She's Crafty

Well, hello there.  So sorry for the semi-extended absence. 

One of the things I did in the last week and a half was make a new table runner for my dining room table.  I can never find 4th of July decorations that I like and this year was no exception, so I looked up some DIY ones online and found one for a table runner that looked easy enough.  The directions call for making it out of paper, but I opted for felt instead.  The final result:





If you're wondering where the picture is, well, my camera may have just officially died.  Use this as a mental inspiration until I can figure out what the deuce is going on with the cam.  Or you can use the pic below.  If you're trying to pretend it's my table, imagine a round table with a white cloth and that my runner is red felt stars (2 rows).

After the whole homesickness bit on the day of my last post, I decided to keep myself busy the following Sunday while I waited for L to get home from Houston.  The paint job that the prior tenants did in our house was not quite what I'd refer to as professional-grade.  Lots of spots needed to be touched up, mostly on all the general wall areas but especially around the ceilings, particularly in our bedroom.  We got painter's tape a couple of weeks ago and I got an edger brush when I got all of my paint and supplies for the desk, but we are not the couple from Young House Love.  We are somewhat lazy about chores like this and painting is not something most people I know decide to just knock out after randomly after work on a weekday because of all the work it takes to just get to the point where you can START painting.  Yet, in an effort to keep myself busy, I decided last Sunday that that day would be Paint Touch-Up Day.  I did the usual prep and took everything off the walls, moved the furniture away from the walls, taped off the areas I planned to work on, and brought in the bar stool I keep in my kitchen (no ladder on hand that wouldn't take 2 people to move inside to our bedroom).  When I finished the bedroom, I was feeling bold and decided I should go ahead and take care of the hallway, too, since it's the same color as the bedroom.  I went through and touched up the hall all over the place and then stood back and admired my handiwork.  Results: the bedroom looked great.  Bonus points: now I could hang the full-length mirror I got in January that I've been waiting to hang because of the paint issues.  AWESOME.  I knew L would be so thrilled.  Then I stepped back into the hallway and noticed how weird it was that the paint seemed to take so much longer to dry.  Whatever.  I left to go pick up L from the airport and was so proud of myself when we walked back in the front door.  He was definitely pleased that I'd taken care of the paint.  Then I pointed out that it had been like an hour and a half at that point and the spots in the hall still hadn't dried.  Except upon closer inspection, they actually had.  Turns out they dried darker, even though that's the paint that was used in the hall.  I have no idea what or how this happened.  Seriously.  The previous tenants left us 3 cans of paint for the 3 different colors they painted in the house.  There's a darker can for the living room and a lighter can for the hall and our bedroom.  Then there's a pale aqua can for the bathroom that doesn't matter.  Obviously I used the lighter can of paint to go in the rooms with the lighter shade of paint (which L seems to think is green but is definitely BEIGE).  In some spots, my hallway touch-ups blended right in with the original paint.  In other spots, it looked like this:





Oh wait, yet again, no pic available.  Super annoying.  Instead, I've drawn you a rendering of what it looked like.  The colors are not accurate, but I only had 16 options with which to work:

So yeah, that wasn't gonna work for me.  Especially since we knew we were having friends over for the 4th.  That meant we were going to have to repaint THE WHOLE THING.  Is it a huge hallway?  No, but it does span the length of our house.  Bonus problem: I wasn't sure if there was going to be enough paint to re-paint the whole hallway.  That meant purchasing more paint.  Note: if you have Ralph Lauren paint in your home and need more of it, Home Depot has quit stocking it so you need to hurry and go buy it if it's important to you to have the same base.  We ran into this problem.  They were out of the RL base that the prior tenants had used, so I went with Glidden.  They matched the paint, but on the wall it's slightly darker than the previous color.  I don't know if that's just because now there's a second coat on or if it's because of the different base or a combo of both.  At any rate, the hallway is now finished.  Part of me wants to touch up the living room, but I also don't want to risk having to paint the ENTIRE thing if the touched up areas dry darker. 

The biggest lesson I learned from all of the painting: L cannot tell the difference between the darker and lighter paint colors that are in our house.  They are definitely close and clearly part of the same family of colors, but there's a definite difference between them.  Here's a shot of a corner where the colors meet:


BURN!  Once again, the pic I took is being held hostage on my camera.  Just imagine one of those paint chips with like a family of 4-5 colors on it, so they all coordinate but they are various hues of the same color.  Well, it's like comparing paint chips #2 and #5.  You can tell they are similar, but there's a clear difference.

Another important note: as I've previously mentioned, I went to summer camp for years and years as a kid and worked there on staff for another 5 years.  For 3 of those years, I was the Head of the Crafts.  (Jealous???)  The bane of my existence every summer was when kids would decide they wanted to paint and then leave their paint brushes in the sink, most of the time without washing them out (a similar problem was running them under the sink for like 5 seconds and putting them on the drying rack... that doesn't sufficiently get the paint out).  L had to help with the hall repainting, specifically with the corners, baseboards, and along the ceiling.  Imagine my fury when I found an unwashed paintbrush in the kitchen sink a mere 3 hours after we'd stopped painting.  To be fair, L has no idea how much I hate finding unwashed paint brushes in the sink because he wasn't around back in the day.  Also I know it wasn't intentional.  Lucky for us, we don't do a lot of painting so hopefully this won't be a continual problem.