Manolo for the Home

When it comes to plain ceilings (i.e., not tin, decorative plaster, or good-looking wood), you have a limited number of options. You can paint them ivory or cream or eggshell, or whatever incarnation of white looks best with your chosen paint color scheme. You can add embellishments like vinyl wall stickers, though that sort of thing can look a bit juvenile and typically works best in kids’ rooms. Or you can go against the grain and paint your ceilings a color other than white.

People are generally afraid to do this. They’re used to painting walls, so when they think of adding color to a room, their thoughts turn to vertical surfaces. It’s also more difficult to coordinate furnishings with accessories with floor colors with wall colors with ceiling colors, omg, but really, it’s not impossible. It’s even easier when you start with a nice neutral for your walls. One option involves painting all your walls the same color, then varying the color of your ceilings by room. Or you can go all-out and have coordinating wall and ceiling colors that differ entirely from room to room.

The best way to approaching painting ceilings is to look for inspiration (some of which I have thoughtfully provided below) then play with color combos using Paint or Photoshop or The Gimp until you find something that works. You can even paint a small test area on one wall and an adjoining bit of ceiling just like you should do with the wall only so you see how the colors influence each other and the room in different sorts of light. To begin, check these out. And if you’ve painted your ceilings a color other than white, tell us about it!

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Brrr, so cold here. And the snow that’s still on the ground has turned that dismal gray color that means it’s no longer at all nice to use for snow ice cream. I’m entirely sick of winter at this point. I’ve exhausted my to-do list of indoor projects needing my attention, and I’m itching to tackle some outdoor projects. Alas, it is too cold for exterior painting and too wet for sanding, so I’m SOL. The worst part is my brain keeps retreating into itself where it can dream of places like this uninterruptedly.

Maybe not places exactly like this, as those lovely little bungalows are in Wells-Next-The-Sea, a seaport situated on the North Norfolk coast in England. I’m sure Wells-Next-The-Sea is quite picturesque just now with all those pretty colors, but I can’t imagine that it’s at all warm, which makes it less than inviting in my mind. Summer (or at the very least springtime) cannot come quickly enough, in my opinion.

(Photo by russelljsmith)

A block of apartments in Chartres, France — a lovely, lovely place — might have looked like any other, were it not for four months of what must have been strenuous painting.

Aren’t they fun? Various areas are done in differing styles so you get a little taste of everything. I sadly don’t know anything about these apartments other than their locale, but more pics can’t be seen here.

When I bought my house, I inherited an old, ugly fence. It’s sort of leaning over in some spots, and I’m ashamed to admit that a small (but rather unnecessary) portion of it fell in not too long ago. What really irks me about my fence is that the paint is peeling like a banana skin almost everywhere. We’ve been so focused on other things that the poor fence has been ignored for more than two years, most likely because it is a backyard fence and thus mainly visible only to us.

Perhaps I should do as Better Homes & Gardens says and invite the neighborhood children to a fence painting party? The recipe is easy… you need some willing youngsters (just don’t mention it’s a chore), some brushes, and a whole lot of paint. I’d also suggest adding numerous drop cloths to the mix unless you’re a fan of technicolor grass. Of course, a fence painting party will really only work for those who don’t mind a fence that looks like it was painted by children or less-than-talented adults, I suppose. But like I said, my fence is in the backyard, so I’m golden.

I’m a huge fan of hardwood floors for both their beauty and their durability, but I’ll admit that they can be pretty boring. Paint can do a lot to fix up a dull floor, but painted wood floors can be a little overwhelming if you’re not showcasing them as the focal point of the room.

Painted checkerboard floors that feature wood floors are a good compromise, as they’re not so in-your-face as, say, a bright blue floor or as blah as a plain white floor, but at the same time they appeal to the eye. Here are six examples:

A soft, low-contrast checkerboard floor doesn’t steal a room’s thunder.

This patterned floor adds a lot of oomph to what might otherwise be a fairly drab kitchen. (via)

This red and white checkerboard floor is playful and fun. (via)

The border on this painted checkerboard floor gives the floor the finished look usually provided by a fine rug. (via)

In a room with built-ins like cabinets, your checkerboard floor colors can match or not, depending on the sort of look and feel you want to achieve. (via)

And when I say you I mean *you* — as DIY projects for the home go, painting a floor is one of the easier ones. The Wood Floor Guide has a how-to that takes you through the floor painting process step-by-step, though I much prefer the how-to on the This Old House web site because it includes not only steps, but also a video.

Trying to figure out just which shade of paint to put in the living room, bedroom, bathroom, or den? While the sample color pots that a number of paint companies are now selling are great, sometimes you’re just not ready to throw a square of color up on an otherwise not-quite-ready-to-paint wall. But those tiny little paint chips from the Home Depot (or wherever) just don’t show you how the room will feel in that color, and to find the right paint hue, you want to view each prospective shade in all the different kinds of light the room will get, from full sun to electric.

