I should be reading The Scarlet Letter. I'm stalling.

I promise, I'll take basement bedroom photos on Wednesday. I keep meaning to, then missing daylight. The floors are GORGEOUS. Now if we could just keep the stupid bugs out of there... I finished the trim in both rooms, so the very last part of painting will be touching up some spots in Justin's room. The roller with the white floor paint splattered a little on the bottom portions of the blue walls. And I may or may not have dropped a huge glob down one part of the wall when I was touching up the window trim. Oops. The gray in the guest bedroom needs SO much touching up, but we ran out of it, and the big stupid Home Depot is no longer carrying Ralph Lauren paint colors. We could try to get it matched in another brand of paint, but I'm worried it would look bizarre. We did get the bed all put in the guest bedroom. We just need to put the sheets, etc. on it. It's a little awkward because the room is an awkward shape, but we can always move it if we figure out a better configuration. We're both just really happy to have a guest bedroom! Some day we'll redo the bathroom down there (mainly a lipstick on a pig kind of job I think) and fix up the kitchen, too. We have dreams of setting up a sweet little bar area in that basement kitchen. And who doesn't love having a back up fridge??? We already have a stove and microwave and dishwasher waiting to be installed down there. My dad and stepmom passed them to us when they moved. Oh, so much work... But I love the idea that we are building (hopefully) equity on our own. We'll someday have to have professional help with the bigger projects, like the upstairs bath and the kitchen, but I'm trying to convince Justin that I could teach myself how to tile and redo the floors in our upstairs bathroom. I'm not succeeding.
The new project I have urgently waiting for attention is spray-painting a bed frame for our new bed. Our old bed was a lovely wooden bed from Justin's Dad. It's a double, and will live on forever in the basement bedroom as the guest bed. When we got our new mattress (a queen) we bought a bed frame from Costco (thanks Mom) but we can't afford a headboard and footboard. Did you guys know how expensive that business is??? Bananas. I've been reading up on lots and lots of blogs about DIY headboards (Quirky Delight, I'm looking at you) but I just don't have it in me to scour for beds at the thrift stores. And a lot of my favorite thrift stores have been getting CRAZY expensive lately. Boo. So when my boss said she had a black iron canopy bed that we could have for free, I jumped at it. I assumed we wouldn't use the canopy part, but the finnials that fit on without the canopy attachment are SO early 90's that I might try to just test what the canopy would look like. In my mind, I thought the black iron bed would be like this gorgeous Country Living example, which is not altogether our taste, but is so classic and gorgeous, you just can't not like it.
Is there really anywhere this bed wouldn't work? By the way, I love this little room. The shiny white floor, the little stool, and the cowhide rug... So cute. I love this kind of country. Clean and pretty. I'd like to spend a weekend here. And have nice older ladies bring me tea while I knit in that blue chair in the corner. Hmmm. But anyways, the bed we got is more like contemporary, and by contemporary I mean early 90's (at least without the canopy on). It was free, and I am not trying to sound like an ungrateful jerk, just wanting to explain. It has the swirly ball finnials. Ew. It's almost exactly like this:
Sorry, that photo is kind of tiny. But you get the idea. In any case, I have no guilt whatsoever about my plan to spraypaint it red. I have the spraypaint, as well as the gun attachment for the spray bottles. I learned my lesson with Roxanne's dresser about spraypaint finger and the globs that can happen as a result. It can get ugly. We were originally planning to just not use a headboard/footboard for a while, but the bed scoots around a lot, and Roxanne has figured this out. She likes to push it around a little (when she thinks we aren't looking) and if you bump into it after a middle of the night bathroom break, you will scoot it a foot or two. When discussing the paint color for the bed, Justin and I agreed that a bright color would be best, to break up the white blob that our all white curtains and all white bed were forming. I wanted orange, but HD only had one can of the Pumpkin Orange spray paint. Jerks. And yellow just seems a little overdone for right now. The red will hopefully be pretty though. And detract from the datedness of the bed.
I'm loving this color with the gray walls, but our walls are darker, and if it doesn't come in spray form, I'm not interested...

Enough with the chemical burns...

Where to start? Justin and I bought a new mattress on Saturday (thanks again to my mom for keeping Roxanne so we could actually take our time). We got a great deal during the Macy's Labor Day Mattress Sale (no, I'm not being paid). So, in with the queen bed, and downstairs with the double. The new bed will be here on Saturday sometime (we got free delivery, too!) so we have a week to try and desperately get things in order. Also, I think there's some kind of law that says you have to do home improvement projects during Labor Day weekend if you aren't at the beach. And we aren't at the beach.

