Renovation nation

I could do a post a day on some mundane interior project that will only interest a few of you, but honestly... it's this or nothing right now. This is all I've got, all I've been doing. So at the risk of my little corner of the web becoming a renovation blog, I gamely present... some renovation projects! Here's just a taste of what we've been up to lately... much more to come soon.

First things first... the door. You guys were right-on when you spotted the bright red door in the cherry blossom photos (Benjamin Moore Heritage Red, for you fellow color nerds out there). It's an enormous improvement over the previous color that I called "terracotta puke," and made me feel at home with the first brushstroke of this very Maggie color. We have a new light ready to install and have also ordered a new number plate, which I'm excited to see come together.

The first thing you see when you walk inside are the stairs. I really wish I'd gotten a proper "before" picture of the stairs. Instead, all I have is the realtor photo, which is as optimistically altered as you might expect. The stairs are made from different wood than the house's original floors, and had been stained to try to match them. There was a lot of reddish-brown going on, and to me they looked very.... country, but not in the rustic, warm way that I adore. In the before photo below, the stairs appear to be a perfect match to the floors. But trust me, they were not. There's an overarching problem of the seams of the stairs needing some major love with wood putty, but for the time-being, they just needed crisping up (technical term). As for the color, my inclination was to go in a different direction than the floors rather than trying to be matchy-matchy.  I sanded the stairs and risers, painted the risers a great white (Mythic Bright White), and stained the stairs a yummy walnut. We'll eventually replace that wall with a great bannister, but for now, I breathe a sigh of relief every time I open the door.

Upstairs in the bathroom, there was a window that offered pedestrians across the street a direct view into... (wait for it) ... the shower. Seriously. Again, sorry for the lack of a proper before photo. It appears that the previous owners had a curtain covering the window, but as the spot would already be crowded with the end of the shower curtain and liner, I decided to simplify matters. The cleanest solution I could come up with was a window film that would maintain all of the light in the bathroom without turning our place into a peepshow. To the chagrin or relief of all dog-walkers below, we are no longer publicly showering.

Stay tuned for more bathroom decor talk... I'm currently 2/3 of the way through a major color transformation and organization solution up there. The upstairs of the house is all about new organization solutions, actually. Sexy stuff.

Other signs that we are very much "in transition" here... we have paint sample cards taped to every wall in the house, boxes and bags still all over the place, our little patch of grass out front is growing into a jungle because we haven't gotten around to buying a mini lawn mower yet, etc. But there's one big thing I haven't mentioned: our kitchen is a construction zone. This deserves a post all of its own, and we'll get there, but for now, here's why we don't walk barefoot in the kitchen yet:

Truly, not enough hours in the day lately.