There are two things that we think are incredibly difficult to shop for: 1) curtains and 2) rugs. We have a hard time agreeing on patterns and colors. Rugs are especially hard for us because our old house has big, oddly-shaped rooms that require big, oddly-shaped rugs. Total budget busters.
A few weeks ago, we went rug shopping for our office and hallway. Here’s what we got:
The curvy diamonds remind us of some Moroccan patterned rugs we’ve seen at West Elm and Pottery Barn. For a rug this size, we were expecting to pay $500ish, but we we paid half that price. Why? Because this is not a rug. It’s carpet.
We went to a carpet store and asked if they could custom cut a rug for us. We picked this pattern, and they cut it down to size and did a binding edge with a matching fabric. Viola! Custom rug in a non-standard size for $250.
The texture reminds us of jute rugs, but it’s super soft. And really easy to vacuum, which is huge for us since our dogs are shedding like crazy.
Speaking of which… In case you’re wondering how our painted floors are holding up to 2 dogs, check it out:
Our floors went from smooth-and-glossy to scratched pretty much the day after we brought Margot home in December.
We’re OK with it since painting was always a temporary solution. Just thought we’d throw it out there for any dog owners who are considering painting their soft wood floors. All the more reason to throw down some rugs.
We were a little worried that the patterned rug would clash with our patterned curtains, but we like how they look together:
As The Dude would say, “That rug really tied the room together.”
In other office news, we painted the trim and sealed up the brick wall.
Here’s how the brick looked before sealing:
The dry brick was shedding even more than our dogs. We’d dust in the morning and by the evening, there would be a thick layer of red and white chalk all over the furniture and floors. We couldn’t keep up with the vacuuming and dusting, so we decided to paint the wall with a clear coat of masonry sealer. Here’s what it looked like after one coat:
It looks much less dry and pasty. The red of the brick pops more, and — yay! — it’s not shedding anymore. We’re not sure if we’re going to do a second coat because the first did such a great job.
Here’s how our desk is looking these days:
New notepad from Anthropologie:
Recycled leather pen holder:
New printer — this is only living on the desk temporarily until we figure out a better place for it:
The black dresser is also temporarily in the office until we find a better spot for it:
We still need to make frames for our art. The prints are just leaning against the wall for now. It’s starting to look pretty finished, huh?
Also looking finished: our hallway. We fiiiinally painted the trim and threw down a runner so it’s officially done.
We ordered a custom runner from the same carpet shop. It didn’t photograph well because it’s still all curly from being rolled up. We were too excited about sharing it to wait.
This runner looks a lot like jute from a distance, but when you look closer, it’s a tan and light blue pattern:
The 2′x12′ runner was also $250. We couldn’t find any runners this long in stores, so we thought it was a totally fair price. We’ll post better pictures in a few days when the rug has uncurled itself. Stay tuned for that. We’ll be back soon with more updates!
Or office desk, rather. Take a look at what Bradley worked on yesterday:
That’s our new office desk. It’s over 8-feet wide and has plenty of room for both of us to sit side-by-side. The desk top was actually a counter that Bradley’s company started creating but then abandoned to work on something else. It was wrapped in furniture blankets and exiled to the basement until a few months ago, when Bradley’s boss did some spring cleaning. He didn’t want to throw out the counter, but also didn’t want to keep it. So we offered to take it off his hands.
It looks like wood, but it’s actually plywood covered with a 1/4″ spalted maple veneer.
That crazy pattern — spalting — is caused by fungus. Basically the tree died and rotted naturally. And then it was reborn as a fancy veneer.
You can see some little holes throughout the table top:
Those were made by worms and bugs.
Here’s how Bradley took an unfinished counter and turned it into a desk. First, he had to veneer the sides because they were unfinished.
He attached a thin strip of veneer to the table using heavy-duty wood glue. He taped the veneer to the desktop to make sure it dried in perfect position. The wood strip was both longer and taller than it needed to be. You can see it sticking up along the edge of the table:
The next step was to shave off the excess wood and get a nice, smooth edge. Bradley used a router for that:
After that, it just was a matter of attaching the legs:
We stayed in Brooklyn for an extra day so Bradley could weld a set of 3 legs for the desk. (They haven’t moved the metal shop out to Pennsylvania yet, so that’s where all the welding happens.) He used 1.5″ angled steel for the box part and a piece of steel for the “wings” that connect to the wood.
Instead of using chemicals to color the steel, we decided to leave it as is.
We liked how the edges were a shinier grey and the rest of the was a more dull black. Bradley gave the legs a clear coat of varnish:
Then we carried it up to the office so he could assemble the legs:
He put a couple of felt furniture pads on each leg to keep them from scratching up the painted floor:
Then we flipped it and pushed it against the wall:
Ta-da!
We brought up one of our zebrawood chairs to try out the desk. Bradley mock typed for me:
Those chairs are actually for our (currently nonexistent) dining room table, and we’re not really sure if they’re working with the table.
Both wood grains are so unique that we were worried they would fight for attention. The spalted maple is much quieter than the super obnoxiously loud zebrawood chairs. So we’re considering using these as our office chairs. They’re much more comfortable than they look — I promise.
After setting up the desk, we got super geeked about how finished the room is looking. Sure, we still have to putting up and painting the trim, but — holy crap! — we have furniture in there. Finally! With our spending freeze officially over, we decided to go shopping for office accessories.
Here’s how our desk looks today:
Finding those two lamps at Target was nothing short of a Christma-Hanu-Rama-Kwanzaa miracle. Bradley and I do not agree on lamps. We’ve been vetoing one another’s lamp choices for months now. He thinks my picks are too girly-grandma-chic. I think his picks are too boring. But these puppies, we both agreed on right away:
They’re a good mix of vintage and classic and modern and industrial. And the oil-rubbed bronze fits right in with the black floors, doorways and desk legs. We snagged two of those for $30 a pop.
We also picked up this big apothecary jar:
Since I work from home a lot, I’ll be spending a lot of time in the office. Which means my four-legged friends will be spending a lot of time in the office, too. So we’re using the apothecary jar to stash dog treats in. Margot’s obsessed with it:
She keeps sneaking off into the office to stare at the jar.
We’re thinking about moving it closer to the middle of the desk just in case she gets tempted to climb up there. (She jumped up on the coffee table and ate an entire bag of treats a few days ago. Total brat!) We also picked up this cute ramekin to use as a water bowl for the pups:
We keep a water bowl in the kitchen, which is right under the office. One of our dogs is no spring chicken, and walking up and down stairs is getting harder for her. So we decided to put a water bowl upstairs so she doesn’t have to go far.
