oh sandy.

Living room paint color in action:

The medallion is not sealed yet in this photo - we have to add a bead of caulk since the old ceiling is a little wavy in some spots.

Oh and the floors have been started! This is our bedroom with the paint color whose name I still can't remember. It's a faint, pale-like thing. Check out the sanding transformation:

I really like the pale wood and almost have the urge to just seal it. The thing is - it's pretty stained up in some spots. Let's just say there were dogs living here before and they were not given the chance to catch some fresh air.

This is the room adjoining our bedroom aka: the office (what we will be using it for,) the nursery or the room with the bay window. My Father freaks out if we call it a bedroom. When asked why he calmly explains that bedrooms don't have bay windows. I don't get it either.

Those bags are filled with sawdust from our floors! We intend to paint this room the same color as our bedroom.

This is our kitchen! I knew there were decent floors under all of that gunk!

We're having a bit of patching done in here - on the right side where there was an intake vent. The vent currently leads to nothing and is no longer useful. I'm not sure what we're going to do with the former hearth though... perhaps use some leveling compound? We can't add wood over the concrete so it may be our only option. The stove will be covering most of this area.

What gunk you say? You can't see the gunk? Have look around the kitchen's first sanded patch:

Yuck.

newly stripped

Fernando spent 3 days on this messy project. The banister and newel post needed to be stripped. Everything was covered in thick layers of flaking varnish and dirt resulting in a sort of burgundy color. He used denatured alcohol and everything from steel wool, to sandpaper, to paint brushes, to metal brushes and so many paper towels - it was hard to get that junk off! Now we can stain it all to match the floors. I thought white trim paint would be nice but I almost had my head torn off at the suggestion.

Completely stripped and a peak of the new ceiling paint here:

In other news, the floors are finally being refinished today! Well, the project is supposed to take about a week to complete... I'm happy it's finally begun. We've also put up the ceiling medallion in the living room, painted the foyer ceiling Lido Green by Benjamin Moore, painted the living room walls and ceiling a pale grey called Iced Cube Silver by BM, painted our bedroom a color that I can remember off the top of my head, replaced a few cracked windows, had a new home security system installed and added some blinds to the downstairs windows (finally.)

The upstairs bathroom is almost complete. I purchased the Axor Montreux Short Two Handle Lavatory Mixer faucet by Hansgrohe in chrome for the bathroom sink. It looks like this:

We had to order more subway tile (I wish I had a photo because the tiled wall is looking soooo good) because we decided to stop a few inches from the ceiling and so we needed bullnosed tiles to finish up. We also ran out of floor tiles because I apparently don't know how to use a tape measure. More have been ordered and after the wood floors are complete my Dad should be able to finish up. Here's a photo that's almost not worth showing but you can see how the floor is coming along:

I'm sorry, I know I need to post a big photo update soon...

black as night, black as coal = too much to ask for

As you may know, we really wanted our floors stained black. It's a hard color to achieve on most woods without straight up paint or aniline dye. We've been working with a floor company to try to get our floors as dark as possible. After they had come by and put a few samples down they offered to do an entire room so that we could see how the color was really going to look. You can see the before and afters here:

The middle shot is one coat of "Cabot Penetrating Interior Oil Base Wood Stain" in Ebony and the right shot is 2 coats. It's pretty close to black but there is still some brown peeking through here and there. They seem to think it will be even darker after the coats of poly are applied. I don't know if that's true... I do like it and after having 4 floor companies come over, this is the closest to black I've seen! One of the companies even promised that their specially mixed black stain was black "like a crayon." On our floors it looked more brown than Minwax. The Cabot Ebony is definitely more black than Minwax's Ebony - so that's what we're going with. I'm guessing that if we had the time (and money) for 3 coats of stain we might actually achieve a true black but I'm also thinking that my floors are going to stop absorbing stain at some point - right?
I'm relieved to see that all of the mess left on our floors after the walls were skim coated came up no problem. That room in particular was really bad - it looked like someone dumped an entire bucket of joint compound in the center of the room!