craft room: various stages of completion

If I waited 'til I felt I was done with a room, I'd never post anything. Anyone else feel that their houses are ever really done? Maybe that's the fun in decorating, the constant changing & rearranging. My co-worker Mary (she's actually my one employee, but I feel more comfortable calling her my co-worker) asked me the other day what I will do when I am done with my many decorating endeavors. Will I actually be able to sit & enjoy my craft room? Yes! Will I find something else to paint? Probably. That's just me.

This is my craft room. Originally, this was going to be the beautiful guest room, but I doubt that dream will ever materialize. And anyway, we rarely have guests. I had set up our other spare room as the office/craft room, but I like the view better from this room. Not that I still won't drag all my supplies out to the living room to work out there, but at least everything will be organized & have a home. Right? Right.

I cursed the person who hung that awful wallpaper boarder. Not because it was so awful, which it was, but because it took me 3 days to get it all off. 3 days of holding my arms in an upright position means 3 days of soreness afterwards. I used fabric softener, the trick I had seen on so many DIY shows, but every square inch had to be scraped off.
The color is French General's Plume Bleu, and I couldn't love a shade of blue any more. It has just the right amount of turquoise, and it changes depending on the light. A crisp, white trim is the perfect accent. Eventually, I will (ahem, Honey will) replace all the trim in the house with this, taller trim. I think it looks more historic, more vintage. PS, Honey laid the laminate flooring a few months back.


The apartment building we moved from was built in the early 1900's, and it had gorgeous woodwork & built-ins. Even the glass panes in the french doors & the built-ins were hand-blown glass. Our apartment still had much of the original wood, meaning it hadn't been painted white. (Who paints 90 year old wood??) The trim was all this taller style, and I decided that our house also needed taller trim so as to make-believe our house wasn't built in 1981. A girl can pretend.

Hanging trim, as it turns out, is not as easy as I thought. Not so much the hanging of the trim, but the measuring. I suck at measuring. And trying to measure when there are 45 degree cuts involved, effectively making one side of the trim upwards of a 1/2 inch longer than the other side, is beyond frustrating to me. I was so frustrated in fact, and was afraid Honey would be equally frustrated at having to cut the same piece for the THIRD time, that I tried to sand the piece down instead. It didn't work. Honey was gracious & cut it a FOURTH time for me, and it finally fit. I gave over the task of measuring to Honey, and after a couple pieces, he had it down. More accurately, I turned over the whole trim project to Honey, and he did a really good job.

Still to be done:
hang curtain rod
make curtains
find a light fixture
hang shelves
crown molding
make a curtain for closet door? (for as long as I can remember, I have been taking closet doors off so as to maximize space, but I'm inclined to hang some pretty fabric here to hide the clutter).
bring furniture in
organize everything!

TG