Happy Father's Day

The day started off nice, with a lovely Father's Day gift from Lilya:

We have some beautiful little Iittala plates that have gorgeous, highly stylized foxes on them; this is the same designer, but with owls (sacred symbol of Athena, and hence not to be taken lightly). It being Sunday, and a holiday, things got off to a slow start and an early end today, but a lot got done, including one of those things that I just really love about home improvement: a small thing that takes very little time, is quite easy, and makes an enormous difference.

But first, the paint. There are some issues with our current paint. It's okay during the day, but at night, it turns into the drabbest, greyest, ugliest putty color imaginable. The highly textured walls we have may be classic and original, but they don't help either. The whole thing begins to take on the appearance of an artificial cave, like something you might see at Disneyland, or a set on the original series of Star Trek (cue fight music!).

The extreme texture also makes repainting a real pain: it sucks up huge quantities of paint, and always leaves a spot behind that you missed. The dining room is particularly odd, because rather than the whole wall surface being textured (as is the case in the living room and the stairwell and hallways), the texturing is confined to "framed panels" set in the walls, as if the textures were paintings (the "frames" are pressed into the plaster as well). In any case, the upshot is that the whole gallon of paint went to two of the walls, and evidently a second gallon will be needed for the remainder. The living room will be even more paint-hungry, I imagine. I was also not sure about the color. Because of the whole "drab Star Trek cave made out of putty" problem, I really wanted to brighten things up. We've read that an off-white with a touch of yellow will remain "warm" looking in pretty much all lighting conditions, but my walls weren't looking warm—they were looking a bit ill, in fact. Lilya pointed out that the room was only half-painted, which can affect the color quite a bit, and then I realized that the entire floor was currently covered with an electric-blue plastic sheet. And indeed, with the sheet out and more of the room painted, it has a much healthier look. Not exactly daring or innovative, but it'll do.

Lilya's favorite part? The dark blue painter's tape. Typical. It's like the old joke about the venerable Chinese musician who has never before heard Western music. He attends a concert where they play Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Afterwards, they eagerly ask him what his favorite movement was. "The Ode to Joy, right?" "No, no. The one at the beginning was sublime," says the old man. "The first movement?" they ask, surprised. "No, no—before the first movement." He means, of course, when all the musicians were tuning their instruments.

 Here you can see a direct comparison of the two paint colors.

But I promised a radical change, and here it is: I put down stain. First of all, it's a physical pleasure. No effort, no time, the lambswool pad is delightfully soft and slides across the floor all on its own. And in seconds, the floor goes from this:

 to this (although this exaggerated the darkness):

It is, for the record, the "natural" or lightest stain they make, and it's the same one we used in the kitchen—the two colors are remarkably close now, for all that they're two different kinds of wood. Here's an "in progress" shot:

It's like Photoshopping, but happens in real time, in real life! And one last shot of the other corner, all aglow. Both of these are pretty close to the real color:

Not surprisingly, this adds to the "warm" look of the walls, too.

In other news, I spray painted all the ventilation grates ("registers") black—they look old, rusty and just generally bad, so hopefully this will help. It certainly looked a lot better when we did it in the kitchen. I'm going to save those, however, for when the floors are finished, so we get the combined look.

Either tonight or tomorrow morning I'll do the first coat of polyurethane, which means breaking out my Darth Vader respirator, and possibly moving out of the house for a few days.