Lego and Sawdust

We’ve been stressing for a long time about this.

The way our house is laid out, you can see almost every wall on the upper floor from the front door. There is a place in the living room that you can see the living room, front hall, hallway, bathroom, kitchen and dining room walls. There is no place that is a clean break between all these walls, so they pretty much all have to be one colour.

Choosing this colour has paralyzed us for a long time, but now that the new front hall is primed and ready for paint, it was go time. So we did it. 3 trips to Home Depot to pick up paint chips resulted in nothing but more choices, so MrsPages decided we’d hold a Survivor/American Idol showdown. She bubble sorted every single colour chip from the paint store. Then she cut swatches of all the colours we’d been looking at and stuck them on our largest white wall.

Then we started voting chips off the island.

We stood in the afternoon sunlight, a good distance away from the wall. We decided that no matter what we thought of a chip, if the other didn’t like it, it was gone. One vote was enough. They decreased in number, quickly at first then more slowly.

It all came down to a few shades of taupey brown, two shades of light blue and two shades of more dramatic green. We both decided that the blue just wasn’t us. The taupey browns were similar to a colour that we put on a wall as a test a year or so ago, and we decided we didn’t want to go there. So green it is. Behr Tint 410E-3, “Rejuvenate” green, that is.

Here’s the colour, and the action in time-lapse. The first frame is the huge pile of chips we started with. The black marks on the right side of the wall are a triple-light switch without the cover on and the hole where the alarm system wire goes.

[edit - pics of the painted ex-closet area are here]

We used to have a closet at the front door. It was a pain to get to, as it was right behind the opened front door. In the winter, as all 7 of us pile in the front door, the first few in would get pushed off of the postage stamp of linoleum reserved for dirty boots. No one could hang up a coat until everyone moved into the living room so the door could be closed, exposing the closet.

This is was not good.

So, we decided to tear the whole thing out. We’d have an open entryway with hooks on the wall and a bench, and we’d expand the linoleum area by at least a factor of 3. In the picture of the demolition, it’s LittlePage3 holding the hammer, but off to the left is MrSnowy. Ash and MrSnowy helped with tearout and the cleanup. We hate cleanup. We love MrSnowy and Ash for helping with the cleanup.

When we drywalled the newly framed hallway area, MrBrad was there with his tools for 3 days, assisting with the drywall installation and doing the mudding. We hate mudding. We hate dust. We love MrBrad for doing the mudding.

The floor was a wreck under the linoleum, and we needed to cut out some of the hardwoods to put the new floor area down. MrMike is a friend of ours who is also a flooring installer. He came over and did an absolutely beautiful job of putting subfloor in and framing it with leftover hardwoods. He’s just waiting for us to decide on a linoleum pattern and he’s going to install that for us too. We love MrMike for doing the floor. Sorry, MrMike, no pictures of the floor yet.

Ash had some time one her hands and decided she wanted to come over. She spent the time she was here painting the new front hall with drywall primer. MrsPages and the kids did school and normal schedule, Ash just came and painted. She was covered in paint specks and she was tired at the end of the day. We love Ash for coming over to paint “just because”.

This is all just great, but looking back on our whole set of house renovations (not just this closet) I see this pattern repeating itself again and again. Our pictures of the projects are full of friends giving up time and sweat (and occasionally blood) to work with us and spend time here. We feel so unworthy. I’m not sure what we did to deserve the friends we have. Heck, we don’t even serve caffeinated coffee.

I can only hope that we can in some way repay the love shown to us by our friends. Not just happy phone calls and handshakes at church (though those are important too). Love that holds the other end of a sheet of drywall or cleans a roller cover or sands a butt-joint on the ceiling for the third time. Love with feet on.

Love that keeps us going.

[edit - See the painted closet area here.]