Our Home’s New, True Colors
Rebuilding a Beautiful, Vacant Historic Detroit Home (Episode 42)
Will painting ever end?!
We’re on week 6 or so of painters working full time and finally, we get to see paint on walls! Our painters Jeff and Kurt have been largely focused on prep work and sanding throughout the house and so not much has visually seemed to change even though a lot of work has been happening behind the scenes.
We finally have covered the last of the yellow paint in the house, all of our yellow rope molding and yellow painted wood trim is at the very least primed if not completely painted. With the yellow covered, it means that we have officially touched every single surface in the house, walls, floors, windows, ceilings, doors, everything has been touched in our home. Our ceilings outside of a couple rooms are completely repainted fresh white and look spectacular with our now glossy white rope and decorative plaster trim. 2nd floor and main Doors are all sprayed their new dark grey color and Brandon is in the middle of stripping our 3 remaining doors on the 1st floor so that they can eventually be re-stained.
Starting to hang doors
With our doors finally painted, Brandon and I took to start rehanging some doors and reassembling our freshly cleaned hardware back onto them. This gave us a opportunity to really see our color choices come together for the firs time and so far, we are really happy with them!
With essentially all prep work complete, we finally got the satisfaction of our first finished room this week. Our former library has now been completely repainted, and since we took the time to remove all of the paint from our hardware, once it was reinstalled, this room looks spectacular! Deciding to paint the ceiling a lighter shade of the wall color is one decision we love so much now that we’re planning on doing it in our living room as well, our ceiling medallions and other plaster work pops so much more and it will be especially helpful in calling attention to our even larger plaster work in the living room.
The only surface untouched in the dining room now is 2 walls behind the piano which we plan on wallpapering. We’re nearly done selecting wallpaper for several spots in the house and once they arrive, Jeff will be able to install our choice in the dining room which will be our new lounge/bar space.
Wallpaper!
Another fun step for us has been picking out things like wallpaper. We’ve got 4 places at the moment where we’ll be introducing wallpaper to the house:
- 1st floor bathroom/powder room
- Living room fireplace mantle
- Bar/lounge wall
- 2nd floor pink tile guest bathroom
Our interior designer Jacquelyn has been great at helping us find materials such as carpets and wallpaper. We’ve made our selections and other then some last minute samples for the bar/lounge we’re pretty confident with our choices.
Our rooms will really be taken to another level with the right wallpaper, and I’m really excited to see some of these on full blast in our home.
Chandelier Cleaning
Now that we’ve got 2 painted rooms essentially done, it was time to clean up our grimey chandeliers that have been accumulating dust for the last 7 years. Brandon and I bought a wonderful spray chandelier cleaner called Sparkle Plenty which does a great job, however given the level of cleaning we need, Brandon and I decided to disassemble our crystals and clean everything by hand for a deep clean.
After pulling one apart, we decided as a though experiment to count all of our crystals in the whole home. After some note taking and measuring, I calculated that we have over 450 crystals on our 11 chandeliers and in total, that makes over 25 lbs worth of crystals in the home! Now that we have 2 nice and clean, it’s astounding how much of a difference a deep clean makes in their appearance!
We also spent some time this past week installing a new chandelier! This one in our master bathroom. This room was formerly a guest bedroom attached to our jack-and-jill bath, and as a bedroom, had it’s own mini chandelier. Now that we’ve finished turning it into a bathroom, we wanted to reincorporate a chandelier into the room above the bathtub. Brandon and I installed the chandelier and it looks great with our deep navy walls and brass trimmings!
Master Bedroom
Another last minute decision was made about painting in our master bedroom. After seeing it in another Tudor Revival home in our neighborhood, Brandon and I were intrigued by the idea of painting our trim a dark color somewhere in the house. We decided to go for it in our master bedroom, and so now our trim is all a dark grey and will be painted with a very light grey wall.
Next…
The big thing we are waiting on at the moment besides more paint is for our staircase railing and balusters to finally be put back together! After that, we’re also excited about some electrical finishing touches, and of course, wallpaper!
Our journey isn’t over
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