Lights and Mirrors

I hate working in the dark. So much so that I once put a chandelier in my garage. If I'm working on darned near anything and I'm not out in the full sun, chances are I have on my stylish head lamp. I've been working on a not-yet-complete project in my front hallway where I had a single bulb under a heavy opaque shade. It has always been dark in that hallway and I've always hated it. But the lamp shade is so pretty that I have struggled with the decision to replace it.

And then Husband casually said "If you were going to replace it, what would you replace it with?" In my world that's basically permission to rip something down. But we were kind of in the middle of a pandemic and my favorite lighting shop, you guessed it, Bart's Barn, was very closed. I went to Home Depot and took pictures of every lighting fixture I liked. I did the same at Lowes. I made a pinterest board. I obsessed about what lighting fixture I would get. But I didn't buy anything because lighting fixtures are anywhere between $80 and $300 new and they're like $15 at Bart's. I displayed patience in epic proportions. 

Yesterday, Bart's reopened. 

That price tag says $25, but it was also half off. So, $13 later, here we are. I hung it from a cup hook in my garage shelves to paint it. Cause there is no way I'm keeping that early 90's brass in my house. 

I kept the bulbs in while I painted because these are incandescents and I was going to replace them with LEDs and it saved me having to tape the insides of the fixtures. There is a central bulb at the bottom that got stuffed with old grocery store plastic bags and taped up. And so, we paint!

This color is called flat soft iron and it's the same color I used when I spray painted the doorknobs in most of the house and drawer pulls in the bathrooms. It gives the house a bit of consistency. Another thing I've learned to do as I've matured. 

Voila! It was actually very simple to install. We got it up on the first try with no expletives. 

Another way I fight dark corners in my house is with mirrors. I love mirrors. And while we were at Barts, I found two cute little mirrors to add to my mirror collection. I was actually looking for a desk. I didn't find a desk. So when we left Bart's we ran over to Goodwill to see if they had any furniture. I still did not find a desk. But I did find a gigantic beveled glass mirror. For $12. Which is the same as I paid for one of my cute little tiny mirrors at Bart's. 

I do not understand Goodwill. They price things ridiculously low. I'm not complaining. But it's like they don't want furniture in their store and they price it stupid low to get rid of it ASAP. I think that's why they rarely have any decent furniture. They've got tons of stuff right now, because they continued to take collections while everyone was stuck in their houses in the pandemic. Lots of people went Marie Kondo on their spaces when they were forced to stay in them. 

Anyway. Mirror.

I started by getting the picture wire off the back of the mirror. This thing is like, 25 pounds. We're not in picture wire territory here. There's even a note on the back saying not to use it. 

And yet, that is want was holding this bad boy up. So I first got some painter's tape and spaced out the D rings on the back of the mirror. 

Then I marked a level line on the wall and moved the tape to the wall. Using the marks on the tape, I drilled a couple of holes in the wall for my heavy duty molly bolts. These things will each hold 75 pounds. This mirror isn't coming out of the wall. 

Husband helped me hang the huge mirror and then went back to his spaceship game on the computer. For the smaller mirrors in my collection I used these curved drywall hook thingies. 

I like them a lot. You just push them into the wall where you want them to be. Due to their curved shape they press against the backside of the wall and are perfectly good for hanging lightweight items like diplomas or family photos or small mirrors. They take all of 6 seconds to learn how to use. When they're in this is all you see. 

I just eyed the placement because all the mirrors are different sizes, and in about four minutes, I had them all up in a neat little collage worthy of HGTV. 

Now I just need to find the windex. 

Pandemic Pandemonium

Wow. It's been five years. A lot has happened. I've gotten married. I changed careers. I had back surgery. It would seem that Handy Mandy went into hibernation for a while. Ever since I started my new business it seems like I haven't had a moment to work on my house. And the 1965 Wellington Palace has needed some help. But when you own a business, particularly one that operates primarily on the weekend, well, there isn't a lot of time to straighten out a 55 year old fixer upper.

But then the world turned upside down.

