  The tile you choose when you don't want to have to choose tile The back of our first floor boasts one of the most enviable spaces in our house - a spacious and open butlers pantry (with a laundry room and powder room, to boot)
The cabinets in this room are wonderful, but once you get over the *idea* of the pantry, it doesn't do much else to shine. A few months ago I was invited to a house party by a friend of the host. While I think my house is awesome, it was built as a middle class home and didn't come with many bells and whistles. This other house, however, was built around the same time as mine and has many similar features but was clearly built to be a show stopper over 100 years ago. From gorgeous, hand poured stained glass windows to intricately etched stair rails, this house was a stunner! I tried to peep at as much of the house as possible without looking like a total creep. Unclear if I succeeded in the second part. But I did notice that they also had a pantry/mudroom/powder room just behind their kitchen. Among other highlights of this surprisingly beautiful, yet highly functional space was a large scale checkerboard floor. As soon as I saw it I knew that my pantry was getting a facelift. A floor lift?
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  not magical My hands down favorite place in the whole house is our finished attic - also referred to as our game room. It has a high ceiling, exposed beams, light filled windows on three sides and gorgeous wood floors. We've put a giant old table up there so I never have to put puzzles, painting or board games away, Jeff has set up his sewing machine and gaming systems and we're in the process of turning two twin beds into a cozy sectional sofa. (Just waiting on Ikea's supply line for the items we need!) But the stairs leading up to this magical place? Well they looked like stairs heading up to an attic. I mean - thats what they are, of course, but something needed to be done about these grungy, neglected steps.  the up close grunge Also - I really wanted a reason to get a heat gun. I live by a maxim of asking whats the worst that can happen and in this case it wasn't going to get much worse than this. So these steps became a training ground for me to learn a thing or two about paint stripping, staining and where my very basic skills stopped. The stairs were painted this offensively neutral beige that invites you to turn around and not make the climb. The trim was painted with a reddish brown that I believe was created by someone who had had wood described to him but never actually seen any himself but thought he could make a paint color to look like wood, anyways. (I've been seeing this on fences and decks in the past few years and I would like for this to stop. Please. You're not fooling anyone that you've just painted wood. So pick a better color.)
The trim paint came off like a dream. Seriously - this was so satisfying and exactly what I was hoping to achieve when I decided that I must have a heat gun. Its hard to tell from this photo but this is the same area - before and after stripping.
 Prepped and ready to paint One of the very first projects I wanted to tackle when we moved into the manor was to give our kitchen a little facelift. Our house, as a whole, went though a substantial renovation in the 1990s. The once cold, tiny kitchen was turned into a butlers pantry and the dining room transformed into a bigger, open kitchen. Functionally, its perfect and while the design isn’t exactly my taste, the quality of the cabinetry was exceptional and was done with a nod to the arts and crafts style that the house was built in. However, the countertops was a cheap formica in a dark green and the back splash was a beige with some random leaf tiles. These screamed “dated” not “vintage” to me and I wanted them to go! Since the countertops were cheap formica, and because I was simply trying to achieve a facelift for the kitchen, I decided I didn't have anything to lose and would to try countertop paint. We bought the Giani Marble Countertop Paint Kit and I started studying the process. Giani has a great how to video on their youtube page and I watched that several times, but I also decided to check out as many “before and after” items of the marbling that I could find. And yikes. The marbling, which I assume is meant to distract from any potential imperfections in the countertops, was oftentimes incredibly distracting in its own right because of how badly it came out. Jeff is a talented artist and I knew that if we were going to have successful marbling, he would need to be the one to do it. But then we started wondering if we should even bother with the marbling at all. The giani kit comes with a warranty but it was explicit that that would be voided if the marbling wasn’t completed. Once we painted the white, however, we loved the change so much and decided not to mess with a good thing and skipped the marbling. We completed this project 10 months ago and it still looks wonderful, hasn't’ stained and has remained durable. All of our living room furniture from our old house fit perfectly into the manor. Our slightly arched sofa lined up beautifully in front of our bay window and our entertainment unit was a great fit for the opposing wall. At our old house, this white piece was up against a blue wall making a lovely contrast. The new house, however, didn't have anything to contrast against. Much to my own surprise, I love the neutral color the sellers painted the living room to get it market ready. It's a perfect vanilla ice cream color - subtle but warm. I didn't want to change it. This wall was driving me nuts, though. It just needed something.  