Valspar is made of lies

I went to Lowe's this morning to have my paint mixed up. I wasn't 100% sure of the colors, but I had mostly decided. I was going to get a sample of one other black color to try with the super dark purple.

Lowe's, however informed me that they couldn't mix the paint in the Porch and Floor paint I was after. This is especially weird, because their literature claims the porch paint can be tinted to ANY Valspar color. Not "some" or "most." It says "ANY" color, and that was why I had decided to go with Valspar for this project.

 

If you watch television at all, you've probably seen a hundred Lowe's commercials lately advertising their ability to color match to any color. Apparently this is also a lie. I'm seriously irked at both Lowe's and Valspar that I spent a bunch of money on samples, when they can't even make the paint.

 

I contacted Valspar via phone and was told that the porch paint only comes in certain pre-fab colors, which is clearly not the case, because I had previously had custom colors mixed from their normal catalog. Even the label on the Porch & Floor paint says its available in custom colors.

 

 

The only reason I have been going to Lowe's at all over the course of this project was because I was buying the paint there, so the false claim of getting any color mixed seriously irksome. Pharaoh informs me from his study of daytime court shows that this is a case of detrimental reliance. He's on the job, lawyering for me. Supposedly they're going to reimburse me for the samples I purchased, but we'll see how that goes.

 

On the bright side, I took the paint chip for the colors I wanted to Home Despot, they ran them through their system and they say they can match them in Behr Porch Paint. So if I decide I really want these colors, I'm not out of options. I'm going to take the weekend to decide.

 

How embarrassing for Valspar that their competitor will make one of their colors when they themselves can't. I won't be using any more Valspar products again if they can't find a way to make good on this.

 

I suppose its just as well. Last night I left the sample board on the floor, and the cats took the opportunity to demonstrate which colors show dusty pawprints the most.

 

 

 

Still, fuck you, Lowes and Valspar for making me waste my time picking a color and driving back and forth!

 

 



Stained

I don't really like stain. It manages to be both sticky and oily at the same time, and the colour selections tend to be the same ugly neutrals that I could find at the Clinque counter.

It wasn't really on my radar for the bathroom until my friend Heather came over last week and mentioned that I could probably stain my doors to match the vanity. I hate the ugly doors enough that this seemed like a good idea. I had tossed around the idea of painting the back of the door bright orange, to match the accessories in this room. My mother, though, expressed her displeasure at the orange in the bathroom by asking what I was going to do when I wanted to change it, so I think painting the door may have induced a heart attack.

Here's the original color. All of the doors in the house are identical to this one, and I think they're all repulsive.

So while my many purple paint patches dried, I decided to try to stain the doors in the Halloween Bathroom.

The vanity has definite grey and brown tones in it (they call it a "driftwood finish", and I like thinking that the vanity is some sort of post-tsunami debris that washed up full of fish and Godzilla scales.)

 

I picked Varathane's Weathered Grey stain, which seems approximately the right colour. I went back and forth about getting one with poly already in it or not, and wound up deciding to go with the straight stain so that it wasn't glossy. This was probably a mistake, but I did save $5! hooray!

I've done two coats of the stain so far, and It's coming out nicer on the closet door than it is on the door to the room. I think it's going to need another coat, but I'm letting it dry out for a while first. The colour is slightly bluer than the vanity, but I think it'll look fine once it has had a chance to dry.

 

An added non-bonus to stain is the drippiness. I'm currently as spotted as my cat. and look like I might have some sort of disease. I'm OK with this, because my childhood taught me that if you have spots, you can live in the zoo.

 



 

 

Indecision

Now that the sanding is well under way, I'm working on picking out the colours and pattern to paint on the hallway floor. Right now, I'm conflicted about the whole thing. The only thing I know for sure is that I'd like to carry some of the bright purple from the outside of the house into the entry way.

The pattern is the first difficulty. I'm looking at two different stencil styles right now, this moroccan-inspired pattern, and this trellis thing. I'm mostly decided on the Moroccan one, but that may change by tomorrow.

I'm also torn on the colors (swatches below, keep in mind they read darker and bluer on my phone, links to the web pages for the colours below too). I'm trying to decide between three combinations.

1. Chimney Smoke (dark grey) or Corduroy Black (darker grey), Twilight Purple (darkdark purple) and tiny dots of Spirit Blue (bright purple)
2. Twlight Purple (dark purple) and Spirit Blue (Bright Purple)
3. Chimney Smoke (Dark Grey) and Oatlands Violet (medium purple)

Please feel free to provide your votes so I can ignore them and/or pretend it was all your idea!

