Queen Anne Gets a Paint Job, Part 4

Without further ado, here are some pictures of our house WITH PAINT! We've been waiting a long four years for this to happen, and it's finally time. Enjoy~~

All the different colors.

Some color up on the second floor! The teal color is called Blue Echo.

The teal is done.

Alex adds some lime green to the peak. All of the wavy lines will be that color.

The peak in the shade. The trim around the window needs to be painted a cream color, yet, and the storm windows aren't quite done.

The peak in the sun. What a difference! There are four different colors up there: charcoal along the crown moulding, the wavy cedar shakes are a lime green, the zig-zag cedar shakes are more of an olive green, and the squared cedar shakes are the same as the body of the house.

I will post more progress as its being made! Thanks for reading!

Queen Anne Gets a Paint Job, Part 3

The south side. Some people hear that and think of big cities like Chicago. In this case, we are talking about the south-facing side of our 1902 Queen Anne Victorian.

The south side of our home has had some issues. A floating corner that was having a hard time staying afloat. A leaky roof. A dilapidated porch. A weird fire escape??

A while back, our home was a multi-family home, and the second and third floors were used as a boarding house. We're not sure what the municipal code required, but we can only assume that it was during this time that a fire escape was added off the third floor. It was certainly an ugly thing.

The fire escape is visible in the upper left.

Another view of the fire escape.

When Karstin and Alex finished up on the north and east sides of the house, they moved on to the south. They were able to get two days' work done before this happened:

Spring in Wisconsin. Go figure.

We had to wait a bit for the snow to melt and for the ground to dry up a little bit, and the scraping was underway!

Notice how the fire escape is gone. Yay!

Down to the bare wood.

Alex commented that the paint came off really easily on this side of the house, compared to the north and east sides. We're thinking it may have had something to do with how the sun always beats down on this side of the house.

Ready for primer.

Now that the south side was completely scraped and prepped, Karstin and Alex could put some primer on. They decided that some of the primer would be tinted gray, so the darker colors of paint wouldn't need two coats.

Primer's all done. Now to get some color on there.

Check back for updates when the paint gets applied!

Queen Anne Gets a Paint Job, Part 2

The scraping and priming has begun! Karstin and Alex have been diligently grinding and hand scraping the layers of paint off of the east and north sides of our home. Some of these pictures are not for the faint of heart, especially if you have a fear of heights. You have been warned!

Access to the porch roof is very important. The painters can reach a lot of the house from here!

A lot of the second floor has been scraped.

Moving on to the north side of the house...

The wooden pillars came pretty clean. The spindles under the railings took them over a week to complete! There were many layers of paint on each one of them, but they got it all down to the bare wood.

Yeah, that is pretty high...

This is why we hired someone to paint our house. There's no way I'd go up there.

Gulp.

Now that they are finished putting the primer on these two sides of the house, we can get excited for color to be added. You read that right - COLOR. Queen Anne is getting a new paint job, and color, to boot! And not just one color... SEVEN.

Primer is all done on this side! It won't be white for long...

All has been completed on the north side, too, except for the very top of the peak.

The spindles turned out great. All 159 of them.

Stay tuned for more updates on our painting adventure!

Queen Anne Gets a Paint Job, Part I

When we purchased our house in June, 2012, we knew that we'd have to get our house painted as soon as we could. Years of neglect, peeling paint, and possible citations from the City of Green Bay for lack of upkeep were all bearing down on us.

This soffit is missing quite a bit of paint.

This one is too. The water damage really affected the paint.

We were recommended Green Bay's Perfect Painter by more than just a handful of neighbors. Joel Van Stechelman has quite the reputation in Astor for painting houses, not only for his time and effort, but also for the quality and longevity of the final product. Our neighbors had their house painted nearly ten years ago, and it still looks fresh and perfect today. To be honest, I was under the impression that the home had vinyl siding on it, the paint looks so great. Calling Joel was a given.

More missing paint here.

We got Joel over to our house to take a look at the exterior. We walked around a couple of times, and he told us that he'd get us on his list.

Fast forward to September 1, 2015. Backing out of the driveway on the first day of school, ready to bring our son Jacob to his first day as a preschooler. A truck pulls up with a whole bunch of ladders. Could it be? Could it really be them?? Were my eyes deceiving me?

Sure enough! Karstin, Joel's son, and his friend Alex, were coming to set up to start painting our house. This began the journey that we will hopefully someday call our "little $20,000 house project".

