I really like the Murphy bed’s built-in lights when they are on and I am reading. However, they have a significant design flaw.
You can see my jury-rigged solution: part of the packaging from the Ikea pillowcases I bought. It doesn’t entirely solve the problem; it just lessens it.
The button to turn on the lights has a very bright blue light that shines regardless of the on/off status of the lights themselves.
From the future, I can say that the second layer of solution involves me leaning the memory foam pillows against the headboard to cover the light. There’s a void between the mattress and the wall, so the pillows sit at an angle.
That means I can’t really use them as pillows, just as light blockers.
Other than that situation, I’m really enjoying my Murphy bed.
I have attached the rod-grabbers to the lining of the valance, and hung it up to see how it looks. I am, at this point, regretting not getting a lining that was more in line with the color of the valance.
But things seem to be fine.
Laying out the official material and positioning the birds.
Then I got distracted by the bonus project, which is to take the additional birds and make decorative diamonds. I had enough material to add a matching diamond to each bird. These will eventually be wall decor.
The curtains are gone, but before I put them in the fiber recycling bag, I took the diamonds with birds off of them so that I can repurpose them as part of the new valance.
As I was planning the renovation, I realized I never shut the curtains in the bedroom because I had a shade, so it made more sense to make a valance.
Here, I have cut out the backing material (it was an old sheet of Matt’s) and am testing the best layout for the birds.
Here, I have put the official material over the backing material, but I have not yet moved the birds.
This will be a project that is done in fits and starts.
When I got the bright idea to wallpaper my closet, I wondered if the fact I watched my mother wallpaper thirty to forty years ago meant that I had absorbed skills and that I could also wallpaper.
You know what doesn’t exist anymore? Wallpaper stores. I wanted to go to a store and flip through some books like I did thirty to forty years ago. I made an attempt, visiting a paint store whose website said they had wallpaper, but it turned out the wallpaper had moved to their Lake Oswego location and no one had updated the website.
What does exist now that didn’t thirty to forty years ago is the internet, the place where I bought my wallpaper, and the place where I watched five to ten videos about how to wallpaper.
One of the last videos I watched said, as if this was common knowledge, that if you have textured walls, you need to skim coat them before wallpapering. Cue watching several videos about skim coating.
My painting friend S. North pointed out that this was one and a half walls in my closet, and maybe I didn’t need to skim coat? Because I had to buy two rolls, I figured I would do one panel to see how it went with textured walls.
It was fine. If I was wallpapering the main room, I would have to skim coat, but for my purposes, the textured walls were fine.
Having put one panel up, I kept going and two to three hours later I was done! I did have the skills!
Here’s the wallpaper. I liked the trees and the autumn colors, plus there was orange to go with the green, and orange is good to work into everything.
One of the videos I watched suggested using painter’s tape to mark where the drop was, and that worked very well. This pattern had a big drop, which was annoying.
But look! Done! I hadn’t thought about what to do about that shelf support, but I took the screw at the bottom out and had Matt hold it away from the wall when I was hanging that panel. It worked great.
I probably should have watched a few more videos about turning the corner, because that was a little rough, but overall okay.
This was a super fun project (that I dithered about for quite some time before starting) and I’m pleased with the results.
Now to put the closet back together. In that first picture you can see most of the closet contents waiting to go back.
Back in May, I tackled the second task on my unemployment to-do list: painting the front of the house.
Something went wrong with the previous paint job, and the paint bubbled on the right side of the door. This was fine (I mean, not really, but it looked fine) until pressure washing peeled off the paint on some lower bubbles, leaving the cement siding exposed.
Matt had previously had the paint matched, and in May I sanded things down. Sometime in July, I borrowed my neighbor’s extension ladder and used Krud Kutter in lieu of pressure washing to clean the surface. That undid my sanding efforts.
And now, in September, I have sanded again and painted! I’m pleased with the results. I didn’t paint all the way up, and used the porch shelter as a demarcation point. But the colors look fine and point where the paint changes is blocked by the bush on one side and the upper porch on the other.
Most all of the bubbles flattened out and while you can see the outline, they blend pretty well.
This is one exception, but we will put back the mailbox and it will cover that right up. You can also see where the wood has rotted. It was very spongy when I did the initial work in May.
Rather than try to replace the wood, I’m thinking of this as a stop-gap measure. the house is up for repainting in the next few years, and the painters replace the boards that need it when they paint.
While scanning slides, I find it interesting to note that the slides my grandfather purchased (probably at the giftshops of national parks etc.) have mostly degraded and turned a red color. It’s very apparent when I hold them up to look at them, and somewhat less apparent in the slide viewer.
Whereas the slides my grandfather created still look great.
My coworker Sarah is due in February, so there is a baby shower on Thursday. I made this little blanket for the new parents.
I think this is the first baby blanket I have hand monogrammed and I’m quite pleased at both the chain stitch and how swoopy the C is. I did not draw the C, but I grabbed it from one of the alphabets I had squirreled away.
The theme of the party was Space Dinosaur Cowboy and I was trying for all three things, but JoAnn’s was not connecting me with any cowboy stuff. But I did like the stars and then the not-at-all concerned dinosaurs hanging out in the snow.
I ended up making the bias binding. When I do that, I always make extra because it’s a really mood killer to come up a few inches short of bias binding. (How do I know? Because I’ve done it.) But then what to do with the extra bias binding? I had the idea to poke two holes in the plain brown wrapping and make a bow with it.