Update:

I took a trip to Lowe's this morning. It turns out their database was down, which caused a big delay, but I wound up coming home with some samples, which I painted on a piece of plywood that I had in the garage.

 

I let it dry, then I painted stripes on each colour just so I could see how they looked together. No, I'm not going to paint the floor plaid. 

 

And here's the colours in natural light, against the house. Again, my phone is making everything way more blue than it should be, the house is a very purpleyviolet.

 

 

I decided I like the dark purple a lot, and I think I'm going to do the pattern on top in silver, but I'm not wild about the dark grey with it. They're both too cool toned I think. So now I'm looking at using a brown for the border instead. The bad thing about the purple is that it needs a primer or something else underneath it, because its thin and shows the grain badly.

 

This is a picture against the walls. I think tomorrow I'll pick a brown and just go with it. 

 



Roulette

My friend Ken and I play a game. We call it Britney Roulette. Its origins are shrouded in mystery, but had something to do with our mutual abhorrence/adoration of Kevin Federline. This lead us to exchange Britney-related holiday gifts for years, and somehow Britney Roulette was born. The rules are simple: load a Britney Spears album into your preferred MP3 playing device. Put it on random. Pray.

When Britney comes up (and she always comes up) you lose Britney Roulette. For me, this always happens at the most embarrassing moments.... When I've got punk music turned up to 11 in my car with the windows down... When I'm talking in vent in a raid group... Well, whenever there's any witnesses, random is almost guaranteed to decide that "Oops I Did It Again" is the way to go.

I tell you this, because I want you to understand that today's sanding session ended when I was reloading my sandpaper and lost Britney Roulette and had to go turn off my Ipod. It seemed like a good time to take a shower.

It's pretty easy to see the difference of the sanded vs non-sanded area with the 80 grit. You can see it takes off a lot of the gacky drywall, and generates a ton of gross red dust.

 

Meet my crew

Today I did the first pass with 80 grit sand paper on the first section of hallway. I'm going to try to do two passes with the 80 grit, hopefully this will help with getting out the bigger imperfections. I only did one through the clown room, and there are still some spots in there I'm not thrilled with. This is likely to take me about 3-4 days to finish completely.

Sanding is pretty boring. The sanders are mostly too loud for me to listen to music or watch TV while I'm sanding, so I spend a lot of time talking to my tools. I decided it was time for you to meet them. Hipstamatic photos, for style points.

This is Nurse Stanley. You've probably already met him. He was shiny and new when I worked on the clown room, but he's since acquired a fine patina of dust that would make any librarian proud.

 

 

This is Betrand, the Belt Sander. I believe he may actually be older than I am. He's a fine craftsman by day. He enjoys long walks on the beach and racing. At night, he dons 40 grit and attacks the faces of evildoers. 

 

 

This is Springy, the palm sander. He's smaller and easier to use than Bertrand, so I tend to use him more, though it takes longer. He's also necessary for getting closer to the walls and into the closets, where it's almost impossible to use the belt sander. Sometimes I have to supplement his work with some hand sanding, but overall he's my favourite. 

 

 

This is the supply wall. Normally there are photos hanging from these hooks, but it seemed like a good place to keep all the sand paper and masks for the moment. 

The right tool for the stupidest job

So it turns out, that it SCRAPES right up. Wiping be damned.

Today I soaked the floor and let it sit for an hour. Still no dice on the wiping. I let another hour pass, and nothing. I was pretty sure that the advice about wiping was true, because during the poopstorm when the floor was saturated, I managed to scrape up a bunch of the gunk with a screwdriver.

While I waited for the gunk to soften, I decided to block off the area under the doors. A lot of dust has been getting underneath them. So I'm trying cardboard and masking tape. The main problem is that the doors need to open and close, so I can't duct-tape them off. I'm not thrilled with this as a solution, and there's probably a better one out there.

So... what he hell, it worked once. I decided to try using my biggest screw driver to try scraping the stuff once it had soaked. Turns out it worked amazingly. Once I discovered that, I switched to a putty/drywall knife, which I'm sure my father will tell me I should have been using from the start. Once I got the right tool, I was able to clear out the hallway by spraying it down with water and then scraping it up. The whole thing took less time than I spent on the first five feet, so I feel a little dumb about it now.

