Making it Lovely

Tag: painted trim

  • Painting the Trim in the Living Room

    Painting the Trim in the Living Room


    I’ve been meaning to get around to painting the trim in the living room for quite some time now. It was on my 30 Before Thirty list, but it was one of the handful of things I didn’t accomplish (because I was pregnant and had no energy). So I rolled it onto my Lovely life List, and I decided it’s finally a good time to check that one off.

    Painting projects (or any projects, really) happen so much more slowly now with two young kids underfoot. I let Eleanor help paint for the first time, and then she wanted to look through the fan decks to pick paint colors for the house. Did you know the exterior should be green? With sparkles? So it has been decreed.

    I’ve only painted half of the room so far. There’s a door between the living room and the entry, and soon I’ll move on to the front entry itself. I haven’t decided if I’ll be painting both doors there, and if so, which colors. I’ll probably leave the front door unpainted, at least for now. White is an obvious choice for the other, but I do like the look of black interior doors. What do you think?

    p.s. Here’s a refresher on why I’m painting all of this wood trim in the first place.

  • Hang-it-All Up

    Hang-it-All Up

    The stairs to the basement are looking cute. Finally.

    The stairway is right next to the back door in the kitchen, which is the entrance we use most often. We used to have hooks and a shelf there for our coats and shoes, but we took them down when we remodeled the basement. Then the contractor mistook them for trash (an easy mistake to make), and thus we had nothing up for a while. Outerwear began to migrate throughout the first floor and shoes abounded.

    I bought what I thought was an Eames Hang-it-All from a discount shopping site, but it turned out to be a fake. It’s fine, I just didn’t realize that when I bought it. But it’s here and it’s cute, and it’s great for the basement stairwell.

    An Eames Hang-it-All

    The stairs made installation difficult. I did make sure to locate the wall studs though, and I put together a quick how-to in case you ever need to do the same.

    Bye bye, IKEA shelves that were mistaken for trash. Hello, accidental knockoff Hang-it-All. If my house were a reality show, this area would be the bad girl, stirring up drama. And it would be the lamest reality show ever.

    This is a pretty simple before and after. We painted the walls pink (Wild Aster, Benjamin Moore) and the door and trim white (Antique White, Benjamin Moore). We no longer needed a shelf because we added a shoe organizer (from the Orla Kiely collection that Target had a couple of years ago), which makes the shoes much easier to reach. Then we hung our new hooks.

    We also added children to our family, for the sole purpose of having a reason to keep cute hats and coats around for ‘after’ photos.

    It’s working out well!

    p.s. I wrote about August’s cute lion hat here.