Passion!

Lovely, isn't it?

Ok, so you're saying, "Two white doors. What's the big deal?"

This. This is the big deal.

Our second bedroom, which we use as our office (plus guitar storage, cat accommodations, and occasional guest room), was apparently previously a teenager's bedroom. Or possibly a schizophrenic's. I picture a goth princess. When we first moved in, the walls were this awful dull coral color, but around the edge of the ceiling there was a strip of old paint where the last owners had failed to grasp how painters' tape works. So, before yucky dull coral, the walls had been bright vibrant red... and the ceiling had been black. On the back of these two doors (hall on the left, closet on the right), you could see distinct hints of this angsty expression beneath a hastily applied thin coat of white. You could clearly read the word "PASSION" in raised pink letters.

After ignoring it for way too long, I finally got to work with the sander. A couple of hours and two very numb hands later, a blanket of dust covered me and everything in the room, and the full glory of the artistry was revealed.

I was fifteen once, and I kind of get it; besides, I painted a few whole-room murals that I know were a much bigger pain to undo than this pair of doors. So I have a hard time being upset with the artist. Although really: shoe prints? This person dipped her shoes - Vans, specifically - in paint and then planted them on the doors. Multiple times. In different colors. (The vine is kind of nice, though.)

The shoddy job in covering it up - that part annoys me. I would much rather they'd just left it as is, and I would have a lot less white dust everywhere.

It took 4 coats of primer and two coats of paint, but the "passion" has been erased, now preserved only in photos.

No longer a cardboard box

The progress continues. . . After a bit of a respite, it seems we have gotten back into the groove of getting stuff accomplished on the house.

One of the things that we have been working on slowly for the last year has been to add some curb appeal. When we fist moved in, it was little more than a brown box, sitting atop brown land, on a street filled with brown houses. The new front yard took care of the bottom layer. We had wanted to paint it since we first moved in, but only just now pulled the trigger to do it.

The tan never really did it for us, and we also really wanted to get rid of the black trim (really who does that?). We were looking to paint it a bluish gray, and after looking through a large book of paint chips, we thought we had picked that out. We matched this with a white that had a touch of gray in it, so it hopefully wouldn't be quite as jarring as the bright white typically used for trim.

Between a much needed pressure washing, the base coat and the trim, it took John DeFranco from A&S Painting the better part of three days to complete the painting of the house and garage. And one of the first things we realized, is that the color we picked out wasn't so much bluish gray as it was grayish blue. Fairly bright blue, in fact. So bright that with just the blue and the white trim together, it looked like a tribute to the University of North Carolina, Cara's Alma Mater by the way (but not nearly as bad as the house in a friend's neighborhood in Jacksonville that was painted in University of Florida colors).

To set the new paint off, we also got something that we have never had on the house, SHUTTERS!!! Should I be that excited about it, probably not, but it really ties it all together. We ordered some vinyl shutters that are already colored, and thus didn't require any paint, from Larson Shutter Company. These came in the mail, and with the use of my trusty Milwaukee drill, went up in just a few minutes.

We did have to do some painting ourselves though. We opted to do the doors ourselves. And by ourselves, I mean Cara did a fantastic job painting the doors. You may not have gathered this yet, but I hate painting. But we did the doors to match the shutters in a wine red color, actually called Chianti by Behr. We still need to finish some touch-ups on the doors, but it done for the most part. And the house looks fantastic if I do say so myself. Next step is to put up a white picket fence, and finish off our little cottage by the sea.