Don't tell anyone.

Universal solvent, my rump.

My phone is currently suffering from IOS 7, so things have been a bit delayed, because my pics were being persnickity. Today = a gazillion posts to catch up.

I've finished using the 40 grit belt sander on the majority of the hall, but it doesn't do very well at getting close to the walls, so I need to follow with the smaller, palm sander. Unfortunately, the area close to the walls is also covered with drywall mud from when the walls were put up.

This stuff is nasty. It takes forever to sand, and it clogs the sand paper. When I worked on the clown room, my father assured me that if I got it wet, it would wipe right up.  Another friend of mine who is Knowledgeable About Things said the same thing... "it wipes right up!".

 

It does not wipe right up. I soaked the stuff with water, and tried to wipe it up. No luck. So I got it wetter and left it for 15 minutes. This was slightly better, once I tried using a sponge with scrubby stuff on the back, but an hour of scrubbing only got me a few feet down the hall. Plus the motion of scrubbing is not significantly different from sanding by hand... its not easier, its not faster. The only benefit I can see right now of doing this manually is that I'm saving money on sand paper, and gaining some gross whiteish water. Tomorrow I'm going to try soaking it for an hour.

 

 

At this stage, the other problem I'm trying to solve for is screws that don't go all the way into the wood. In the clown room it was all nails, which I used a set to drive deeper. The screws are a little rougher to deal with. My cordless drill doesn't have enough torque to drive them in, and doing them by hand is even worse. I'm currently researching (read: asking my dad) what I should be doing. I don't want to take them out unless I can replace them with nails or something, and I'm not sure what the pros and cons of this are. Though if it makes the floors creaky and haunted mansion, I'm all for it.



 



Helloooooo, Nurse!

It's been a long week already, and its only Thursday. I've gotten older, and maybe wiser. Though that has nothing to do with the Project Management exam I'm studying for which has been causing me to pray to every deity I can think of that I never have to Manage a Project using this method. That said, I'm happy that the bathroom is as complete as I can get it (finished curtains and caulked the bathtub yesterday... pictures will follow when the closet door has been installed) and that I can get back to a steady diet of sanding my troubles away.

I was a bit delayed today because I forgot I ran out of 50 grit belts for the belt sander, so I had to make a trip to the hardware store. They were out of 50, so I got 40, which seems like serious overkill, but it seemed like more fun than more passes at finer grit. I got about half of the hallway done before it got too dusty to see much.

The dust from the hallway has the potential to waft its way upstairs and into the main living areas upstairs, so I'm not really looking forward to the cleanup after this one. Currently I'm not running any air filters down there, but I may rethink that. Right now I'm approaching it like surgery... a few minutes of sanding, then letting Stanley the Shop-Vac/Nurse apply suction to get the dust off the floor. Maybe I'll make him some scrubs, at least it would make the photos more exciting.

 

 

The hallway has a lot more staples and screws which come enough above the plywood to make sparks if I accidentally run over them with the belt sander. I'm terrified the dust is going to start a flash fire during one of the sparks, which will result in the whole thing going up in a giant fireball.  Maybe I should get health insurance. I wonder if Stanley is in-network for any providers.

Yipes, Stripes!

Ok, so I stayed up most of the night working on the bathroom in order to be finished before a parental visitation this morning.  I also wanted to get it as done as I could, so that I can celebrate my birthday next week without worrying about working on the bathroom.

 

The first order of business was the moulding and window sill. They were this ugly yellowy color, and it was driving me a little crazy. So I decided to use the dark color from my kitchen and repaint them. The door frame still looks a little funky, but i'm ok with it for the most part. 

 

 

 

Also on the menu, respraying the drawer pieces every hour. as it turns out, I didn't think of wearing gloves until after the third or fourth coat... it kinda looks like I shanked the Kool-Aid man on an orange-flavoured day. 

 

 

All that's left at this point is to rehang the closet drawer, which means drilling through the tile, and curtains. Here's some pics of the finishedish product. I wound up with a lot more stripes than expected, but I'm ok with that. 

 

This afternoon I decided to throw together some curtains. I used a shower curtain I picked up at Bloodbath & Beyond on clearance and cut it up. The hem length isn't final, but I haven't decided how long to make them yet, so I left it there. I may add some orange ribbon or something to brighten them up. They also have vertical stripes, which is hard to see in the pic. 