You know how these projects go... One thing requires another thing which requires another thing. So we started with stripping the floors in the two basement bedrooms. The carpet has been out for a while, but there was that nasty old adhesive everywhere. I have mostly finished up one room, the one that will be Justin's room, herein referred to as the Man Room. The other room, which will be for my crafts and the guest bedroom, is in a state of disgustingness. I have scraped it clean, but all that sludge is just sitting there for me to clean up. But since I can't think straight, I'm taking a breather. This stripping agent works very well, but it's AWFUL. It stinks, but in a way that is toxic. Like, I probably have lost half of my brain cells between yesterday and today. The other really hard part is trying to get it all off the floor. My method in the other room was to scrape it all up, get as much of the sludge as I could into a bucket, and then pour water on the floor and mop it around, then run the shop vac over everything. I did the water in the bucket part twice in the other room, but I'm still worried that there's residue there. And I'm worried that it will damage the paint that we put on the floor in a few days. We opted for white floor concrete floor paint. If it will go on without getting destroyed by any remaining chemicals, we think it will look lovely. It will likely need at least two coats, but Justin and I think it will brighten the rooms down there.

We also need to paint the Man Room. With a lot of pushiness from me, we opted for a dark blue, Benjamin Moore's Gentleman's Gray. I know it looks really dark, but with the white floors and white trim, it's going to be amazing. We want to create a more sophisticated "study" look in that room. I told Justin I think it would be neat to make it look like a mid-century command center for NASA or something, and he haltingly agrees with my cheesy description. We have a very large world map to put on one wall, and it's laminated, so I think it will definitely brighten things up. Justin seems mostly excited about getting a rug. I say get everything else done first... I have already found some great metal filing cabinets and he has an awesome teal mid-century good-form chair. Eventually, I hope we can get him a vintage steelcase tanker desk and some vintage task lamps. There are a ton of awesome vintage NASA posters on Etsy, and I'm keeping my eye out for a cheap lunar globe. They can't all be this expensive...

As for the guest room, I painted the walls a couple of months ago in the most lovely soft shade of gray. It will look really great with the white floors. If I ever get all that done... I have dark turquoise velvet curtains for the windows, and I plan to use either an antique quilt on the bed, or our old duvet cover from IKEA that is yellow and white stripes. I'm leaning towards the quilt though, since it's sort of "my room" and I have been collecting vintage needle art for the walls in there. Can you tell how excited I am? Justin and I really can't wait to have these two rooms as extra living space. And we hope sometime soon to be able to get a TV and a sofa for the part of the basement that is now his office. We want a den. And it would be amazing to not ever have to have a TV in our living room. As for the Craigslist couch, we are on a spending hiatus now that we spent so much on supplies for the basement bedrooms and the mattress. Oh well. Things happen when they are meant to.

Pictures to come. I'm scatterbrained thanks to the fumes I've been inhaling. And all the chemical burns I've sustained. Seriously, this stuff is no joke.

Craigslist Couch... Yea or Nay?

So, I was looking on Craigslist (probably while on the phone with my mom who was probably also looking on Craigslist) for vintage sofas. I troll Craigslist pretty regularly because it's like thrift store shopping from work. I never follow up on anything, aside from that one estate sale I saw advertised there... But I found two lovely vintage sofas that seemed like they were in great shape and had fairly reasonable prices. After e-mailing the sellers (just for kicks) and getting fast responses from both, I decided one was not in good shape (a vintage sectional that looked like it needed to be reupholstered=$$$$) and the other was lovely, but just too expensive.

Fast forward to now, the seller of the too expensive sofa just sent me an e-mail with three simple words: "Make an offer?" Whew. I'll talk to Justin about it, but I'm not sure what to do... This sofa is kind of far away, and we'd surely have to procure a bigger vehicle to get it home. BUT, the color seems like it would be fantastic in our living room, since it would bring out the reddish color of our Eames chairs. And it would mean we could move the current living room couch into the basement for our TV den that we will some day complete. It was listed for $500. What do I even offer??? Do I even want to offer??? I have been thinking that maybe we should just go new couch to avoid the ick factor, but this couch is tempting.