The varnish that we used on the desk legs has a really strong fresh paint smell. It’s going to take a few days to fade out. In the meantime, we’ve picked up a diffuser to help de-stink the office.
We liked the cute printed bottle, and the lemongrass smell is so fresh and so clean-clean. We liked it so much that we picked up another one of these for the guest bedroom. We also got couple of letter trays to keep our paper messes under control. His:
And hers:
A set of 3 magazine boxes helps divide the desk in half. The boxes and the trays were on sale for $4 each. Not bad! We also got a small waste basket to sit under the desk:
We liked how plain and simple the little metal bin is. What we don’t like: those cords in the background. Once we have our laptops and phones in the office, there are going to be even more cords under the desk. We’re working on a solution for that and we’ll share it soon. One more thing we’re working on:
We need to find a rug that fits the room. This grey IKEA rug used to feel so massive in our Brooklyn apartment. Now it looks tiny. We might use it for the laundry room later on, but we’ll leave it in the office until we find something that fits better. For now, it’s a good perch for Margot to keep an eye on that treat jar:
Still there. Good.
Here’s what’s left to work on in the office before we can call it officially done:
Install shelves in the closet
Finish putting up trim (in the closet and along the brick wall)
Paint the trim
Install bookshelf (or bookshelves?)
We’ll also eventually put in a dimmer for the recessed lighting because it’s too bright otherwise. But there’s no rush on that.
Oh, hey, remember when the office used to look like this?
Every now and then I like to dig up the before pictures to make the “work in progress” pictures look even fancier:
We’ve been working hard to cross everything off of our November / December To-Do list, and we’re getting close. We’ll be back with some more updates — including one biiiiig project — soon. Stay tuned!
The good news: we’re ready to move into the guest bedroom! The bad news: it’s not going to happen until the weekend. Actually, that’s probably bad news only to us. It’s getting super cold now, and the dining room — currently our bedroom — is completely un-insulated. We’re up to 3 down comforters now. And hoodies. And sometimes socks.
We’re geeked about moving into the guest bedroom because it’s directly above the wood stove so it stays nice & toasty. Crawling into an icy cold bed every night is getting a little old. So we focused mostly on the guest bedroom the entire weekend.
I had a little time to tackle a quickie project in the office. Remember our ridiculously long curtains?
I needed to hem those puppies before they got dirty. (Jabba the Mutt loooooves nesting in any fabric she can get her hands on.)
The only problem is that we don’t have a sewing machine. And we can’t get one either since we’re on a spending freeze for the rest of the year. Even if we did buy a sewing machine, there would be a pretty big learning curve. Neither of us has sewed in years. And the last time we tried, it was kind of a disaster. (Where exactly does the bobbin go?)
We decided to go the no-sew route, which actually ended up being way easier and faster than firing up a sewing machine. I started by measuring each curtain to see how much I needed to lob off:
I used a tape measure and let the bottom touch the floor. The top touched the top of the curtain:
That gave the me the distance between the top of the curtain and the floor. In this case, it was 85″. Our floors are slightly uneven, so each curtain was a little different.
Next, I set up the ironing board in front of the window. I scootched it as close to the window as possible.
Each set of our IKEA curtains came with hemming tape, so we didn’t have to buy any. It’s pretty cheap at fabric stores, though.
This panel were 92″ long, and I wanted it to be 85″. So folded over 7″ and ironed it to get a crisp line.
After that I checked to make sure the fold was correct. I let the curtain fall to the ground and made sure the fold line hit the floor. Then I ironed the fold again — this time with the hemming tape stuffed inside. I simply unrolled the hemming tape and lined it up along the fold. Easy!
I gave the tape a few minutes to cool off (it peels up when it’s hot). Then I cut the excess fabric and tossed it. And that’s it.
Here’s how the curtains looked after I finished:
Sorry about the drastic change in lighting. It was dark by the time I finished! Anyway, the curtains grazed the floors just like West Elm image we used for inspiration:
We haven’t swept or mopped up there since we painted the floors. It’s been nearly a month. We’ve been stomping around up there in our work shoes, tracking plaster dust and grime all over. And they’re looking pretty grody.
Our dirty floors are actually the reason we didn’t move into the guest bedroom last night. We needed to sweep/vacuum and mop, and we were too exhausted. We’re in Brooklyn for the next couple of days, so we won’t get to it until Friday. Eep. Can’t wait!
We’ve had a busy weekend, and there are a ton of pictures we have to share. Stay tuned, peeps.
In our last post, we showed you our new firewood rack. We also inadvertently showed you another project we worked on this weekend: our new dining room windows.
The window above the stack of firewood looked like this last weekend:
A rogue chunk of plaster went flying through the single pane glass during our dining room demolition. We covered it up with a sheet of plywood and ignored it for over 6 weeks. You can see a bit of the top right hand corner:
We pretended we were pioneering a new look called shanty-chic. Our neighbors pretended not to notice.
While I stacked firewood in the basement, Bradley swapped out both windows by himself. It took him about an hour to do both. And that includes removing the old window weights and insulting the hollow crevices. (The process was exactly the same as when we changed the windows in the office upstairs. You can read about that here.)
Here’s how the windows look now:
The dining room was always one of the most cold spots in our house — more so when our window was busted and cold air came streaming in. After swapping out the window, we noticed a difference right away. The room stays warmer, even though the walls aren’t insulated. And it’s only going to get better from here.
We can officially scratch dining room windows off of our Just Say No(vember) to-do list. We got a head start on another project as well:
A few weekends ago, we picked up some curtains for the office and guest bedroom.
We snagged 3 sets of the Hedda Blad for $15 a pair. And 2 sets of Matilda for the guest bedroom for $24.99 a pop.
We picked up 5 Skuggig curtain rods for $20 a pop.
IKEA’s instruction sheets are a little cryptic, but we managed to figure them out. First things first: we measured out how high we wanted our curtain rods and marked the wall:
Next, we drilled our pilot holes:
We put wall anchors into each hole.
Wall anchors help distribute weight of whatever you hang on them, so we like using them for things like curtain rods.
Putting in wall anchors is super easy. You gently push the anchor into your pilot hole, then use a hammer to lightly tap it in. After that, you put your screw right into your anchor and you’re set. (If super-detailed instructions float your boat, check out this site.)
