For those of you asking, I don’t know the dog’s name. No one does. It’s really sad.
I’m sitting here imagining what colors I want to use in my house. I want something really bright for my bedroom. I also have to choose which room I want to be my bedroom. Do I want morning sun? Or do I want to avoid that but have the heat of the afternoon sun on my bed if I take the room on the west. Lily would probably like that the most.
I really want to do something neat in the dining room and living room- something rich like a burgundy, maybe. I think I am going to make the kitchen clean and bright- maybe a classic white that uses the older looking cabinets with glass panel doors, and a big standing butcher block in the center. Maybe even have a drain installed in the center of the kitchen floor! And one of those hanging pot racks with hooks for my pots and pans. And a GAS stove for once.
Maybe I will just do every room a different color. A rich green for my office, a sunny yellow for my bedroom, and nice pastel blue for the guest bedroom, burgundy and polished wood for the dining room with a nice oriental rug, and who knows what for my living room. And I have TALL ceilings so nice ceiling fans everywhere.
And a nice bench with built in shoe rack right by the stairs when you walk in and maybe an armoire coat rack. Definitely a hat stand and a place for the incoming and outgoing mail and keys. And a nice container for umbrellas by the door. And I will have room for all my framed pictures!
This is going to be fun.
Fordpowers
I full on LOL’ed at you falling through the deck. ???. Sorry. Kinda not sorry but hope you are ok.
Congrats on the house! Decorating is fun!
Jerzy Russian
If it is a boy dog, I suggest you call him Adam. That way, you will have Adam and Steve, if only for a little while.
I don’t think a drain in the middle of the kitchen floor is a good idea, unless you make the floor waterproof, and sloped properly. Also, if there is a drain there, you will be tempted to have water go down there, which could result in a slippery floor, which in turn could lead to more blog posts. Hmm, a drain in the middle of the kitchen floor actually does sound like a good idea after all.
22over7
Sounds fantastic. Of course, as you’re working on it (and working and working), you’ll get a better feel for how you want things to look. Hardwood floors?
Mnemosyne
Whatever it is that you decide to do, Suzanne will tell you it’s terrible and you have no taste, so I say that you should just do you. It’s your house, do what makes you happy.
Arclite
Heh, as soon as you bought the place, I imagined a yellow bedroom, and here you are.
I think it’s normal to buy a new house, and then not be able to sleep while you plan what to do with it. Nothing odd with that. You’re brain is buzzing, and won’t shut off. Normally I’d tell you to have a couple of whiskeys but I know that’s out. Maybe some nice chamomile tea?
Helen
Dude. Get the mice/cockroaches/rabbits living in your basement out first.
redshirt
Morning sun is TERRIBLE for a bedroom. Choose another room.
MomSense
Check out houzz.com. Keep in mind that colors can look so different on the wall than on the paint chip. I like to paint some large swatches to see how the color looks with the light in the room.
scav
Ahhhh, if there’s a good room for afternoon sun, just thrown in a dedicated napping bed in there and declare it an overflow guest room or just a really large petbed in an office/library/petcave. Have a winter bedroom and a summer bedroom with the guest residing in the off-season venue. All the rooms to play with.
Calming Influence
It is going to be fun. Just stay off the fucking roof.
redshirt
Wouldn’t it be funny if Cole actually participated in this thread?
Can anyone recall the last time Cole participated in a thread?
Mike J
Sometimes the corrections are as good as the article.
John Cole
Steve is sitting on my lap right on the deep bruise I earned today and it is killing me but he is so happy and purring and kneading my leg so I am letting him stay there.
John Cole
@redshirt: I just did.
Mike E
I’m thinking domestic air bags…somebody invented that, right?
zombie rotten mcdonald
Congrats on the house. Looks like a fun Money Pit.
Otherwise, I will just leave this here: https://youtu.be/7ZwOGVWqHAw
Calming Influence
By the bye, I’ve been waiting patiently for a number of years for your YouTube how-to video for popping your shoulder back in using a door knob.
redshirt
@John Cole: True! How’s your leg? What is the status of your current home? Are you renting?
?BillinGlendaleCA
Just a suggestion, after today’s little fall you might want to have the flooring checked out to make sure that you can walk around on it safely.
OT: We took the kid out for a congratulatory dinner for getting her RN. She informed us this(Aug 4) was also her 5th anniversary of her discharge from the Air Force.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@John Cole: Sure Steve, we all know who really has control of the keyboard.
PNW
When I got tired of plain old white walls I used butter yellow in the bedrooms and terra cotta in the living room. The colors really warmed up the rooms without clashing horribly. Good luck on your remodel and the pup
ruemara
JC, one thing I did was find LoVOC paints and developed a theme. Mine was caribbean tropics softened in the bright sun. The ceilings were the cleanest bright white available. One room was the sea room, in a muted pale blue walls with a hint of purple grey in the blue. The sun room was muted bright yellow that pulled from the golden hue of the wood trim. A sunken living room was the same arctic white, but I coated that paint job in a pearlescence to capture as much light as possible. The whole thing came together better than I could have hoped. Similar values in paint and related hues and shades per room. Think about spaces that relax you or things you enjoy. If you’re big into outside, you might like a pale blue grey ceiling and varieties of greens with accent browns. All the other decor issues will be tricky, but the paint colors are easy. You’ll enjoy it, trust me. Good luck and congratulations again.
ruemara
weird. I wrote a post on your decor thing and it got ated
Villago Delenda Est
John, your enthusiasm with this new project of yours just bubbles off the screen.
I think Steve should choose all the colors, btw.
Steeplejack
@John Cole:
Let your home-design freak flag fly! Since you’re not moving in right away, you will have time and (mental) space to think things through and pare down the riot of conflicting ideas that are no doubt bombarding your head.
Fair Economist
Decorating is great fun, especially a house with good bones like your new one (well, apart from the porch). I generally don’t think rooms that focus on a single color look good because the light gets colored too and that makes anything you put in for contrast or accent look – strange. IMO most of the time you should strive for an overall roughly neutral palette. So if you have a lot of deep reds there should be a lot of yellow, green, or blue to balance it. You can balance with a less saturated color – a trendy combination right now is blue and brown – which is actually blue and orange (color wheel opposites), except the orange is desaturated and darkened, thus brown.
That house looks like it deserves nice-looking furniture, so take your time filling it up to get the right stuff.
Cat48
I like,the house. I’ve always wanted a house,with a porch like that.
? Martin
My suggestion is a moderate color with a bold accent wall. That accent can carry across rooms with line-of-sight, typically on parallel walls. Gold/aubergine, etc. Color is tricky, so you’re likely to get it wrong a few times before your eye catches it right. Don’t be afraid of color.
I don’t know your budget but if you are looking to dress up a house, you need to add depth. Avoid flat contractor doors and go for some kind of raised panel or other textured. They’re much cheaper now that they can milled from MDF. Avoid light, hollow doors if you can. There’s something very gratifying about a door with some mass that can close well. Avoid contractor trim as well and hire a trim guy to put in proper casings, baseboards, crown. A good 8″ baseboard and proper casings really makes a house fill in. But there’s a notable cost difference between the cheap contractor trim that they slap on with a quarter round in a few minutes and properly considered casework. Materials is cheap for painted MDF or PVC, but there’s a fair bit of labor. If you are handy, patient, and detailed, it’s a good skill to learn. You can add an incredible amount of value to your home, and there aren’t many good trim carpenters out there, so there’s demand.
AnotherBruce
I don’t know about sunny yellow for the bedroom. I’m not telling you what to do, but I want to keep the bedroom dark. I’ve got kind of brownish reddish walls that absorb light. The rest of my house has very good lighting with skylights and good windows. I go to the bedroom for serious sleep.
Calming Influence
Maybe you could pitch your project to the DIY network (or Comedy Central) as Cole’s fixer-upper, West Virginia style:
John: “I was hoping there would be hardwood flooring under this orange shag carpeting, but it looks like it’s just dirt.”
“I’ll probably paint it.”
Mnemosyne
@? Martin:
And if he does end up fostering kids and teens, they will appreciate having a nice, solid door they can slam when they need to express their feelings without getting into too much trouble.
I hope John isn’t getting too optimistic about what teenagers can be like. I think Hillary (the front-pager, not the candidate) said that one of her Somalian foster sons once told her that he’d rather be living back at the refugee camp than with her and all of her rules. But he was a teenager, so he grew out of it eventually.
EmanG
Do a little color theory research. I lived in a very small Chicago condo for awhile and learned that blue makes rooms bigger, red makes them seem smaller. Pick your mood and be fearless, hell you own the damn place. You can always paint over it! Congrats on the purchase. Owning a house, much like being actually married, just feels different. Enjoy.
John Weiss
John,
John Weiss, retired art director here.
