Prime Time

Rob called this afternoon to let me know that Ian had driven up to Rockville to exchange the off-white tile at the Architectural Ceramics warehouse and ended up having to get a different brand of tile since they were all out of the one we had selected. They wanted me to come by the house to make sure I was OK with the substitution before he installed it, so I finished up what I was working on and headed over.

Yesterday it was 83 degrees, but today it was in the low 60s and raining, so I had to put on real shoes (no flip-flops) and a raincoat. When I got to the house I remembered that the painters were scheduled to start priming today. I wished I had worn something a little grungier... There must have been about a dozen guys painting various parts of the house, including the stairwell, so I couldn't get upstairs where everyone seemed to be working, so I just hung out downstairs until someone came down. Fortunately, Ian was the first person to venture down, so he showed me the tile. It looked flatter and more industrial than the original tile we had picked, but since that tile wasn't going to be available for another month or so, and it was going on the floor anyway, I told Ian to go ahead and use it.

I was expecting the house to be completely white, but the painters primed most of the rooms with the same or at least similar colors to what we had picked out. Here's a sneak preview...
This is the front bedroom downstairs, which we call the "Indian Room" as it was decorated with furniture and artwork from India. The color looks kind of peachy in the photo, but it's called Cinnamon & Spice.
The color we picked for the family room is called "Lilly Pad." We chose it because it matches the tile backsplash in the adjacent kitchen, which is a color called "Lily Pad"
This is the back bedroom upstairs, which will probably be Josh's office since there is no longer room for two desks in mine. He picked out the color, which is called "Blue Nose." For some reason, they painted white over the test patch that Josh did on the wall before they primed it. I'm sure that will disappear once they do the final coat.
The hallway and stairwell are a pale yellowish color called "Cashmere." That's Rob on the floor at the end of the hall installing the laundry room door.
The front bedroom upstairs is another shade of blue called "Airway." Piled up in the middle of the floor are some of our new doors. We decided to reuse all the original doors on the main level of the house, but since we needed new ones for upstairs, we chose a different style.
Here's the door Rob installed in the laundry room.I heard lots of noise and yelling coming from the master bedroom. I was a little apprehensive about going in there, but Rob encouraged me to check it out. It turned out John and Steve W were working on our built-ins. Yay! Steve gave me a stern lecture about testing paint colors, and said we should have used paper or cardboard instead of painting directly on the walls. If that was a problem I'm not sure why Rob would have suggested it to us, but I got the sense that Steve was mostly just messing with me -- which Rob later confirmed. After Steve left, John and I tried to work out the best height for the window seat. It will be a bench with a hinged lid so we can store stuff inside, but it will also be a cozy place to sit and read a book or enjoy the view of the back yard (assuming it will eventually be an enjoyable view once again).

On the tile front, Ian and his team had almost finished the subway tile in the shower in the master bathroom.
And had pulled up all the tile that they installed on the floor yesterday in the other upstairs bathroom. It's a shame they had to undo all that hard work -- it looks like a pretty challenging pattern to install.
When I got home, there was an email from Dane introducing me to the closet designer they work with. I checked with Josh to see if he felt he needed to be involved in the closet design, but he seemed more than happy to leave that up to me, so I set up an appointment for Tuesday afternoon. I'm hoping that will be one of the "fun" parts of remodeling the house.