Next up, we hung our rods:
We decided to cut our rods because they were much wider than our curtains.
The curtain rods are aluminum so we could use a grinder to cut them. We marked our cuts with painter’s tape and lobbed off a bit from one end.
The guest bedroom curtains are a gauzy white with a light vertical stripe pattern.We love how they let in plenty of sunlight but still give us lots of privacy. We decided not to hem the guest bedroom curtains because we liked how they grazed the floor. Curtain length is kinda tricky. Too short and they look silly, too long and they look comical. We asked ourselves WWWED — What Would West Elm Do?
One one problem: our window has a radiator right in front of it.
Doh! Not so pretty. And we can’t just turn it around and shove it near the wall because it’s too wide. Luckily, we have an extra radiator in the purple room:
We tore down the wall between the purple room and the master bedroom, so we don’t really need another radiator in there. This one is taller and skinner than the guest bedroom radiator. We could — hypothetically — put it next to the window. That way the curtains wouldn’t be in the way. We dragged it into the guest bedroom to give it a shot:
We had to do a quick swap of the pipe fittings. Bradley headed them with a soldering torch:
He heated the fitting and then we tried to pry off the fitting with a wrench. It took longer than we expected.
…annnnnd the fitting still didn’t come off. So we left the radiators for another day and hung curtains in the office:
These puppies definitely need to be hemmed.
We used the same curtain rods in both the guest bedroom and the office, but they look totally different:
The office ceilings are so short (less than the standard 8′), so we tried hanging the rods from the ceiling. We loved the way they look similar but different.
We snuck in the next morning to see how the curtains look with sunlight streaming in:
Ooh la la!
Love that soft glow!
We also snagged this clock from IKEA:
We loved its simple, old-school-cool look. And when we saw this, it went straight into our cart:
We couldn’t help ourselves — we’re total suckers for pugs.
We’re off to catch up on Dexter and The Walking Dead rest up for this weekend’s projects. We’ll be back with updates soon!
We rolled on our second and third coats of floor paint this weekend, and we. are. done! Here’s how they look now:
So shiny! It’s hard to believe they used to look like this:
We’ve gotten a lot of emails & comments from people who are in the same boat — they were expecting hardwood floors and got ugly, old soft pine flooring instead. Our first word of advice: don’t panic! There’s hope. We’re going to share all the details of how we got our floors from gross-&-grungy to gorgeous. Remember that this is just what worked for us. It may or may not work the same for you.
It all starts with the right paint. Home Depot, Lowe’s and Cole’s (a local chain) suggested an oil-based primer followed by 3 coats of heavy-duty latex. The paint department employees at each of the 3 stores insisted that latex has come a long way and that the special (aka very expensive) floor paints are super durable. We were pretty skeptical, but decided to give it a show. We got a gallon of the recommended Benjamin Moore primer and paint to test out. Long story short: it sucked. And at $50 per can, that was an expensive lesson to learn. We’re still bitter.
So we decided to talk to a paint specialist instead. We went to a company in Brooklyn that sells only professional-grade paints, stains and other finishing products. These guys know their stuff. Here’s what they told us about painting soft pine floors:
Never, ever use latex on floors. Ever.
Oil-based paints are much more durable.
Make sure the floors are squeaky clean before painting.
We vacuumed twice, then used wet rags to scrub the floors. We tried using tack cloths, but they missed a lot of dust, left residue on the floors and made our fingers feel sticky. Wet rags worked just fine.
We want the paint to soak into the wood, not sit on top of the wood. Sooo…
Sand the floors really well to make them as porous as possible.
You can read about our floor-sanding adventure here.
Don’t use a primer.
Yup. This totally goes against everything we’ve ever been told about painting. But we want the color to soak into the wood — not the primer.
Thin out your first coat for maximum soakage.
Mix paint thinner into your oil-based paint to make it really runny. We did a ratio of 1/3 parts paint thinner to 2/3 paint and our first coat was very watery. Be careful not to splatter it on the walls. We have a little touch up to do in the guest bedroom from our overzealous rolling.
Roll a paper-thin coat.
This is a general rule for painting, but it’s extra important when painting floors. We don’t want any clumps or globs because they might peel up later. Our first coat was so thin, we were worried we that we thinned it out too much. That’s how we knew we were doing it right.
Lightly scuff the surface in between coats.
Don’t skip this step. It’s tedious and boring, but necessary. Glossy paint doesn’t stick to other glossy surfaces. Scuffing up the surface gives us a nice, rough surface for the paint to stick to. We used 320-grit sandpaper and an orbital sander.
Second and third coats: use full-strength oil-based paint.
Again, roll paper-thin coats and scuff up the surface in between coats. Depending on the paint and the floors, more coats might be necessary. Just keep scuffing and keep painting until the floors are covered.
Our paint guy also gave us a little insight about why you shouldn’t buy your floor paint at general hardware stores. The VOC content of oil-based paint is much higher than latex, and a lot of people are buying low-VOC paints these days. Hardware stores stock up on whatever is selling, so you might have to go to a specialty store to get a durable paint.
We picked up a 5-gallon bucket of glossy black oil-based for about $90. Compared to the $50-a-gallon Ben Moore latex paint, this is a serious bargain.
Time to get to work:
We used a paint mixer attachment for our drill to give the bucket a good mix. The attachment is metal so it’s reusable, and it costs about $8. After that, we poured a little paint into our rolling pan, added paint thinner, and gave it another whirl. Then we rolled it on.
Here’s how our first coat looked after it dried:
Not bad! It wasn’t textured at all and looked more like a stain than a paint.
We let the first coat dry for a full 2 weeks. This is definitely not a requirement, but we thought it might help the floors harden up a little more. Oil-based paints can take 3-4 weeks to reach full-strength. And, sure enough, after 2 weeks of curing, our floors were feeling way better. We tried scratching up the paint in the closet and in areas that will be covered with trim — it didn’t budge.
We also stomped around on the floors in sneakers and work boots to see how the floors held up.
We managed to make them super dirty, but the paint stayed put.
Next step: scuffing.
Not gonna lie: we panicked a little when we saw how much paint we scuffed off. The floors went from a glossy black to a very dull grey. And then we remembered that we have at least 2 more coats to throw down.
