Hanging Art, We Must Officially Live Here Or Something

Lucky for us, friends of ours were trying to find a new home for a giant 4′ x 5′ map of historic Paris. We’ve traveled quite a bit but never to Paris, regardless the map is really cool and we couldn’t pass it up:

After bringing it home on top of our car in December, we leaned it on the third floor railing and hadn’t thought much about it since until yesterday. It’s prettttty huge so we decided to hang it up here:

A little to the left.

The annual Progressive Dinner was last night, hence the dessert making the night before, so we took the opportunity to try a little furniture rearrangement.

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I have no idea if my dream library chair -the classic Eames lounge- will realistically fit up here… But I think I’m willing to try:

Of course if I had this chair I’d have to make time to sit in it to read some classy lit, so I will have to keep dreaming until the house is done!

Dessert!

Tonight instead of painting, or cleaning, we prepped for tomorrow’s progressive dinner; we chose to host desserts again and since the theme is Southern Italian we’re making strawberry tiramisu and cannoli cupcakes. Rob is king of the tiramisu. Or should I say Prince:

Strawberry Tiramisu! Yum:

Meanwhile, I was making the cannoli cupcakes of my dreams. Chocolate ganache is so easy, and I have some left over… What to do with it??

Much more fun than painting doors!

Whirlwind

Tonight we started a massive reorganization of the orange bedroom & downstairs ‘workshops’ and we moved the antique bed frame into the guest room. We discovered recently that the bed is probably as old as our house:

We also put the hardware on the hall closets, put the shelves in and filled those guys up. Mini Open:

Mini Closed:

Linen Open:

Hall colors looks great with our Turkish rug we bought on vacation there a few months ago, but it probably will head back to our master closet- the proportions are better and now we’re used to luxuriousness underfoot in our closet.

Paint Fun

This is from one of Rob’s favorite childhood books. Reminds me of working on our house… especially the clawfoot tub! But forget the tub, because right now I feel like the painting skunk:

Another night of painting doors:

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Lovely Trim & Doors

Oh, how I’ve not missed painting doors…. one coat on this door and half another door down. At this rate I’ll be done by Valentines Day:

Rob installed the base in closet; bottom third of base (shoe) in room:

More Base! And one of our essential rolls of blue tape. We use it to punch-list as we go- touch up paint here, etc:

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punch_list

Doooooors!

Three doors up in 24 hours? Oh yeah. Rob hung three closet doors in the orange room this weekend. Start with the routing and chiseling on the clothes closet:

Once that was hung, he moved up to the upper closet:

Rout, chisel, attach hinges, hang door:

Hotness. Even the cute little thumb turns are in on the upper doors:

Yay:

Needs some paint, but door hardware is a pain so it’s awesome to have these all in.

Random Side Projects

Sunday was filled with wrapping up a ton of little projects, which made it feel like I got a lot done but without much to show for it. I painted two coats on the mechanical soffit panel:

Primed and painted a ton of stops, base and other misc wood:

Third coat of water based poly on the cork:

Second and final coat of blue in the hall:

Whew. I’m tired thinking about it. Also discovered that our master bedroom plaster ceiling, which was laminated over with drywall a long time before we moved in, had been painted the exact same blue as our bedroom walls. The yellow is wall paper…

(I’m not getting into the story of just HOW I managed to figure this out)

Closet Fit-Out

The guest room closet needed it’s shelf and rod, so we cut the oak we had used in the other closet too, and used the same water based poly we used on the cork floor to shine it up a bit on the sides facing out. Here’s the pieces drying on a cardboard box:

Yeah so don’t do that… Or else your husband may go to pick up the pieces to install them and find this:

After the un-sticking, progress:

And done:

A real closet! The little bedroom is all grown up: