Two other people in the recent question about obsession mentioned home improvement. Beth and others garden as well. I want to know what books and websites you've found helpful, what you've done to your house that you wish you hadn't, what you haven't done that you wish you had, and stuff like that.

-- Anonymous, April 10, 2000

Answers

F'rinstance, we're debating wall colors. (For background, we've just bought our first house and won't move in until late next month.) Our living room faces west and has two small windows on the south side as well. We'd like to do a color, but I've lived so long (five years) in apartments that get very little direct sunlight that I'm afraid to darken the room.

Deeply colored walls are trendy right now, and also I'm afraid to go along with the trend. But it's paint, and (relatively) easily changed. Jenn (elphaba.diaryland.com) has a vividly colored house, very bold and beautiful, that is a wonderful departure from the ubiquitous and "safe" eggshell white and pale beige carpet.

So anyway, first we considered white with one accent wall, but then Rich thought dark trim on the other, white walls would be the thang. I hated that idea, and now we're thinking of a color (green, probably) with glossy, white-white trim through the living and dining rooms. Green we can compromise on, and his study (facing north, with windows but no direct sun) will be periwinkle with white, and our bedroom (facing east, full of windows and light) lavender with white. The ceilings will be a nearly-white version of the wall color.

Will this be nauseating? Trendy? Relaxing? A vain effort, since we have barely any furniture? Advice, groans of disgust, and all input gladly received.

-- Anonymous, April 10, 2000

Lisa, your planned colour scheme is exactly what we're also planning, so can we save ourselves the effort and just move in with you?

We've been in our flat since last July, and we've only stripped wallpaper from one wall so far, which isn't exactly getting on with the job. When I get cracking and do it I find it great fun and highly theraputic, but the thought of stripping wallpaper is horrible. Once we've done that through the whole flat we need to get some walls replastered, and then we'll paint it ourselves. We also need new carpet, a whole new kitchen, and better double-glazing. And we're completely broke.

I don't know of any very good books on the subject, aside from the Readers' Digest Guide to DIY (I think that's the name), which tells you how to do everything under the sun. Otherwise, I subscribe to a magazine called Living etc, which has a nice mix of different decorating styles each month, and recognises that we don't all want to spend #20k on a new kitchen or a little foot stool (I'm in the UK, by the way).

Dulux has a good website (www.dulux.co.uk) which lets you try different colour schemes out. I don't know if you can buy Dulux paint in the USA, but it could be a useful tool regardless.

(apologies if this appears twice - it didn't seem to go through the first time, so I'm trying it again)

-- Anonymous, April 10, 2000

Jackie, can you cook? or garden? or strip furniture? Are you opposed to birds and dogs? or do you hate cats? We can talk.

-- Anonymous, April 10, 2000

I can make excellent toast, I can appreciate a good garden, I've never stripped furniture, I have no strong feelings on birds or cats but I love dogs ... really, I'm basically useless but harmless around the house.

Maybe we should start a procrastinating decorating couples' commune, and between us all we could actually get a house finished within a year or so.

-- Anonymous, April 10, 2000

You guys are trying to make me kill myself, aren't you?

I'm doing the garden. That's all I can do. Our bathroom is still unfinished, we've lived here for a year and a half and we still aren't unpacked yet. We barely have functional furniture.

I just don't care about houses. I am all about the great outdoors.

We finally got our bookshelf this week. Note the singular: we ordered two. Where is the other one? Hell if I know.

Ask me if we've unpacked a single book. Go ahead, ask me.

-- Anonymous, April 10, 2000

This one is my obsession. We're contractors, too, which helps for the bigger projects, but I usually end up doing most of the little ones, especially painting, because it's therapy for me. I love having a project where I can see the finished result in a few days as opposed to a few months or years (with the writing).