I'm not exactly one for being understated but after talking it over with a friend with an impeccable eye for subtle yet playful design I decided that a fun wallpaper in a neutral color could be just the right move. We narrowed down our choices to these 4 options. They're all busy but neutral with an art deco/vintage inspired design. Jeff and I chose this design. It's got an art deco vibe that I love and a slight gold shimmer in the accent color. Plus it's called "speakeasy" and kinda looks like it's giving you the middle finger. I like that. Jeff and I have never hung wallpaper before so this was going to be a learning experience. We also knew we were going to be covering most of the wall back up with a big piece of furniture so we could learn as we go as long as our mistakes were in the right places. (Is that an oxymoron?) And make mistakes we did!  But then we pushed our billy bookshelf configuration up against the wall and no one is the wiser! (Except you reading this and every single person who comes into our house and we tell them how hilariously bad the wallpaper is behind the furniture) How good does this look??!!! (And peep the board and baton wall through the doorway)    Before view from the front door (Installing the black and white tiffany-style lamp was the very first thing I did to this house) After passing through our front door vestibule you enter a narrow entryway that heads straight up the stairs or allows access to the downstairs rooms on the right. There's also a radiator in the middle of this already narrow path which seems like an unnecessary waste of space, but at least previous owners had custom built a cover for it. Essentially we have a built-in receiving table.  Before view of the entryway from the top of the stairs Aside from that, I found this space to be too small to serve a useful function - coats on hooks would assault any person trying to pass though, for instance - but as the first impression of the inside of the Manor it was awfully boring. Eventually we landed on installing a board and batten wall for visual interest that wouldn't take up more space.  in progress Here's how we did it: I’ve never been great with math (despite the fact that my father was a numbers wiz of an actuary) and I knew this was going to need some precise equations so the boards were spaced evenly the whole way. I wasn’t sure how to tackle this, but then I remembered that my father is a newly retired numbers wiz of an actuary! We’ve come a long way, my dad and I, since I would ask him for long division help in the 4th grade and end up in tears and frustration. I called him up and explained the project. I needed an equation to equally space the vertical 1x3 boards on a 17 foot wall with the first and last boards landing exactly on each end. Determine the horizontal length you are covering, in inches. Subtract the width of the vertical board y = number of vertical boards x = spacing z = width of vertical board y = inches-x / x+z Our 17 foot wall = 204 inches. Our vertical boards are 3 inches so our distance in inches we are starting with is 201” y = 201 - x / x + 3 Once he came up with the algebra to solve this, Jeff and I plugged in different amounts of vertical boards and played around with how the different options looked on the wall until we landed on the spacing we liked. We decided on 10 boards* - not including the first board, which is already baked into the equation by putting a 3 inch gap between each distance - with a spacing of 17.4 inches. *Kind of - because we knew we wanted the horizontal board to run into the stairs, we didn't actually place a vertical board at the end, but spaced it as if there would be a board there if the stairs weren't in the way. We knew we were going to paint this Sherwin Williams Dard Hunter Green so we applied a dark paint primer before we started marking out our spacing. We also installed the horizontal board so we could cut the vertical pieces exactly to size. It’s an old house and things don’t always align perfectly. We realized we needed to measure every piece to its exact location, despite the fact that it was technically level. We also needed to cut size specific pieces running up the stairs. The final decision we needed to make was what to do about the bottom. We weren’t interested in messing with the original floorboard but we needed to blend the two elements together, so we decided on a 45 degree angled cut at the bottom to transition them. It worked great! We got to work measuring, cutting and painting our boards. Jeff used our paint gun to spray paint the boards before we hung them. We used Liquid nails interior paneling adhesive and 2' hardwood trim finishing nails to to attach the boards to the wall, and applied wood filler to the seams, nail holes and anywhere where else that needed to be smoothed out. We finished everything up with a few coats of paint and here we are! I couldn’t be more happy with how it turned out and people are often surprised to learn it isn’t an original feature!  Board and Baton instructions Supplies:
Method:
y = inches-x / x+z
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We have a crush on our houseDIY-ing our way through our gorgeous Arts & Crafts style Pennsylvania home Archives
August 2022
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