Bad Boys, Bad Boys

March was the month of the dining room. Let me tell you about the dining room.

The floors? Black and white checkered tile. The walls? Maroon/gold/blue striped wallpaper above the chair rail, maroon paint below the chair rail. The lighting? A huge gold chandelier. And if all that wasn't enough, there were (lovely in the 70s, I'm sure) hideous built in cabinets along one wall. The problem with the cabinets was two-fold: first, they were ugly, and second, only the lower half were actually cabinets. The top half was glass shelves, assumably for displaying useless crap.

My first home improvement project, after getting the apartment next door ready to inhabit, was to "do something" with the dining room. We started with stripping the wallpaper. When we were done, we decided that while we were at it, we might as well tear out the built-in cabinets. We called a few handymen, picked one, and he got to work. He hit "some snags", of course, and the rule of Pi applied: everything took 3 times as long and cost 3 times as much as we originally planned. The end result was great, however, and I declared ripping out the cabinets the best decison we'd made all year.

After the cabinets were torn out, we moved on to painting. I have been painting for a week straight. On Thursday night we walked into our neighborhood Ace Hardware store, and they lady at the counter recognized us right away and we told her we were there for more paint, she said "Wow, you must be painting your whole house!" "Actually," Chris said, "it's just one room." How sad is that?

In our defense, it's one room, but 2 different colors on the walls (one on the bottom part of the walls and one on the top part) AND we painted the ceiling. Our walls are plaster, and crumbly enough that we've started referring to our house as "The Crack House", because that's seriously what it looks like. The could film an episode of Cops in here. Or they could have, before we painted.

The walls were in such bad shape that they required 2 coats of primer, and 3 coats of color. The ceiling? 2 coats of primer and 4 coats of color, although not because it was in bad shape, but because the previous owners saw fit to wallpaper the fucking ceiling. Gold wallpaper with gold stars all over it. It looked like Christmas wrap. After stripping the wallpaper off the walls, we decided that there was no way in hell that we were going to go to the trouble of stripping the wallpaper off the ceiling. So we committed the cardinal sin of remodeling: we painted over the wallpaper. (Hate mail here, please.) After 2 coats of gray primer and 3 coats of white ceiling paint, you could still see the gold stars through the paint. We put a 4th coat on Thursday night, with better, thicker paint (hence our trip to Ace last night wherein the cashier surmised that we were painting our whole house) and hoped for the best. It worked. Seriously, though, a normal person wouldn't have been able to see the stars. But I knew they were there. They were there, and they were mocking me.

So for the past week and a half, when we weren't fixing crumbling walls or running out of paint, we were painting. Except for Friday night, when we were ripping up the floors in the dining room, because black and white checkered tile isn't a part of the dining room in my head, and is Step 3, right after Cabinets and Walls. (We're getting the original hardwood floor that is under all of this tile refinished, which, fortunately, is not as expensive as it sounds. They basically just shave a layer off the wood, and then coat it with something clear.) And good god, was it ever worth it.

Because March is the month of the dining room, I sold our old dining table last week, so this weekend meant a trip to Park City to pick up our new one. We found a table that we loved a few months ago, and we told ourselves that if it went on sale, we would get it. So after months of checking their website obsessively, it finally went on sale last Monday. And because I'm nothing if not inconsistent, I decided that we would only get it if we could sell the dining table we already have. It sold the day I listed the ad, for $500, which isn't too shabby considering that I bought it for $640 three years ago.

I'll leave you with some pictures:

Before. This is the previous owners' stuff in this picture.









Crack house. This was after the walls were repaired.











Stars. On the ceiling.












My boyfriend is hott with a double-t.











Possibly the worst "after" picture ever. The walls are actually a light aqua, not white, as they look here. I'll try to take a better picture this week. Oh, and that's our new table.

posted by Ami @ Friday, March 31, 2006