We vacuumed the floors and cleaned them with wet rags:
Then we rolled on the second coat:
This is where we started seeing a light at the end of the tunnel. The second coat rolled much more saturated than the first. We wanted a pure black — not a blue-black, but a black-black — and this paint did not disappoint. We were especially excited about painting the guest bedroom:
Those are the “old” floors and are in much rougher shape than the office floors.
With the second coat of paint, they were looking every bit as slick as the office flooring. Check out how the hallway looks with the black door at the end:
We were worried it would end up being too much black and the hallway would look really dark. The soft grey walls help keep things light, and we think the black floors and black doors look really old-school and sophisticated.
We let the second coat dry for 24 hours. This is how the guest bedroom looked the next morning:
And the office:
The floors were super glossy:
We think it adds a lot of dimension to the rooms. It also makes us want to hang our curtains, because we keep getting blinded by sunlight reflecting off the floors.
The best part is that the old floors still look like old floors. You can see cracks, imperfections and wood grain:
They have all the character you’d expect from 130-year-old floors without all the cracking, peeling and staining. You’ll never see that in new hardwood floors. So all you folks who emailed us about finding soft pine floors — embrace ‘em! They’ll make your house look and feel so much more unique.
We scuffed, vacuumed and mopped one more time, and then rolled on coat #3:
We’re going to let the final coat dry for at least a week before we go upstairs. And we’ll wait 3 weeks before we move any furniture upstairs.
A lot of people have warned us that black floors require constant cleaning, but we’re OK with that. We plan on throwing down some rugs, which will help. We also tend to hang out in socks or flip flops when we’re at home, so shoe grime isn’t a huge issue. We’ll just keep vacuuming and mopping like normal and deal with dusty footprints as they come.
And now for our favorite part of the whole project — the part where we realize how much money we saved!
Cost breakdown for painting our floors:
24-hour sander rental + sanding pads = $307.35
5 gallons of paint = $90 (we used less than half of the bucket, so we’ll count it as $45)
Sanding discs for orbital sander = $20
Paint rollers = $8
Grand total for 2 rooms + hallway = $380.35 Cost of buying hardwood flooring for 2 rooms + hallway = $3000 What we saved = $2619.65!
We’re seriously considering going to a bank to take out $2619.65 in pennies. Then we could fill up a room and swim around in money like Scrooge McDuck.
We should also mention that the estimated $3000 was for the absolute cheapest wood flooring we could find at Lumber Liquidators. And it doesn’t include tax. The total cost for buying wood floors for the entire house? $15,000. No thanks!
A few people have pointed out that we could have gone with an “engineered wood” flooring, but we’re not fans. No matter what HGTV says, fake wood floors never look or feel like the real thing to us. Either way, we’re guessing they would have cost more than 380 beans!
—
What we learned from our floor painting adventure:
This could take a while.
Painting floors — the right way — is a long process. Don’t go into it thinking it’s a quickie weekend project. It’ll end in tears. Speaking of tears…
Get knee pads.
They sell them at Home Depot in the same aisle as the the sanding pads….and now we know why. We’ve spent a lot of time on our knees the past few weekends. From scuffing the floors to scrubbing them clean, there was a lot of crawling going on. And, hoo boy, we are definitely feeling it now. So far, we’ve painting only about 1/4 of our entire house. We’ll be investing in some heavy-duty knee pads before we paint any more floors.
Oil-based paints will stank up your house.
Obviously this means you should wear a respirator while you paint. But it might also mean not staying in your house while the fumes clear up. We’re pretty lucky because we can hole up in the living room downstairs. We leave the doors closed all the time, so we never smell fumes in there. We also don’t have any bambinos running around to worry about. And, best of all, we leave for Brooklyn the day after we paint. By the time we get back, the fumes aren’t nearly as bad.
Floor paint isn’t forever.
While we love the look of our painted floors, we know this isn’t a permanent solution. We’re hoping to buy ourselves 5 years of use out of them. After that, if we have the funds, we’ll revisit the idea of installing hardwood floors. Or we could just sand and paint them all over again. We love the flexibility!
Bradley and I are total children of the ’80s, which means two things: 1) we grew up with some very embarrassing haircuts, and 2) Mr. Miyagi was a god. So when it came time to sand our floors, we cued up this YouTube clip and took notes:
Sanding floors, painting houses, defending against attacks from those dastardly Cobra Kai — home renovation is serious business. Now if only we could find a teenage boy we could con into renovating the house for us…
On Saturday morning, we marched on over to the Home Depot tool rental department and came back home with this puppy:
We had the option between a heavy-duty belt sander and a disc sander. We went with the disc sander. According to our Home Depot guy, the belt sander gets a better finish, but it’s harder to use. There was a definite potential of shaving too much off if we didn’t know what we were doing. We’ve never actually sanded floors before so we decided to play it safe. The disc sander still gets a nice finish and it’s way more user-friendly.
The Home Depot guy gave us a quick rundown on the proper way to use the machine. Here’s the right way:
Wear a respirator. Keep the sander close to your body so you can use your body weight to steer it. Keep the cord out of the sander’s way, and keep both hands on the handles at all times.
Here are some wrong ways to use a sander:
1. Do not ride the sander.
2. Do not Superman on the sander.
3. Do not surf on the sander.
4. Do not read a magazine while sanding.
5. Do not let pugs sand your floor. Not without a proper pug sander attachment, anyway.
And most importantly:
6. Do not attempt to sand your floors with anything other than a sander.
Now that we have that cleared up, it’s time to get on with the sanding. We started with a quick check to remove any staples or nails we might have missed:
Then we loaded up the sander with fresh 36-grit sandpaper:
The lowdown on sandpaper:
The lower the number, the rougher the paper.
The higher the number, the less gritty, so really high numbers will smooth and polish.
You can’t jump from a really gritty sandpaper to a really smooth sandpaper. You have to work your way up gradually to get a really even surface. So start with a lower-grit sandpaper, then go a little higher, then a little higher, and finish off with a high-grit sandpaper.
We started with 36-grit, then re-sanded with 40-grit, 80-grit and ended with a 120-grit. That means we had to sand each room 4 times total. And we had to do it in 24 hours. It sounds like a lot of work, but we were up for the challenge. After living with our crusty old floors for 5 months, we were feeling downright giddy:
We flipped the on switch and let ‘er rip:
We had at least 2 layers of paint to strip, but the 35-grit sandpaper ate right through it. We were initially a little nervous about getting too close to the walls, but the disc sander was great for getting right up to the edge:
The sandpaper is underneath the machine, so it didn’t hit our wall at all. We had to replace our sanding discs pretty frequently because the the paint gummed things up:
This isn’t something we planned for, so just a few hours after bringing the sander home, we were on our last set of discs. Oops! Bradley handed over the sander to me while he ran to Home Depot to get more. I was sweating bullets all day because I knew eventually I would have to SAND THE FLOOR! and I wasn’t sure I could do it.