 

 

All that's left to do is move the kitty litter back in. I might wait a while, becasue i know they're going to make a huge mess, though there's a special kitty litter area to the right of the sink now, so it'll be like they get their own stall. 

Morange

Most of what remains to be done in the guest bath has to do with decorating.

Unfortunately, that meant going to Ikea and Bloodbath & Beyond today. A Saturday.

I think I might be experiencing PTSD from all of the crowds.

I picked up a chest of drawers to use for storage in the bathroom, and I decided that I really wanted it to be orange inside. The outside is a black/brown colour that is the darkest Ikea ever gets. Currently I'm spraypainting the pieces that make up the insides of the drawers.

I'm not sure why I decided to use spray paint. Something in my head said it would work well for this project, but other than the quick dry time, I'm kinda regretting it. So far I've been through a can and a half, and I think I'm going to run through four full cans of spray paint by the time I'm done. It may be because I'm using it on untreated pine, or it might be my technique. I probably should have used a primer or something fancy, but I thought the spray paint would cover it. Below is how it looked after one coat. It looks slightly less diseased after two.

 

My mother used to use a similar colour to paint the telephone pole near our house so that people could find our driveway. She was always afraid she would be caught defacing public property, and had a whole story worked up to explain to the authorities should they ever come calling. (Something about the local teenage miscreants or cows or both, I think.) I'm sure she'll find it homey.

 

I'm working on assembling the chest of drawers in the bathroom, because there's not a lot of space anywhere else right now. As it turns out, there's not a lot of space in there either, so it's a lot like playing Tetris. Since I'm stuck waiting until the spray paint is done now, I can't get much else done tonight, so the skeleton of a Halloweeny chest of drawers is hanging out in there by itself. I hope it doesn't get lonely.



Agent Orange

I am not a big fan of the colour orange. My friend Marc loves it the most, because he says he read a study once that says that orange causes insanity the way blue is calming. I'm pretty sure he's right. Most of my favourite people love orange, but I can't stand it.

That said, it's a guest bath that I'm decorating, so I decided that it should be up to my most frequent guests... and since many of them enjoy a weird love affair with a colour with no rhyme, I went with it. So Marc, Daniel, James, and Shawn... you're to blame for it looking like Halloween puked in the guest bath.

 

 

There is still a bit of work to do in there, curtains, a shower curtain, and some paint touchup mostly. And deciding if I want a slightly less muppet-skinned rug on the floor. Right now its functional though, and that's what I was going for. More pics when its 100% done. 

(I don't really like grey either. It's a weird inbetween colour that can't make up its mind between black and white. I don't know why I keep putting it in my house lately. Maybe something about old age makes it OK.)

13 shades of grey

Holy crap, I almost have my bathroom back!!

My dad came by yesterday and helped with the plumbing of the toilet and vanity. Collectively, they required approximately five separate visits to the hardware store for various missing parts and pieces. It was complicated by the fact that the toilet apparently broke itself while it was sitting in the bath tub.

Once the toilet was all hooked up and repaired, we assembled the vanity. I'm not totally wild about it, but I was really, really, really tired of looking for them. It was grey, and it was on sale, so it was purchased.

 

I am happy that the sink has a healthy self image, and may have been by MariLu Henner in China. Beautiful!

 

 

Ok, so its done and plumbed, but not pretty yet. There is a little bit of cleanup work that needs to be done, and some other random stuff to finish the room. Hopefully I will get to that this week, when I'm not working on the hallway.



 

I am still seriously considering painting the vanity a different colour. I'm not sure how many shades of grey its actually legal to have in one bathroom without it turning into some sort of dirty Oprah's Book Club read. 

The saga of the hallway begins

So while the grout in the bathroom was drying, and the sealer sealing, I made the decision to jump into painting the hallway. This might have been a bit premature, but my hand was forced by my furry roomates, who showed their displeasure at having their litterboxes relocated by peeing all over the carpet.

Since there was already a huge chunk missing thanks to the poopstorm.

There are a lot more staples and tack strips to pull up in the hallway than there were in the clownroom, mostly because the bookcases in the clownroom covered the edges, where the pointy bits hang out. The square footage overall may be slightly more than the clownroom, but I don't anticipate it taking as long now that I know the drill.

I haven't decided on an inspiration for this room. its a hallway, so its hard to be too creative.  I might try to match it a bit to the outside of the house, since its kinda a transitional area. Anyone have any ideas?

