Mini Paintypants.

The pink bathroom. It's just... erm... pink.


We've grown to accept the pink tile. It's fine, really. I mean, yeah, OK, it's pink, and that's not our first choice for bathroom colors, but it's fine. The carpet was bad, and that's gone.

What really sucked the most was the ratty, dirty, pinkish paint... complete with bad settlement cracks.



You can see the pinkish hue, and, yeah, those lines are cracks in the plaster. I filled the cracks with spackle, and that made things a little better, but the walls looked crappy and dirty.

So, this weekend, I tried to make it better.

I finally ditched the pink curtains, which made the room look a little bleak, I think, but the clean white paint brightened the place up quite a bit. And we don't have to look at cracks in the walls anymore.

However (there's always a "however," isn't there?), I managed to snap a hunk out of the plexiglass cover that sits in front of the light above the mirror when I was cleaning it. I was so irritated with myself that I didn't take a picture. Having said this, I hate that damn fixture and mirrored medicine cabinet. The whole thing is ancient and ugly, and I want it gone. Avy thinks I broke it on purpose, but I didn't... I didn't mean to break it before we could replace it, though. Now we have to look at a broken hunk of plastic every morning until we can replace it. Ugh.

All Hail the Mighty Goo-Gone

You may remember that our upstairs bathroom was in a state of carpetedness (yes, I invented that word--you can feel free to use it if you wish) when we moved into The Serpico House.

When we removed the carpet, we found nice pink tile. It was in fine shape, except for the adhesive the installers used to make it stick to the floor near the door. Interestingly, that was the only area where they used adhesive or anything other than gravity to hold the carpet down to the floor. I don't know if this represents shoddy workmanship or what, but at least we only had to deal with one cruddy-looking area of the floor.

And, believe it or not, that stuff didn't want to come up with the use of a mere scraper.

It looked like this...



Kinda gross, right? I know. Worse, we left it that way all this time... mainly because it didn't want to come off. This past Sunday morning, I walked past the bathroom and said to myself, "Maybe I'll try something else..." (cue "I Control, I Fly" by Monster Magnet--good song!)

Goo-Gone. That's what I tried. Yes. It worked. Took about 15 minutes total to get this....


There's one more annoyance off the list.

Uppa Da Stairs.

I promised I'd show the upstairs of The Serpico House today, and I am as good as my word.

Let's have a look...
That'd be my dad pointing at the fold-up steps to the attic. This room will be Xavier's chill spot. Icky green carpet. Meh. It's gonna go. It's a nice room otherwise, though. Once the carpet is out, I think a coat of paint will do the trick on this one.

The attic is actually a good size (I walked up the steps and checked it out.) Apparently some of the other home-owners in the area have finished theirs and added a real staircase, which creates a very usable third-floor room. I do like this idea, but that can happen at some point down the road. As of right now, I think it's just going to be a hatch-thingy in the ceiling of Xavier's room. We'll have to figure something out with it before he becomes a teenager, though. Otherwise, you can bet it will become a den of illicit things very quickly.


Across the hall from Xavier's room is the office.


It's nice-sized room, for sure, and we're thinking this will be the place where we keep Avy's sewing stuff, the computer doo-dads and some of my guitar/music things. We also want to put a bed/futon in there for possible guests. Once again, the nasty carpet must go. A little paint n' spackle, and I think it'll be groovy. The window off to the right is a door leading to sort of deck thing. It's kind of odd--it leads to this hunk of flat roof above the kitchen. There's no decking on the roof, and there are no railings around it, either, so I don't know why the door is there, but all of the houses in the area have these things.

Possible uses for this extra space:

1. A deck. Duh. We could put some decking and a railing up there, and we'd have a nice little spot to watch the birds in the morning. Not a horrible idea.
   
2. Make the office into a master suite by building the deck area into a big-ass, baller bathroom. One of the back walls butts up to the back wall of the present second-floor bathroom, so this is a good possibility.
   
3. Nothing. Just keep it clean of leaves and make sure it's all painted up with roof paint and leave it alone.

We're going with the third option for now.

OK, so... on to our bedroom...Here we have the big bedroom. We plan to use this one. It's really a good size. The pink carpet is... um... not staying, and I am not sure why there's a chair rail all the way around the room, but... hey, it's a big bedroom with a two big closets. Xavier really liked the closets. A little paint, and I think we'll be good to go. I kind of hope they leave the bed. I think we could sell that sucker on Craigslist for a pretty penny. That's paint money, kids.

And now, another horror show. The bathroom.

Yep. Pink and grey. And carpeted. I guess it's not horrible, but Xavier doesn't look too excited about it. We want to do a total gut on this, but that might not be feasible any time soon, so I think we'll start with paint and getting rid of the damn carpet.

There's also a pretty horrid, cracked chandelier in the upstairs hallway--it makes the hallway glow red like it's a whorehouse in Amsterdam. That'll have to go, too. There's also a mystery light switch in the hallway with tape on it and a little note to "leave this on." Being the jerk I am, I turned it off to see what happened. Turns out it opens a portal to Narnia. Mr. Tumnus says hi. Actually, nothing happened as far as I could tell. That kind of thing can't stand in my home. Switches should have some kind of function or be banished to the great rift.

I see some wiring work in my future with this thing.


I'll show you the finished basement on Monday.