Texas hottie Jo writes:

I’m planning to paint my bedroom white. It’s got three windows, two on the south side and one on the west side. I live in Texas, so those are bad exposures in terms of heat and light. Right now the bedroom is a cool bluish-green, which is nice, but I’m looking for something more minimalist.

How on earth do I choose a good, cool white for the bedroom? Do you think it’d be okay to keep the trim Behr Ultra Pure White as it is now, or should I go with a tone closer to a greyed-down white? For what it’s worth, the floors are red oak and the ceiling, after I paint it, will be a blue–something like Yolo’s Water 03.

Thanks in advance for any advice you can give. To give you some idea of how big an idiot I am when it comes to picking colors, I’d originally intended to paint the bedroom peach…..which made it into a blast furnace, visually, before I even got the first wall halfway done.

I can feel your pain, having had a similarly exposed bedroom once upon a time, While I was not in Texas — far from it, in fact — the room in question, for all its window-y goodness, rarely received anything resembling a breeze. In the winter, I baked; in the summer, I broiled, unless I had the AC going around the clock. The good news is that while you can’t change all that much about the way sunlight affects a space thermodynamically, you can change the feel of that space using things like paint and furniture.

Now, first and foremost, cut yourself some slack. Knowing that white isn’t just white puts you one step ahead of many novice home designers! For some context, there are 140 different shades of white in Benjamin Moore’s Off White Collection and hundreds (if not thousands) of whites sold by other paint manufacturers. That said, I’m really digging on the grayish white idea, but for the walls rather than the trim. For what it’s worth, Behr “Ultra Pure White” is one of the cleanest and whitest reasonably-priced white paints out there, and it goes well with a wide range of other whites, so I wouldn’t worry too much about mucking about with the trim unless you’re really keen to paint it.

The benefit of choosing a really, really, reeeeally light gray (or is that quite a dark white?) is that a soft cool neutral can make both the heat and the light entering your space via the windows seem less intense. I know from experience that while an intense stark white can have a cooling effect, it can also ramp up the impact of light, making an otherwise normal bedroom feel like an operating theater or psychiatric cell. And warmer whites? Well, remember what happened with the peach? I get the sweats just thinking about it. As for the YOLO Water.03 on the ceiling, however, I love it!

Unfortunately, as much as I’d love to point you toward a specific color that will solve all of your problems, my ability to browse hues is limited by the vagaries of computer design. What looks on my monitor like the white that will solve all your problems — YOLO Air.05, Benjamin Moore White Heron, and Rodda Paint Co. Mercury come to mind — might very well turn out to be too greenish, too blueish, too dark, or too something else when viewed on your monitor or in person. That said, Colorcharts.org has a paints and stains gallery that lets you check out whites, off-whites, and other paint colors from a bunch of different manufacturers before you ever step foot in a hardware store paint aisle.

Settling on the right white paint, as difficult as it can be, can also be fun. Once you have some whites in mind, contact the manufacturer to find out if they offer either poster-size “chips” or mini-cans. Hang up the poster chips and/or paint largish squares of white on your walls to see how they look in the daytime, the afternoon, the evening hours, and finally, under artificial light at night. It shouldn’t take you long to figure out which whites subdue the intensity of the light streaming into your bedroom while still looking sharp once the sun has gone down and coordinating well with both your red oak floors and your uniquely hued ceiling. The hard part will be choosing between those that satisfy your needs!

(Photo by Andrea_R)

For a mere $289,000, you can own the Jolly Green Giant’s childhood home!

Where I grew up, black houses definitely seemed out of place. The one black house in my neigborhood was dubbed “the witches’ house” and no one trick-or-treated there for fear of being used as a sacrifice in some devilish ritual. Original, I know.

I’ve always thought that big black houses look a tad foreboding. Who knows what shadows lurk inside it’s murky, twilight walls? Plus, they’re a little too Halloween for my taste, though that might just be memories of the witches’ house talking. I want to know how you feel about black houses — would you want to live in one? Or next to one? Take part in the poll, then expand your answer in the comments!

Note: This picture was originally published in the now-defunct Budget Living — you can find an article about the house here.

I could have bought an old, old, old home fraught with problems. When The Beard and I were house shopping, we saw one place we absolutely loved — it had three full floors with lots of rooms on each, high ceilings, wood floors, huge windows, and plenty of old school curb appeal. It also had a foundation so warped that the house itself was starting to lean to the left. Not good. We could afford the asking price, but not the necessary renovations.

So instead of buying an old, old, old home fraught with problems, we bought a fairly new cottage (circa 1950 or so) fraught with…well, ugliness. For example, we’ve been exploring the lovely wood shingles underneath the horrid off-yellow siding in preparation for the day we’ll tear it all off and paint. Then there is the vinyl flooring in the kitchen — it doesn’t quite reach the baseboards, leaving gaps where dust and dirt congregate.

The front door is actually quite new but, as it turns out, we are side door people. Growing up, I always wondered why some families used the front door exclusively while others gravitated toward the side door. We were driven to become the latter sort by practical concerns. Screen doors in the mud room effectively keep indoor cats from escaping, while it’s much easier for them to slip out the front. Plus, it’s nice to be sheltered when holding groceries in one hand while turning a key with the other during a rainstorm. It’s a place for dirty shoes, somewhere to stash a muddy trowel when one is too lazy to walk to the shed, and yet another way to let fresh spring breezes in.

The only problem? Said mud room was ugly, ugly, ugly.

(more…)

I am in the process of redoing my house. As you might imagine, it’s a slow process for a variety of reasons. There is, of course, the money factor. I’d very much like to rip the roof off of my squat little cottage and have the whole thing lifted up. When it comes to the exterior structure of my home, I basically want to copy a picture I ripped out of Cottage Living. Being that I don’t want to take out a home equity loan, it’ll be a while before that happens.

Then there’s time and motivation. My approach to DIY is pretty frenetic — I spend a lot of time thinking about a project until I can see the final result in my head before I do anything. I’ll talk it over with The Beard until he gets my vision so I can be sure he’s on board. He doesn’t always appreciate what I’m picturing in my head until my projects are halfway finished, but he trusts me.

But once I start a project, just try to hold me back! Finishing what I’ve started becomes really important to me because I have trouble concentrating on other things when there’s a partially-done project staring me in the face. For example, when we moved into our house, I had to at least get the bedroom in order before I could go to sleep. It didn’t matter that I was utterly exhausted and midnight had come and gone.

My newest obsession revolves around my formerly nasty space that I call a vestibule and The Beard calls a mudroom. Picture peeling paint, shoddily applied paint, random nails being used as hooks, and a huge warped hook board. All in all, the space was BLEAH. Long story short, I wagered that the nice vertical wood I saw peeking out from under the hook board went all the way up, and my brain started envisioning a white country-style entryway with black cast iron hardware.

Luckily, I was right, because I went right ahead and pried the stupid hook board off the wall over The Beard’s gentle objections. Then I pried out all of the useless nails and filled them up with wood putty, scraped and sanded until I was practically falling over, primed every nook and cranny, and laid down one coat of lovely white paint. I will be laying down a second (and possibly a third coat) today. Boy, are my arms tired.

The only thing I’ve already done today is buy a bunch of cast iron hooks. While searching for said hooks, I found Stag Lane Primitives.

If you like old stuff — sometimes extremely pointless old stuff — you’ll probably like it as much as I do. I’ve found my source for the random assortment of antiques and faux antiques that will sit on the shelves of my vestibule/mudroom, and that makes me very, very happy.