Comfort Gray

 Hey!!  It's been a couple of months since I popped on here.  👀

Blame it on the wonderful world of internet technology.  In the 10+ years I've been blogging, I've never had any technical issues until the past few months.  Every free minute I had to jump onto my computer to blog was spent dealing with blog issues.  The internet changes everyday and to fix anything now, I feel like you have to take an entire college course to keep up.  There were quite a few frustrating moments but thankfully, I think they're ironed out for the most part.  

So, with twisted digits, I'm just going to go ahead and sweep all the technical stuff under the rug and dive into paint.  Hopefully it'll stay under that rug and just, well, disappear.  We've gotten a good chunk of home project progress down pat and I've got a big 'ole kitchen update to share soon but right now, I'm going to take it easy and share a tried and true paint color...

Comfort Gray 

The past couple of weeks, I spent about an hour each day painting trim and walls in our storage room/laundry nook/half bath area.  This combo of three rooms plus a small hallway sits right off the breakfast nook and it's the only place that still had unpainted wood trim.  That fact alone made it look like it didn't even belong in this house.  I hate painting trim so much that I'm sure I've put this off lots and lots of times but I finally buckled down and went classic white on it.  (By classic white I mean Pure White by Sherwin Williams color-matched to Valspar paint in a satin sheen - all of the trim in our house is this color.)

Well, Arch You Cute

 A few months ago, I squeezed a little makeover in in the girls' room.  The twins share a room now (the youngest two moved out into this cute room) and I really wanted to make it more "them".  They're not toddlers or little girls anymore and they get closer to being bonified big girls everyday...ok, they are big girls - major denial over here...and so I wanted to make their room something cute and happy and whimsical and all those fun words.

We started with the rug that was already in there and the blank white walls, added some bold velvet curtains, and some pattern to the dresser, and then I took a page from Mandi's book and painted some arches on their walls.  Initially, I was going to go more bold and paint hearts all over their walls (just like the diamonds I painted in the kids old shared room) but they really, really wanted arches over hearts.  Ok girls, it's your room.  Arches it is.

How To Make a Rug Stay In Place

Rollin' in here quick with a spotty internet connection to tell you a little bit about a rug and how it was driving me nuts.

Last year, when I did a quick little makeover on the kids' bathroom, I laid down this rug* to top everything off.

Still love, love, love the rug but don't love, love, love how much it slid around.

Save My Seat

 Or, rather, seatS.  From my kids.  And maybe from myself too.  

We bought these chairs* several years ago when I was going through a big mid-century phase (haven't quite grown out of that one yet because it's a w e s o m e).  I found two of them at Dirt Cheap and two more on Amazon Warehouse - each pair a different color but at the time, I didn't mind because they were so cheap.  Sometimes logic leaves me when I see a good deal, what can I say?  So one pair had a gray upholstered seat and the other, an ivory seat.  The gray held up, the ivory?  With kids?  Chairs that we use every single day during meals?  Not so much.

We Just A-Door It

The craziest thing happened to us last year.  We made all these plans for the front of the house (read more about them here) and before we told a single person what they were, a friend texted to say they were getting a new front door, would we want their old one?

Not so unusual or crazy, right?  Except she also sent a photo of that door and immediately, I had to pinch myself and blink 39575 times to make sure I wasn't seeing anything unreal.  It was almost exactly like the door in our plans.  I mean, what are the chances?!

Heart-racing, I made Anthony drop everything and go over to measure to see if it would work and HUZZAH, it was the same size as our current front door (not so crazy since doors come in standard sizes).  He brought it home to his very excited wife, set it in our outdoor storage room, and...there it sat...for over a year.

We've never changed a front door so maybe that was part of why it sat for so long - intimidation - and probably it was also because we have four small children and lives way beyond swapping out doors but either way, we finally pulled that thing out two weekends ago and started the process of getting some more curb appeal up in here.

Sadly, in case you were wondering how to, I didn't take any pictures of how we replaced the old with the new nor am I going to take any of those pictures I didn't take and write up a tutorial because, like I said above, we've never done this before.  We went into it thinking it would probably be a project that seems easy but when you actually start it, it isn't at all and that's exactly what it ended up being.  It took us the majority of two consecutive Saturdays to hang our new door - take down the old, remove the hinges and knobs, run to Lowe's, route out new hinge spots on the new door, go back to Lowe's, rework the door jamb, run quick to Ace Hardware, put hinges on the new door, and finally, hold your breath and hope it all worked out as you hang the new door and hope to goodness it closes right!!!

Spoiler alert:  it did!

I'll show it to you in a second but to appreciate the new even more, let's backtrack to what the front of the house looked like when we moved in, courtesy of a realtor photo: