Glidden are providing us with the supplies for this project in order for us to share this makeover experience with you. For more on Glidden Paint and where to buy, click here to view the full line of paints.

Now that we have wrapped up our extensive living room makeover, it is time for the final room in our Glidden makeover series: The kitchen! Once this is complete, every room in the house will have been officially made over and completed. (The bathroom and master bedroom weren’t included in this series as they had both been painted fairly recently and weren’t in need of a re-do.) May 2013 is going to be a significant month for me, as it will mark the 10th anniversary of my mom’s passing. By mid-May of 2003, I had become an overnight homeowner, inheriting this house after the very sudden and unexpected death of my mom. I began the strange and slow process of dealing with everything mom had left behind and beginning all of these much-needed renovations. It’s so bizarre to me that it’s already been ten years that my mom has been gone and ten years that I’ve been DIY-ing this home. It’s interesting timing how we’ll be finally finishing all of the major renovations of the home right around the 10th anniversary of all this. It will make me feel good to really feel like I am starting the next chapter of my life and putting some of this behind me. 2013 is all about fresh starts for me!

As eager as I am to complete this renovation, I know it will be a big job – we left the living room and kitchen until last, as we knew they would be two of the most disruptive rooms to tear apart. So I wanted to ask if anyone here who has done a kitchen remodel has advice for staying sane during it? I know cooking will be difficult, and since we’re still transitioning off Nutrisystem, I’ve been focusing on easy, ready-made meals – we’ve been doing granola bars for breakfasts and lunches with Nutrisystem dinners at night. For extras, we’re sticking with things like hardboiled eggs, bananas, and oatmeal; I figure I can embark on elaborate culinary adventures after I have a space to cook in again.

Although I’m sure I’ll be tearing my hair out when my pots and pans are stored in the living room, I cannot wait to get the kitchen revamped. It’s always been one of the ugliest rooms in the house, from the chipped, broken cupboards to the lack of dishwasher. Even the curtain is torn! Time to discard the last of the “Old” and usher in the new.

Watch this space to see our final makeover unveiled – and let me know how you handled your own kitchen renovations, if you’ve done one!

As I mentioned in my last post featuring our Glidden living room makeover, this room was time-intensive due to the elaborate crown molding and batten trim in the room. I wanted to put together a separate post detailing how we achieved this effect – we received complimentary paint for the project, but this post wasn’t required by the client; I simply thought this tutorial could be useful to anyone else faced with how to paint crown molding in their own home. I did include my Amazon Associates link for the special tape we used below, so if anyone decided to purchase it for their own project, I will put the 10 cents earned towards my next renovation project.

This house was built in 1929, and the living room features some of the most elaborate molding I’ve seen. Previously, the walls and crown molding were all painted one solid color:

For years, I’ve been thinking how impressive the room would look if I painted the trim a contrasting color from the walls. Inspired by the ceiling, I thought about various “Checkerboard” style paint jobs, eventually deciding that I’d like to do the walls deep red and the crown molding black. This was a bold choice, and one that would either look fantastic if done right or terrible if done wrong.

After a month of working on the room, we have completed the project, and while my color scheme would not be to everyone’s taste, it turned out exactly how I envisioned it and I am thrilled. Jai worked very hard not only to meticulously paint the trim, but also in coming up with a creative solution to the problem of taping off the crown molding to paint.

We knew this project would be fraught with challenges. For starters, none of the lines in this old house are truly straight; not to mention, the crown molding and trim has many, many curved angles and covers the entire ceiling and all four walls. Figuring out how to adequately tape the rounded portions of the crown molding was one of the biggest issues we encountered.

As with most DIY solutions to renovating an old home, the solution was rather unorthodox. After a fruitless search for any type of circular stickers or tape that would cover the wall at each point where the crown molding curved and joined together, we decided the only way to cover this area would be to cut our own circular sections of tape to fit. Jai found a small paint jar that was the exact right size to fit this area, and used this as the template with which to cut the tape.

The first step was to lay a portion of Scotch-Blue Painter’s Tape Advanced Delicate Surface on the cutting board. Jai did this so that when he put down portions of tape to trace and cut, they wouldn’t lose their stickiness as quickly.

Using the paint pot as his guide, Jai carefully traced around the bottom to create a circle in the size we needed.

Once the circle was traced, he carefully cut out the circle with scissors. This isn’t a project for the paint of heart (Typo caused an unintentional pun so it stays!) – he cut over 40 of these circles in order to have enough to cover the room!

To tape off the room, we first laid down a strip of regular painter’s masking tape in strips. Then Jai would cut his carefully crafted circles in half, placing them directly over the sections where the regular tape met up. We had to be very careful with how we placed the tape in order to ensure that it right up against the crown molding. It’s recommended to use the Scotch-Blue tape for all the sections over the regular masking tape, but we had already spent $40 on all the tape we had bought and didn’t want to go out and buy even more. We tried using the regular masking tape to make the circular portions as well, but it just didn’t stick well enough – the Scotch-Blue is a lot weightier.

The actual painting process took time, not only because Jai was being careful with the paint to get the best possible result, but also because we were working overtime at our jobs during all of this and had to work on it during stolen moments in between everything else. We were concerned during the taping process, because the masking tape kept peeling off; and because it had to stay on the walls for about a week and a half, we worried that as soon as we peeled it off, all the red paint on the walls would come off as well. Fortunately, that did not happen!

I give all credit for this project to Jai’s steady hand and attention to detail. The project was as time-consuming as we expected, but well worth it. If you have a complicated paint job coming up, I hope that sharing how we dealt with our particular crown molding and batten trim issue will give you some inspiration!

Glidden are providing us with the supplies for this project in order for us to share this makeover experience with you. For more on Glidden Paint and where to buy, click here to view the full line of paints.

As we mentioned at the end of last month, we’ve been working on our living room makeover. We knew that this room was going to be complicated, and from start to finish it took a little over one month. This was part due to the bold color choices and ambitious choice of painting the extensive crown molding and batten trim a contrasting color from the walls; not to mention, we’ve been working overtime and dealing with things like taxes in between. It was tough having my couch stored in the middle of the kitchen and having no entertainment center or seats all month; however, the results were worth the inconvenience.

For the walls, we chose Red Delicious and for the trim we chose Onyx Black. It’s a very bold, Gothic color scheme, which is exactly what I was going for! I wanted to paint the room’s elaborate crown molding a contrasting color, which I knew would be a big job and a bit of a risk. We put a lot of time into very carefully taping off the trim so that the paint would look as straight and even as possible, and I give all credit to Jai for doing an amazing job! I wrote a separate tutorial explaining how we did this, so if you’re curious, click here to read it.

One of the reasons this project took a while is because the red paint required a lot of coats to cover completely – about 6. We started with 2 gallons of the Red Delicious, and we ended up buying another gallon on our own while Glidden sent us an additional three gallons simultaneously, so we went from not enough paint to a bit of a surplus. A friend that was helping us paint had also painted one of her rooms red using a different brand of dark red paint and had the same problem, so I think it’s just the nature of deep red paint. If you’re planning to do a room this color, be prepared for more coats than with most other colors.

So, what do you think of my goth living room?

Happy Easter, everyone! This has been one particularly busy week for us.

As you’re probably aware, we’re working on a total home makeover using complimentary Glidden paint. This month’s project is our living room, which we are painting red and black. It’s looking great already so I’m really looking forward to the final product. Having one of the main rooms torn up for construction is always a challenge, especially since my couch is now in the kitchen , but it’s all worth it and I’m so excited that all my home renovations will finally be completed by summer.

Also on the agenda this week were taxes. This is no small project for me since I’m self-employed – since I don’t get a W-2 from an employer, I have to make sure I print off copies of all my pay stubs (In the form of check stubs, PayPal receipts, invoices, etc.), tally up all expenses, and so forth. This means spending a great deal of time pouring over my paperwork and records in order to ensure that I have all the paperwork I need, inputting numbers in spreadsheets to come up with expense and revenue tallies – and that’s just to make sure I have everything I need for my accountant. I don’t even do the actual tax preparation anymore! I used to do everything myself, but with the immense amount of time it takes to research tax rules and regulations each year, it’s less expensive to hire an accountant than to take that much time off work. Not to mention that my accountant is very knowledgeable and just rocks in general!

Since Murphy’s Law is always in effect, this jam-packed week also included a broken dryer. Luckily, I have a great fortune to have a fiancé who can figure out how to fix almost anything, and he identified the there was a crack in the element. We found the part on Amazon for $20 (And yes, that is my Amazon Associates link, just in case you have the exact same broken dryer and want the part too ), so I ordered it with a gift card and got it a little over a week later. Jai replaced the part, just as he did with the furnace, and it’s been working like a champ ever since…which is good, since we had a ton of laundry built up!

What have you been up to this week, readers?

We’re on the fourth month of our Glidden Home Makeover series, and on Monday we finished painting our converted attic space. Behold, Jai’s new office, painted in Blue Cloud and Cool Cobalt:

My dad painted these little birds on the wall for me when I was growing up, since this used to be my childhood bedroom. So we thought it would be a nice touch to leave this decorative inset as it was!

As with the rest of the house, the original paint job was very old, so these cream shelves had gotten stained over the years.

We also improved the space by reinforcing Jai’s computer workbenches and adding more cabinet storage.

And there you have it! We’re really happy with the results. Since this was my childhood bedroom, it was bearing the same shade of pink paint that I had chosen at age 9, so it was way overdue! It wasn’t intentional, but we realized the humor of painting over a girl’s pink room with blue paint for a guy. This will continue to be Jai’s office, with half of the area continuing to house the spare bed (And soon, our futon as well) so that it will have a nice living/seating area as well. Now that we’re wrapping up all these years of renovations, we won’t have to use the upstairs as storage anymore – although we still have two rooms left to paint, so we’ll be playing furniture Tetris for a little while longer until the whole house is complete. I can’t believe how much we’ve gotten done in a relatively short period of time, considering how much else is going on. It’s so exciting! This month, we start on the living room, so stay tuned for that makeover!

For more on Glidden Paint and where to buy, click here to view the full line of paints. Glidden are providing us with the supplies for this project in order for us to share this makeover experience with you.

February marks month 4 of our Glidden Home Makeover series, and it also marks the start of our more time-intensive jobs. This month, we are working on painting the upstairs portion of our home. This is a converted attic room, which means it is one long, open space. In theory, one portion of it is Jai’s office and the other portion is our guest room, but in practice it is Jai’s office/storage space. With all the other renovations going on, you have to put the displaced items somewhere, and this former attic space is a natural first choice due to the large open floor plan.

Since prepping this room means essentially clearing everything out of the entire second floor of our home, the rest of the house is now crammed with furniture, boxes, and Jai’s workshop items – boxes of computers and parts. We knew this one would take a while, and the prepping took even longer than we thought, since we’re doing this in between work. We’ve been working on it since mid-February and just yesterday got the last of the items pulled out, so today marks the first actual day of painting. We’re doing the walls in Blue Cloud and the trim in Cool Cobalt, and we’re excited to make this room all that it can be. Although it’s time consuming, we’re really taking the effort to make as many fixes and improvements to each area as we can, since it’s a great opportunity to cross a lot of bothersome items off our to-do lists and really transform each area. Jai has already made improvements to his workbenches and modified furniture to better serve his needs, so it’s going to be fantastic when it’s finished. Here’s a sneak peek at the initial coat of paint:

Once all the painting is finished and dried, I’ll have share photos and comparisons of the final product so you can see how it all turns out!

For more on Glidden Paint and where to buy, click here to view the full line of paints. Glidden are providing us with the supplies for this project in order for us to share this makeover experience with you.

We’re on month three of our Glidden Home Makeover series, and this month, we decided to repaint, repair, and convert a “Spare” room into an office. This is the room between my kitchen and bathroom, and due to the many intensive renovations that we’ve worked on over the years, this room has been mostly needed as a repository for construction supplies, always “In transit” with another project. (We built a deck adjacent to its back door, converted the attic space above it and completely renovated the bathroom, so it was smack dab between many large and time consuming projects!) Now that we have gotten these projects wrapped up, I had an opportunity to convert it into what its final purpose was always intended: An office. I had wanted to do this two years ago, but my injury put all plans other than physiotherapy and work on hold for a long time. Now I could finally move the filing cabinet out of Jai’s office and get a permanent place to store things that have been scattered all over the house due to all the constant renovations and upheaval.

For this room, I chose True Turquoise for the walls and Blooming Fuchsia for the trim. If you hadn’t figured it out yet, I really like bright colors. The turquoise actually looks more blue in real life than it does in the online paint chip (To me, anyway), but I like it even better – the Fuchsia is also appears more bold and bright to me than it did in the preview, which is perfect. The room looks very “My Little Pony”, which is exactly what I was going for! I’m very serious about my business and work really long hours – so it’s nice to have a playful touch in my office!

As you can see, the paint was looking SUPER shabby – that’s not dirt, the wall is scrubbed clean. Those are scuffs and scrapes that had accumulated because the room had gone so long without a fresh coat of paint.

So much better! Also, note the filing cabinet – you probably figure I painted this to match the room, right? Wrong. I bought this filing cabinet at a thrift shop around 2009 and covered it in spray paint the same year – and it matches the walls almost exactly! How awesome is that?

Oh boy! The back door was a HOT MESS. There were three things going on here:

1. Long story short, this door has always been flimsy, and one day I locked myself out of the house and kicked the middle out of the door so that I could get back in. Jai then patched up the door and the door frame, but it needed a more permanent fix.

2. That block of wood nailed over the floor? That’s covering a hole where rats had burrowed through the floor. This section of the floor is prone to dry rot and needed to be replaced again; we had nailed the wood down in the meantime to stop any other creatures from digging through, and added “Replace landing” to our never-ending to-do list over the holidays.

3. Those same rats that were coming up through the floor could be heard in the wall. We thought if we pried off the doorframe, we could block it up and stop them from getting in. Surprise! It’s solid wood wall all the way through – the rats were crawling through some miniscule hole inside the wall. So now we had rats and another item on our to-do list!

Jai was able to repair all of these issues before repainting, so that’s a big hassle out of the way. In case you’re wondering why the new landing is green, it’s because of a waterproof sealant that was placed on top of the wood; we can paint or varnish it later. You’ll notice a little bit of water on the floor, partly because we noticed a spot where water is still coming through in the door and partly because the door was half open and letting rain in while I took the photo and I didn’t notice. Ha! We’ll keep sealing up areas as we find them, and at a later date, replace the door altogether when feasible.

Finally, here is the office wall and doorframe that faces the kitchen, to give you a full panoramic idea of this room’s layout.

So there you have it! Not only has this room gotten a much-needed facelift and repaint, it was a great opportunity to take care of these annoying little repairs that had been building up. The whole experience was pretty easy – one thing a reader pointed out in the comments of one of my previous makeovers is how Glidden paint doesn’t smell strongly, and they’re so right. Most of the time when I’ve done painting, the fumes were strong and remained so for a few days – I remember the time I painted my bedroom while also bleaching my hair. Hooo boy, was I knocked out with the smell of those two things together! But the Glidden paint doesn’t smell strongly at all going on and there’s no fumes afterwards – we just finished the office tonight, and it just smells like a normal room!

For more on Glidden Paint and where to buy, click here to view the full line of paints. Glidden are providing us with the supplies for this project in order for us to share this makeover experience with you.

It’s month two of our Glidden Home Makeover series, and for this month’s project, we decided to focus on the laundry room. We chose this room as we thought it would be a relatively simple room to paint compared to the rest of the house, and since December is so hectic. For this room, we decided to paint the walls Very Violet, with the trim in Pure Purple. We started prepping and painting less than a week before Christmas, and as I looked at my torn-up house, I thought, “I must be INSANE!!” But the timing ended up working better than I could have ever anticipated. Thanks to Jai’s hard work, the room was prepped, painted, organized and put back together perfectly with my house spic and span in about 5 days. I did some of the prep and painting also, but not very much, since I had so many work commitments lined up.

You may notice something different in these two photos aside from the wall color. Remember what I said earlier about serendipitous timing? Well, on Christmas Eve, our wonderful family stopped by and surprised us with their Christmas gift to us: A washing machine!! Our old one had been on the outs for a long time, so our family decided to get a replacement. Wow!! So not only are you seeing a new room, but a new washing machine too! It couldn’t have been better timing, since we had just finished redoing the whole room that same weekend!

These cabinets will have doors on them at some point, but for now they are partly finished; Jai built these himself to make more efficient use of the room and add storage. Since we don’t have a garage, this is where we store most of our tools, and this room is very highly trafficked during construction in other rooms. Over time, the cabinets had become very disorganized and I hadn’t gotten time to clear them out. There’s nothing better than painting for getting a fresh start on a room, so this was a great chance to go through all our items in this room, toss out what wasn’t needed and re-organize the shelves.

As I look at these photos now, it probably looks a little cluttered, but remember that we don’t have a garage so all of those items like tools, garden supplies, and so on have to go inside the house instead; so I think we’ve made the best we can of it.

Jai built these cabinets to my height, so that I can stand directly under them without hitting my head. Is that cool or what?! That’s why there is a weird angle on these photos, as I had to stand on my tiptoes to get the shot. He built these custom cabinets the same year I started doing a lot of coupon shopping, so I’d have more space for some of my pantry items; as you can see, I store coffee and some other things in here.

We left this countertop white so that it would be a nice work surface to fold clothes on as well as some contrast.

Yes, I know – there are still holes in the wall. Those were made while doing wiring for the bathroom (One room over) – since the whole house is under construction and we’re doing it ourselves, there are some things you just have to live with for a while. You may have noticed the license plates on the wall – those were some creative decorative covers we came up with for some small holes in the wall, so that there wouldn’t be a peephole into the bathroom. Ha!

I’m happy with how this turned out and that we were able to do it quite rapidly. As you can see, the walls in this room are textured drywall, which means that it absorbs paint like crazy – we definitely had to use more paint in this room in order to cover the surface. So if you have a room with heavy texturing like this, it’s kind of a pain to paint over, so make sure you have lots of paint on hand! The flip side to this is that the paint dried pretty quickly, which is good, because I was in a bit of a rush to move everything back into the room since I didn’t want the house torn apart during the holidays. I think it all worked out well and I love the bold purple color; understated just isn’t my thing.

What do you think of my new laundry room, readers? Are you working on any painting projects this month?

For more on Glidden Paint and where to buy, click here to view the full line of paints. Glidden are providing us with the supplies for this project in order for us to share this makeover experience with you.

Last month, we announced our Glidden Home Makeover. This week, we completed our first room in the makeover: Our “Dining room”. I say that in quotation marks because we don’t dine in there at the moment, but when we’re done remodeling the kitchen, we will. We picked this room to start with because we knew this room would be the least challenging. Since I’ve been so busy with the Gift Guide, Jai was left to his own devices on this one, starting yesterday (Thursday) and completing it today, Friday. For this room, we decided to transition from faded, chipped green paint and old wallpaper to a brighter shade, “Pool Party Blue”. Here are some before and after shots:

Here’s the before shot of the stairs and wallpaper. You will also notice the unfinished banister in the background. The reason it’s unfinished is because Jai installed it recently – there hadn’t been one there previously.

Closeup of how chipped the paint was in this room:

We painted over the wallpaper and painted the banister so everything matches now!

This is an open closet/storage space under the stairs. Since it doesn’t have a door, we covered it in wallpaper to avoid the contents getting splattered with paint. Since the inside is unfinished, it seemed unnecessary to paint it – it’s basically like an oversized crawlspace.

