Halfway There

The bedrooms are done!  I’m so relieved that it finally feels like I’m getting somewhere with all this painting.  I think my bedroom looks great, even though my family argued that I went too dark with the color.  I disagree!

Excuse the blurriness; a photographer, I am not.

Also, ignore the junk everywhere.  It’s hard to keep things tidy when you’re constantly moving things around!  Again, my bedroom was Behr Classic Taupe.  The closets and trim are Behr White- keeping it simple.  Also, debating whether or not I should keep that desk.  The previous owners left it behind, but I can’t decide if I have the room for it.  Decisions, decisions!  Below is the finished second bedroom:

I’m really proud of this room because of how good the accent wall came out.  I think the two colors look amazing together.. I really lucked out on the selection!  Just as a refresher, the purple is Behr Purple Mauve and the grey is Behr Silver Chalice.  Apologies for the pictures of the living room- it has the most clutter by far.

The color here is Behr Raffia Cream.  As you can see, I’m not quite finished with this room.  It still needs a few coats on the trim and baseboards, but I should be finished in here by Thursday.  That means, as soon as I get the wood rot fixed, I can get my new floors!

Of course, that wood rot is a whole other issue.  I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve called the condo management company and the contractor directly.  I just cannot seem to get anyone to actually come out and do the work.  Do people really run their businesses like this?  Any advice for me on this matter?  I have to travel for work soon, so I’m hoping to have all of the flooring work done by then.  But the way this has been going, I definitely won’t be holding my breath.  In the meantime, my awesome family has been able to help with other jobs that need doing around the condo.  My mother was able to paint all the ceilings (go Mom!), so forget every bad myth you’ve heard about painting popcorn.  Trust me, you’ll be fine.  My father got to doing some of the less-appealing jobs, like caulking all of the cracks around the windows and spraying the hornets’ nests that have set up camp on my balcony.  Not fun.

Meanwhile, I’ve moved on to painting the bathroom.  My bathroom is separated into 2 rooms, which I’ve started referring to as the tub room and the vanity room, just to tell them apart.  This is the current status of the vanity room:

 

The color here is Behr Valley Mist.  I’ve decided to just put a fresh coat of white in the tub room for now.  While I eventually want it to be this nice teal color, right now I have a most hideous bright blue tub and toilet, and those colors would clash for sure.  When I get around to replacing those fixtures, that’s when I’ll change the wall color in the tub room.  Since this picture was taken, I’ve taken the mirror down.  My sister’s fiancee does carpentry work, and he’s going to build me a cute white frame to go around the mirror’s edge. (“Cute” is my word, of course, not his.)  I can’t wait to see it when it’s finished!

 

Endless Paint Prep

This weekend was all about prepping the walls for paint.  After spackling and sanding for hours, I figured they were ready, but one glance from my folks and they could tell I still had a long way to go.  Who knew paint prep would take so long?  I’m trying to focus on getting the bathroom and kitchen ready first, since those are 2 rooms that aren’t getting new floors right away.  I’ve started to tape those rooms, and I hope to have them ready to begin painting by this weekend.  The other larger rooms will need some extra sanding, probably by way of an electric sander.  Unfortunately, the condo association has rules about construction noise, and limits the time you can do that sort of work to business hours only.  Hopefully I can bend the rules just a bit.. I do have a job after all!

One of the other projects I had planned for this past weekend was changing the mailbox lock.  The seller was supposed to provide me with keys to the mailbox, but apparently they never had a set.  So I called the town post office and arranged for a mailman to meet me at the mailbox so I could pop out the old lock and replace it with a new one.  On Friday, I went to the local locksmith and purchased the most universal size they had for a mailbox lock, which came to about $13.  The salesman there explained to me how I could go about changing it, and when I told him I had just replaced a deadbolt recently, he assured me I would have no problem.  Well, when the mailman arrived on Saturday, the two of us took quite a long time figuring it out.  It took us about 30 minutes to change the lock, and I’m very grateful that he took the time to help me; I can only imagine how long I would have been there if he hadn’t.

Because no post on this blog would be complete without a new problem arising, it’s only fitting that I discovered another issue on Saturday.  I was minding my own business, cleaning in the bathroom, when out of the corner of my eye, I noticed water coming UP from the sink drain.  Who even knew that was a thing?  I hadn’t run the faucet or any other bathroom fixtures so far that day, so I knew the water was coming from somewhere else.  So I frantically scooped the rising water out of the sink and poured it down the tub to try to get the situation under control.  When it seemed to calm down, I ran down the stairs and knocked on the downstairs neighbors’ door.  They had never heard of such a problem happening in their unit, so I placed an emergency call to the association.  They transferred me to the person on-call, who sent the local sewer company.  Turns out, whenever the people across the hall used their bathroom sink, the water came up in my drain.  To me, that’s just crazy!  The plumber had to cut and replace the pipe to fix the problem, but now the water is draining normally.  Looking on the bright side, the bill for this job goes to the association, not me, since it involved more than one unit.  I’m grateful that at least this issue was cost-free to fix, but if I find one more unexpected problem, it’s really going to damper my spirits.