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It’s done! The living room floor is done! It looks beautiful and wonderful and exactly like we’d hoped it would, and yet, there is a problem. Because there is always a problem.
The dog is the problem.
Our dog, Nori, is famous for two things.
One: she is excessively adorable.
Two: she is excessively wimpy. She has a list of terrors that could keep a doggie therapist busy for years. Decades even.
In particular, floors are her nemesis. Linoleum is her least favorite and when faced with linoleum she will freeze, legs outstretched, forcing us to physically drag her across the flooring while she shakes and drools. Actually, we know of several interior designers who have the same reaction to linoleum, so at least she is not alone.
Tile can also be a problem, especially large, shiny tiles that look like little pieces of linoleum. She can usually be coaxed across tile, but only for a really, really good piece of food.
Wood has never been a problem. She hasn’t reacted terribly well to the wood flooring in the kitchen, but we figured that was because she was afraid of the stove. And refrigerator. And the chairs. (She seems to be okay with the dishwasher. For the moment.)
Anyway, the wood in the kitchen was okay. But then we started putting the flooring in the living room. And all doggie hell broke loose.
She spent most of Saturday hunched on the stairs, watching through wide eyes while we covered her beloved plywood (non-shiny! non-slippery!) in the skin of a thousand puppies. Okay, actually it was butterscotch-stained oak flooring, but you wouldn’t have thought so from the look on her face. When we quit on Saturday, we had flooring done to halfway across the stairway. For the rest of the night, she would only step off of the stairs on the plywood side. We started to have a bad feeling.
On Sunday, she again watched in mute horror as the flooring crept across the plywood. Finally, when we were about four feet from the dining room wall, Nori staged a protest. She marched over and laid down in front of where we were flooring, preventing us from continuing. We laughed and shoved her away. She did it again. And again. And again. If the poor thing could have figured out a way to handcuff herself to the floor nailer while displaying a spray-painted "SAVE THE PLYWOOD" banner, she would have.
Sadly for her, she only weighs 50 pounds and we are fully capable of physically moving her from our path. And thus, with much drama and carrying of the dog, the floor was finished.
View A, from the stairs towards the entryway:
View B, from the entryway to the stairs:
View C, a close-up of the the trim around the future home of the wood stove (we will do slate under the woodstove):
Can anyone else hear the sound of a little black dog weeping?
It’s hard to explain just how white that primer on the walls was. So white. Tremendously white. Whiter than Snow White riding a white horse through new fallen snow. And that’s white.
So we clearly need to fix that. Plus, given our sloppy painting technique, painting before the flooring went in seemed to make a lot of sense. Yes, indeed, painting was next on the agenda.
Let’s meet the contenders, shall we?
For the living room, where the theme was "Not White But Still Neutral Because We Have Too Much Wacky Art":
On the left is White Hyacinth and on the right is Indian White. These are both from the Sherman Williams’ Arts and Crafts collection.
And in the dining room, where the theme was "More Exciting Than the Living Room But It Still Needs to Match So Maybe Green":
Here you can see where Cherie went a little nuts with sample colors. On the left is Ruskin Room Green, again from Sherman Williams. In the middle is Georgian Green and on the right is Kennebunkport Green. Those last two were from Benjamin Moore’s Historic Colors collection.
And the winners are:
White Hyacinth and Georgian Green. Seen here together from the front of the living room, a view which clearly demonstrates why these colors had to coordinate. Which they actually do.
The Indian White was terrifically unattractive on our wall. It looked like "flesh" tone–as in Crayola crayons or Band-Aids. (We put "flesh" in quotations because we’ve never met anyone whose "flesh" was actually "flesh" toned.) It was really quite creepy. And the two rejected greens were either too dark (Kennebunkport) or didn’t look as nice with the White Hyacinth (Ruskin Room).
As for all that debris scattered around, pay it no mind. That’s just a little something we were working on this weekend involving wood flooring and our living room. Really. Don’t pay any attention to it. At least until tomorrow, which is when we will triumphantly unveil our new living room floor.
Yes. We are alive. Sort of.
