It’s been a while since I’ve updated on our Winter House Project (replacing all of our interior doors and painting all of our trim white).  It’s not exactly done, but it’s close.  We have a few touch ups left to do, the pantry door in the kitchen and the closet doors in our two upstairs bedrooms.  We had held off on purchasing the closet doors until we decided what we wanted to do.  Each bedroom has two sets of double closets – so that’s a total of 8 doors just for the closets!  We decided to go with a French-style door rather than the bi-fold doors that are there now.  We’ll wait for them to go on sale, and then rather than hand-painting them like I did on the rest of the doors, we’ll find a warm day, take everything outside and use a paint sprayer.  It should make things go much faster!  The other thing we have left to do is the ceiling beams.  Our main floor has a cathedral ceiling with a beam down the center and our family room has several beams along the ceiling.  At first, we weren’t sure if we wanted to paint these or not, but now that everything else is done, I think they would look better white.  I also have a couple paint colors picked out for our bedrooms.  At some point, I will get to that!

That said, we have gotten a lot accomplished!  We had one bedroom and our two bathrooms that already had white trim.  Everything else, we painted.  We also replaced 7 interior doors, replaced the stairway railings and the balcony railing.  The doors were by far the worst part.  There’s a lot of trim, but that’s pretty quick and easy to paint.  If you’re thinking about replacing doors in your house, though, be warned!  It’s a fairly involved project.  Fortunately, Tom did all the hard work – all I did was paint!

And now…for the part you’ve been waiting for…pictures!  Let’s start with a few before pictures so you can really get an idea how much 80s wood trim was in this house.

 And here’s what the house looks like today:

I suppose it’s time for a real update on our winter house project.  Last weekend, I spent almost the entire day Saturday painting.  It felt really good to make some real progress, though it was a LOT of work!  Here’s an update of what’s done and how things are coming along:

If you’ve been paying attention, you know that I already had most of the lower level done, including the stairwell.  Here’s another look at the lower family room before and after:

We also finished the downstairs bedroom door.  The bathroom door still needs to be finalized.

I started off painting the window frame on Friday and finished up on Saturday.  This took a lot of time and a lot of paint (it’s a huge window), but it just looks so much brighter now!

I also painted the vast majority of the trim on our main level, including the window box in the kitchen, the front door trim, the sliding glass door trim, and all of the floor trim minus a little stretch behind the china cabinet in the dining room (still need to move that so I can paint back there!)

We finished two of the doors upstairs over the weekend: the linen closet and the guest room.

You can see the progression of what we’ve been working on by looking at the untouched bathroom door; the newly hung, waiting-to-be-finished bedroom door; and the completed doors.

Here’s the transition stage of the stairwell, compared with what it used to look like.  I think I’m going to like the white! 

Now, we just need to get some new railings… I decided big chunky railings don’t really look any better white than they do as stained wood!

We’re making good progress, but there are still a few areas left to do.  I’m really happy about how everything is looking, though.  I feel like it really updates the house and makes it feel brighter and fresher.

In case you were wondering, we are slowly (but surely) making progress on our winter house project (painting all of our trim white, and replacing our interior doors).  I’ve painted the trim in one bedroom (minus the closet), our downstairs family room and one of the stairwells.  The base trim isn’t so bad; it just takes a while to tape it all off, and it usually takes 2-3 coats of paint to cover over the dark wood. 

What I’m learning is that the really hard part is actually the doors.  Tom has been replacing the door frames and hanging the doors, but I’ve been doing the painting.  This involves priming one side; letting it dry; priming the other side; letting it dry; painting one side; letting it dry; painting the other side; letting it dry – and hope you don’t have to make too many touch ups!  I also learned after the first couple doors, that there really is a proper way to paint paneled wood doors with a brush.  It really seems to take forever, but we’re getting there.  I have four doorways painted now – just 3 more to go!  Tom’s been doing a great job with installing the doors/door frames – with only one head injury to date.  It was really only a little cut after a door frame fell on his head!  But head wounds sure do bleed a lot…yuck.  Let’s hope there are no more injuries as we finish!

I’m not sure how long it will take us to finish.  Here’s what’s left:

-          Painting the trim on the main floor (living room, dining room kitchen)

-          Finish painting & installing doors (8 in all – only 1 is completely done)

-          Painting trim in upstairs hallway & master bedroom

-          Paint second stairwell

-          Decide if/how to replace railings (I painted one stairway railing white, and realized that it didn’t really help it look any better.  Now, instead of a chunky, ugly wooden railing we have a chunky, ugly white railing.)

-          Decide if we’re painting in the sunroom (lots of railings in there…)

Sheesh.  Now that I write it out it sure sounds like a lot!  Thank goodness one bedroom and both baths were already done.  I need to finish by March, though, because gardening projects start then :)

Our winter house project (painting all of our trim white) is coming along….slowly.  I got part of our downstairs family room done – just need to finish up the doorways and the ceiling.  With the new paint and the new credenza we recently purchased, the room is actually starting to look like a nice, sophisticated space. 

Previously, it was more like college student’s movie room.  So, in my attempt to continue the trend and bring this room completely out of its former state, I decided we needed some wall art.  There is a ledge on the back wall, behind the couch, which I plan to just put a few picture frames and decorative items. 

However, the wall above that really needs something, I think.  I’d like to do a large picture, but I don’t really want to spend money on a painting.  So, I thought I’d look through my own photography and see what I could find.  I figure I can print something out at the maximum size our printer will allow (13” x 19”), have it matted and framed, and end up with a decent sized art piece.

I decided on reds and brows as a color theme for the room – going off the dark brown credenza, milk chocolate brown couch, and red throw pillows (oh, and the framed Zetterberg Red Wing’s jersey).  Going through my pictures, I didn’t see a whole lot.  I also didn’t think I’d like the look of a photograph on the wall, so I decided to try my hand at some Photoshop art.  I played around with a few different pictures to get them the right color scheme, and to stylize them to look more like a painting or an art piece than just a picture.  Here’s the one I liked best – let me know what you think:

I’ve been debating for some time now what to do about all of the 80s wood (or faux wood) in our house.  I feel like it really makes the house look dated, and much of the trim and doors are all scratched up (somebody must’ve had a yippy dog here at some point); so, besides the out-dated style, it’s just in bad shape.  I had been thinking about just painting everything white, but there’s just so much wood that I was concerned about whether or not it would look good – it’d be quite a dramatic change! 

 But then, two things happened.  First, when Tom’s parents were in town last, his mom mentioned something about painting all the trim white and how it would help brighten the place up.  I needed that – a firm opinion that yes, painting would be a positive change (thanks, mom!).  Second, this past weekend, doors were on sale.  This is important because if we painted all of the trim white, we’d need white doors, as well.  The doors we have right now are hollow and are about as cheap as they come.  I really think that painting them might even make them look worse.  That means getting all new interior doors – which are expensive!  But, with the sale we were able to get all new pine, solid doors for our whole house, minus the bedroom closets (still deciding what we want for those).  Paint was also on sale, so we lucked out there, too!  Did you know there are about 20 different shades of white, though?  I sure had a heck of a time trying to figure out which white was right!  I finally decided on “Designer White” thinking, “Well, if it’s good enough for real designers…”  Yep.  Fell for the marketing ploy.

I am now ready for cold weather and am okay with hibernating indoors because I have something to keep me busy for quite a while!  I’m starting in the guest room and will do one area at a time until eventually (hopefully) it all gets done.  Here’s a sneak preview of what it’ll look like.

 Now we just have to hope that Tom can figure out how to hang all the doors!