I haven’t posted any pictures of the finished kitchen. Here it is. It’s a beautiful space to work, watch the ocean, and enjoy life.
And here’s the other side. I love the tile backsplash and the contrast of dark and light cabinets.
The exterior painting is moving along. Chuck climbed on the roof today to paint the trim. He’s really dedicated to his work.
We’re thrilled to be done with the old minty green trim.
This is also our first pass at painting the wrought iron black. There’s some overspray that we’ll fix shortly. The wrought iron looks so much better now and is resuming its rightful place as an architectural element instead of disappearing into the house. When we bought the place I was initially horrified by the ornamental curlicues, but now I love them. They’re one of the few original parts of the house left, and have held up really well for 58 years.
We’ve resumed painting the outside again. The color scheme is a bright white for the base and a gray-blue for the trim and eaves. Notice how Chuck had the paint color matched to the gutters.
By carrying the trim color all the way underneath the eaves, it accentuates them as an architectural element. The wide overhangs are one of my favorite features of the house.
A previous owner only painted the minimum surface necessary to photograph the house for sale. From this angle, you can see that the walls in back hadn’t been painted in years, and the green trim went just far enough to cover an older coat of garish electric blue. When we’re done, the blue gray trim and white will carry all the way across, thank you very much. The redwood fence is our new addition to screen the new kitchen sliding door entrance to the backyard.
We love our LED house numbers from a company called Luxello. They make me smile every time I see them. And the numbers seem to be one of the most popular items on the blog, as I see lots of outgoing web traffic from the blog to surrounding.com where they’re for sale. People have asked me if they come in different colors and sizes.
That’s why I was excited to discover that Luxello now has options. Ours are brushed aluminum, 5 inches (12.7 cm) high with white LEDs, at $57 each. You can now get the same gleaming silvery finish in a 10 inch (25.4 cm) size ($104 each); perfect for isolated locations that really need to be seen from the road. They have letters as well as numbers. Luxello can even make custom sizes and finishes, like bronze, brass or black, with LEDs in white, blue, amber, green or red.
They also offer brass numbers as a stock option ($59 each). Brass wouldn’t work on our color scheme, but they’d look really chic on the right house.
Chuck finished the bamboo flooring treatment in the master bedroom. What a transformation! We love it. With about $200 in materials, some specialized tools, and Chuck’s design and fabrication expertise it all came together.
Now the whole room is a warm, cozy retreat. I love how the how the wood tones are reflected in the orange and brown wallpaper, along with more accents of orange and blue in the pillows, lamps, upholstery and carpet.
Our master bedroom suite is almost done. When we bought the house in December, we were pretty sure this unpermitted illegal room had to be demolished.
But we got lucky when our structural engineer and the Pismo Beach Building Division approved a simple fix: fastening the back corner securely to the foundation. We had to rip up the subfloor and remove sheetrock from that corner, but it was still much better than tearing down the entire room.
Wonderful, except that the walls in that corner are now unfinished plywood. It does have a certain post-apocalyptic chic, but it’s not ideal for that soothing retreat experience you want in a bedroom.
Next step is covering the plywood. Again, Chuck had an inventive solution. Remember the bamboo flooring on the living room ceiling? We had tons left over.
It’s $1.99/square foot at a nearby big-box store, and it’s an inexpensive way to beautifully cover a large surface area on a ceiling or wall. Chuck told me he would never actually use bamboo flooring on a floor because it scratches too easily. And the online reviews for this product bear that out, with many people giving it one star out of five, complaining that in a matter of weeks their floors were a beaten-up, scratchy mess. On our ceilings and walls this won’t be a problem. Here’s Chuck beginning this morning.
And here’s the near-finished result. Just a few pieces need custom angle cuts along the ceiling. Part of the trick is cutting the boards to different lengths so it looks deliberately random, not like we forgot to measure. The bedroom will be beautiful when it’s finished.