Watch out for saturated colors. Sometimes they work just fine in *very* bright lit rooms. It can be quite nice and intimate in rooms with plenty of illumination from (my favorite) plenty of floor lamps. But, you have to keep in mind, a color that looks nice at the paint store will frequently be too much on four walls as the effect of color is multiplied when the room is painted. When I was a dick-swinging art director, sellin’ the ham, I learned that less is more. Meaning if you like a color and you’re going to paint four walls with it, pick a less saturated color in the same ‘family’. Unles you like carnival decor.
Looks like you really ‘stepped in it’. Hope you recover – smartly.
jw
? Martin
@Mnemosyne: Actually, a good solid door is a great insulator against the kids noise (toys, stereo, etc.) – a more common desire than the door slamming.
Mnemosyne
@? Martin:
If we’re not allowed to tease the bloghost, what’s the point of having a blog?
Mary G
I have only had old (for CA) houses. My own was built in 1923 and my mom’s that I live in now was built in 1950. It can be frustrating, because a lot of things are standardized now, and older houses aren’t. I had to special order a toilet that was a lot more expensive because mine was only 10 inches from the wall and the standard is now 12. My kitchen appliances all stick out from the counters about five inches, because I kept the old cabinets and just had them refaced with new doors. They looked like new and cost a lot less.
I’m terrible with paint. It never looks like the swatches. They sell little sample jars that I changed to after a blue shade on the exterior turned out to be a loud purple.
Choosing door and cabinet handles is fun, but the huge selection can be overwhelming.
You’ll love it when you’re done, though. Old houses that you fix up to your own taste are like a really comfortable sweater that you’ve had for years.
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Congratulations to the kid! I don’t think I told you how much I enjoyed your pictures of the Huntington. It brought back a lot of happy memories and one not-so-happy memory of a botany professor who was obsessed with euphorbias, which are mostly ugly and poisonous, which I found out the hard way by getting sap in my eye.
? Martin
@Mnemosyne: Excellent point.
Amir Khalid
You might want to give the poor dog a temporary name so people can easily refer to him. E.g. if you found him on a Thursday, you could call him that. Or Tyrone, or Ishmael, or Pickwick, or whatever strikes your fancy.
Anne Laurie
John, seems like you’ve always had trouble dropping off / staying asleep — yellow walls won’t help, they’re for “wake up” kitchens and such. Go with a nice shade of blue, it’s calming for us insomniacs. There’s seventeen million possible choices, so at least one of them will make you happy.
Most blues are also a great backdrop for photos, and wall art generally. You should have the pictures you like best — such as Larime’s drawing of Lily, Rosie & Tunch — mounted where you can see them from your bed. That makes it easier to relax at night and to get up in the morning.
Unless, of course, you do some test-painting and decide that you find yellow walls soothing. In which case, you be you. But think about human-made objects that are normally yellow — blinkers, raincoats, curb markings — not WARNING like red, but strongly eye-catching.
Also (later, when you’re closer to moving in) look into some high-quality light-blocking blinds for your bedroom. There are some gorgeous easy-gliding models out there whose clean lines & tidy practicality will thrill your German soul, not cheap, but for the room you spend the most time in, well worth the investment!
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Mary G: I got a membership at the Huntington, so there will be many more pictures. I’m thinking of going to the Getty Villa tomorrow. Even though I grew up in 1000 Oaks, I’ve never been.
Mj_Oregon
We have an east facing bedroom. It gets light here REALLY early in late June. About 4:30 am early. If you respond to changes in light levels as easily as I do, an east side bedroom isn’t for you. Trust me on this. I’m still grumbling that it’s getting light now at 5:30 am. I’m an owl, not a lark!
Anne Laurie
@Amir Khalid:
Shush. He names the dog, he’ll end up keeping the poor thing, and both he and the dog have enough on their separate plates without that!
Mary G
@?BillinGlendaleCA: It’s a great place for your pictures if they let you take them inside – lots of great statues. I liked it better than the big Getty inside, more coherent collections.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Anne Laurie: He could always call it Dog like Columbo did.
Amir Khalid
@Anne Laurie:
He didn’t keep Ginger. He didn’t keep that girl cat — what was her name? — that he had for a while.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Mary G: We went to the Getty Center when it first opened, though I think it had some of the Villa’s collection since it was being renovated. I went to the Getty Center last month but didn’t see any of the collections, I was just taking pictures outside. They do allow photography of most of the collection, obviously no flash.
Mary G
@?BillinGlendaleCA: I also went fairly soon after it opened. The spiral garden was amazing. I hope to get back and see it now that it’s matured.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Mary G: You mean this garden?
