An Amelia Hill House Fall Update

It was pointed out to me that I have been awful at blog documenting this Amelia Hill House renovation adventure. An adventure it has been! If you're on Instagram, you have had a sneak preview in my stories. If not, here's what's been up in the old farmhouse!

Library is getting bookshelves like a proper library!

Bookshelves are getting installed this week, and I'm so happy with them! We sprung for having a local carpenter build shelves out of real wood, instead of doing the IKEA route again. It felt right for the age of the house to add something long lasting and useful.

These are the entire length of this room, but it won't all fit in the frame. Six bookcases total.

Next week we can finally start putting books on shelves, and not in multiple boxes and bins. The luxury!

And paint!

Picking a color for this room was probably the hardest decision about the house for me (besides buying the house.) It felt like such a big deal to pick a color for an entire room. Not just the baseboards, cabinets, or a wall.

We hemmed and hawed, and vacillated between blues and greens - and red for a hot minute there. We have not had a sunny day since we started painting this past Monday, but soon we will see how this looks in full light! This light has made it impossible to capture a true color photo of the color, but it is Sycamore Grove from Behr which looks more of a richer green on our walls.

But the lighting may be an issue

Full light is something sorely lacking in the library as of late, and not just due to the dreary weather.
When I was scraping the ceiling of its popcorn (more on that later) I had to remove the old light fixture to safely scrape that area. I've never loved the fixture, and it has always manage to be a bit dim - despite having 5 light bulbs. However I wasn't expecting to find cloth covered wires and no ground wire.

You might recall that rewiring the entire house was part of our pre-move in contractor work. Or so I thought. We're trying to understand what, exactly, happened in the communication breakdown between what we got in the estimate and what the electrician believed to be his scope of work. That outdated wiring limits what kind of fixture we can install, and it may not even be safe to install anything.

Hopefully that gets ironed out soon. The days are growing shorter here in the north!

Oh ceilings

Now about that ceiling.

We had your typical popcorn ceiling in the library. I don't actually mind popcorn ceilings, but when we took down the room length mirror door closet, it exposed a radically different texture on that part of the ceiling. Leaving them as is wasn't going to work long term.

So I started scraping, to limited success. I mostly succeeded in getting the large bumpy parts off, but there was still a definite varying texture remaining.

So we rented a dry wall sander from Home Depot and started sanding.

Oh my goodness. Even with being hooked up to a shop vac, that room, and it's adjourning rooms, looked like they were covered in volcanic ash. We're probably doing to be dusting for a week, just to get back to normal. So lesson learned - don't try and sand off remaining popcorn ceiling.

Now I'm not sure what to do. Heavy duty hand scraper? Just cover the whole thing? If so, which what? I don't feel keen to put up new popcorn ceiling after the rain of dust and spider webs that came off the old one. Open to ideas in the comments!

The nursery is getting some color

Nursery color was a much easier decision. Maybe because it's a smaller room, way up at the top of the house, and only inhabited by the least verbal of my children. We went with Daydream from Sherwin Williams. It's sort of a lilac grey but it looks much more on the lavender side on our walls. That works for me, but would have been frustrating if we were going for more of a delicate color.

I need to do one more coat of color, then start on the trim, but then this room will finally be open for occupation! The kids are so excited to do The Great Room Swap again.

Projects on the back burner

In an old house, there is always more that could be done, but some are higher on the list than others.
That includes things like: cleaning out the garage, planning a functional garden for next year, replacing some doors, painting the day nursery ceiling, and making any sort of organizational effort in the day nursery actually. It's currently just an explosion of toys that I choose to ignore for the time being.

Projects on the back back burner

Then there are the things that probably aren't going to happen for another few years. They include getting the fireplace in working order (although I do think adding candles in there does a lot to brighten and cozy the room.)
Decorating the guest house with any sort of vision.
Replacing our crumbling retaining wall next to the stone patio (granted this might get moved up to back burner status out of necessity, but probably not until next spring/summer.)
Updating our extremely 1970's living room so it's not the darkest room in the house, and doesn't mesh with it's adjourning rooms in style or feel at all.

Rachel from Efficient Momma has some help with that last one! She has started offering room consultations, and she worked on our living room as part of her portfolio.
Some rooms in the house were very easy for me to envision and break down into actionable steps. This living room? It just felt like a giant block of scary. Painting the fireplace had been suggested, but I had a hard time picturing that in the space. Rachel's photoshopping skills helped me a lot!

She includes links to specific products and DIY tutorials, along with her thoughts and reasoning, in a helpful item-by-item write up along with the photo. Even though we probably won't tackle this space for a while, I feel like at least I can keep an eye out for specific items, like the large area rug, as we acquire items for other areas of the house.

Overall, I'm so happy to be doing this work! Even when it gives me blisters on my hands from painting so much. Getting all the interior spaces in the house usable by winter has been a big goal for me, and I think it can happen!

Going to throw this out there because sometimes the Internet is a magic genie granter-of-wishes-and-dreams: if you know of a good place to get things like rugs, chairs/couches, lamps, and other library needed items in the Minneapolis area or online - let me know! I would love to thrift or antique these items if I can.
I can re-pay you in an open invitation to join me for coffee, or a whiskey, in the completed Amelia Hill House library!

Updating to link up with This Ain't the Lyceum for 7 Quick Takes!