The sander is big. And loud. I had visions of tripping and falling in front of it, and the 35-grit sandpaper eating up my face. Or worse — what if I lost control and the sander crashed through a wall? Or if I got stuck in one spot and it ate a hole through the floor? What if the “off” switch broke and I had to sand and sand forever?
I obviously watched too many sitcoms growing up because stuff like that only happens on TV. At the time, though, it all seemed very likely. But we only had 24 hours with our sander and I had no choice but to get over it. I took a deep breath, grabbed the handles, flipped the switch and started sanding. The verdict? It wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be. It was sort of like using a vacuum cleaner. A really big, heavy vacuum cleaner that vibrates and shakes the entire room. OK, fine, it wasn’t like using a vacuum cleaner at all. But it wasn’t horrifying. I still have a face and our floors are intact. So I call that a success.
We vacuumed after each round of sanding to check out our progress. The sander actually doesn’t kick up dust into the air at all, but it does leave some dust behind on the floor. Here’s how the guest bedroom looked after 40-grit:
Smooooth! When we first removed the carpet, we were so disappointed to find soft pine planks instead of a gorgeous hardwood, but the floors have really grown on us.
After the guest bedroom, we headed over to the office. This room was more of a challenge than the guest bedroom because it has hard pine flooring instead of soft pine. They’re harder to sand. There was also glue under the carpets, and those patches needed some serious work to sand off:
There was also this beast to deal with:
That radiator easily weighs 400 pounds. It’s massive. We thought we could just put it on the dolly and wheel it around, but that left gashes in the wood. To sand around it, we had to pick it up and waddle it over to the other side of the room. We went back and forth with it for 4 rounds of sanding. Still surprised neither of us ended up with a hernia from that.
Here’s how the office looked after sanding:
It was already dark by the time we finished, so we got to test out our new recessed lightbulbs:
It took us 3 trips to the hardware stores, but we finally found bulbs that sit really far back in the can and cast a nice light. The others all either sat out too far or looked too blue, so we returned them. We’re loving how the lighting adds instant drama to the room:
The little space right outside the office didn’t sand so well:
We went over it for what seemed like forever, but the paint never quite came off. We’re not sure if it’s just soaked really deeply into the wood, but we scuffed it so much that our paint will definitely stick to it.
By the time we finished all 4 rounds of sanding in the office and guest bedroom, it was 8PM. We still had the hallway to do, but we also didn’t want to piss off our neighbors. I did a quick check to see how loud we were being by running out to the yard and standing right in front of the fence that divides our property from our neighbor’s. Inside the house, it sounded like a tornado was happening upstairs. Outside, it was barely a hum. I had to strain to hear it. Looks like all our insulation and new windows helped soundproof the place as well as keep it warm!
We decided to keep going and finish up the hallway before going to bed:
We’d been sanding for over 9 hours by the time we finished, and we were wiped out. We didn’t bother cleaning up after we finished. On Sunday morning, we went back up to vacuum and take some daylight pictures:
And then we decided to go ahead and sand the dining room floors. Bradley spent part of Saturday prepping the room while I sanded. We weren’t sure whether we’d have time for the dining room, but we wanted to be ready just in case. Good thing, too, because we had 4 hours still left on the clock and that gave us plenty of time. Here’s what they looked like before Bradley prepped the room:
And here’s how they look now:
You can also take a peek at the afters in the “no” pictures above. My favorite:
I love the look on Jabba’s face in that one. Don’t feel sorry for her, peeps. That dog loves our shenanigans.
Coming up next:
We’re painting our floors! I’d better go brush up on Mr. Miyagi’s recommendations. Is it side-to-side? Or up-down? I forget. We’ll be back with more updates, so stay tuned.
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What we learned from our floor-sanding adventure:
Give yourself plenty of time.
Our Home Depot offers a 4-hour rental and a 24-hour rental. The 4-hour rental is $20 cheaper, but we’re pretty sure we couldn’t finish up even one room in that amount of time.
Buy more than you need.
We could have saved an emergency trip to Home Depot by stocking up and then returning all the unopened packs for a refund when we took the sander back. Luckily there are 2 of us here, so 1 person could sand while the other ran to Home Depot. And that brings us to the most important lesson we learned…
It takes two.
Having 2 people around was a major help in getting 3 rooms and a hallway sanded in less than 24 hours. One person could sand while the other prepped the next room. We also traded off sanding duties every couple of hours. That way our arms could rest up in between sanding sessions, but we still plugged along at the same pace. Plus, the sander was crazy-heavy. It definitely takes 2 people to haul that thing up and down stairs. Partner up, people! Now show me….SAND THE FLOOR!
I cackled at my own post title for far too long. I may also have snorted and spilled a little coffee on my own lap. Blogging: it’s a dangerous business.
We’ve been talking about painting for months now, and this weekend, it was finally, fiiiiiinally time to put some color on the walls. But first, we had to have a mild freakout about the colors we chose.
See, ever since we told people we were ready to paint, we started getting comments that made us uncomfortable. Like “Ooooh, can’t wait to see some crazy awesome colors!” Or worse: “You’re both designers, so I bet you’ll pick amazing colors!” Cue the clammy hands and schweddy foreheads.
Suddenly our colors seemed like lame and boring versions of the colors we really wanted. We cracked open each gallon and peered at the colors we had been so in love with, and barely recognized them. We felt jilted. Betrayed. We raised our gnarled fists to the sky and cursed Benjamin Moore. And then we made a fresh pot of coffee and got to painting.
Here’s the thing, peeps: color is a subjective thang. You may love the colors we’ve chosen or you may hate them. We’re not gonna get our collective panties in a bunch. What’s important is that they fit in our space and with the vision we have for our whole house. So, without further rambling, here’s the color we picked for the office:
That’s Benjamin Moore Shenandoah Taupe AC-36. We looked at approximately 40 billion paint chips before we agreed on it. We picked it because we loved the warm grey-brown tone and because we thought it would make the itty bitty office feel a bit bigger. Our biggest challenge with this room is its shorter-than-average ceilings. Average ceilings are 8′. The office has 7.5′ on the dot.