ETA: Here’s a link to the whole album of my visit to the Getty Center last month.
NotMax
Drain in the kitchen floor? Not a great idea, unless hosing the place down regularly is what you have planned. All sorts of little things from prep (and from pets) will find their way in into the damp and mildew or rot, so you’ll be using bleach a lot, thus the kitchen will smell like bleach a lot.
Hospital white walls may be your thing, but they can be cold and sterile (plus show every little splatter and grease deposit). Consider looking into washable wall coverings that have a design to complement the counters and floor. Or maybe tile half way up from the counters and a flat finish off-white for the rest.
Regardless, if doing a total makeover remember that it is impossible to have too many conveniently located outlets in a kitchen.
Painted all the kitchen cabinetry here a sort of muted buttercup, using Varathane brand paint (plastic-based). Has a nice sheen to it and still looks freshly painted some 30 years later. Stands up wonderfully to cleaners, detergents and vigorous scrubbing.
Sam
Bold colors and differently colored rooms is exactly how my folks have done their house. I don’t have a ton of pics of the interior online, but the last pic on this post shows our dark red dining room and a bit of our bright yellow (with green floors) kitchen.
Upstairs, the bedrooms are literally designated by their colors (the red room, the blue room).
And count me as one who likes morning light. But I have to wake up relatively early for work, so I like the “natural alarm clock” effect. It’s definitely a personal preference. I can also fall asleep in broad daylight with no issue, so take that for what it’s worth.
sm*t cl*de
@John Cole:
Shifting a Maine Coone who wants your company is not really an option.
greennotGreen
On choosing interior colors:
Find a picture you like, say a Klee or a Van Gogh (I used a picture of a modern quilt) and draw your colors from that. That way, you can use different colors and they’ll still go together. In my first house all the colors were from one palette (a very 80s palette) except for the guest bedroom where I wanted to hang an antique quilt, so I painted it light brown. But it was so jarring against the rest of the house that I eventually took down the quilt and repainted the walls.
Rosalita
We’ll just call him a lucky dog for now since John has come to his rescue.
Personally I love a bedroom that gets morning sun, makes it easier to get up. I have that now, with deep wedgewood blue walls. So restful, yet easy going in the a.m.
I am looking forward to your journey on this John!
Tinare
I love color and every room in my house is a different one. Definitely bring home paint chips and then get samples of your favorites and paint swatches to see what they really look like on your wall with the lighting. I wanted a light apple green kitchen. What looked best in the paint chips would have been a disaster. It took about six different samples to find the right shade, but it was worth it.
wormtown
when you get to that point, if you can afford it, hire someone to work with on the decorating. It is worth it.
Karla
I like having an east-facing bedroom, but I’m a morning person. It’s a calming, warm terra cotta lightened up a little with some white. I originally picked the color because it complemented with my nightstand, the one piece of furniture I knew I was using in the room. However, now I like it because it’s the opposite of blue light that could have a disruptive influence on my circadian clock when I go to bed.
Karla
The apartment I’m moving to has a specific dog wash room. Maybe some room in the house could have that purpose and have a drain in the floor. (I don’t have a dog and have never looked in the room.)
HinTN
@MomSense: is right about colors. Also Mrs H knows light and, if you have windows that you plan not to shield with curtains or blinds (no more naked mopping) then the passage of the sun across the day will give you a rich tapestry of changing light. More about color choices affiant sayeth not, except that subtle grays do more with that light than bold colors.
gogol's wife
Glad to hear the doggie is doing well. You’re a saint.
Humdog
I second the suggestion for butter yellow instead of white. It is so nice with wood and it is so much warmer than a white. It takes me forever to decide paint colors. Better luck to you, John, on everything!
beth
All this talk about paint colors and no one’s posted this yet?
tmflibrarian
@MomSense: We did this in our dining room when trying to pick the “right” dark red. We had some people over during that time who said it looked like there had been a mob hit on the wall. But we did pick the perfect dark red….
Bobby Thomson
It’s all personal preference, but I would go with lighter colors. They make the house brighter and also make it look bigger. A very subtle orangey yellow is good for vibrant spaces and a periwinkle is good for relaxation.
Bobbo
I like doing lots of colors, which would be appropriate for the era when the house was built. You should check out Sherwin Williams if you have one – they have palettes designed for various periods. I’m thinking Late Victorian or Arts and Crafts.
stinger
John, you describe it so well, I can just see it — beautiful! Although I do think a calmer scheme for the bedroom is more conducive to sleep than bright colors. But above all, have fun with it!
wuzzat
I know it’s a slim possibility given what an asshole the former owner was, but you might want to check with the town clerk to see if the dog was ever licensed. If yes, they probably have a name listed.
