a modest update
It’s been over seven months since we moved up here to the place we affectionately refer to as Janderhil.I made that name up while scrambling letters of our surnames and looking up old place-naming prefixes and suffixes. I ended up with Jan, yahn, a variant of John, which is my dad’s name. Then der-hil, of the hill, a mash-up of sorts, because it sounds like “yonder hill”. And then I felt foolish about the name and how much I liked it, and I sat on it for a year before finally mentioning it to someone. Thankfully they liked it.
I gave a quick tour of the house back in May, and here is a small look into how it looks now.
master bedroom update
Alternate title: Another One Bites the Dust.
I said in my post about repainting our sitting room that I had no plans for repainting any other rooms in the house.
…I lied.
Or I didn’t lie, exactly, because I didn’t really know what the next couple of days held. In the words of three-year-old Clive, “I was only pretending!” I can’t be held responsible. Because paint I did.
Let’s start at the very beginning, shall we? Here’s the master bedroom when we bought the house:
the $18 makeover
Earlier this week, I ruined my light-and-airy (or as airy as possible) sitting room with a can of Gladden French Grey that I bought on a whim for $18.
This was my sitting room in the spring of 2013. I had just repainted it a few months previously (and gotten rid of the superfluous table and chairs). To my dismay, however, I accidentally rendered the room somewhat monochromatic; this meant that in addition to making it light and bright I also made it (in my taste) pretty boring. I know some people like this sort of look, but I don’t. But I had a barely-two-year-old and a six-or-seven-month-old and I didn’t feel like repainting it again. So I’ve just lived with it for the past three years.
the self-induced headache (or, what happens when you can’t leave well enough alone)
Our guest bathroom (which is really now “The Boys’ Bathroom”, but I can’t remember to call it that) was the very first room that was done in the house.
Here’s what it looked like when we bought the house. It was really gross.
The other bathrooms weren’t much better, and so my Mom- and Dad-in-law redid the room for us before we had to move in.
Here’s the bathroom today (no really, I just took this picture a little bit ago.) It’s been great–there’s nothing really wrong with it–except that it’s looked the same every day for the past nearly-eight-years. I’ve loved it all that time! But I am ready for something different.
About the time I repainted the boys’ room black (above the board and batten) and the dining table and Ephraim’s bed the same Poker Green, I got the itch to tackle this bathroom in the same sort of color scheme. Not black, because it’s a little room with no windows, but maybe a deep charcoal grey, and that emerald green I’m just really loving right now.
I had a whole picture in my head, how it would look, and it was FABULOUS. Probably the wainscot would go grey, and above it the walls would be the same Daydream Haze that I have wanted everywhere in the house for the past three years. I would frame some of the Waterlogue pictures I’ve done recently–the ones heavy on greens and blues–and get different colored towels for each boy in that green/blue spectrum. The whole picture was very cool, very jewel-like, and I couldn’t get it out of my head.
But then…I remembered.
Our tile.
Our tile is beige, but leans heavily toward yellow. There’s also border tile that is blue and a sort of sage green (which I could work with.) But the tile? In my head, the cooler and more jewel-like the bathroom got, the dingier the floor became.
At first I didn’t care. “Ah, it’s a neutral,” I told myself. “It’ll go with anything.” So I looked up some pins of bathrooms with beige tile and cooler colors to convince myself. And…I couldn’t really find any I liked. I did find a couple of blog posts admonishing people for mixing “clean and dirty colors” (which I think was what I was trying to do.)
But I didn’t panic. I said, “It’s OK, I can just make sure my grey is on the warmer side.” That lasted for about two minutes as, upon searching for a few, I decided I really didn’t like warm greys much at all.
I took the picture posted above to do a mock-up in Photoshop and see if it really did turn the floor into a dingy mess, and yes, it did. But I couldn’t just give up, now. I had to find a solution.
It was at this point my head began to hurt. What here has translated as a few lines of text was, for me, hours and hours of deliberating and trying to picture things and looking for solutions that would just take me too long to type here.
Why can’t you just leave things alone, I started telling myself. The bathroom is fine. Just leave it alone!
I CAN’T now! I would answer, desperately. I’ve already seen it in my head, and Jeremy’s given me permission to paint!
Well then stop obsessing about it, and go buy paint!
I went to the store today. I bought paint.
Pictures tomorrow? I’m hoping!