You see, we went on vacation to visit Michael’s family in Key West.
We had a plan for updating the site during vacation. We were going to update before we left to show you how we painted the living room and dining rooms actual colors other than white. And then we were going to update during vacation to show you some classic Key West architecture. And then we were going to do a post after vacation to let you know that we were back in the land of snow and ice.
Except that we got busy, and then there was illness, and then there was catching up at work and, well, frankly, we decided that we would rather spend our vacation in Key West sitting in the sun and making enough Vitamin D to get us through to June (which is the next time we expect to be able to spend that much time outside again). And we decided that we’d rather spend the days after vacation sleeping it off. Or, at least that’s what we assume we’d rather do because we’ve pretty much been asleep since we got back. (Re-entry to Maine in March is a cruel thing.)
We’ll try to get some updates up soon. We have things to tell you. Things are happening. Or they will be happening if we can stay awake long enough.
Mr. Drywall Guy finished on Friday in a flurry of dust, which matching the blizzard that was taking place outside. We’ve gotten kind of used to the dust situation around here and have abandoned all hope of living a dust-free existence. We don’t bother dusting anything with the exception of 1) the television screen (M: How can it be snowing on that Lost island? C: I think that’s just from the drywall sanding. Here’s a tissue) and 2) the pets (C: Can you brush off the cat? She laid down in the living room again. M: Why do we own black pets?). But even by our dust-tolerant standards there was a stunning amount of whiteness flying around. Remember how impressed we were that he skim-coated the entire living room ceiling? Well, all that had to end up somewhere.
Witness the XTreme Dust that we were facing, here helpfully illustrated after a first pass of the shop vac:
It was a lot of dust and it took us all of Saturday morning to even make a dent in it. But we dusted and vacuumed and dusted and vacuumed and dusted and vacuumed up as much as we could. And then we rented a giant paint sprayer and primer-bombed the entire place.
No, really. The paint sprayer has to be one of the best inventions ever for this kind of thing. We tacked plastic to all of the windows and the doorways to the finished rooms, stuffed paper in all of the outlet boxes, and slapped masking tape over the light switches. Then Cherie sequestered herself in the bedroom with the animals while Michael slapped on a dust mask and a hat and sprayed 7 gallons of primer all over everything. And that primer was white. Snowblind white. At least it was until someone let Cherie loose on paint samples. (More to come on that.)
White living room:
White dining room:
White hallway (with a black cat for contrast):
White bedroom:
And white outside:
With a black dog for contrast.
For the last week and a half, we’ve been watching a drywaller mud and tape the whole house and all we have to say about it is this: paying someone else to do the work rules. The place looks 9,000 times (that’s an unscientific number) better than it would if we were doing it. And it’s getting done a whole lot faster. This guy has skill. And he is a perfectionist, which is a pretty good quality to have in a drywaller, we think.
He is such a perfectionist that–when he didn’t like the way the living room ceiling was turning out–he strapped on his stilts and skim-coated the whole thing. The entire ceiling. Covered in drywall compound. And he mixed it himself, because heaven knows he’s not lazy like us and therefore doesn’t buy the pre-mixed.
Our solution to an unsatisfactory ceiling would have been to sand it one more time, shrug, slap on some primer, and never look up.
In case you couldn’t tell, neither of us is a perfectionist.
The only downside to the whole "hiring someone" experiment is that our skin is little too thin for this. We think he hates us. The first day he worked, he spent six hours (SIX HOURS) fixing the drywall that we hung. We know that drywallers hate to mud over drywall that has been hung by amateurs because it makes their job that much harder. But we are not amateurs! We’re…us! Our drywall is hung properly, right?
Um, maybe not. Listening to him tighten screws, cut away bad joints, double the number of screws in the walls, and–in one notable case–actually take down the drywall, shim out the wall, and rehang the piece was pretty humbling. Occasionally he would sigh dramatically or mutter under his breath. And our spirits would sink even lower.
There’s nothing worse than having someone who knows what they are doing quietly show you how much you stink.
On the other hand, there’s nothing better than watching someone else do the work. Work on, Mr. Drywall Guy. Work on.
