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!

Desk and dresser drawers get color. (The blue turns out wrong, though.)

I'm going for a sort of beachy restoration look. Also, I'm not sure I have enough acrylic paint to cover full pieces of furniture, but there's a ton of cream latex left.

Half the furniture is going to match the trim.

That being handily in progress and my spreadsheet on comparative cash flow allocations having been compared and allocated, I decided that since fancy paper had failed me, I'd try looking at better-quality wrapping paper for wallpaper.

Camelback Road offers the Magic Triangle of a Container Store, another Paper Source, and a World Market all within about one-quarter mile of one another... actually, make that a Magic Quadrilateral, as there's also a post office, so I mailed a Father's Day gift in a state other than tardy panic.

Container Store... exists in a sort of pocket universe of upscale cliché, so of course one of the two checkout clerks was engaged in a lengthy discussion with a woman in yoga pants who was seeking spiritual perfection through the tiniest details of her storage purchases. While I'd been tempted by Calico Zoo for a hypothetical kids' room in the smaller middle bit of the upstairs, I decided that simply handing over a credit card would betray my lack of enlightenment, and that it would be better to move on with my journey unencumbered.

World Market was much more exciting, notably because it actually had rolls of the close-out Mermaids Seahorse paper that I'd been drooling over but not willing to pay shipping for. That's for the bathroom, and then I bought the matching broad nautical stripe for some other unspecified portion of the upstairs, depending what mood I'm in, figuring for under $2.50, it was good to have a match.

Heck, I may run the stripes vertically in one bedroom and horizontally in the other..

Paper Source turned out to be where the action was. I had squandered portions of last night researching historic wallpapers online -- not because I have any specific notion of the period of this house*, but because it's soothing to stare at historic wallpapers -- and had revived a pash for the kind of 1920s botanical/floral patterns where the plants might eat you. Behold!

Blossoms as big as your head!

 Paper Source also provided a nicely restrained gray-on-cream floral for the kitchen.

Blossoms NOT the size of your head, as I resisted that option.

 It also provided paper for a kitchen accent wall. Since it's a fixer-upper, I could not resist.**

Think of it as being like the inspirational words people hang on the wall, only pictures.

 All this activity finally got a reaction from Phineas.

"It's a kitchen, it must have FOOD."

*The actual house-house itself is probably from the 1980s, based on the pink-and-blue upholstery, the standard-for-that-era dollhouse wallpaper, and my gut instinct for these things. But it's a generic sort of house shape, so it could, in its fictive world, be from just about any time from 1910 on to the present, with modestly higher probability for the 1950s and 1960s.

**Note what's missing from the wallpaper selections? PINK. There will be NO PINK in the finished house. Not even flowers in the vases will be pink. NO PINK. (The Goth Condo has all the pink required in my life.)