Weekend Review: The Going Green Edition

So. What did I do this weekend???

Tada! Libby's newly greenified room! Plus some cabinetry I've yet to actually, you know, put together. However, since the boxes sat unopened on my front porch for four days, simply unpacking and bringing them inside is a major accomplishment if you ask me.

Also a major accomplishment? All that green on them there walls. Not only is my having tackled yet another paint job an accomplishment in itself, it's a MAJOR accomplishment because the can of green paint had sat unopened in that room for...a year? Two years? I can't even remember.

Let me check. I bought it the same time I bought the stain for the small chest I stained a while back...(back from checking) So apparently I never actually blogged about that whole thing. Best guess is, I bought it in the fall of 2011 so it's been at least a little over a year. A year of good intentions sitting in my floor ignored.

I had hated the almost white "timid violet" paint job almost from the time I first slapped it up on the walls. Then last year, I had an epiphany of what I should have painted it all along...pale green! You know, to play up the dark green carpet. Plus, with all the shades of purple accents I had brought in in an attempt to get the timid violet walls to look more violet than timid, I knew I needed a color that would work well with the carpet AND the purple. Personally, I love green and purple together. So there's how I got to my color choice.

So what was the catalyst to actually getting it done? The cabinets, of course.

You see, I've had a sort of "vision" for what I wanted to do with Libby's room since not long after I moved the bookcases out. Her room had become a sort of dumping ground for everything I didn't have space for. My crock pot, the rolling rack of cardstock/scrapbooking supplies Sis1 had given me, my old coffee table--just, a lot of stuff! But I didn't want Libby's room to the kind of room you feel you hafta close the door to when company's over. (Doesn't everyone have one of those rooms at some point or another?) So around the time the paint color came to me, the vision of a bunch of white pantry cabinets sprang to mind as well. There's actually a line of the things at Lowe's that I'd been drooling over for YEARS. They took them away for a while, though, and when they brought them back, it was a less than well rated brand. And as expensive as they are, I wasn't about to pull the trigger on them no matter how pretty they looked in the store. More than one reviewer stated that the things splintered when assembled. Splintering=BAD.

At that point, I had pretty much given up on the idea. I wasn't going to settle for something that didn't fit the picture in my  head but I also wasn't going to spend a boat load of money on splintering crap.

Then last week  happened.

Just out of curiosity and a small amount of hope, I browsed through the pantry/storage section on Walmart.com. I found one piece that I liked but it was black and I thought, meh. It's pretty but not what I had in my mind. So I put it in the "cart" but didn't purchase deciding, instead, to sleep on it.

So I slept on it and decided to just do it. Black and green work well together as evidenced in my guest bathroom, after all. BUT THEN...

You know how they have these little boxes on a product's page that says "People who viewed this item also viewed these"? Guess what other people had been viewing! The beautiful white cabinets that look just like the ones at Lowe's except...the ones at Wal-Mart were the brand that Lowe's had originally carried and had stellar product reviews. In fact, more than one reviewer compared them to the cheaper line at Lowe's and commented on how much better these were.

I didn't pull the trigger right away, though, because it was still a lot of money and I'm still paying off my Christmas debt. (Don't ask. Apparently around Christmas I took up the mentality that "It's only money" and thus flexed that plastic like a body builder.) I put the pieces I liked in my "cart" went home and slept on it.

The deciding factor was this: They were all on sale, about 25% off and all had temporary free shipping offers.  The fact that they were exactly what I had envisioned? Sealed the deal.

So all last week, I took thirty minutes or so each evening and emptied out Libby's room, hence the mess I posted on Friday. Prepped the floor boards Friday night and sometime around 10am Saturday morning, I got to painting. And I prayed...Prayed that any rain would hold off until after I'd gotten the cabinets brought in. Prayed I would die quickly when/if I fell from my step stool (I'm seriously afraid of heights and hate any sort of pain associated with long recoveries. haha)

It took me about four hours to paint the one room by myself but thankfully my knees held out, the rain held off (it's thundering now!) and it looks fabulous.

I restyled this bookcase, too. But ignore the junk leaning against it. That will all be put away once the cabinets get built.

It's still a nice pale-ish shade but you can definitely tell that it's green. And once the white cabinets go up? I think it's going to really pop. I just gotta get 'em built.

At least one of them is going to hafta wait, though. One of the panel boards was split in half so I had to order a replacement part for it this morning. Thankfully, the replacement will be free!

The plan is to flank Libby's bed with the cabinets and, if I can find what I'm looking for, to bridge the space between the cabinets with some open shelving. I've got whimsy in mind for this room, using some of my old toys and some other childish graphic stuff. If I can fit it, I'd like to eventually have a desk under the window for all the recording equipment I inherited from Paw-Paw Joe. And by recording equipment, I don't mean I'll be cutting any albums soon. Just that he had this set up of conversion equipment to put cassettes and LP's onto CD's. ;-) I haven't had a place to put it all up and use it before now but hopefully I'll be able to do that soon.

Hopefully I'll get the cabinets built one day this week. Possibly build one a night or something, providing the replacement part comes in quickly. Considering that I strained my left leg just carrying in the pieces last night, I'm thinking I won't tackle them until toward the end of the week.

Meanwhile, Libby's bed is in MY room and we're having a hard time adjusting. Last night she ended up sleeping with me in MY bed because she just can't be in the same room with me and not be touching me.

My next question is, to paint the closet doors white  or leave them wood toned? Hmmm....First world problem, I know.