J R in WV
@Amir Khalid:
A friend of mine who converted to Islam chose the name Ishmael… it’s famous here from “Moby Dick”, of course.
J R in WV
John,
We have a tiny (24x48x12) house in the SE high desert, facing East. I painted each wall/ceiling a room a different color. I picked pastel, but definite colors, a pale green, pale yellow, a pale amethyst lavender, etc, and most rooms got 3 or 4 colors.
It worked out really well. As others have suggested, you should get sample jars when you have picked some colors, and paint big parts of walls, chips are a waste of time except in comparing variations of colors standing at the wall of colors in the paint department. You have to try out a color on a wall in the house to know if that color will work in that room.
I have done a ton of painting, starting professionally at 14, my Mom taught me a lot, and then the Navy, which paints ships continuously to keep them intact, gave me an intense master class in how to use various tools to apply 8 different kinds of paint, from oil based through alcohol based.
Worst painting accident, paint locker 6 decks down a well with a ladder and hatches on each deck. We used a rope and pulley rig to lift 5 gallon pails of paint with a snap hook on the bail handle. Usually 2 or 3 guys climbed down to the locker to move buckets to the bottom of the well, and 4 or 5 guys on top to carry buckets away.
We used alcohol-based primers on decks, and had to work fast because a deck heated by the sun would dry that stuff in about 30 seconds.
So one day the bail handle broke off a bucket of alcohol-based primer, which fell 30 or 40 feet into the paint locker, and exploded. The guys working at the bottom of that well were covered with bright blue primer, and the air they were breathing was filled with industrial alcohol fumes. The PO running the crew yelled for them to climb fast – and they did, like squirrels.
They looked like Smurfs when they got out of the well into the sun. Blue from head to toe, everywhere they weren’t covered by their working clothes. They looked odd for a long time, really.
OT, I guess, but a funny story.
Using multiple definite colors gives a room a jewel like attribute to me. That jewel like variety of colors, from amethyst to emerald through yellow and ruby (pale, pale red – NOT pink) really worked in that sunny space. So then back home in the WV forest, shady 7 months of the year, we used the same trick. The rooms are so much bigger you can barely tell the walls are different colors. But ti still worked very well.
Aleta
A blue undercoat beneath red paint has a warm glow (unexpectedly) and is really easy to live in, doesn’t jar like some reds.
JustRuss
I went from an East-facing room to south-facing, and it’s been a good change. Up here morning sun starts about 4:30 in June, too damn early. And with no AC, I don’t want afternoon sun pouring through the windows heating things up before bed time. I still get good morning light, but it’s indirect, not intensely blazing.
karen marie
NEVER paint your bedroom yellow! Living room? Sure. But never the bedroom. Bedroom should be restful. Previous house, I painted my bedroom a bright blue-teal, and it was wonderful. It was cheerful in sunlight but quieted down at night. Low-lit blue or green is pleasant, low-lit yellow is the thing of nightmares.
While maroon sounds daring and exciting for a dining room, I would advise against it. It is really hard to paint over. Do maroon stripes but not four solid walls, please. You want the dining room to be welcoming and appetizing.
karen marie
@Aleta: Many years ago I painted the bathroom deep red. It was like standing inside a bleeding vagina.
WaterGirl
@karen marie:
I feel quite safe in saying that you have surely formed a sentence which has never before been uttered in the history of the world.
hilzoy
My bedroom is pale sea green, like weathered light green glass, and I love it. (Restful like blues, but not as cold.) A color I call “cream of butternut squash” works well with hardwood, as do various sorts of apricot. (I prefer this to yellow; it’s awesome with old hardwood floors.) When I bought my house, it had (and retains) a lovely color in the halls, which is a very, very, VERY pale version of — well, it has less brown and grey than sage, but in that general family. Except so pale that on the chip you can almost not tell it’s not a sort of off-white. But on the walls, magic.
Keep the ceilings white. When I bought my house, the TV room was bright! golden! yellow!, including the ceilings. Like being in an egg yolk.
karen marie
@beth: OMG! Thank you! After watching that clip, I fell over a movie version of PG Wodehouse’s Heavy Weather!
karen marie
@hilzoy: I painted my living room a similar color and absolutely loved it.
stinger
I wish everybody would share the brand and color name or number of all these great colors you’ve painted your rooms!