This is what I like to call sprint-painting. This occurred over a weekend where I didn’t have anything scheduled and my husband was scheduled for most of the weekend. Here’s how it went down:

Sprint 1 – Friday: 5pm. Get out of work, head home, raid the fridge, and move all your furniture into the middle of the room. Sand down the seafoam green.

Friday 10pm: Wash the layer of dust off, sleep in the middle of the room.

Sprint 2 – Saturday 8am: Wake up, find another set of painting clothes (aka not the dust covered ones), and paint the part that needs to dry first. In this case, that’s where the bed sits.

Sprint 3 – Saturday 11am: Shuffle stuff around and paint the other half while the first half dries. Head out and find lunch.

Sprint 4 – Saturday 3pm: Shuffle stuff back and paint the 2nd coat.

Sprint 5 – Saturday 8pm: Have your husband call and ask, “you painted? really?”

Really, even two coats of paint is totally doable even if the room is a good size and you plan it out well. Anyway, here’s the results!

And my personal favorite, with a little moooood lighting…

In any case, guess what happened to the upstairs of Chez Boucher!?! If you’re watching my Flickr, you already know…we painted. Now, our upstairs is different than most capes… Normally you would see two bedrooms upstairs, but the previous owners added a half dormer and knocked down the wall one one bedroom to make a loft. I wanted to paint these to feel like the master suite that I always imagined the upstairs to be…so they got the same color.

Something I’m experimenting in this house is of matched pairs. The kitchen and the living room are both shades of yellow, the spare bedroom and the office are both grey, and the upstairs has teal in the loft and the bedroom. I wanted the rooms to feel bigger, and plus it allows us to easily share accessories between the rooms.

More on the bedroom later, but for now, here’s the color of the loft…

Now, with all the corners, it wasn’t without its oops…

…but this was because we decided to paint it freehand as opposed to tape off the ceiling, since the ceiling needs to be painted anyway. So, I can live with the oops, because I love the walls and the fact that I can finally hang stuff up. More on that later, too.

I sure missed you guys. Can’t wait to update more soon!

Don’t know when it started, but I believe it’s a perfect storm of getting sick of staring at my bare kitchen windows, finding a tutorial for faux roman shades online, and discovering a hidden JoAnn Fabrics only 10 minutes away.

So off to JoAnns I went, and I found the perfect graphic fabric. Perfect width…but not enough in the length, which I could make do with since I was folding the bottoms upwards.

If sewing makes you nervous (which it totally does for me), a graphic fabric works well since you can line things up using the print.

This tutorial was originally found through House of Turquoise, then went over to Cameras and Chaos, and finally ended at Centsational Girl. Whew! What a mouthful!

I’m not going to give you all the steps (since she does such a great job already), but I will let you know where I deviated:

1. I did not attach the shade directly to the wall. Since we have old windows our blinds are attached inside the frame, and jut out more than normal. To compensate I bought 3″ depth curtain rods and allocated enough on the top seam to fit the rod through.

2. I also did not put the dowel in the bottom because the fabric was heavy to begin with, so it drapes well on it’s own. I also did not put light blocking fabric behind it because, well, I didn’t feel like it.

3. I used binder clips and safety pins to gauge my folds. I’m a big fan of testing a decoration and staring at it for a while.

4. Having your friends weigh in on it is also great party discussion. You’ll notice the final fold is different than the test shots.

Oh, and the total cost: $13 for the fabric, $5 for the curtain rods, 1 Ramones album and a glass of wine (but I already owned the last two).

If you’re looking to waste another 10 minutes on the Internet, you can watch our same friend who inspected our curtains propose to his girlfriend at the top of a mountain…well, ok, it’s about 7 min of my husband wheezing up the hill and 3 minutes of awesome proposal, but you get the idea.

This lasted for the entirety of the test drive…he would exclaim “Yarrrrrris!” and then giggle for a while, the giggles would then die down for a moment and then he would think of it again and giggle some more. He was a perpetual giggle machine.

After we left the dealership, he said, “So, are you going to get the ….giggle…snort….Yaris?” I could tell he was trying to contain himself.
“No, I don’t know if I could handle 5 years of car payments while you make pirate jokes every time you get in.” And that’s how I bought my Scion.

There’s many things we do separately, but car shopping and working on the yarrrr – I mean, yard, has always been done together. Our priorities on the yard has always been:
1.) Keep it easy to maintain
2.) Make it look nice

Here’s where we started the weekend with.

The flowers were left over from the previous owners. They flower once and then don’t do much after that.

This weekend we tackled the major lawn maintenance projects:
Wake up the lawn from its long winter’s nap

First off was raking all the leftover leaves and mowing them into mulch. Afterwards, we put down GrubEx, fertilizer, and lime. We are both rather new to the lawn care realm and are still experimenting.

I’m amazed at how nice the lawn looks with just a haircut. I hope this year it grows well.

The Mr. also experimented with some patch seed grower. I think the only tough thing here is the instructions require twice a day watering – which is rough on our schedule.

Dig flower beds into the front and sides
This was my major project. It consisted of digging up the old plants and grass, removing the old mulch, mixing topsoil in, adding drainage rock, and putting new mulch on. I plan on planting next weekend.

