brown…or brown?

I got four paint samples from Lowe’s for what I’ve been calling our “L-shaped room” downstairs.

I don’t normally get samples; I typically am confident enough in my decision about the paint color that I don’t think I need to sample it.  However, this is a pretty big room and I’m not painting twice!

The room will have one of our red couches and a leather chair and light brownish drapes, but that’s all I know for sure.  I know I want to keep the room neutral and get away from the red/teal/black theme I had going on in Ohio.

So, I wanted to go with a really neutral and somewhat light shade of brown on the walls.

The first one is way more gray than I’d thought it would be, so it’s out.  The fourth one is too dark, so it’s out.  The two in the middle I could live with, but I was really looking more something just a bit lighter.

Here are the colors on a different wall that gets less light:

I think I’m going to have to go back to get another sample or two…

And Andrew’s chair is on its way, so I might just wait until it arrives and I can see it in the room before I pick the color.  It’s not like there aren’t other things for me to be doing around here!

lights, camera, action!

The laundry room now has lights!

 

Andrew and his dad put up the drywall ceiling the other night and Andrew installed some can lights as well.  Andrew is a fan of can lights.  As in, he basically puts them in every room possible.  He did in Ohio, and he’s doing it here.  He’s gotta be some sort of expert by now…

There’s been a lot of action in there tonight–loud sawing noises and burning smells and wafts of dust coming from that general direction–so I’ve hunkered down in my office upstairs for some much-needed computering.

I cannot tell you how excited I am for this weekend–so I can get things done.  Lord, let there be enough hours in the day!

demolished

So…a couple days ago, Andrew decided to demolish our almost-perfectly-good-laundry room.

Took it right down to the studs.

In his defense, it really was the right thing to do, at the right time–which just happened to be an inconvenient time.  Ideally, it would have been great to use the laundry room as-is until we side the house, THEN begin giant laundry room remodel project.

However, I haven’t been able to actually DO any laundry, because we have an electric dryer and the hook-up is for gas.  We had an electrician come at the end of last week to install a plug for us, and his inability to fix the problem that day (turns out that directly below the laundry room is a walled-off area in the basement which prevented him from working) was a blessing in disguise.

Andrew started poking around in the laundry room, and the more he saw, the more he disliked.  It was full of shoddy construction, cruddy built-in cabinets and it was super cramped.  We’d thought of taking the door out before (hence waiting until we side the house) to make more room in there, but shelved the idea for now in favor of getting laundry capability sooner rather than later.

Well, it was now-or-never on the laundry room re-d0, and I chose to lose my door (there are three OTHER doors to use to get into the house) and my utility sink (sad, but I have one in the basement, so I can’t complain too much), in favor of getting A TON more space and changing the set-up from a galley-style, narrow room to a more square version.

Andrew has taken almost all the drywall down and has to do all the plumbing and electrical work (putting it all inside the wall rather than outside, like it was before), before he can put up new drywall.

I won’t have laundry for a little while, but it’ll be worth it in the end to have a roomy workspace and not feel claustrophobic every time I go in there!  I have extra paint from the kitchen, entryway and dining room, so I’m sure I’ll use some of that to paint in there and make it bright and happy.  There is even enough room for a small cart for some extra storage since we won’t be putting up cabinets.  The blue tape shows where a window will be (yay for natural light!), and I’ll have a bar going the length of the room on which I can hang clothes that don’t go in the dryer.

Thankfully, I have the option to do laundry at Andrew’s parents’ house just down the road until this room becomes functional…