House Painting- Before & After

The painting of the exterior of the house has been completed!  They took about 2 weeks- we were really lucky with dry weather!

Here are the before & after pictures!

FRONT- BEFORE

FRONT- AFTER

BACK- BEFORE

BACK- AFTER

SIDE- BEFORE

SIDE- AFTER

SIDE_ AFTER

SIDE- BEFORE

I'm so glad that we went with the brighter red!  When I look back at photos of the original red we had selected, it looks much too pink!

I like this angle, and how the old & new sections look blended, now that the painting is complete!

The paint we used was Benjamin Moore.

House colors:

Body-Hale Navy

Trim- Smoke Embers

Accent- Heritage Red

Threshold boards- Platinum Gray

Related Posts:

Scraping

Fixing siding

Primer

Body of House

Accents & Trim

A few detail shots:

Back Porch ceiling, new light fixture, bell.

I love how crisp the trim work is!

Old brass oil lamp through the window

Kitchen Complete!

After almost a year of construction, we're happy that the kitchen is pretty much done!  There are still some small items that I'll detail in another post, but it's functional and we're loving it!

View from back door

View from Dining Room doorway

The windows let in lots of light!

View from sitting at the kitchen table.

Reverse wall of kitchen- basement door on left, dining room door on right

Kitchen eating area

View from the corner between stove & sink

Reverse- island seating

mudroom area & half bath

mudroom area

 Here's a quick look at what else we accomplished with this project:

Added a Butler's Pantry... so much storage!

Exterior... we plan to get the house painted this spring.

The old kitchen became the dining room...

We moved the laundry room upstairs... still a lot of finishing touches to do, but no more running to the basement to turn the wash!

We added a new master closet & bathroom...

There's also several smaller items that deserve mention...
-the addition of the coat closet in the downstairs hallway
-additional lighting added to the hallway
-we gained storage space in the attic
-the third floor stairway landing was expanded, which makes it much roomier
-the ceiling of the master bedroom was replaced
-the family room now feels bigger since we moved the piano into the parlor (the old dining room)

Dining Room- Before & After!

Here are pictures of the finished dining room, and a comparison of when it was the old kitchen!







Cooking in here is already becoming a distant memory (thank goodness!)

View from the kitchen doorway- looking through to the parlor

I put plates up on the top.  It's going to be a lot of fun to switch them out for the different seasons.

Currently, I put up the "Colonial Heritage Series" which was a collection by Ridgewood Fine China Company, sponsored by the Early American Society.

The images are paintings of well know colonial houses.  My dad had bought them for my mom on their tenth wedding anniversary.

The second set is a fish set placed above the buffet.

I love the way the green pops agains the brown wall, and the way the brown comes out in the fish!  These my mom & dad gave us.  They are marked with Carrollton Pottery Company on the back- which was in business from 1903-1930.  There are also the little bone dishes to go with them! They are so different, I just love them!

White Washing the Beams

There were a couple of reasons we decided to keep the beams exposed for the media room...

   -It would be too closed-in/low if we sheetrocked the ceiling at the height of the beams.

   -If we enclosed the beams in sheetrock it would look too modern for our taste & the style of the rest of the house.

The only problem was that in addition to the original 1700's beams, there were some newer boards that had been added through the years.  You could clearly see the difference between the hand-hewn beams and the new ones.  

You can see the new beams tucked
behind some of the old beams.

To make them blend together better, we decided to do a white wash on them.  I think this will also make the room feel higher than if we kept them dark.

I mixed roughly two parts of water with one part paint and got to work.  I had to get used to the drippiness of the paint, but once I got started it went fairly quickly (for having to do all four sides of each beam!)

Before

After

Before

After

Before

After

An added bonus is that the roman numerals on the hand-hewn beams now really pop!

You may also have noticed that Mike got a coat of primer on the rest of the room.

Next up is adding some color!