Shore condo files: paint & floors

As I mentioned already ( click here to catch up on our little secret ), I don't have good before or in progress photos of the work we already completed at the shore place. I'm oddly upset about this but nothing I can do now.

I did find a few crap shots to show you the two things we did right away.


In case you are wondering, that is not me laying on the ground...its my brother taking a break from the hard labor enslavement. Naturally the TV was the first thing that we moved in. I know all of you tv haters are screaming at your monitors right now but I love tv no matter what state I'm in :)

The first being the color on the walls. I wanted something light and beachy but not stark white. So I went with a soft beige color careful not to get anything with a peach undertone (have I mentioned how much I hate peachy beige colors? barf.) If you are curious, I used Behr Parisian Taupe. I would have liked to paint every room a different color but Mr. Limestone veto'd that idea. So we compromised on painting the living room and bedroom in this shade and the kitchen in another (Restoration Hardware Silver Sage, not pictured). In light of the fact he does do all the heavy lifting, it seemed like a reasonable middle ground.

The second change we made was much more work: the floors. The existing carpet was completely disguisting. There were blood stains as well as myserious marks of unknown origin. We pulled up that nasty business right away. Oh my god, the smell of it! We spent an entire weekend pulling up the one gazillion staples before calling in a flooring guy to sand and poly the the whole thing. (We briefly considered renting the equipment and trying our hand at the project to save money before realizing fixing our mistakes would probably cost more than having it done right to begin with. In fact, the cost of the work was really reasonable b/c we have so little square footage and we did all the prep work) We didn't use any stain b/c we wanted to keep the more casual, natural wood shade.

And even though we had no furniture to speak of at this point, it made such an incredible difference. The odor, which up until that point was like a bad tenant you can't rid of, was evicted. It not only looked better but it felt better. Finally we could focus on the more fun stuff.