The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

Hi everyone! What a crazy few weeks it’s been! We've been busy doing a lot of projects. I’ll start off with some of the good things and then proceed to what stressed me out.


After 10 years of living with this metal and wood handrail in my foyer – it is gone gone gone!!



This is my new bannister and I LOVE it. I need to paint it and I’m thinking black handrail/post and white spindles.


Of course now the steps are looking shabby so I think I’ll have to paint those again too. But what should I do? I do like the painted runner look but maybe I should just do the steps all one color and the risers a different color? What do you think?


Also, finally fixed the barn doors. They look bad don’t they!

Now the barn is ready to be painted (we pretty much decided on periwinkle with white trim). I think that’ll look particularly pretty in spring with pink roses climbing over top (have to cut them down to paint but they’ll be o.k. by next year).


We fixed a few other little things that we just hadn’t gotten to that were bugging me AND I found two great pieces of furniture at Goodwill (I’ll post them another time)

On to the bad….This is what my family room looked like on  Monday.


The whole room had paneling when we bought it which I painted a cheery yellow (what else?). You can see a bit of it around the window.

We noticed that something wasn’t right with one of the sections at the beginning of the year (after we had all the flooding rains in the fall) but we just had a new heating/air system installed so we waited to fix it. BIG MISTAKE!

Well, we pulled off that panel  thinking/hoping we just had to put on a replacement panel and found…..TERMITES!!! Yes, we have a Termite Bond (the entire exterior is treated every four years), yes we have yearly inspections etc. Apparently we had more than a few loose bricks/cracked mortar joints on the brickface on the outside of that cinderblock wall which let in a lot of moisture (from those monsoon rains) and termites are really bad in Georgia anyway and they love themselves some wet wood! Coupled with other factors having to do with the way the house was constructed (in the 60’s) which I won’t bore you with, it was just the perfect storm so to speak.

We found them on one end and then starting taking all the panels off that wall and found some on the other end. We kept going until we didn’t find anymore. They were pretty much just in two areas and part of the ceiling.

So  my basement was drilled again on the inside this time and retreated with I’m sure horribly noxious chemicals that probably took a few years off our lives! But what are you going to do. There is no eco-friendly termite treatment as far as I know.
 
That’s the ugly above (my apologies to anyone that has this and likes it – I don’t)….with help from friends, we put  up more paneling which I can tell you is such a bummer for me it almost makes me want to cry! I’ve always wanted to drywall the whole basement and this would have been a good time but it’s just out of our budget (we didn’t have a replacement policy on our Termite Bond, just for retreat  so we had to pay for redoing the walls– live and learn).


So, in the future….a post on how to paint paneling….sigh! I have so much stuff to paint and we were in the process of picking colors for my daughter's room because she wanted to repaint her room. That's on the back burner now!

Good thing I have a generally optimistic attitude – it could have been worse and at least I have a home -  even though it sometimes feels like a money pit!

I had to leave you with something pretty!  Have a great weekend everyone – we had planned on putting in a privacy fence along the back of our property this weekend so we'll go ahead with that since we already have the materials! All I can say is that I'm never bored and who needs a gym membership?


P.S. I changed my template to the stretch so if you are not seeing all of the photos - stretch out the sides of the screen. I have to do that with my desktop but not my laptop.