Bonus: Pretty up the side entrance

Although I didn’t get a before shot, I finally got over my fear of what’s possibly living under the stairs and cleaned out the leaves. After adding some mulch, it looks a whole lot better. Anyone want a giant pile of bricks? We have a ton of them.

Working together on different projects made this a totally doable weekend project. And now I have two very dirty hands, a very tired husband, and a satisfied weekend.

- After studying my butt off for most of the week, I took the Miller Analogies Test on Sat morning. I have a blog post brewing about it and I’ll let you know when it’s ready.

- We had a bunch of people over and we watched the Chesapeake Regional, followed by Sacramento. Chesapeake was fun to watch since we had a lot of friends competing. My high school team (currently now run by my dad) came in 2nd place and did an overall awesome job. Sacramento was good, but ran long. We literally watched half of a DVR’d episode of Wipeout while waiting between just one finals match.

- My Mr. made his first attempt at homemade espinaca. It needs some tweaking, but it’s definitely on the right track.

- In an attempt to get spring to get here already, we bought patio furniture! We also talked about our outdoor strategy for the spring/summer. Very very exciting stuff.

- I futzed with paint upstairs. We’re currently trying to find a happy medium between “too dark” (me) and “this looks like a bathroom” (the Mr.). I want something turquoise-ish. All the ones on the left are very blue – and the three from the right are my 2nd round of samples.

- We attempted to pick out tile for our kitchen backsplash again. More on that soon.

What did you do this weekend?

Yesterday, I crossed off another thing off my Goddess Leonie list. I ordered some sweet sweet personal business cards.

I love my work ones, but this is something I’ve always wanted to have. I’ve made a few versions of ink-jet printed ones (including the disaster that was printing on translucent paper – woo!), but I’ve never ordered them from a company. So, on an email deal, I slow-shipped it from Vistaprint and I got 250 for a whopping $5.

Here’s the before:

I had started this project while I had a few weeks off from work, thinking I would be able to paint the room and the cabinet by the time I came back. Boy was I wrong. Big Blue was hiding not one, but FIVE layers of paint underneath: Bright blue, light blue, yellow, orange, and black. Although I got the room painted in time, I spent many evenings over the course of months just stripping the paint off.

Look at this grossness. This was the back of one of the old handles. Can’t look away, eh?

However, I’m very proud with how it turned out:

So how do you go from Big Bad Blue to Gorgeous? Actually pretty easy.

Supplies:

• Orbital sander – I use a Ryobi Random Orbit Sander. I love this one a lot because it fits nice in my hand and the weight of the battery is above the sander, which causes for a more even job.
• Sanding disks in various grits. The grit is the amount of coarseness in the disk. The lower the number, the grittier it is.
• White Paint – this was actually left over from the previous owners. We use it everywhere. I think it’s Lowes Ultra Pure White.
• Brown Paint  – Behr Paint and Primer in Heirloom Mahogany. My husband calls it “Hersheys chocolate color”.
• Paint Brush – I prefer a 2″ brush when doing larger jobs that don’t need a ton of accuracy.
• 2″ Painters Tape
• Cabinet Pulls – also from The Depot. These came in a set of 10.
• Screwdriver (Phillips or Flathead, depending on the pulls)

Steps to remove the old paint:

1. Remove the old handles. Stare at the grossness some more.
2. Sand that mutha down. This was by far the worst part. Normally I don’t sand all the way down to the wood but with so many layers I wanted to start fresh on this one so that my finish was nice and clean. When you sand, start with the low numbers and work your way up. I started with some 60 grit here. This took forever – because of all the layers I would sand all evening, and I would only get through one of the drawers.
3. Get fed up with sanding and grab some paint stripper. I did NOT want to use paint stripper. First of all, my work area is my basement – and I didn’t want to die from paint stripper fumes. I also don’t like to use chemicals in general, but the work was going far too slow. I chose Citristrip Paint and Varnish Stripper because it seemed like the least of the paint stripper evils. It has a citrusy smell but takes longer to work than the others – you spray it on, let it sit overnight, and then come back and strip it off with a wood scraper. I wish I took pictures of this, because it looked pretty darn bubbly and cool.
4. Sand again to get an even finish. I used 120 and then 220 grit, just to even things out.
5. Fill any holes/gashes with wood filler and sand. Any will do here.
   
6. Clean the entire cabinet of dust. I used a mix of my vacuum and a can of compressed air.

Steps to paint the cabinet:

1. Paint the whole thing your stripe color. This was very easy. Start by removing the drawers and work in nice, even strokes. I really like using a brush here because I like the texture it leaves, but you should be aware of the direction of “grain” you are creating. I also painted the shelve edge that was visible from the front, but not inside. Let it dry overnight.
2. Tape your stripes. Put all the drawers back into the cabinet. I wanted to have the middle stripe centered over the drawer pulls and then have the other two 1/2″ away from that. You’re going to tape everything together – the top and the drawers – to get a consistent line. Make sure you press your finger down the edges to ensure your paint edge.



3. Cut your lines and free your cabinets. I made a video for this one! Check it out:
4. Remove the drawers & paint your top coat. I did two coats of the brown. Remember to keep your grain the same as the coat below. Let it dry overnight one last time. Get excited about finally being able to show it off!
5. Convince your husband to help you carry it upstairs and add your hardware.
6. Happy dance!

Goodbye Big Blue, Hello set of drawers I am proud to move a million times.