Here’s the fun part: we dug through our old posts and found the official before pictures. We’ll break down the before and after for each angle. Squee! We’ve been waiting to do this for 5 months now! Lets jump right in:
So. Much. Better. Here’s a view from the hallway looking in. You can catch a glimpse of the Smurf blue carpet we removed the day we picked up the keys to the house:
Standing in front of the brick wall looking at the other end of the room:
Here’s a better look at the recessed lighting. There are 3 that run down the center of the room:
View from the doorway looking in:
Standing in the corner from the last set of photos, looking towards the doorway:
And, finally, the closet. I couldn’t find great before pictures, but you get the general idea. It’s way back in the corner:
We love how the taupe looks next to the raw brick:
But nothing made us happier than seeing the way taupe looks with a crisp white:
Ooh la la! We swooned when those went on. We know plain white switch covers aren’t a big deal, but feast your eyes on what used to light up our room:
I rest my case.
Now lets talk about how we roll. Our paint, that is:
We mentioned in an earlier post that we sprayed on our primer but rolled on our colors. That doesn’t mean it took us forever to roll. Not when we have the right tools for the job.
All of the tools above are made my Wooster except for the red thingy, which is made by Shur-Line. Check out the roller in the middle; that’s a standard-sized roller that everyone has and will give you an idea of how big the other items are. The ginormous roller on the left is what saved us a ton of time. It covers the walls twice as fast as a standard roller. No kidding. We used the mini roller for small spaces like the trimless windows.
The paint tray is also a huge time saver. It holds a gallon of paint, so we basically just dumped the entire bucket in all at once. It took a gallon and a quart to paint 2 coats in the office, so we only had to refill once. We covered the tray with some saran wrap in between coats — we painted a coat, broke for lunch, then came back and painted the second coat.
We also have a couple of roller extensions that let us paint the ceiling and the tall walls without having to drag a ladder all over the place:
We own 2 extensions, one of them by Wooster and the other by another company. The one in the picture above is not the Wooster — it’s the cheap one that works fine. I forgot to take a picture of the Wooster (teehee!) but that’s the one we recommend. It’s adjustable to different heights with a flip of a switch. Love it!
And, finally, there’s my new favorite painting tool: the Shur-Line Edge Painter.
Basically, it’s a painting pad with 2 little wheels on the end. You dip the pad lightly in your paint, then put the pad on the surface you want to paint. You gently line up the wheels to the surface you want to follow (in our case, the ceiling). Then you drag with from one side to the other, leaving a clean line of paint behind you.
Taking a picture while simultaneously trying to paint a clean line was just not happening. Believe me, I tried. Here’s a picture I found that pretty much explains everything I just said, only way more clearly:
We actually painted the office and the guest bedroom on the same day — 2 coats in each room, plus the clean up in between where we washed out our paint tray and rollers — so it really didn’t take us that long.
We used to get the cheapie paint tray sets from Lowe’s, but they don’t hold up well over time. We invested in these slightly pricier Wooster tools (the jumbo roller is $16 and each rolling pad is $8), and honestly, they’re worth it. They glide waaaaay smoother than our other rollers so they don’t leave too much texture on the walls. We actually ended up throwing out our cheapie rollers on Saturday because we were super impressed by the Wooster set. We have a lot of painting to do. Might as well use tools that don’t make us miserable, right?
What we’ve learned:
Go with your gut.
Our first instincts for each of the rooms we painted ended up being pretty spot on. We knew we were in the right ballpark when we found ourselves gravitating towards one color family (like deep greys and dark tans for the office). After that, it was just a matter of finding the one that matched our ceiling best.
Don’t pick color palettes for each room. Pick color palettes for the whole house. We have 9 rooms and 3 hallways to paint in our house, and it would be super easy to get overexcited and paint each one a totally different color. We won’t, though, because we want our house to have a unified feel. This is why we painted the ceilings in the office, guest bedroom and hallway the same color (Olympic Horseradish) and then chose colors that coordinated with the ceiling colors as well as with each other. Each room will still have its own distinct palette, but it’ll all be part of the big picture. Young House Love has a great post about this that’s worth checking out.
I just wrote 1365 words about painting one room.
I’m not sure whether to be proud or embarrassed. Yiish.
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None of the brands we mentioned paid or perked us to write this post. We just like sharing the news when we find tools we love.
I edited down our pictures from the weekend and there was a definite theme going on: white. Kinda ironic since this is our first post about painting, but we’ll roll with it.
We planned on spraying on our primer coat with our paint spray gun. We took it for a test drive a few weekends ago with our DIY moulding project:
We were super happy to find out that the gun paints a perfect, even coat really fast. And not-so-happy to learn that it sends paint flying everywhere. It’s incredibly messy. So we decided to go the overkill route and spent half of Saturday carefully taping and masking everything we didn’t want to paint. Like our windows and our homemade concrete window sills:
We then cleared everything out of the room, including one very heavy, over-sized radiator. We didn’t bother laying down tarp because a) we’re going to sand & paint the floors anyway and b) because taping wasted half a day and we were ready to get painting.
Bradley got a special outfit for the occasion:
I asked him to look excited, and that’s what he gave me. I also asked him to give me a supermodel pose and this is what I got:
He’s no Heidi Klum, that’s for sure. Or maybe he’s Heidi Klum with a broken hip. I don’t really know what he was going for there. Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, maybe.
Bradley got an extension attachment for the spray gun that let him spray the ceilings without using a ladder:
He fired up the gun, and started priming the guest bedroom:
He started with the perimeter of the room, then the ceiling and finally the walls. The guest bedroom walls were already a creamy-white color, so it doesn’t seem like a drastic change in the after pictures, but it felt like a huge difference to us.
Before priming, the walls had scuffs and marks:
After priming, everything felt so fresh and so clean-clean:
That’s with one coat of primer. Our spray gun gives us insanely even coverage!
While the guest bedroom dried, we emptied the office and prepped it for painting. It looked like a Dexter kill room by the time we were done:
Just as a refresher, here’s how the office looked a couple of months ago. This is after we ripped up the baby blue carpet:
And here’s what it looks like now. The office formerly known as The Smurf Room:
Not a hint of Smurfiness left. Thank. Goodness. Even the dark-&-creepy closet ended up looking really nice:
So how did we like our gun for indoor painting? I’ll put it to you this way: Bradley would marry the gun if he could. I might settle for a steamy affair, but only because my heart really belongs to the jackhammer.
