The Upstairs Rooms: In Color

We still have a few things left to finish - installing the ceiling fans, putting on the outlet covers, tiling the bathroom - but it has been quite the haul just to get to the point where the walls are painted, the floors are finished, and most of the baseboard and shoe mold is installed. I'm too happy about getting to this point, so I'm posting photos...

BATHROOM
This is the bathroom floor - stained and finished. We had to put a dark stain down to hide the water stains and irregularities in the wood. The corner you see in this photo is where the tub sat originally. You can see plumbing stubs in the wall to the right of the corner - the sink cabinet will go there.
The paint color in here is Benjamin Moore's Hawthorne Yellow. A side note about the paint - we started with Benjamin Moore primer, and it was the most difficult paint I've worked with in a very long time, so we switched to Sherwin Williams paint, which I have always had good luck using. The SW primer went on beautifully. I had already selected all my paint colors from the Benjamin Moore swatches, and all but one from the Historic Colors group.So I had my Sherwin Williams store mix my paint using the BM colors.
We still have to install tile on the walls, and in the tub/shower enclosure, and I will order a radiator cover for the radiator so that I don't have to add yet another coat of paint to the thing.
The woodwork in this room is two-toned. Not something I planned initially, and most definitely not a historically correct option, but when I was sanding and prepping the woodwork for urethane, I found that the woodwork in the bathroom had been stained a pecan color. I was able to sand all of the woodwork down to bare wood and urethane it except for the door, the window sashes and a small door in the built-in. I was faced with taking far too much extra time to try and get these ready for clear urethane, or I could figure out something else to do. I knew the floor was going to be stained dark, and I already had my bathroom cabinet picked out and it was dark as well. The idea for blending light and dark woods in this room just seemed to make sense. It may not suit everyone's taste, but I like mixed woods, and having the lighter, golden pine wood framing out this rich, dark mahogany color, to me is really striking and a little exotic.

UPSTAIRS LANDING
Everyone asked me if I was going to take the telephone out of this hallway. It really isn't necessary, especially in our highly mobile era of portable phones, cell phones and wireless everything, but there was a certain charm, and practicality to having a telephone in a central location upstairs.
My dad ran new phone wire through the house from the initial jack that the phone company installed, and I found a new phone with a bit of a vintage look to it that we hung on the wall.
The walls here are Concord White.
All the woodwork in this landing area, including the built-in, just got a light sanding and a fresh coat of urethane. I was doubtful about how it would look, but when we put the urethane on, the wood just came back to life and absolutely sparkled.
As I've mentioned before, I had all the window and door hardware re-plated so it looks brand new, but is, in fact the original hardware.



MASTER BEDROOM and BACK HALL
This is the window that we had to remove in order to load in all the sheetrock for the upstairs rooms. It was boarded up for about a month (maybe longer, it's easy to lose track), and almost caused me to lose my homeowner's insurance. I got a call from my agent who said that an underwriter had driven past my house and wanted to cancel my policy because of this window and a few other mostly small issues. Long story short, the company was very difficult to deal with, would not compromise or negotiate, so I took my business elsewhere.
Yet another side effect of the real estate boom and bust. Insurance companies are nervous about insuring properties that don't fit into a tidy little box. Being in the middle of a renovation, without a general contractor, and without a concrete date for completion really made them nervous. My lack of patience with them asking the same questions over and over, while refusing to budge off of their cancellation threat, didn't help, and certainly didn't elicit any spirit of cooperation on my end either.
This is my third renovation and I have never had any problems at all with an insurance company. I really didn't see that coming at all.
OK, so the master bedroom is painted Tucson Tan, and this back hallway is Stratton Blue. When I first looked at this house, this little hallway was being used as an ad hoc closet, and I couldn't quite figure out its purpose. Then I realized that the window you can just see on the right side used to be a door, which means that there must have been a 2-story porch at one time, and this was the access to it from the second floor.
My future plan is to put a 2-story porch back on the house, remove this window and replace it with a door. This porch will look out over the driveway, and its first floor will provide a completely enclosed, weather tight entry to the kitchen - a very important feature for keeping the heat in and the icy cold air out in the Buffalo winters.
This hallway also provides bathroom plumbing access. The door you can just see on the left wall beside the radiator provided access to the bathtub plumbing, and now provides access to my sink. The cutout on the left at the front of the photo is a new access point for the tub and shower combination.
Originally there was an old porcelain sconce stuck on the wall in a very odd location. There were four such sconces that were randomly stuck on walls in the house, and fortunately, they were matching pairs. We took one of the pairs, rewired them and found a better location for the pair on this wall. What you see here are still temporary lights, but we will be installing the sconces soon.

GUEST BEDROOM
This was, without doubt, the ugliest room upstairs. Actually, the ugliest in the entire house. It was painted this awful royal blue with a semi-gloss finish, and the plaster had a dozen badly mended cracks in it.
I was in a quandary about what to do as far as the walls went - I didn't want to remove plaster, but what was there was just hideous. I was fortunate that my sheetrock guys suggested skim-coating the walls, and that worked out beautifully.
We painted the newly smooth walls (and the radiator, which had also been blemished with the blue paint) with Roxbury Caramel in a flat finish, and this room feels so peaceful and cozy. It gets western light, which changes the paint color as light and color interact.


OFFICE/SPARE ROOM
This, the smallest bedroom at about 9 x 10, actually had a nice peachy color on the walls already, which gave me the notion to keep it in those tones. The room is on the northeast corner of the house, but even so, it gets some nice light. I could see how the sun would warm the color on the walls and change it from peach to yellow-ish to rosy pink.
I replaced their peach with Ansonia Peach again in a flat paint. I used flat paint in all the bedrooms to hide the plaster irregularities, and all the ceilings got coated with Montgomery White, which is more of a french vanilla color. I am not a fan of "ceiling white." To me, it makes a room hard looking. And incomplete - like you forgot to do the ceiling.
I know that the paint colors look almost identical in these photos even though they are different. I did stay in a certain range of colors so that no one room would be jarring (like the "blue room" was). Benjamin Moore has virtual color swatches on their website if you are curious enough to get a better take on what these colors actually look like.