I love the 80s!

Just not in my house...

Below is a picture of the view down our hallway when we moved in... Then someone got the GENIUS idea that our house would look less 1984 if I painted the trim.  My friend and co-worker, Whitney, tried to warm me about the awfulness that is painting trim after she had a similar idea last year, but I did not head her advice.  I have given her sh*t about not being honest enough.  I told her she failed to tell me it was the worst thing you'd ever do.  I cannot recommend it to anyone.  I actually recommend if you ever think, "Our house would look so much better with painted trim", that your next thought should be, "What realtor should we use to go buy a house that already has white trim". Yes, my friends, I recommend you just move.  It's about that bad.  Actually it might be way less bad for someone who doesn't work 70hrs a week at baseline, or someone who had full weekends off.... enough of my rambling.  The fact of the matter is, it DOES look far better white, I just think there are easier ways to get there (like moving).  I had a full weekend off while Brendan was away, so I thought I would surprise him by accomplishing this one task.  Needless to say I accomplished NOTHING else.  There were 6 laundry baskets all over the living room when he got home! But the hallway had white trim, and I'm sure that was the most important thing to him ;)

The hallway when we bought the house last year

Long ago (when I painted the living room trim) we replaced the baseboards.  At least I had the foresight to realize that was a way better idea than painting them), so we replaced them all the way down the hallway then, too.  We also enlisted the help of my Brendan's most awesome brother to assist in sanding (I just couldn't handle doing all the steps!).  So this is what we lived with (seriously, without doors) for months and months 

Except that you can't actually live without a bathroom door for more than a week (and you only get a week if you live with just your husband and are too busy for any sort of a social life), so I previously made the bathroom door look like this... (also note I my mom and sister painted the hallway sometime previously)

Well that looked damn good, but not good enough to make me find time to do the rest. So we continued on in our life without doors for many more moons.  We at one point had to screw on a door by a few screws but wo a knob so Lydia could go to bed... I'm not proud of the conditions I live in, but it is my life...

So anyway, starting with above, I finally got out my primer and my tape and set to work...

(So there was a time we had all the hall closet contents in the office) I'm not proud of the fact that I went to the office every morning to get my towel or Q-tip, but it happened

All primed and ready for paint!

 Bummer thing is when you take off those doors, oh yeah! you have to paint those, too.  Thank goodness paddy had already sanded them!

Primed (at least one side)

Oh wait! There's more! 

 Finally! Alllllll done!  The part you don't see here is that I rehung the doors will all new hinges and doorknobs, so I spent awhile putting on 4 new doorknobs and 8 new hinges and holding up doors to hang myself! Good thing we have hollow core doors!  

What are these tall wooden things blocking my entry into a room??

So beautiful! I LOVE IT! Also note I changed the light fixture at some point in the past, much better!

More 1980s... 

Our kitchen is a time warp.  Brendan actually says he feels like he is in an 80s sitcom when he's in there.  I can't say I disagree.  It's horrible.  And a terrible design to boot. I can't even tell you how awful. Here's a picture of the 1980s-ness.

One of my favorite pictures is this one of my friend Trisha after we had a cooking catastrophe.  But she's wearing my 70s print apron and my vintage tupperware is on the counter as well as the green tea kettle, so it seriously looks like this could have been taking circa 1985!!

The worst of the awful kitchen, though was this behemoth.  Seriously, guys, the microwave took 2-3x longer than a normal microwave.  I actually would have to put things in for 8-10 minutes REGULARLY!  And one day I tried to make microwave popcorn and it wasn't strong enough to pop more than a couple of kernals! The bag never even inflated! 

So some awesome people in our life took pity on us.  Importantly my parents' good friends, Dean & Kim, and my parents.  Dean and Kim swapped out their wall oven and microwave and oven for a double oven and were ungodly generous to see if we would like their "old" ones.  God bless people like this.  SOOOO my dad and mom brought it down one day and we my dad spent a whole saturday installing it (ironically they had to cancel plans with dean and kim the night of install bc it took so long!)

Trying to get it out. Turns out you had to totally disassemble the thing...

The beast coming out

Hmm what's this new spot for me to sit??

 I think the people before us stored some tinfoil in the drawer below the oven... and some old oven mits and shopping bags.  We opted to throw all that away...

Then there was an electrical issue, namely that we needed a way to get electricity to the oven bc the box the previous one was wired into was inside that drawer and hard to get to.  Luckily my dad is awesome and fixed that issue by putting a plug on the oven wires and a plug into the wall.  Oh yeah, and the original one had only one power supply, the new one has 2 separate, so he also stole and outlet from a nearby light switch to make a way to plug in the microwave.... um, crazy, right?!

Oh yeah, then the original didn't need a microwave shelf because they were all one unit.  This one not so much, so he had to build a shelf... are you seeing why this was a full day project?!

 

Finally we were ready to put the new one in!!!

Tah dah!

AND....!!!

 

Someone else thought it was great we could make popcorn, too!  Little punk - she's so naughty! 

But how can you stay mad at this face??

We have a long ways to go, but I think we have made some progress in our quest to move into the new millenium!