Nantucket-based interior and architectural designer Deborah Timmermann has a solution perfect for those who’d rather keep their walls looking pristine before painting. She suggest that to get “an accurate assessment, paint pieces of shirt cardboard to make large samples and tape them to a wall. Stand eight to 10 feet away with your back to them, and look at them in a hand mirror. It helps you see the color in perspective.”

I love this tip!

One of the easiest ways to refresh old furniture or give a fab vintage furniture find a makeover is to paint it. Painting furniture isn’t hard, though admittedly it is easy to get a ‘meh’ result if your entire project consists of nothing more than slapping on a few coats of paint. I’ve painted furniture the right way and I’ve painted furniture the wrong way, and I speak from experience when I say the former furniture looked a whole lot nicer.

So what is the right way to paint furniture? Young House Love put together a step-by-step list that pretty much sums it up, from when to sand (or not) and the benefits of finishing furniture with a few coats of water-based polyurethane to how long to wait before integrating your newly painted furniture into the house. Young House Love doesn’t allow excerpting, so you’ll just have to go check out their instructions.

But I can tell you that it really is as simple as it sounds! If you’d like even more direction, I recommend Furniture Facelifts: A Step-By-Step Guide by Liz Wagstaff and 50 Ways to Paint Furniture by Elise Kinkead. Both are full of great ideas and are easy to follow.

I’ve dreamed of owning a piano for quite some time, but two things have deterred me. One is of the cost of moving the darned things from one home to another. You may not know this, but a lot of people give away pianos on sites like Craiglist. Acquiring a piano can be as easy as paying to have one hauled to your home. But then there’s the second deterrent, but which I mean the crazies who are giving away the pianos.

While I’m sure some of the wannabe former piano owners are perfectly sensible people, the ones I have met were not. Sorry, but you cannot ask me to give you a cash deposit for a free piano that I am taking off your hands so you don’t have to pay to move it into your new fifth-floor walk up. And if you call me five times a day while I’m still finding a piano mover to ask if I’m actually going to take your piano, the answer will be “No, I’m not. Stop calling here.”

Can you tell I’ve been burned on this? No matter, I’m still dreaming of the day I can take someone’s unwanted piano off their hands. It’s just a matter of finding the right person and the right piano. Leah, of Futuregirl Leah Riley’s Art Shop, obviously found the right piano (possibly from the right person). It just needed a little… something.

This is what she started with. Her piano was yellow, which many people might like, but she didn’t like it, and that’s what’s important. It wasn’t just the color that was lacking, however. This piano needed personality!

After a bit of sanding, the piano was primed and ready to accept proper paint. How to paint it was the question, and to come to an answer, Leah conducted a poll letter her blog readers choose between two potential faces.

Faces, you ask? Yes, faces. Monster faces. Adorable, super fun monster faces.

After two coats of Robin’s Egg Blue flat, the piano was looking quite nice and was ready to get its new mug. Had Leah stopped there, it would still have been a successful project, in my humble opinion.

Leah had this to say about her monstrous creation:

The finished piano monster paint job – I didn’t want it to beat you over the head with its monster-ness. Just some subtle monster suggestions. Here it lurks just around the corner, waiting to trip you, pounce, and eat your hands!

Very cool!

When I was in high school, I desperately wanted my bedroom to look like this. Substantial charcoal-gray paint. Minimal furniture. Plenty of glamour. And just enough artwork and embellishment to make it so that friends who visited my bedroom would envy my limited living space.

Unfortunately, I was in my teens without money or anyone to teach me the finer points of decorating and finishing a space, so my bedroom ended up looking more like a very sad goth hideout with posters and clicky-clacky hangings and all the other silly things teenagers seem to like so much. If only I had known then what I know now. C’est la vie, I suppose.

As you may have seen yesterday on Manolo for the Brides, I had Pergo installed in my kitchen yesterday. I have to say I am very pleased with the results, though it rather saddens me that it looks *better* than the hardwood floors I have everywhere else, and those were refinished fairly recently. Now that the very, very ugly blue and white vinyl flooring is gone, I can finally divorce myself from the impulse to use so much blue in the kitchen. It was a little monotonous, actually, for my living room is done in two shades of blue. When we moved in, all the doorways in the kitchen and hallway were edged in dark blue to match the color of the vinyl and we didn’t bother changing it since we had planned to redo the floors before anything else in the house.

Now we are faced with a conundrum. We’re more or less committed to the idea of keeping the walls white because I like a lot of color in the kitchen, but I like it on the counters and such. We all know I love purple, so I’m leaning toward that, but The Beard is unconvinced. I was thinking that painted kitchen cabinets would provide just enough color to make things interesting. The question now is which purple? Here are some I like, as found on My Perfect Color:

Glidden Black Tulip

Color Your World Purple Prince

Sherwin Williams Izmir Purple

Dutch Boy Purple Velvet

Ralph Lauren Athletic Purple

Ralph Lauren Studio Purple

Vote in the poll to tell me (and by extension The Beard) which purple you prefer!