As for color -- I'm a color fiend. I have lived in homes with plain tan walls (for years, actually, when the kids were so little that any sort of painting project was out of the question for me) and I was bored silly with the homogenous look. In this area, there are a lot of gorgeous houses going up and inside, they all look the same -- versions of tan, taupe, and "stone" or grayish green. It's beautiful -- don't get me wrong, but it's in every single house. There's no personality!

Right now, I am (brace yourselves) doing my living room a deep red -- it's a look I did in our old house that turned out gorgeous. When I"m done, it'll look like old, aged stone. The kitchen and dining room just off this room is now a buttery yellow. I'll have to work with the accessories to pull these two strong colors together, but if you've been looking at any decorating magazines lately, you'll see that they're popular now (coincidentally) and go really well. When I first told people I was going to do a red living room for our last house, they thought I was nuts. (This is from everyone for whom "tan" was an all-purpose color.) But they would walk in and stop and go "wow" when it was done. It really did look beautiful.

IF you want to do any sort of faux painting finish, I highly reccommend a book I found in a Lowe's -- it's called Mastering Fine Decorative Paint Techniques by Sharon Ross and Elise Kinkead. Terrific photos / layout / instructions.

The white or lighter colors on the ceiling definitely mitigate the darker colors on the walls. A couple of tips (if I may offer?) for choosing colors for your rooms -- (and you all may know these... I just thought I'd list things I learned the hard way)(grin):

1) when you're choosing a color, if the sample comes on one of those cards where there are several shades of the color (in graduated steps of hue), pay attention to the tone of the color. For example, you can choose a "mossy green" color, only to get home and realize that it has a yellowish cast to it, when you thought it was going to be grayer or bluer.

2) when you're pretty sure you're going to paint more than one room, try to choose those colors ahead and have samples on hand when you're buying, say, the curtains in one room which will be seen from the other room. It's funny how something like that can clash when it looked "right" in the store.

3) best tip I ever got -- ask the paint dealer if you can buy (or have for free, some will do this, some won't) -- a small sample of the color. You'll need about a pint or a quart, both of which are cheap enough to buy, usually. If you're doing different colors in adjoining rooms, get both colors. Next, you'll need something large enough to hang, but not so large, you're having to drive nails in the wall. I suggest a posterboard (a project board like you buy at Office Depot, for you US readers... a 2 foot by 3 foot cheap, white, cardboard or something of that size will do), and paint the color which is going to go in that room with your sample. Thumb tack it on the wall and leave it there for a couple of days (at least), where you can see how the color changes with daylight and then artificial light. It's best to do the same with the color in the adjoining room and tack it up next to this one so you can see if they go together. It's really not very time consuming and it has saved me gallons of paint mistakes when I realized that the color which looked great in the sunshine, looked horrible at night.

I could go on and on. Sorry -- don't mean to write a book here.

Oh -- one website which may have something on paint is www.hgtv.com (the site for the cable channel of the same name). They have lots of links to do it yourself projects, if I remember correctly.

And now... I'm going back to caulking.

-- Anonymous, April 10, 2000

Hey, Beth -- I'll trade ya. I'll come do your house and you come do my yard. ;) I love the idea of a beautiful garden, a stone pathway, maybe even a small water garden and little seating areas which are nearly hidden by strategically placed plants. I just can't seem to get outside. Outside is something I walk through to the car. Of course, it doesn't help that plants commit suicide when they're in my car on the way home from the store. Perfectly healthy plants turn brown before they ever reach my driveway.

I'll paint, you plant. ;)

-- Anonymous, April 10, 2000

Jackie, sounds like we're a pair. Unfortunately, talking to another couple over paint samples on Saturday, we discovered that the other woman and I should live together in a flurry of lavender and the men live next door in their blue doldrums and maybe we could go bowling or something. So I'm not sure I could fit you in. However, it sounds from the toast and level of garden-ability that we could go off into slacker heaven together.

Beth, if you kill yourself before I meet you, I'll kill you. Or something.