It took us less than 45 minutes to prime all 3 spaces, including ceilings and closets. The pictures we’ve posted are after only one coat. We would’ve had to roll on 2 coats to get that kind of coverage. So we’re really digging our gun for that. We would have been priming all weekend without it. The only downside is the amount of spray that ends up on the floors:
Again, this is no big deal for us since we’re going to sand and paint our floors soon. But for someone with nice, hardwood floors, this is no bueno. If you do use a spray gun indoors, mask, tape and drape like crazy. Also, wear a bunny suit so you can bust out a supermodel pose every once in a while:
We waited until the next day before we cracked open a gallon of our ceiling paint:
I know what you’re thinking: it looks white. Well, it isn’t. It’s Olympic C151 Horseradish, smartypants. I used this same paint to update the vintage owl bookends I got for my birthday way back in June. It’s a warmer shade that looks white until you paint it on fresh white primer:
We chose Horseradish for the ceilings because it matches the colors we want in all 3 spaces. This way we have something that totally unifies the different rooms, even though they all have different palettes.
Bradley showed me how to cut the corners using a shield. We don’t plan on putting up any trim up top, so we have to get our lines as clean and sharp as possible. While I cut the ceilings in all 3 areas, Bradley rolled:
We decided to roll on the colors instead of spraying because we didn’t want to go through the trouble of taping and masking all the walls. We embrace our laziness.
See how it’s a warmer white than the super-pasty-white primer? The result is subtle, but we think it makes a big difference in the feel of the space. Bradley reinstalled the recessed lighting after the paint dried so we could ooh and ahh about how the lights looked with the paint:
Meanwhile, I admired the way the ceiling paint looks against the brick wall:
And against the original beam we uncovered back in our demolition days:
I also tried to get a good photo of the wrong lightbulbs we got from Lowe’s that we have to return. We accidentally picked up a box of floodlights instead of recessed lightbulbs, and they look pretty awful. Instead, I took a picture of a little speck creeping along our freshly-painted ceiling:
Eek! Baby spider! We’re having kind of an infestation of spiders right now. No idea where they’re getting in, but most of them are not making it out alive. It’s death by flip-flop for those unlucky enough to wander inside. And then there’s this big mama I found attached the outside of the house:
That thing was — I kid you not — the size of a semi truck. Or my thumbnail. I kinda forgot which one after I caught it looking right at me:
It turned around and I saw it’s big, googly eyes. Not gonna lie: I dropped my flip-flop and ran. Spider 1, Leena 0.
What we learned from this project:
Paper > Plastic. We used both paper and plastic to mask our windows and sills. Plastic is a huge pain in the butt — it’s hard to cut, doesn’t tape well, and paint splatter takes forever to dry. Paper wins.
We heart our spray gun, but it requires a LOT of prep work and a lot of clean-up time. We still highly recommend it for exterior painting, new construction, and priming gut-renovated spaces, but not so much for spraying color in interior spaces.
We paid extra for low-VOC primer, but it was still super stinky. Next time we’ll go with the regular stuff, wear respirator masks and leave the windows open for a few days.
You know that feeling you get when you come back from vacation and sleep in your own bed? Multiply that by about a bajillion and that’s how we felt when the flood watch ended and we came home on Saturday afternoon. Even when we opened the basement door and found this:
Yes, it smelled as bad as it looked.
Our sump pump is easily 30 years old. It works, but every now and then it shuts itself off and you have to give it a swift kick to get things going. We added that to our list of ancient things we need to replace, and spent the rest of Saturday cleaning the entire first floor. On Sunday, we were back to renovating as usual.
Right now we’re trying to finish up some odds-and-ends projects upstairs so we can start painting walls and sanding floors. Here’s a shot of how our hallway looked before the Labor Day weekend:
And here’s how it looks today:
Yup! We’ve been painting doors and doorways! The bathroom door in the hallway isn’t totally finished. I just leaned it up against the doorway (accidentally upside-down) to show what it’ll look like once it’s in place. The hardware is still drying and we need to strip and paint the flip-side, but that won’t take long. The guest bedroom French doors are drying against a wall and need one more coat before they’re DONE-done:
The guest bedroom closet doors are dry and ready to be put back in place:
We never loved these cheap closet doors from Lowe’s. We got them because they were the least ugly of all the doors Lowe’s had to offer. And I practically had to wrestle and hog-tie Bradley in the closet door aisle before he agreed to buy them. They’ve been the bane of his existence ever since. Once the paint dried, though, he was all oohs and aahs. Up close, they don’t really look painted — they look stained:
While our doors and doorways dried, we fixed up a few things that were bugging us about the brick wall. Here’s our before shot again:
See all of those black cracks in our exposed brick wall? Those are spots where the mortar has chipped away. There’s also a big black rectangle at the top right hand corner of the wall where a couple of bricks were removed. We’re not really sure why, but based on lathe strip and old square nails that were used to patch the hole, it was done a long, long time ago. There are also some gaps on the floor where the wooden door frame used to be:
Bradley mixed up a batch of mortar and filled in the gaps:
He scooped mortar into the gap, patted it down flat, and then scraped his trowel across to get a smooth, even surface. Here’s how that spot looked when it dried:
And here’s how the filled gaps will look with our DIY moulding against them:
As for the brick wall, Bradley only wanted to patch the areas that will eventually be covered by a storage cabinet. This way we can experiment with what looks better, a meticulous brick-pointing job or a NYC-style patch job. We see the patch job a lot in old exposed brick walls in NYC. Basically, you take some mortar and smear it right across the brick face:
No need to be neat about it; a patch job is supposed to look industrial and old-school. When done properly, it can give a brick wall a lot of character. Since this spot is going to be covered with insulation and a cabinet, Bradley decided to leave a secret message in the wall. I didn’t even notice it until it was all dry:
30 years down the line, maybe some feisty whippersnappers will rip out our OMG-that-is-sooooo-dated custom cabinet and discover our graffiti. And they’ll get all huffy and puffy about it the way we do when we discover “SCOTT” written all over the house. It’s our way of paying it forward. Setting up challenges for future generations of DIYers. (Insert evil laughter here.)
