Jenn Martinelli Blogging in Boston

Dear walls in the livingroom: You started off a crazy hideous yellow. It was not your fault. I did not blame you.

We tried to repaint you. We changed our mind about the color several times. We noticed bad patches in you and tried to fix you. We eventually decided we needed to completely refinish all of you.

But now, after spending months stripping paint, sanding, skim-coating, sanding, etc., when we apply our lovely wonderful primer that worked great the first time, you are bubbling... or maybe it's blistering:

Blistering/bubbling paint

Why? Don't you want to be a lovely charcoal grey with a perfectly smooth finish and be able to relax and enjoy your paint color instead of being constantly accosted by orbital sanders and mud knives and chemicals?

I just said to Rob, "We need to have a kid so they can clean up after us."

What this means is I've decided that the fastest way to get our house clean is to take however long it takes to get pregnant, go through 9 months of pregnancy, and then raise a kid for 12+ years until they can do chores effectively, and that there's no faster way to go about it.

I think this is a bad sign.

So as you may remember that we ordered Flor carpet tiles for our condo. Well after weeks of them sitting in the boxes they came in at my office, we finally brought them home and are putting them down.

Here is a small bad photo of Molly the (foster) kitty sitting on the carpet tile in the kitchen:

As we get everything set up more, I'll take more photos with an actual camera rather than a camera phone. We're happy with the tiles and think they will be really nice.

We ordered carpet tiles Friday night. Flor was having a 15% off sale that we wanted to make sure we didn't miss. Of course, the sale ended at 1am eastern time and we were placing our order at approximately 12:57am. Which is further evidence that we suck.

Anyway, we ordered Rake Me Over in Lime for the livingroom:

and Favorite Jeans in Black Label for the kitchen:

We are expecting the tile to arrive sometime this week and trying like hell to have our crap organized and put away by the time it arrives so that we can put the tiles down and make sure they work and we like them, etc.

I am pretty sure that we will love it but until it gets here and we see it I'm a little anxious. We need to move past our $20 IKEA area rugs and get some decent stuff down on the floor. (Note: we are using the carpet tiles to make area rugs, we're not covering up our hardwood floors, don't worry. No, we have not lost our minds.)

Wish us luck!

As you probably know and are sick of hearing about, we are trying to pick our 5th (or maybe 6th?) paint color attempt for the living room. I fully acknowledge that everyone thinks we're insane. We're just trying to do a good job with our place so that we don't hate it in 6 months and want to change things.

We recently got two paint samples from Benjamin Moore and the one that we liked better on the wall was Woodcliff Lake:

(No, that's not our livingroom. Settle down.)

But, we are a little worried it is too dark and/or too brown (we prefer a grayer tone). So, we are now considering the two below colors, which I realize are probably barely distinguishable from each other.

Dolphin:

and Chelsea Gray:

I'm not even asking you to vote, though I assume at least one person might have an opinion. I'm just trying to explain to you the joys of paint. You'd think I could do a better job picking colors and being sure about it since I was an art major. I guess I'm not the painting kind of art major. I should stick to line drawing and black and white photography I guess. SIGH.

Hey guess what everyone? I'm almost in love with our plaster walls, which I completely fucking hated about a week ago. Why? Because my feelings for the awfulness of working with plaster pale in comparison to my feelings about how ridiculously effing difficult it apparently is to install baseboard molding.

I mean, did you know about coping? Yeah. Me neither. Here are a bunch of links about it:

Reader's Digest baseboard coping step by step (This is probably the most thorough explanation and best photos I've found.)

Extreme How To coping tight joints

EHow coping baseboard with a sabre saw

And, if you want to feel like an idiot, as I did after watching this, please view the little video on Bob Vila's site where the guy making a coping joint does it in like 32 seconds perfectly: Bob Vila cutting and installing baseboard video.

OK. So, this whole situation makes me wish I was instead putting up a new plaster wall rather than baseboard. Or maybe thinking I should dump Rob Reed and hook up with a master carpenter stat. (No offense Rob Reed.) It's super frustrating.

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