We closed our business on March 16th, 2020, because I got Covid 19. And we haven't reopened due to state mandates, and, obviously, for the health and safety of our customers. Thankfully, I seem to have been the lucky recipient of a milder form of the disease, and have recovered. It was still not very fun. 1/10, definitely would not recommend.

And when I recovered I went a little bit stir crazy. And well, Handy Mandy came out of hibernation.

Our living room had original 1965 faux wood paneling everywhere. And I kind of randomly started tearing out walls. I know what a lot of you are thinking. "Man I'm glad I'm not married to that crazy woman." I'm betting at least once my husband wished he wasn't either.

Most of the walls had drywall behind the paneling but I think when they were doing the house they kind of... ran out of drywall. And instead of getting more, they just did this one wall of crazy patches, and then left the garage wall without any.

Bonus points if you can tell what movie I watched while I tore out walls. 

There was also some neat water damage in the laundry wall where the washer used to leak. The washer got fixed, but the lovely mold was left behind, since it was hidden behind paneling. So we ripped all of that out and went to studs.

Now here, I cheated. I was still pretty weak from Covid and not in the mood to hang full sheets of drywall. So I called my contractor. He rocked out an awesome job hanging up the drywall for me in one morning. I finished up the taping and bedding. 

And then I sanded. And mudded. And sanded. And mudded. I wanted smooth walls without a texture on them. I don't like orange peel. And what I really should have done was put a skim coat over the whole wall. 

But I didn't. 

If I'm being honest I did a pretty crappy job of taping and bedding, even though I did 3 coats. I could have done a lot better job. But at one point I was just over it. I wanted to paint and move on with my life. And I more or less decided that most people wouldn't notice my crappy job, and I was going to hang artwork on the walls anyway. And I went with it. 

Ages ago I ripped the paneling off the little wall by the kitchen to see what was underneath, and how hard it would be to redo the walls, and I painted it a nice neutral gray green, that I'm pretty sure I mixed myself from other buckets of used paint. I've discovered as I've matured that if you paint the walls a neutral color you can put wacky colors on your furniture without making people's heads spin. It's my new M.O. So I went to home depot and brought home every single color swatch they had and managed to find one that was actually almost a dead on match. 

It's a bit lighter than the original, but with the fire place being where it is, between this wall and any other wall, you can't visually tell the difference. So we painted. 

I tend to do the cutting in and Husband is very handy with a roller. When we start at the same time, we generally finish within 20 minutes or so of one another. 

Sometimes I leave him a little note to cover up.


Since we had moved all the furniture and taken off all the switch plates and outlet covers, we decided this would be a good time to rewire everything with nice white outlets and switches. This is a pretty cheap swap if you can do it yourself. I think we spent less than $20 for five switches and four outlets. This is what passes for quality time in our house. Also, headlamps are super convenient, especially when all your breakers are turned off. I think we'll start a new fashion.

Next we replaced all our crown molding. We paid a bit extra to get stainable pine crown molding and I managed to match the stain on our kitchen cabinets exactly. I figured, I had done a 3000 square foot business in baseboards, crown molding couldn't be that much more difficult. Nothing a couple of youtube videos couldn't sort out.

Let me tell you something. Crown molding is hard. Much harder than baseboards. Way harder. There were some expletives. There was a lot more "Amanda cut this wrong so we have to do it again." We removed at least four pieces of trim to try to get them to fit in better. And there was just enough waste that I had to go buy an extra piece because I ran out. Which meant two coats of stain and one of poly, and waiting overnight for it to dry before I could even attempt to cut it.

There were tears.

But you know what? I'm thinking of adding crown to the dining room. So it couldn't have been that bad right?

Anyway it looks great. And I had enough left over to make this nifty coat rack.

And I got a bit coat rack crazy. I found this gorgeous piece of scrap wood in my pile in the garage, and after a bit of sanding, I slapped a nice edge on it with my router. 

Someone had painted that. Who does that? What is wrong with people? Anyway. It made a great coat rack for the back door.