Where to begin?

Some people have a cookout on the 4th of July, some watch fireworks, some go to the beach or take a ride on their boat. The Eykamp's well, we renovate! My big plan for this weekend was to attend our local monthly Flea Market, I haven't been in awhile and I was itching to go. Little did I know Matt had other ideas that included paint and a brush. We haven't been able to paint most of the interior of our house, it always seems there is something more pressing to do first. We have a few rooms painted but mostly every room is white and in dire need of a coat of paint (I think the last time they had a fresh coat was in the 70s).

Front Parlour

After we cleaned up

I'm thinking about selling my green Indonesian table. It's a dinning table that would be used with floor pillows. We had it on the wall by the front door and it's always been a catch all (which I didn't mind because we couldn't hurt it) but it's right in the walkway and I don't have anywhere else to put it. Its deep but short (only about 26" tall) and I have never really known what to do with it. Any suggestions??

The fireplace tile is deep green & black our furniture is red velvet, I wanted a neutral color for the walls that would match both so I chose gray. It's darker than I thought but I like it. Picking a paint color turned out to be harder than I though. My husband has been banned because I figured out there was no thinking involved on his part he just opened the chart and said "I like that color"! After explaining to him that the color needed to match the furnishings and should look good with the room color adjacent so there is "flow" he said, "just tell me what color to get". He was great though, he painted most of this himself while I busied myself with cleaning, meals, being a runner and keeping the kids entertained (which consisted of me yelling at them to stop yelling - ironic isn't it?).

The wall color is up and most of the trim has been painted (we ran out of white paint). I'm very happy with the results, but I'm ready to finish so I can get everything back in there!


The ceiling needs some patch work, it's mostly the old patches that are failing. We have had a lot of demolition and construction around our street for the past 15 years and every time something goes down one of the ceilings take the brunt of it. I'm going to get someone to look at them but in the past whenever we did that they wanted to tear them down or put drywall on top of them. Neither way is acceptable to me since I want to restore not remodel. If I can't find someone to do it reasonably and the way I want it, Matt and I are going to attempt to fix them ourselves.


The room that used to be the front hall

During the war most of the houses in Park View were turned into apartments to accommodate the influx of men coming to work at the shipyard. When we bought our house it was three apartments, the downstairs hall was one of the victims of this change. The front stairs came straight down to the first floor and the hall ran from the front door to the back door. In order to separate the downstairs apartment from the two upstairs the staircase was split and a turn was added in order to wall off this area. This created a very small hall behind the stairs and an even smaller foyer. We would love to change this but it does help in the winter with heating.

Wall going into the bathroom

Wall behind the stairs

I chose the color Bungalow Gold, I don't think it shows up well in the pictures but it's very pretty. The dinning room is attached to this room so we'll paint under the chair rail the same color.

A view from the dinning room

Hopefully we'll finish up this weekend, there is a lot of trim in an old house!

Saturday morning the kids and I went to the flea market then walked downtown and through our favorite cemetery.

We had a very productive weekend, hopefully we can keep the momentum going. Fresh paint makes such a difference!