A New Coat of Paint: The Playroom

One of the rooms on the second floor doesn't have a closet. We knew that we wouldn't want to use it for a bedroom, so the next logical idea was to use it for a playroom for the current and future Lenz children!

When we first bought the house, the color of this room was kind of like a "peachy-tan"... the same color that my sewing room was before we had it painted a lovely lavender color.

Before painting.

There were a few cracks in this wall that we wanted to repair before the room got painted.

A few small cracks on this wall needed our attention as well.

We wanted the theme of this room to be Dr. Seuss' books, so we needed a nice neutral color that would go with everything from One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish to Horton Hears a Who and The Cat in the Hat. White was not a part of the conversation, simply because the trim was already going to be white, and who wants an all-white playroom? We went with Easter Lily. It really does look white on the computer screen, but against the white trim, it has a touch of yellow.

Nitka Painting was called up again. They were able to come out and paint this room for us, along with Jacob's new bedroom, which is right next door to this room.

Another room painted!

After painting.

We like how it turned out!

Pillar Repair

When we first walked through our home, one of the things that we noticed was that one of the stone pillars on our porch was leaning. We knew we'd have to get it repaired someday, but that day came very recently!

This is what we have had to look at since we bought our house!
The stone pillar in the background of the picture was not exactly vertical either,
so it needed to be repaired as well.

Pat Drury of Drury Designs was brought on board to help coordinate the repairs we'd need to make to our 111-year-old porch. In addition to the leaning pillar, we also had some problems with the porch roof leaking, but that will be covered in a future blog post. We will also have more lighting installed along the entire length of the porch. We are really looking forward to that!

The first thing that had to happen was that our mason, Aaron from Vanden Avond Masonry, had to take the pillars apart layer by layer. Then, Eric from Roffers Concrete Construction had to come and dig out the old footings. He had to go four feet down! After that, he had to pour new footings for the repaired pillars. The final step was for Aaron to reassemble the pillars.

The disassembled pillars.

Eric removing concrete debris.

The excavating begins!

Four feet down.

The first part of the footings have been poured.

The rest of the footing has been poured.
The forms around the outside had to stay on for several days.

This is all that you can see of the footings - the rest of it is buried under four feet of topsoil.

Now that the pillars have been reassembled, we are so glad that we can cross off another thing on our list of renovations.

The stone pillars have been put back together... and they aren't leaning!
The mason did a nice job of making the mortar look aged, so these repaired pieces don't stand out
compared to those that didn't need repairs.