Here’s how the big patch by the ceiling looks after drying:
Here’s our “in progress” pic again that shows how the dried mortar looks from a distance:
And, just for funzies, here’s what the hallway looked like waaaaay back in late April when we picked up the keys to our house:
Technically, that’s the cleaned up before picture. When we got the house, the hallway was covered in hideous burgundy carpet. We waited about 30 minutes after our closing before we started ripping up carpet, and in all the excitement, we forgot to take a true before picture. (Read all about it in our very first post.) Here’s the earliest documented before picture of the hallway, taken when I was halfway done ripping out carpet tacks:
Ahh, memories.
We have a lot more updates to share from our very busy Labor Day weekend. And unless some other insane force of nature disrupts our progress (Tornado? Tsunami? Locusts?), we’ll be firing up our spray painter this weekend. Can’t. Wait. Stay tuned!
If it were up to Bradley, there would be no moulding in our house. We’re already doing trimless windows and doors, but he’d go one step further and have drywall go straight to the floor with no trim lining the bottom. Unfortunately for him, we live in reality. It’s way too hard to get drywall just perfect when you have a 130-year-old house with wonky floors. Sometimes molding is necessary.
We kicked off our Labor Day weekend by visiting Lowe’s to check out the trim selection. Unfortunately we weren’t off to a great start — we couldn’t find anything we liked. We wanted something that looked clean and modern but everything they had in stock wasfugly curved. It was also ridiculously expensive. Each 8′ piece of trim was $14. Instead of spending major moolah on trim we weren’t in love with, we moseyed on over to the lumber department. We walked out with 2 sheets of 3/4″ MDF for $60. That’s the cost of 4 pieces of trim from Lowe’s, which is barely enough to cover our hallway. Boo-yah!
3 inches is the standard height for floor molding — it gives you just enough to cover the gap between wall and floor, and a little extra in case there were any plaster issues that need covering up. So we set up our table saw to cut 3″ pieces and let ‘er rip.
We got 29 pieces out of the 2 sheets of MDF. We also made enough dust to fake a moon landing in our garage. MDF is basically just sawdust held together by glue, so it shreds like crazy. Check out our dust pile:
We’ve been dying to try out our paint spray gun for a while, and this was the perfect excuse. Bradley grabbed our giant pail of primer:
Annnnd he spilled a bunch of dust in it when he tipped the lid by accident:
He had to skim it out with paper towels — it worked like a charm. After that, he went to set up the paint area while I mixed the paint with the world’s largest stir stick:
I caught up with him as he was reading up on how to get the paint sprayer running:
We purchased this bad boy about 2 weeks BEFORE we had the keys to the house. Seriously. We wanted to start painting so badly that we just went ahead and got it, along with a giant bucket of primer and 2 gallons of paint for the guest bedroom.
They’ve been sitting in storage for 4 months. Guess we jumped the spray gun. Wokka wokka!
Basically it involves putting one hose into the paint and another into a waste bucket. Then you turn the machine on and it starts pumping paint.
Once paint dribbles into the waste bucket, you transfer over both tubes to the paint bucket and you’re good to go.
Neither of us had ever used a paint sprayer before but it was pretty intuitive: pull the trigger and move the nozzle from one end of the wood to the other in a smooth motion.
Here’s something else that’s also intuitive: if you spray paint on your lawn without a tarp, you’ll get paint on your grass.
Whoopsie doodles. At least the paint turned out smooth and perfect, even if our grass did end up looking totally grungy. We finished off one batch of 5 in 46 seconds — yes, I timed it — and then we took a break to set up some tarps before moving on to a new batch.
You’ll notice our half-painted fence in the background. We’re pretty sure that’s the bane of our neighbors’ collective existence. Too bad for them, we don’t plan on renovating the outside of our house until Spring 2012 because we have a whole lotta indoor renovating to keep us busy till then. We like to think of it as increasing property values from the inside out.
Meanwhile, back in our impromptu spray booth… If we had rolled these puppies, it would have taken 2 or 3 minutes per piece of trim. With the sprayer, we were averaging 45 seconds for 5 of them. At this rate, we could get a room painted — floors and ceilings — in 10 minutes!
Another major bonus of spraying instead of rolling or brushing: the paint went on perfectly even and it had no texture whatsoever. We don’t mind the light texture that paint rollers leave behind, but we loooooove the silky smooth textureless look of spraying. The paint also dried super fast. Maybe it’s the thin, even coverage, but every piece was dry-to-the-touch in less than 5 minutes. We gave it about 20 more minutes of dry time and then carried it upstairs to test how it’ll look:
We still have to prime the top, but we wanted to sand the edges a little more before we do that. We’ll probably do it when we’re spraying primer on the walls. The paint sprayer is super easy to set up and use, but it’s a pain in the butt to clean. Waiting till we paint the walls will make life easier.
Speaking of making life easier, someone got a new toy that’s going to speed things up in the angle-cutting department:
We have a lot of frames for artwork and for mirrors that we need to cut, plus a buncha trim for the house. We’re also going to be doing reclaimed plank walls for the laundry room / bathroom downstairs, so we’ll need to cut a lot of angles to get perfectly joined corners. Knowing all of this, we went ahead and splurged on a miter saw.
Bradley wasted no time testing that sucker out:
We’ll be able to join 2 pieces of trim together with no problem. We even cut this teeny tiny piece for a tight corner:
So that’s it. We made our own trim — enough to cover 232 feet, and it only cost us $60 plus a few bucks worth of primer. The entire project took about an hour of actual work, and about 30 minutes of dry time, so it was a quickie.
Our DIY trim is definitely not a traditional floor moulding with rounded edges and base caps and base shoes and junk, but we’re not really the traditional types. We’re going for a more modern, minimalist look upstairs and these fit right in with our cement window sills and our bold doorways. Once we paint the floors and trim black, they’ll be more of an extension of the floor rather than a moulding along the wall.
What we learned from this project:
Standard moulding kinda sucks and it’s way overpriced.
If you’re into that traditional curvy look, all you need is a router and a base board router bit. It’s just one added step in between the cutting and the priming.
We’re not really sure how much money we actually saved by going the DIY route, but we’re pretty sure it’s enough to fill a small room with coins and swim around in it like Scrooge McDuck. For 60 beans and 1.5 hour of our three-day weekend, we made enough molding to cover all of the rooms and hallways upstairs. We might even have a little extra leftover.
Spray guns: best $200 we’ve ever spent, hands down.
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Legal junk: none of the brands mentioned or shown have paid or perked us for writing about this post. They’re all things we paid for and we use ‘em because we love ‘em.
