DIY

Fun fact:  I’m cheap.

I don’t eat out without planning for it, I don’t buy clothes if they aren’t on sale, and I don’t pay people to do things I can do myself (Which reminds me of one of Dwight Schrute’s best lines, number 3 here.).

Something I can do myself, and quite easily, is paint.  Which is what I did all weekend.  With some man power from my husband, of course.  I felt like we were John and Sherry from Young House Love, and I couldn’t be more excited that one room in our house finally feels like ours.

This is all I can do for you in terms of a before picture.  Until this weekend, the guest room served as the place we put everything that didn’t fit in any of the other rooms, slash place Sous Chef Lauren and Queen Cupcake stayed when they visited.  It was blue.

Or, most of it was blue.  This is the piece of the wall my husband ripped off when he tried to take a piece of plastic off the bottom of the wall.  Nothing a little sanding and spackling couldn’t cover up.

Want to know what else a little sandpaper helped?  Removing the switchplates.

I started by sanding over the painted-on edges and screws, and figured it would only take a little tug before the switchplate popped right off.  False.

Whoever painted this room last must have done the job rather quickly.  With some more sanding and (what used to be) good fingernails, I took care of that problem.

Then it was time to get down to business.

My husband had never painted a room before.  After some initial worry that what he was cutting in was a completely different shade from what I was rolling (“Don’t worry, it will dry the same honey.”), he got the hang of it.  Three hours, and half a gallon of Behr Premium Plus Ultra flat paint in “Sculptor Clay” later, we had a brand new look.

The walls are a light grey color during the daylight hours, and they take on a khaki look after the sun sets.  This room needed to be quasi-manly, as my husband has no man-cave and is desperate to at least get a game room out of this extra space.  I think we achieved that with this color.

But the room also needed to appeal to my favorite girls who come to stay, and so we went for a more balanced palette when we started decorating.  Enter, IKEA Blad curtains in blue and a Hillsand Blue slipcover for the Ektorp (Hillsand Blue slipcovers aren’t sold in stores anymore, but you can find them on eBay.  Idemo blue slipcovers are slightly darker, but are available in stores if you just can’t wait).

During my last trip to IKEA, the bold pattern of these curtains immediately struck me as something Sarah Richardson would use as the inspiration for a room in one of her houses.   Then I realized that Sarah Richardson did use these curtains as the inspiration for a room.  Duh.

We needed a quick check of this post and a little iron-on adhesive tape, and we had curtains.

It’s important to note that like Nigella Lawson, I consider myself to be somewhat of a domestic goddess.  But I have no idea how an iron operates.  I believe it involves water, steam and a funny-looking table, but that’s all I can tell you.  Growing up, my dad ironed every Sunday while watching football.  So I never had to.  And I never learned.

And at the end of the long weekend, this is where we were.  After an arduous search we finally ordered a desk online, only to hear it’s back-ordered until May.  It’s likely nothing else will happen in here until then.  But I’ll share when it does.