Below, take a look at some pictures from before the painters arrived. Watch for updates on their progress!

Some paint is missing from this trim.

A lot of paint was peeling on this side due to a large shrub that we had to remove.

We painted over this area to protect the siding until the painters arrived.

A New Coat of Paint: The Study

Back when our home was built, wallpaper was all the rage. So were dark colors of paint, which is why we chose a mulberry paint color for our study.

Before painting...

... and after!

We love this new, dark color. With the high ceilings and the large windows, the space doesn't feel small, as is what sometimes happens when walls are painted a dark color.

Before...

... and after!

A New Coat of Paint: The Nursery

The walls in our nursery were in rough shape. Something must have happened and caused some damage years ago, because the plaster on one of the walls was patched and very pitted and bumpy. The room was painted in a faux finish, probably to hide the imperfections of the newer plaster.

Some cracks have been repaired.

We tried to even out some of the rough parts by smoothing some joint compound over the pitted and uneven surface of the wall. There were also a few cracks in the walls, which we also repaired.

This large hole took three layers of joint compound to fill in!

After everything was smoothed out, we had Nitka Painting come over and give this room a new coat of paint. We loved the color of the playroom so much, that we had the same color in here. Look at how it turned out!

The color turned out great.

A New Coat of Paint: Jacob's New Bedroom

While we were planning to have Nitka Painting come out and paint our playroom, we wanted them to paint our son Jacob's new bedroom while they were here.

We are having a new baby in January of 2014, so our little guy needs to move to a new room!

This room had many cracks that needed to be fixed.

This wall needed the most attention.

A few more repairs were needed here.

Jacob's new bedroom was pink, initially. We want to do a theme with monkeys, so painting it green and brown was the next step!

These radiator pipes will serve as "trunks" for a tree that monkeys will climb.
We need to get some fake palm leaves to complete the look.

After painting.

Wall art for our monkey theme.

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!

Trimming up the Trim

Of all the rooms in our house, we liked the original color of the walls in the dining room the best.  A nice robust green color, it reminded us of the color in our dining room we had at our previous house.  While we've had a number of rooms already painted (kitchen, bathroom, sewing room), we felt that the green in the dining room was nice enough to keep as is.  Even with the nicely painted walls, this room still needed some attention -- the base trim.

The trim as it was when we moved in.

Although I am generally not a fan of painted trim, the white color does go well with the green walls.  The problem was that the paint had flaked off and was showing many signs of age.  All it took was a fresh coat of paint and our dining room trim was looking like a nice clean inviting space again.  

A fresh coat of paint makes all the difference.

A New Coat of Paint: My Sewing Room

Before we found this house, we weren't really in the market to buy a different one. We were actually thinking of starting to look for some wooded land outside the city to build a dream house, complete with a nice big kitchen, a cozy library, and a room just for me to be able to do my sewing and other crafty stuff.

Lo and behold, this home fell into our laps, and my dreams of having my own workroom were all but gone... until we started figuring out what all of the rooms would be used for. The dining room was obvious, considering both its proximity to the kitchen and the chandelier. The same went for the kitchen and the four bathrooms. The rest of the rooms, however, could be whatever we wanted them to be!

I've always wanted my bedroom to be in a turret, so that determined where our bedroom would be. We wanted the baby to have his room near ours, so that solved that one. We had another entire bedroom set for our guest room, but it wouldn't fit up the stairs to the third floor, so we had to have that on the second floor as well. This left me with a choice between the last two rooms on the second floor, neither of which had closets. I chose the smaller of the two, mainly because of its relatively square shape. The other room is more conducive to be used as a playroom for all of the future Lenz kids.

Once I decided that this room would be the home to my sewing machine, my yarn bins, and the plethora of other crafts odds and ends, I got right down to business. The first task was to take up the carpeting and get the floor refinished. After that was accomplished, we were able to schedule painters to come out and brighten the room up a bit!

The original paint color was a peachy-tan color. Not what I had in mind for a room that I'd be spending a lot of time in, so I decided to go with a light lavender color. The color in the photos looks a little darker than it turned out. The crown molding and ceiling are both white, even though they look lavender in the picture. It was a bright sunny day when I took the pictures, and there was clearly some reflection going on!

The original color.

After getting it painted! It's not that dark in real life.

We got our paint for the kitchen, my workroom, and the 2nd floor bathroom at Parker Paint in Green Bay.