Letting the Sun Shine In

To our sun porch that is.  And thanks to a little Mango Madness, it now looks like it is aglow.  We’ve been procrastinating thinking about our sun porch ever since we laid out our master plan a couple of months ago, but after choosing our wall color a few weeks back, we have been making progress.  Mostly in the form of thinking about it and talking about it and perusing the Home Depot.  But now we have a little bit of tangible proof that we haven’t forgotten our little sun porch.  Which is more like a sauna in the abnormal heat wave that Minnesota has been experiencing the past few days.  With fresh paint on the wall (that we hope will dry in this wild humidity), we know where we are headed with our redo.

We were inspired to start painting on Saturday right before it became unbearably hot.  So while Dain began to tape the trim and window frames, I cleaned the windows….for the first time ever.  And not just my first time.  I’m pretty sure it’s the first time they have been cleaned in their history (since the sun porch was added by the previous owner and never finished).  And they were DISGUSTING.  Obviously, I should have known that windows need to be seriously cleaned, but we’re new to the homeownership game so (gasp) we have never thoroughly cleaned any of our windows. After turning to my most trusted advisor for all things home repair and maintenance (google), I now know that windows should be cleaned twice a year in the spring and fall.  To which I say, you have got to be kidding me.  And I took out the expletive for your sake. Dain claims he knew all of this, which begs the question of why he has never actually done it or even mentioned it to me before.

Let’s just say cleaning the six windows in the sun porch left me one disgruntled wife and homeowner for a couple of hours as I was knee deep in hostas picking dirt and dead bugs out of windowsills and flicking grubs off of myself.  And I promptly called not it on the 13 windows that somebody has to clean upstairs now.  But the windows on the sun porch are sparkly clean.

While I was busy bitching cleaning the windows, Dain added the first coat of Mango Madness to the walls.  Try not to be distracted by how clean that window is…it’s like the neighbor’s yard and garage are right there.  Oh wait, they are.  The price we pay to be city slickers that are still saving up for a retaining wall and fence.

It continually amazes us how paint can transform a space, and this was a good one.  It is BRIGHT.  And we love it.

It’s such a small room that it’s hard to get a good shot, but it really does glow in the sunlight. Mango Madness is probably not for everyone.  For instance, my dad will cringe when he sees it (as he does at any color that doesn’t happily reside in the beige family), but we think it brings some much needed life to our small room.

Dain also added a second coat on Sunday, and he looked like he had just jumped into a swimming pool when he finished thanks to the ungodly heat index over 100 with 80% humidity.  Now it is on to the next steps.  And after seeing what was under our thin, cheap carpet scrap, we are moving towards tiling the floor.

Especially when we realized we could do it for around $200-$300 since it is only about a 10×10 room.  Now that is of course using very affordable tile from Home Depot, but after checking it out, we think we can agree on something from there.

As for the ceiling, while we would love to add decorative tin tiles, we are probably going to go for something more affordable: stenciling.  We have never used a stencil for painting at our house yet, but we’ve been wanting to try our hands at it.  Or really just Dain’s right hand since that’s what will make it happen.  Luckily, the Royal Design Studio sells a variety of Moroccan-inspired patterns to choose from.  We are leaning towards this one.

In the next few weeks we hope to:

1. Prime and paint the trim and baseboards white.
2. Tile the floor.
3. Paint the ceiling (using a stencil?).
4. Add curtain rods and curtains.
5. Decorate.
6. Start thinking about a custom bar/table that Dain wants to build into the wall.

You know…just a couple of things to do around this place.