Two Rooms in Two Weeks

This past weekend we completed the second room in our home renovations project.

And we are definitely ready for a break after this one.  My feelings about completing two rooms in two weeks can be summed up with two words - too much.

Here is the spare bedroom "before:"

Notice the total lack of overhead lights? Well, actually, you can't notice them in this picture, since the ceiling isn't in the shot.  But trust me - there are no overhead lights.  Most of our rooms in this house don't have overhead lights, and that was one of the major reasons we wanted to do these renovations so bad.

So DH drilled holes in the ceiling, which not only created massive amounts of dust in the bedroom...

...but it created dust throughout the entire house.

See the white specks in the air? 

But then there was light!

And so we started to paint.

And we painted some more.  No need to go into a ton of detail about this - if you've ever painted, you know how that goes.  But I can tell you that the color is called Gobi Desert, and that we decided to go with more neutral tones (compared to the bold color we used in our dining room) because we figure that the bedrooms may change in their purposes and what they contain, whereas we're pretty sure the dining room will always be the dining room and will always just have dining room furniture.  We didn't want to commit to a life of having to deal with a certain dramatic color scheme if we wanted to do something as simple as buying a new comforter. 

One of the interesting things that you might not know about Hartman's is that the Hartman way of painting includes no blue painting tape. At all.  You simply buy an expensive edger brush, lie on the floor with your head mere inches away from the baseboard, and you create a perfectly straight line using only that big, bulky brush.  Oh, and curse softly under your breath when you make a mistake but quickly fix said mistake with a damp tissue and a fingernail.  I now have a new skill that I can add to my resume - Master Edger.

By 10 p.m. on Sunday night, we were finally done.

This is the rug that we had in the dining room short term

I absolutely hated that rug when it was in the dining room.  In fact, I had major regrets about it's purchase at all (we had a $200 store credit that we needed to use by a certain date, and so we purchased this rug for $250 and then stored it for over a year.)   But in this room I actually like it, and it looks great with the bedspread that you can see in the first picture (although the bed won't in this room once we're done.)

We finally have overhead lights.  I was initially skeptical about putting recessed lights in these rooms.  For some reason recessed lights seems really tacky to me.  I also wasn't convinced that these lights were worth all of the work that DH was putting into them.  But we bought really nice, really expensive light covers that softened the harshness that I associate with recessed lighting, and DH is the one who did most of the work anyway, so I think I'm sold.  I wish there were other lighting options for us - namely, ceiling fan lights - but unfortunately our ceilings are way too low for anything like that.

The hard work for this room is mostly done, but we still need to sand and pain the closet doors (short-term project) as well as refinish the floor and paint the trim (long-term project.)  Additionally, we need to think carefully about how we put the furniture back in this room because we want to set this up to function as both our office and our spare bedroom for the short-term so that we don't feel obligated to finish the next room in such a short amount of time.  I think we were pretty much ready to bite each others heads off by the end of this project because we felt so rushed and so on edge about the whole thing. 

I definitely want to continue this renovation project, but we need to start taking the tortoise approach, instead of sprinting through like the hare. And, I have a book that I'm only half way through that I started six weeks ago.  I need some "me" time.  I'm so glad the holidays are just around the corner!