Ahead with the renovations

The color was chosen to be both bright and warm, The
wainscoting will be a  bit darker after I stain it. 

I'm actually making some progress on the sun room/breakfast nook/bar off the dining room. The last time I even mentioned the room was back in May when we decided that it would be the next room we work on. At the time we were considering installing a fancy tiled ceiling, but in the end it was just too much work and too complicated. I ended up fixing the peeling paint problem by removing all the bad paint, applying an exterior grade paint as a primer, then finishing with a standard ceiling paint. Then Cindy and I began the expected paint color indecision process. After at least a dozen samples, including one accidentally purchased twice, we ended up a bright turquoise that will lighten the room. To tone it down, I'm installing wainscoting along the bottom third of the wall, which will be lightly stained then sealed with polyurethane.

Katia resting in the dining room after helping me paint. My
work buddy got a little paint on her just under her nose.

Meanwhile, I purchased an electric fireplace to replace the old one in our bedroom but accidentally ordered the wrong size. Upon realizing this I checked about returning it to Amazon, but then further realized that I had purchased the fireplace from a third party seller. This seller refuses to answer my inquiries so we're keeping the fireplace, bad news until I realized
it will be perfect in this new room. We plan to enjoy the room year round and this fireplace will fit in well and take the chill out. We also are looking for a high table with a couple chairs, and perhaps a small bar. I wouldn't mind also having a small upholstered chair for the room, but now I'm really getting ahead of myself. I need to finish the room first.

Otherwise things have been quiet on the renovations front. I had to replace the "flapper" valve on the downstairs toilet after it inexplicably started leaking. I found out that for some reason they tend to curl over time allowing water to leak out of the tank into the bowl. I have no idea why, but it was a cheap and quick fix. Thanks again go to the plumbing experts in the basement of Kovarick's Hardware. Had I gone elsewhere I might have replaced the entire guts of the tank rather than just the $5 valve.

Finally, a project completed, while others drag on.

The new lights, properly anchored. "Window treatments"
in the background

I can finally say with confidence that the upstairs hallway is now done. It joins the list now with 7 other rooms/hallways/stairs that are completely finished. Not bad, I guess, considering that Cindy and I both still work full time, and have done all the work ourselves. The final jobs in the hallway included installing the smoke detector, hanging "window treatments" and to finally replace the ugly lighting. Changing out the lighting was not quite as simple as you would think, since it took us quite some time to select the new fixtures, but more importantly, that once again I found incorrectly installed lighting boxes in the ceiling. This means that I had to properly anchor the boxes before installing the lights. We were able to purchase lower hanging, stylish lights since the ceilings are so nice and high, even on the second floor.  I put them on a dimmer so we can lower the lights and use them as a night light, and because the old fashioned filament bulbs look cool. We used an antique brass switch plate and ordered a solid brass dimmer knob to match the fixtures. Very nice.

The "window treatments" were just a curtain rod and curtains. These too took some time to pick since we wanted to match the light fixtures, and because short length antique brass curtain rods are not as common as you might think. The curtains continue our house tradition of the diamond pattern and are just lightweight shears.

First Alert P1010 smoke detector. Shown
larger than actual size

We got a button style smoke detector, only about 2 inches diameter and 2 inches deep, with a non-replaceable lithium battery which should last about 10 years. They are much smaller than, and work just as well as a traditional smoke detector. I eventually plan to add a smoke detector to our security system which will be a nice backup.

The "quick" bathroom spruce up has taken a couple of serious steps backwards. First, hanging wet towels next to the bathroom door is already having an effect. Despite several coats of high quality, semi gloss paint, it looks like the original darker door colors are now starting to bleed through. It now seems like I will need to use a stain blocker and repaint, and we needed to find a new place to hang our bath towels. So we decided to get new towel rods for the hand towels and bath towels. Hoo-boy. Something as seemingly innocuous as towel racks can definitely cause problems if you choose poorly, or do not think it through.  For starters, the bases of the fixtures we choose were square, not round. So what, right? Wrong. If you don't install the anchoring hardware perfectly level, the much larger square bases exaggerate even a minor error. Also, I installed the long towel rod in the dry wall directly above the top of the tile which runs along the bottom of the wall. I used my level to make sure it was true, which it is, but it didn't occur to me that it would look crooked when compared to the not so level top of the tile below. Damn. Finally, if you've installed any bathroom hardware lately, you may notice that it is "screw-less", meaning that the fixture snaps onto the wall anchor with no visible attachment. Perfect, if you've installed them exactly right and have no need to ever move them. Not so perfect for me, since I now have to muscle them off the wall. This will mean repairing the wall, and repainting before make another attempt. Oof.

We decorated the house again with flags for the 4th. We wanted to replace our large flag we hang off the porch. We've had the flag for many years and while it wasn't torn, it was quite faded. After looking locally for a quality embroidered nylon flag, we ended up ordering online and it arrived, just in time, on the 3rd. Our old flag will be disposed of properly thanks to our local American Legion.