White Out: Entry and Hall Edition

Remember I mentioned I was planning on whiting out the new house....well we are on our way.  After testing 4 whites that I randomly chose from the CIL white pamphlet at Home Depot I settled on Artesian White a whole 20L pail of it.  To test,  I painted a square block in the main room, hallway, mudroom and entry for more than week to see how each white looked in every light situation.  Picking a white is frekin difficult, it could be too pink, yellow, blue and beige. I found Artesian white to be the purest white with a slight creaminess to it. We splurged on CIL Premium paint and I'm glad we did, it only took 2 coats to cover a medium beige and it went on super smooth.

Check out the afters, I am super pleased with the results!  So much more to do though! We need to change out the flooring in the entry, I am thinking a brick tile. I know that may sound crazy but I have seen some awesome pictures and it camouflages dirt so mopping is not required EVERY day. I also bought two IKEA Hemnes shoe cabinets to be installed against the longer wall. Notice anything else? The front door is now black! The plan is to also do the hall doors black but I am waiting to find five matching 5 panel doors from Habitat for Humanity Restore to replace the existing hollow core wood panel doors.

As for the rest....trim, art, rugs and a little bit of styling will complete the spaces.  Don't the pendants look great too?!

Surprise Wood

HA! Tricked you ladies, unfortunately this post is not about pop-up tents but about a discovery that only happens to people with blogs.  We found the original hardwood under the dirty old 70s' rug!! Whenever I read about some blogger or watched a DIY T.V. show about homeowners pulling back the carpets to find the original hardwood I thought WHO THE HELL does that really happen to?!?! Well this time it's me!!! Sorry to gloat but do you know how much money this saves us!? When we bought the house we knew there was the original school flooring in the main room but we didn't know it was hiding under the nasty carpet in the whole main floor!! Boo ya!

I'll tell you how the best day in my life happened...I was painting the ceiling in the spare room when I happened to look down and saw a little piece of brown peeking at me through the closet door floor hardware.  I immediately got down on my knees and started peeling up the carpet in the closet.  It was wood........a lot of enthusiastic screaming followed by Mr.Loonie asking WTF was going on. He couldn't believe it either! We then went to every bedroom closet to reveal more glorious wood!!

Now the wood is not in pristine condition so it will need to be refinished, I'm not sure yet how much this will cost us but I know it is a heck of a lot less than new hardwood! 

The carpet is now serving as a drop cloth when painting the walls and ceiling.  As painting is completed in each room we are removing the carpet and painstakingly removing the nails and staples and washing dripped stucco and years of dust. There are paint and other stains remaining but should be easily sanded out in the refinishing process.  Time to start calling specialists for quotes! 

Pictures below are taken in Penny's Room.

  

Hanging Lantern Update

My friend introduced me to the Habitat for Humanity Restores in the Edmonton area and now Mr.Loonie and I are obsessed.  The jist of how it works is people drop off their unwanted home decor items such as furniture and lighting and also home renovation material like doors, tile, toilets, you name it.  It was pretty amazing actually, we know it will be our first stop when thinking of replacing anything in our house.  They literally have hundreds of interior doors that are in awesome condition.  Anyways....the point of this post is the awesome lantern style pendants I found for $15 each for the two larger ones and $5 for the smaller.  A few days prior, I was browsing for a similar style light on the Home Depot website but they were all over $200! When I saw these lights hanging there in all their glory I was so excited, I had to have them.  

In between the time we moved out of our Fort McMurray house and into our new home, we were staying with my in-laws with not a lot to do so it was a perfect time to fart around on little projects such as this....tedious taping.  It's always awesome having extra help too.  

The plan was simple.  Tape off the inside windows (they were soldered in) and then spray paint black even the cord and the chain.I decided it was too difficult to paint inside the lights but the gold lines inside give kind of a vintagey shimmery look when hanging and light. On the largest one hanging in the entry I did paint the inside light pole by hand with black paint which were unlike the other 2 where the bulbs were flush with the top.

We were in the new house when it finally came time to spray.

Remove the tape and hang.  We had to shorten in the chain in both the hall and entry.

Please excuse the crappy picture but I don't want to give away the entry or hallway reveal, which will be coming soon!

Monday Geocaching

You know what's one good thing about moving to a new city? Un-found geocaches! We were out of caches to find in Fort McMurray so we would have to patiently wait for a new one to be planted but not here! We have literally thousands in a 50 km radius and hundreds within only a few kilometers.  On Monday evening we started our hunt.  The picture below is from one of the caches we found (a mailbox screwed to a fallen log). We were asked to spell our team name using scrabble pieces included in the mailbox, pretty cool idea.  This picture was harder to get than you think, Penny wanted to eat the T....babies.....