-- Anonymous, April 10, 2000

i love the bright colors on my walls! my living room/dining room area has a deep yellow-gold color on some of the walls. there are a lot of small sections of wall, so we put the yellow-gold on some of them and left other sections white. the ceiling is white, too

two of the walls in the kitchen forming one corner, are painted a deep blue-green, and some of the yellow-gold from the dining room is visible to contrast with it. did i mention that i love it? the blue- green is still fairly new, so i still get a jolt out of it whenever i walk into the kitchen.

one of our bathrooms is a medium blue, and i'm planning to paint another bathroom lavender. painting is quite addictive, but that's just because it's so satisfying to have huge sections of exactly the color you want.

-- Anonymous, April 10, 2000

We've owned our 1912 Craftsman bungalow for almost two years, now, not counting the 9 months we rented it before buying. The whole house is what I call "rental cream" with off-white trim. It makes me crazy. We stripped the woodwork in one bedroom in well...let's see...we began in Feb 1999 and quit sometime last fall after fits and stops. Now it sits mostly stripped, some pieces washed of their finish, others still sporting the cracked and melted shellac (from the heat gun). There are 15 patches of color on the wall that represent 15 arguements sweetie and I had over color.

Then there is the half-built cedar fence. It's lovely, what there is of it. Someday it will get copper caps and a railing. And get finished.

The backdoor and it's surrounding wall were torn apart about a year ago, too. The door is fixed but the wall is still pretty ugly.

We tore out the railing on our deck. Those scraps are laying in a heap in the driveway, along with the stump we dug up in July. I found my neighbor's turtle hiding from my kitten under all that debris.

And despite all these unfinished disasters...we've started prepping the exterior for painting. I know this sounds crazy, but it must be done. And for once, I'm really excited about a house project. My goal is to get the painting done by August so I'll still have a month of summer to finish the rest of the project.

As for a garden...that will have to wait until next year. *sigh*

Oh, this was about resources, not venting, wasn't it? I'll have to get back to you with my links. They're at home.

-- Anonymous, April 10, 2000

Kat, thank you. You have just made me feel much better.

My feeling about projects is that unless you want them to turn into actual work, you have to work on what you're interested in when you're interested in it. Obviously there are some emergencies that have to be addressed -- termites, bad wiring, a new roof -- but honestly, the world will not end if you don't finish this project today because there's another one that's caught your interest.

That is, if you can stand living in a construction zone. I guess when you can't stand it anymore, you run around finishing your projects. It's not the end of the world, right?

-- Anonymous, April 11, 2000

I just did something kinda fussy and Martha Stewart-y to help me decide on how to decorate the house we bought and move into next month. I made a scrapbook of pictures I ripped out of magazines (I knew I'd been hoarding those old magazines for some good reason...) The pics came from magazines like House Beautiful, In Style, and Better Homes and Gardens.

I had hoped that it would help me to narrow down my decision of which decorating scheme to go with. But really, its just making me see that I'm gonna have to continue to call my look "eclectic", cuz' I like elements of all different themes. Except country--I really can't stand anything that smacks of that look, and its sooo prevalent up here in the midwest.

Can anyone tell me about removing borders from walls? We'll be trying to remove some of those glued-on type of paper borders. Has anyone done this before? I'm wondering if removing them will require a whole new paint-job...

Thanks for the paint tips, Toni, those were good ones.

-- Anonymous, April 11, 2000

You're welcome, Julie! Glad they're of help. Heaven knows I've made waaaaaay too many color mistakes. I distinctly remember our first house -- we had a big, bright sunroom and we wanted it to be a faint peach color with white trim. In the store, the color really did look peach. The salesman swore it would dry lighter than the color and we were too new to know better. (colors generally dry darker) Since the trim needed priming first anyway, Carl taped up all the windows and used a spray paint gun, figuring he might as well prime the wood with the same color. When he was through, it felt like we were inside the Pepto Bismol bottle. I still can't look at that bottle without shuddering.

-- Anonymous, April 12, 2000