Woodwork Saga

Almost every single person I know who has seen the house has said something about the wood work and what I plan to do to it (paint it while laughing my Evil Under-Lord laugh) I feel the need to set the record straight...

1) I've been looking a LOT at home design blogs online and print magazines. This is an obsession that has at time taken over many an evening and lunch hour at work. I've been squirreling away photos that I like; any photo of a room that appeals to me, for whatever reason, gets put into a folder on my desktop. I've amassed almost 1000 photos from online blogs and hundreds of pages ripped from magazines. This has been going on for about 2 years - long before we even looked for a house to buy.

2) When we found this house - my immediate reaction was - let's paint the woodwork! Of course a lot of nay-sayers said - NOOOO! Don't paint it! You can restore it!

I started bargaining in my head - well, maybe we'll just do this one room, maybe I'll just do these windows in the sunroom, or maybe I'm supposed to leave everything as is.

I was lost, confused! I didn't know what to do as we were closing on the house and I started obsessively looking at the snapshots I took of the house during our viewing - I even photoshopped a couple to see what it would look like if we painted the woodwork white.

3) I decided I needed inspiration and I turned to my aforementioned decor pictures. I looked through every last photo - I couldn't find one single picture that had dark wood trim (or even light wood trim!) All the rooms I loved featured crisp white painted woodwork. My original hunch was based on something!

4) When we actually closed and got the keys to the house - we saw things differently than at our first viewing - what's this thing? why is this here? Why does this window frame look as if someone had chewed on it?

We spent a whole weekend with our families, caulking, patching, sanding and cleaning the rooms with the wood work - it was a mess! And when we were done - the woodwork still looked dirty and dingy.

5) But wait! Another problem came up right away - we hated our wood flooring. It needed badly to be refinished, re-stained a better color. It was greenish puke brown. It was worn down and squeaking in spots (squeaking is an understatement!) We knew we wanted a dark wood floor. But a dark wood floor with dark wood work all over?

6) So we came to the conclusion - in order to even get the woodwork looking nice, we would have to spend a lot of time and/or money getting it into acceptable condition. Spending a lot of time and/or money on something that we didn't even like! Something that was making the house look dark and cave-like.

It didn't make sense - why would we live with something we don't like? We might be here forEVER!

So we painted it...