True Colors (II)

As mentioned in previous posts, one of the first things we did after closing on the house was to repaint every room. In most cases, it was surprisingly easy to select just the right color for the room, and when we were done I only had misgivings about two rooms. The quest to select the perfect dining room color was chronicled in the last post, and here I want to talk about the sunroom/former office/sleeping porch. It was pretty clear that the room hadn't been used very much by the previous owner, and in fact some of our neighbors told us that the owners before them had used it only to store plants and books - for the entire 50 years they occupied the house! Other than the addition of windows at some point in the 1960s or so, not much had changed from its days as a sleeping porch.





The excessive amount of lead paint in the room made it fairly unusable at first, so Chris worked on ripping out the walls and putting in new drywall. He also refinished the painted floors, taking them back to bare wood and putting down 3 coats of poly. At that point, we painted the brand new walls a nice, sunny shade of yellow (B.Moore, Delilah) with bright white trim. For a while it seemed like a fairly happy room, but then the yellow started to fade and become more egg-like (similar to the dining room), and the utter lack of storage started to get to us. In addition, I had set up my sewing table in the corner and had a hard time keeping Sophie out of it and my craft cabinet.

At that point, we planned to simply mount the craft cabinet on the wall and maybe look into repainting the walls a different color. But then inspiration hit, and we pulled out some of the old kitchen wall cabinets from the basement, cleaned them up, painted them white, and mounted them on a footer to form customized, built-in base cabinets to store games, movies, and office supplies. Next, we built a deep storage unit behind the couch and under the south bank of windows that serves as a hidden closet to store a variety of random things. The table surface of the storage unit will house overwintering plants and maybe some winter lettuce and herbs later this year. We also installed a ceiling fan, which added a much-needed, hard-wired overhead light, and we put in a few new outlets. Chris also put up some beautiful crown molding that helped to finish off the room. Oh, and last but not least, we painted the walls a happy teal color