I forgot to take any "before" pictures, so these will have to do. I like to think of this as a giant, cat pee and carpet burrito.

 

 

You can see how much dirt has gotten through the carpet over the years. Part of the reason for doing this is to help keep that dirt out of the house. The main complication of doing this hallway is that we can't get out of the house without going through it, and the cats can't get to their litterboxes. So paint days may be kinda a challenge. Hopefully there are no more burritos in the future.

 



Grout as dark as my heart

OK, its a day of catch-up again. I've been in a flurry of activity, trying to get the backsplash finished so that my dad could help me with the plumbing. I used black grout for this tile too, but it was unsanded grout, so it has a slightly different consistency. It also made the tiles look WAY darker.

 

I don't mind the darkness so much, and as it dries it seems to be lightning a little bit, but the rad cracked glass tiles don't show up as much. Still, its functional and it's done on time, so I can't complain too much.

My neighbours, on the other hand, might. I've been dumping buckets of non-sanded death water over the porch, and it seems to have stained some of my plants. Now it looks like some sort of plague is spreading through my side yard. So that's going pretty well, I think. It's never too early to start decorating for Halloween.

The raddest tile ever

Today was uber-productive. I found a vanity that I don't hate (though I may paint it a different colour) and squished it into the back of my tiny car.

Then my lovely assistant and I put up the glass backsplash. I went with the shorter size, which I think looks better.

 

The closet was the roughest past, it has some areas that will need paint touchup, but you can see the colour of the tile better in this pic. 

 

I used the cardboard that came with the tile as a spacer for most of the room, because it was falling behind the floor tiles when I used actual spacers. Its about the same thickness as the grout lines... hopefully it doesn't get stuck in there with the mortar.

 

The corners were a little bit rough, but it turns out this type of tile is crazy easy to cut, so filling in the gaps wasn't too bad. It doesn't look like a professional job, but it doesn't look terrible either. I think I'm going to paint the mortar line at the top to match the walls.

 

And here's a closeup so you can see the crazy crackleglass. I bought an extra mosaic today at lows, and the cashier flipped out about how cool they were and told me that I'd have "the raddest bathroom ever." So I've got that going for me...

 

Tomorrow, more black grout. Just when my feet are finally coming clean, too. 

Backsplashing

First off, here's a picture of the tiles/wall in natural light instead of the ugly yellow that the vanity lights cast. It's a lot less brown than its been coming out in the photos, and the walls are less blue. You can see the slight gaps between the tile and the wall that are normally covered with moulding.

I hate moulding. With a fiery passion. I think its ugly and dated and ugly. Even the word sounds gross (and blogger's spellcheck hates it having a u). And all the moulding in this house is a gross orange brown color that I am pretty sure comes from staining the wood with the poop of babies nursed on Tang. The moulding that was in this room was all soaked with sewage during the Poopstorm (with no noticeable change to its colour) and I don't really want to replace it. I also want to make sure that should we have another sewage spill its contained on the tile and doesn't go under the walls.
 
The plan has been to replace the moulding with tiles as a sort of backsplash. I did this with extra tiles in the upstairs bathroom, and have been pleased with it as a moulding alternative. Unfortunately, the huge 12 x 24 tiles downstairs don't allow for doing this easily, so I bought some glass mosaic tiles to cut up and use. The mosaic is black, grey, and cracked-glass, which is the reason I went with black grout. It comes in 12 x 12 sheets which I decided to cut up.

 

Initially I cut the mosaics into 4 inchish sections and tried laying it out that way. 

 

I wasn't really happy with the way it looked, and it would have meant buying about $40 more worth of tile to do the whole room (I hadn't accounted for the closet when I bought the first ones). So I decided to try closer to a 2" size. Here's the comparison:

 

In the end, I decided to go with the smaller size all the way around, to save on cost and tile trimming. I also think that the larger size makes it a little too busy. I'm hoping to put it up tomorrow, and grout on Sunday.

 

My goal at this point is to get the toilet in on Tuesday. Once the backsplash is on the wall, I'll be starting on the hallway. This will leave the bathroom mostly complete, except for the whole vanity issue. I still haven't found one that I like very much. Maybe I can just set a sink on the ground...

With this bathroom out of commission while I've been tiling, two of the cats have had their litterbox relocated to the hallway. They've demonstrated their displeasure at this by peeing on the carpet more than in the new box. Fortunately that carpet is already missing a huge chunk thanks to the Poopstorm and was already marked for deletion