This was just standard paint, and since we didn’t have primer and were going over a dark shade, I was concerned about coverage. But this paint takes surprisingly good – it only took two coats on most areas, with a third layer of touch-ups in trouble spots. We also opted to paint over the old wallpaper, and the first coat looked pretty dire and I wondered if I should have just done another wallpaper instead. But after the second coat it look fantastic and has total coverage! Woo-hoo! This whole project was pretty rushed and unprepared in terms of having enough supplies, but it didn’t end up mattering. I’m really pleased with how it turned out – it’s great to finally have this long-overdue paintjob complete in this room, and I think the color looks really nice. Jai said that paint was really easy to work with and very water-soluble and easy to wipe up.

For more on Glidden Paint and where to buy, click here to view the full line of paints. Glidden are providing us with the supplies for this project in order for us to share this makeover experience with you.

So what do you think of how this room turned out? Are you planning any painting projects of your own?

As I’ve mentioned previously, we’ve been working on home renovations for close to a decade now. Holy cow! Everything we’ve done has been on our own, and as you know, you can either remodel quickly, or inexpensively…but not both. With the addition of a driveway over the summer, it dawned on me how far we’ve come. We’ve created a driveway in a property with no parking, we’ve built a large deck where there was nothing but a concrete landing, we completely stripped everything out of the bathroom and made it not only more usable, but luxurious; and that’s not counting all of the storage we’ve created. But there’s one big thing that masks our progress…the paint.

Since I became the owner of this home in 2003, I have only re-painted two rooms. The other rooms in the house have paint that is close to 20 years old at this point. It seems crazy, but with all the other projects that had to take priority in the precious free time I had while starting my business and dealing with everything else, I just did not have time to do much painting. And then with my knee injury over the last few years, I couldn’t even walk, never mind do any work on renovations. So at this point, the paint is so run down as to look appalling. It’s so chipped and awful that it actually makes me feel really self-conscious when people come over. It makes the whole house look run down, even though it’s not at all. I hate it so much.

Well, I’m here to announce some exciting news: Contest Corner has teamed up with Glidden Paint for a makeover series where we will be turning these rooms from drab to fab! Over the next 6 months, Jai and I will be giving each room a makeover with a fresh coat of complimentary Glidden paint and sharing tips of how to DIY on the fly without losing your mind! We are so excited to share our makeover with you and show what a huge difference something as small as paint can make in a room. Not only will we be dramatically improving the appearance of the home by eliminating chipped, worn paint, but we will be choosing completely different color schemes to better reflect our tastes and change the rooms to truly make them our own.

We will be making over 6 rooms in total, so I wanted to give you a little peek at some “Before” pictures to give you an idea of what we’ll be working with:

Living Room:

See all that chipped paint? That’s from when I had to use a wheelchair. It didn’t quite fit through the doorframe so it scraped it up really bad.

Kitchen

Cream and green, this is one of the most atrocious rooms in the house because of how badly the cabinets are chipped.

Office:

Or should I say, my future office, since up until now it’s been a holding room for various construction projects on the rest of the house! This room is cream, white, and scuffed up.

Laundry room:

Again, this is a white and cream room that is just looking worn down after all these years.

Future dining room:

This room has rustic wood walls, so all we’re going to do here is paint over the trim and old wallpaper to make it more homey.

Upstairs:

The upstairs portion of the house is a converted attic space. Jai uses half of it as his office, hence all the computer parts! No joke, this is the same exact shade of pink paint that I picked out when I was 9 years old. I guess the paint itself has held up OK, but seeing as it is now Jai’s office, I think he deserves to pick out his own colors for the room.

The other half of the room is pretty much serving as storage at the moment while we prepare my “Real” office. A lot of those boxes you see are storing things for the Gift Guide which are pending review!

We used Glidden’s online room makeover tool and paint calculator to come up with some super-unique, customized color schemes – I’m so excited to get started and share our “New” home with you. Check back next month for our very first room makeover!

Readers: Are you working on any DIY projects in your home?