for the back room accents. Ivan and I went off to ACE hardware to make our choice with Ana giving us her trust. We went for the beautiful ACE color F34 ‘Dragon Lair’ but it did not meet approval with the boss: it is easy to pick the wrong green I had learn. Ana and I had to go again and we converged on F31 ‘Hearty Hosta’. Thanks to this little back and forth our

window has now about six layers: three Dragon’s Lairs and three more Hearty Hostas.

Luckily, for the orange tone Ivan and I succeeded on the first try with the somehow obvious F19 – Juicy Orange. Here is a sequence showing how things developed. The painting of the shelves took some time and I had to decommission the video system (including TV, DVD and video consoles) for a week. Our kids dealt with it but not without Markus reminding me every day that I had to complete the job, which I did yesterday night, one day before the deadline I had promised them.

The remainder (the orange skylight and the left wall in the front will still take me some time but it is already now clear that the project was a resounding success. The new playroom has so much more light and looks so much more friendly.

The take home message for today is: Never underestimate the effect of a (decent) paint job!