What 30 minutes and $5 will get you...

Earl's old kitchen has a few good points and a lot of things that need changing out.  It's pretty spacious, which is great, and there's decent storage.  The laundry room is separate, which I love --- our previous house had a "laundry closet" in the kitchen, which I wasn't a big fan of.  Earl's kitchen has a flat top stove, which, while not gas, is much preferred to electric eyes by this cook.  There's a nice eating area with a picture window, and there's a built-in desk.

While I hate the wallpaper and I'm not crazy about the dark-stained cabinets in Earl's Old Kitchen, I LOVE the countertops.  Solid-surface, black granite with backsplash.  Pretty!

Unfortunately, Earl either ran out of materials, money, or time when doing the countertops, and he left the desk in the old yellowed laminate.  Not pretty.  And not matchy.  Yuck.

I poked around for several months, trying to figure out what to do about this.  I didn't want to hire someone to custom cut the materials and pay to have them install just the desk piece.  I wasn't confident in my ability to do this work myself, either.  So, I looked at other options.  I considered contact paper but after literally months of searching, I couldn't find anything that matched our counters.  Finally, it occurred to me...why not just paint it?

Enter Rustoleum High-Gloss Black (2 coats) plus two coats of clear sealant.

This picture was taken before I applied the sealant.  Is it perfect?  No.  But it's a thousand times better than it was, and rather than sticking out like a sore thumb, it blends in much better with the rest of the kitchen for now. 

$5 and 30 minutes well spent.

The Boys' Bathroom

The boys' bathroom, aka the upstairs hall bath, aka the 1960s haunted hotel bathroom, was bad.  Bad, bad, bad.  And I left it that way for a year and a half!!!  #hidingmyheadinshame#

It's horrendousness had been needling me for a while when, finally, one day a few weeks ago, Chris and Alex left for a cub scout meeting.  I looked at Zach and said "we can rake leaves, color, play with legos, or paint the bathroom."  Anyone who knows Zach will guess that he picked option #4.  That kid loves a good project as much as I do.

So, we headed upstairs and started taping off trim.  I was fully anticipating having to paint over the wallpaper, sealing it with Kilz, mudding the seams, sealing it with more Kilz, sanding, etc.  Then I saw a little corner that had pulled up.  Crap, I thought to myself.  It's going to bubble and make a huge mess.  So, I gave that little corner a tiny tug, and the whole sheet peeled right off.  Angels sang.  Zach and I had the entire bathroom stripped of wallpaper by the time Chris and Alex got home an hour later.

Then, we uninstalled the 1980s pink mini blind and patched the holes in the window casing.  We unscrewed outlet covers, etc., and had Chris take out the haunted hotel light fixtures.  I took down the framed mirror and the shower curtain rod.  We wiped down the walls, painted on the first layer of primer, and called it a day.

The next day, while the boys were at school, I taped off the windows very well and painted them.  With spray paint.  It's a little trick I figured out when I was painting the dark-stained dental molding in the dining room.  Use spray primer first, then high-gloss spray paint, and it turns out great.  Remember to do several thin, light coats to avoid drips.  It requires a little extra prep work on the front end, but the painting is much easier.

We chose a lovely blue that reminds me of the rooftops of Santorini (especially with the white trim), and two coats did it. 

I took the framed mirror and the ugly light fixtures outside one day, decided to try sprucing them up before replacing them entirely, and they turned out great!  This is Rustoleum's Apple Red, 3 coats.

We added two vintage Mickey prints to the walls, a couple of towel hooks at kid height (if they can't reach the towel rack, the towel will end up on the floor), and a new white faux wood blind, and it's all set.  I do have the fabric and the intention of adding a crisp red valance above that window along with some white crown molding, all in due time.

What do you think?

A Sense of Space

Here are a few "before" photos, just give you a sense of what we're getting ourselves into.

The front of Earl's Old House

The back of Earl's Old House

The wide staircase, view from upstairs.

Earl's Old Office, which is now Alex's room

Earl's daughter Pauletta's old room, now Zach's room

Earl's Old Bedroom, now ours

Earl's Old Master Bathroom

Earl's Old Guest Bathroom, now the boys' bathroom

Earl's Old Dining Room

Earl's Old Living Room, now our home office

Stairs to the basement, with Earl's Old Brown Carpet

Earl's Old Basement Workshop

We have a lot of work to do!

Welcome to Earl's Old House!

Come on in and stay a while.



We bought Earl's Old House in May of 2010, and we're planning to stay forever. A little background information: Earl's Old House is in an older, established neighborhood in the Tucker suburb in northeast Atlanta. It was built in 1968, and the same family lived in it until we bought it in 2010. Earl and his wife lived here and raised their family here. Their daughters eventually grew up and moved away, and then Earl lost his wife. Around 2008 or 2009, Earl passed away. His daughter cleaned up the house and put it on the market, and in May 2010, it became ours.

When we walked into the house for the first time, I felt like I was home. The house has an almost-identical floorplan to the house I grew up in until I was 12, down to the sunroom and the hidden door to the attic over the garage in one of the bedroom closets. My childhood home didn't have a basement, and it did have a nice, level, fenced backyard, but otherwise, the homes are remarkably similar. My husband and children fell in love with it as well, and now it is ours.

When neighbors or new friends ask where we live, we'll tell them our neighborhood or our address, and if they look puzzled, all we have to say is "in Earl's Old House," and they instantly know exactly which house is ours.

While the house has fabulous bones, it needs a lot of work. I'm sure the dark molding and the floral wallpaper were the height of fashion back in 1975, but they're old and dated now. Earl smoked cigars in the house every day for 40 years, so there's a fine film of tobacco on everything, leaving the house smelling stale and looking dingy. The light fixtures are atrocious. But, the foundation is strong and it has great potential.

So, this blog is the story of Earl's Old House, and how we will, slowly but surely, bring it up to the present and make it our own.