the cave…redesigned

for the past few months i’ve been pretty much living in the cave which is my house. i’m hell-bent on redecorating the entire place, so i’ve been really bad and neglecting everything else like friends, birthdays, fingernails, fashion, and the like. but i promise once this biatch of a project is done i will have a party and you’re all invited. thank GAWD things are finally starting to come together around here, which means that i’m ready to rant on my experiences. so for everybody who has been asking me, “where have you been?” and “what the hell are you doing to your house?” this is for you:

• basically what i’ve been doing is painting, painting, and more painting
• i’ve been living part time at home and part time at the home depot
• i used to hide clothes from husbie when he got home before me. now i hide paint samples
• i used to do the rounds at urban outfitters, american apparel, nordstrom, and LF. now i’m a regular at pier 1, crate and barrel, and west elm
• i haven’t bought clothes for MONTHS <shudder>

the whole thing really shouldn’t have taken this long, but i got totally blindsided by the color selection process. it’s funny, because when it came to painting, i thought that color selection would be the easy no-brainer part. i went to a design school, for gawd’s sake. like an idiot (or a beginner) i thought it would be ok to just bring home the color swatches, test it in the light of each room, and that would suffice. so that’s what i did. i didn’t take home any actual paint samples and paint them on my walls. and now my advice to anybody out there who is thinking about doing the same thing is: don’t be an idiot.

but yeah, i totally did that at first and i ended up with an office (which was supposed to be a chic gray with a refreshing green accent wall) turned out to be a lavender and lime green disaster. oh yeah, and let’s not forget the bathroom that went first from lime green to purple.

i was like, “MOTHER——!!!”

it turns out that natural light will really mess with ya.  so to make a ridiculously long story short, i marched my ass over to home depot (where i am now acquainted with the entire paint staff and their individual schedules, and someone never fails to ask me, “you’re back?”) and in the end, after 20 or so samples and endless color-matching inquiries, i found a single gray that worked in my house. it’s benjamin moore nimbus and it has a brownish undertone. freaking gorgeous woohoo! i was so happy that Husbie and I decided to use it in three areas upstairs.

and then there was the business of the ikea furniture. did you know it’s not real wood? <gasp>

well i sure as hell didn’t! so i tried to stain my desk (and my oak cabinets in the hall bathroom) and to make another long story short, i ended up with a crapload of toxic waste and a house that reeked of paint thinner (because husbie didn’t buy the odorless kind even though it is right next to the toxic fumey one at HD. but i digress.)

so after several failed attempts at wood staining (which included a power sander and a series of nervous breakdowns), i basically said “F-this.” i ended up painting all of my cabinets and ikea furniture black, and now it just ROCKS. for anybody who’s interested, i used zinsser 123 primer and a custom black on the ikea stuff and gripper grey primer with glidden black onyx paint on my cabinets. i used the water-based minwax poly on top of everything and voila! it looks purdy.

and then we painted the downstairs white (behr silky white) and the upstairs hallway a charcoal gray (behr creek bend). our next project will be painting the kitchen charcoal to match the upstairs hallway.

(i know people are probably like, where are the pics? but i kinda feel funny about posting pics of my house online. call me paranoid, but it’s sort of like a privacy thing LOL. but who knows, maybe when it’s all done if it looks amazing then i will post a few)

oh, and i discovered a kick-ass website along the way: www.younghouselove.com. these guys are so cute and they basically diy’d their entire house. their “how to” page is my favorite; they tell you how they went about doing everything and their advice on painting and diy decor is awesome. this website helped to convert a clueless girl obsessed with clothes into a home improvement maniac.

now that things are finally under control around here (i’m writing from my new and improved office hehe) i think i’m gonna start digging into the pile of mags that have accumulated in the mail over the past few months. i’ve been way too out of touch with the whole fashion thing. hopefully in the near future i’ll have a mind-blowing shopping spree and blog all about it. hehe