Breakfast Nook Update

It's pretty boring at this point still but I thought that, since I don't have any fun tutorials to share (yet!), maybe you'd settle for an update on breakfast nook progress.

Like I said though, it's pretty boring.

The walls are almost ready for paint - Anthony has been filling and sanding for the past several days (there were a few spots of troubled drywall thanks to vinyl wallpaper removal) - BUT, the window trim is all painted and you can sort of get a (very small) glimpse of the direction this room is going...the light at the end of the design tunnel.  Light and airy.  It's amazing what paint can do...have I ever mentioned that?  ;)  It take a good stretch of the imagination to envision what a room will look like when it's down to bare drywall but once paint starts going up, things get easier to picture.  It also gets way more exciting!  :D

And that is where we are at.

I wanted to get all of the trim in the room painted at once, but some time constraints made me settle on just getting the tedious paint job of the window trim done this past week.  Hopefully that means I can breeze through the straight lines of painting the rest of the trim.  *fingers crossed*

As far as painting the window trim went, I first spent an hour taping the windows off.  All of the window glass is going to get replaced in the next year so I wasn't too particular about taping really well.  Also, I'm #lazy when it comes to taping.  Hehe...  To prime,  I used Kilz oil-based primer because I didn't want to take the chance of tannins in the wood trim seeping through water-based primer and also because I didn't sand the trim (though I did give it a good wipe down) and oil-based primer typically sticks better than it's water-based counterpart.  After that, I painted on two coats of this Valspar paint, semigloss finish, in Pure White (by Sherwin-Williams).  

Before I painted, I took the locks off the windows so that I wouldn't have to paint around them and so I could give them a good cleaning.  After scrubbing them down, they still looked pretty dingy and scratched (I thought maybe they were solid brass since they're gold but they're not...boo hoo) so I gave them all a quick coat of gold spray paint*.  

The old mini-blinds came down and we tried to come up with a privacy solution.  Initially, back when we thought we could raise that low ceiling to the height of the existing ceiling, I had plans to hang some roman shades high over the windows to give the illusion that they were taller than they really are.  It all looked great in my head.  But, since we found we probably won't be able to raise that ceiling, window treatment plans had to change.  I tried to photoshop in some roman shades over the existing windows but I didn't like the look of them - they can only hang up to where that low ceiling is and I really didn't want them covering very much of the actual window.  That meant they had to be really narrow height-wise and, in photoshop land, they just looked awkward.  I also looked into getting these solar shades, which I thought would be really pretty and simple, but at $165+ for all three...nope.  It's just not in the budget right now.  So, I made a quick trek to Home Depot and grabbed three of these cordless mini-blinds for a little over $20 for all three!  (I know, we already had mini-blinds hanging so why did we need new ones?  Well, the old ones weren't cordless and cordless is more simple.  Also, the brackets holding the old white ones were old brackets that belonged to off-white blinds that must've hung long ago and they were never swapped out when new white blinds were put in.  So, not only were they off-white and clashing with the white blinds, but also old and discolored.)  

In order to simplify things further, we didn't hang the twist rods on the blinds but will just adjust them at the top since they don't hang too high.

This weekend we are going to focus on getting the crown molding, baseboards, and trim around the doors primed along with the walls.  Hopefully paint will follow closely behind and by the end of next week, I'll have a painted room to show you.  Huzzah!  

Also, more exciting news...our electrician is coming out this weekend so we can get moving on the kitchen renovation!  We're crossing our fingers to have Thanksgiving in a finished (or at least mostly finished) kitchen.  :D

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