Monday, October 29, 2012

am i Blue? --- no i'm GRAY!!

I love my Mom.  I also love that she was impressed enough with my kitchen backsplash to trust me to do hers as well.

Unfortunately, I'm more of an earthy-tone-brownish kinda girl...whereas Mom is into cooler grays.

Gray is not my friend.  Whether we're talking about the hairs multiplying with increasing voracity atop my head.....or paint.  Grays like to turn blue.  (Again with the hair...You've seen how old-lady-gray hair can, indeed, turn blue, if not properly processed...)

And let's face it.  50 Shades was the WORST. BOOK. EVER.

But I digress.

Mom has a gray quartz countertop and blonde-colored maple cabinets.  Hmmmm...grays and creams living together in perfect harmony??  (I'd like to buy the world a Coke?)  Inconceivable!

But this is my Mom we're talking about, so instead I'm thinking, "As...You...Wish...!!"

After painting the gray tones on one wall THREE different times, they finally started looking less blue.  The tiles still appear somewhat blue in the photos, but in person, they actually do look gray.

Well, most do.

I'm rethinking wanting to do this as a side business.  It turns out I'm not much of a contortionist, and you really NEED to be one in order to properly mask everything off and paint in the corners.  I'm seriously considering looking up the local chiropractor after this one.  I could see any money this kind of work might generate would go straight to the Back Quack.  Well, the masseuse, anyway.

Blue or Gray, Union or Confederate, I still think the backsplash turned out okay. Was I successful in uniting the two different colors palettes?

Here are the before shots...ignore the miscellaneous crap lying around...that's mostly my mess.




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Sunday, October 7, 2012

the boob job. wait, that's wrong. the chest lift. yeah.

I found myself in project mode again.  Hubby was gone for the weekend, and I always find some trouble to get into when he's away.  This was fairly benign, however...merely painting the red wall in the living room.  (The red HAD to go since I just painted the adjoining kitchen wall a lovely eggplant.  Now the red was just blecchhhh....)  The only real difficulties in this project were moving the incredibly heavy TV from the corner, and painting around the piano, since it can NOT be moved.  It's a mere 4 inches from the wall at its closest, and folks, 4 inches just isn't much to work with.  (nyuk...)

But this isn't really about painting a wall.  Or climbing atop my piano (which makes me about as nervous as a whore in church), or crawling under said piano and banging my head about a gazillion times while at the same time, wishing my arm were just that mere 4 inches longer so I could reach that spot in the corner.

It's about my sweet little ice chest I've had forever that now needed a serious facelift.  It was still the same color as when I purchased it some 15+ years ago and was really out-of-place after painting my wall back to a neutral color and changing up my wall decor.

As usual, hubby was a tremendous help.  He started sanding her down for me and got me going with the power tools and I finished up the sand job.  Then he thought he'd be quite helpful and spray the primer on for me.  Philly is genius at 99.9% of the tasks he sets out to accomplish.  This was the .1%.  He was a bit overzealous with the spray can and ended up with puddles of primer on the top of the chest, and drips down the sides.  I now affectionately think of him as my Big Dripper.

I didn't take pictures of this because he managed to get it all sanded down again.  I don't know if I would have done that to him anyway.  'Cause let's face it.  When it comes right down to it, I screw up WAY more stuff than he does, and he almost always has to fix it.  Plus, he's pretty much a saint.  Well, sometimes.  <3

Anyway, here's how my sad little chest started out:



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