Tea Time and Primetime

This weekend turned out to be quite productive, despite it being pretty cold. First, I did a little mini-project on Friday evening. This one was inspired by Centsational Girl's similar project. I was excited to make my own tea towels for the main floor half bath.

First, I bought same floursack towels from Amazon.

And some craft paint and fabric medium for the stamps.

I mixed the craft paint and fabric medium one to one and rolled it onto my stamps with a mini foam roller. To get each stamp even, I rolled the paint on the stamp each time.

Anyone recognize the stamps? I had gotten these for our wedding - the larger leaves were used for the Sunday Brunch invitations and the smaller ones for the place-cards and program. :)

I think they turned out pretty well and look good on our hook. I still have more blank tea towels, so I may try to find more stamps and make some for the kitchen.

The second project was the start of the very large task of painting the basement. Since our entire house was beige when we first moved in, we have been wanting to add color downstairs for quite some time, especially since the pool table is beige, making the downstairs a sea of beige-ness. We also realized that we would need to carry whatever color we chose all the way up the basement stairs because there was no clear break point for it downstairs. We are not painting the main floor, but the wall that the stairs is on will be painted, so it needs to blend well with the main floor (this will make more sense in pictures). The first step was to prime all the walls. From our experience in painting this bouse, we are well aware how the walls tend to absorb the first coat of paint, so we knew we needed to prime. First, here are some pictures from before this weekend. And yes, family is no longer a journey to forever. We decided to remove the wall decal. J never did like it and I don't really get it. We'll have to find a nice picture to put there.

I washed down the walls and prepped the area on Friday afternoon. And then, we painted all day on Saturday. I did the "cutting in" or the areas by the trim and ceiling, and J rolled for me. It took me from 9 - 5 just to do the detail work, so I am super thankful that J helped me. It took 1.5 cans of primer, which was exactly what we had on hand, so that was nice. We will need two coats of color paint, so we determined that we need 3 cans of paint for the color.

Today, I ended up going back over a few places and making touch ups, and I ended up removing the shelf that is pictured here over the bar.

Now it is gone. We don't know whether we should re-install it or not once we are done painting. What does everyone think? We were having a hard time deciding whether to keep the shelf or not.

There she is - all primed and ready for some color. Of course, we haven't exactly decided on a color yet. We have set ourselves a deadline of before next Friday so that I can pick up the paint on the way home from work. We want to paint the color fairly soon, but next weekend is pretty busy, so we will have to see when that actually happens, but definitely within the next two weeks. We knew this project would take some time and planned for that, so we are okay with our stark white basement for now. Actually, as J noted, it is actually a welcome change from all the beige. More updates to come.

In other news, I tried to sand down the awkward piece of unfinished wood above the fireplace (you can view it from some of the pictures above). And I discovered that sanding indoors creates a lot of wood dust. So, that didn't quite turn out as planned. I still feel like I am smelling the wood dust, but it may be my imagination. I aired out the room as soon as I noticed the problem (which, by the way, made it really cold). *Sigh* I did manage to make it less splinter-y, which I suppose is an improvement.

All in all, quite a lot of work for one weekend, but it was nice to make headway in this large painting job that has been hanging over our heads.