Fixer Upper: the second weekend brings wallpaper!

There are more ways to cut wallpaper wrong than to cut it right. (Infinity is larger than one!)

Bottom floor is re-papered, top floor is not.

Hanging paper was a tedious process, as the end walls have cracks, so it made sense to cut posterboard templates, Mod Podge the paper to the templates, and then glue the papered posterboard into place. My space is so limited that I could podge one back wall or a set of end walls at a time, and that's it.

And then it all warps and fits only so-so anyway. The doorways will definitely be getting trim that wasn't included in the original house.

O hai large flowers!

The desk with peach drawers is now a sophisticated black. I haven't entirely decided on the second color for the chair. Though blue painter's tape adds a jaunty industrial touch, it's a sign of things being in-progress, not an artistic statement. Fianna, supervising renovations, sits in an un-redone chair.

My punch list goes for days and days.

The fabric for the kitchen is going to be tea-dyed, possibly even tonight, when I finish cleaning up an experiment in authentic Irish soda bread that entirely explains why the Irish wanted to come to the U.S. for a better life.

Working our way toward industrial chic.

Meanwhile, Phineas marks the house as his. He hop-hopped onto the roof from the bed and went crazy. I guess the shingles feel good under the little cat chin.

It's mine, I tell you, it's MINE!

Fixer Upper Day 3

Very little happened yesterday, due to disappointing trips to the Paper Source near the office (where all paper had gold flecks, veins, stamps, or other gilding) and to Jerry's Artarama (where every floral paper incorporated the exact shade of Pepto Pink that I spent Sunday painting over).

Today, the house is far enough along to be off its drop cloth and in its official spot at the foot of the bed, where it casts serious doubt on the wisdom of this room arrangement, but it's a convenient spot for working on it.

Still huge, less pink.

Between reading corporate reports, I recklessly painted some things. The bath fixtures are shiny pale aqua because I had half a can of shiny pale aqua, and it's a nice bath-ish color.

Super chi-chi vanity rehab in progress.

 Oh, there's more... and a surprise!

Fixer-upper day 2

Tediously taping trim.

I painted things cream for the length of an entire movie on the musical influences of Leonard Cohen, which was pretty much a tour of how to be a Canadian intellectual in the 1950s and 1960s.

Lots of things needed to be cream, including a ton of window trim, the window interiors, the ceilings, and portions of the furniture. Oh! and the stairs. The stairs were held in place with two screws: one straight, one Phillips.

Notice what's missing? The carpet! I found the right corner to grip and gave it a yank. On Thursday, I'm going to Home Depot to look at flooring.

Phineas checks out progress at just the point where the paint might still be tacky enough to hold cat hair.

There's a Paper Source in the plaza that surrounds our current office location, so I'm shopping for wallpaper tonight. It's pricey, but not actually any worse than trying to buy large wallpaper samples online, and the selection is much better than at the nearest art supply store. (If I hate everything, there's always Jerry's in Tempe, but it's a haul.)

And somehow I bought a fixer-upper

While cruising Craig's List between bouts of *cough* decluttering *cough*, I found a gigantic handmade house, with furniture, for $40.

A few hours later, it was delivered. It is literally so big that it needs to function as a footboard.

It's very pink.

It's Barbie-scale. I'd been vaguely hoping for 1:10 for my Madame Alexander family, but it's not like I don't have lots of fashion dolls who could move in.

Step one was to get some paint, as white-with-pink-trim is straight-up unbearable. I limply researched mid-century modern exterior color schemes, decided they were too dark to live with, and wandered off to Barry's Ace Hardware on the tram to look at light grays. Here we are after the second coat (the trim has had a little cream-colored paint so I could see how it looked but has not been addressed seriously, since that will require masking -- but I know where the blue painter's tape is!).



After the jump... interiors! And furniture that leaves me wondering if Greenleaf/Corona Concepts used to do playscale furniture kits.