Newsroom Notes: Winter presents perfect opportunity for renovations, changes

I'm not a big fan of cold weather. Once the mercury starts to drop, I'm perfectly content to don some warm cotton clothing and settle in at home sweet home. Of course, this also means that I have plenty of time to look around at all of the charms and comforts of my dwelling space.

But in addition to noticing all the things I love about my home the transoms, woodwork and hardwood floors, to name a few I also see lots of possibilities for a renovation/redecorating to-do list.

When we bought our house almost two years ago, we decided to find something with potential: something we could live in and fix up as the years and the mortgage payments went by. We've been a bit slow in getting things done, partly because we found out just a couple months after moving in that a new baby was on the way (the biggest clue was that I found myself completely wiped out and asleep on the couch before 7 p.m. most nights).

The new baby is now almost 9 months old, and it's time for her to move out of Mom and Dad's room and into her own, which means that her big brothers will need to vacate their room and relocate to the large attic that until now has been a playroom.

In other words, let the home improvement projects begin.

An attic transformation

The first step is to get the attic ready to serve as a bedroom. The walls, for whatever reason, were purple when we moved in. While that color was deemed OK for a playroom, my boys make no bones about the fact that purple "is not a boy color." Whatever. So off we went to the hardware store. After perusing the color samples in the paint aisle, my firstborn pointed to an "example picture" and deemed that color as the one that he and his brother just had to have. The color? Jack-o-Lantern. Not blue, as I'd hoped, or even a nice green. Orange. An in-your-face orange, in the glossy finish, which the man behind the counter assured me is perfect for children's rooms and the sticky fingerprints that are likely to follow. I'll get my blue in the accents we chose rugs at the store, too, and the walls will be graced with Volkswagen Bug cutouts. A made-to-order boys room.

As I write this, we are preparing to do the painting. Right now, we're waiting on some wall patchwork to dry. My son picked some nice holes in the upstairs walls just because he wanted to see what was in there.

Room No. 2

Before little sister moves into her own room, it needs some patching and painting, too. I'm still deciding on a shade of pink, but pink is what the room will be. More specifically, it'll be pink with carousel pony dcor. I realize that it's kind of clich to put a little girl in a pink room, but I don't care. And frankly, neither will my daughter, at least for a couple more years.

I'll be hunting in the months to come for some moulding for her bedroom, which should be fun, since I want it to match some of the other moulding that's already in our 1897-built home.

Doors, doors, doors

My husband and I are determined that this year, we will complete some tasks we've been swearing to finish since we moved in. With old houses at least ours come old doors. On a dark night, I can stand outside and see light all the way around the doors. And don't even get me started on cold drafts. I'd like to find some stately doors, but I know I'm up for a challenge my doorways are smaller than those in newer homes. I'll just think of it as a treasure hunt of sorts.

And speaking of doors, the room that we use as the master bedroom has no doors. My best guess is that the previous owners didn't use the room as a sleeping area. It's either that, or, as my husband speculates, the entry had some really neat French doors and the other owners took them when they left. I've always felt there was something grand about French doors, so while we've considered other options for closing the room off such as the heavy drapery we've been using I'm holding out for some knock'em-dead French doors.

Wonderful wood

My husband has contributed to our home improvement list his desire to strip the paint from all the woodwork around the doors and transoms. I think it'll be a good move, and as long as we can open the windows for just a bit of ventilation, I see no reason to wait on warmer weather for this task.

What we have in mind for the hardwood floors probably will have to wait. While the floors have been redone in several places, there are plenty of others that need help and we've had the splinters to prove it.

I'm looking forward to visiting the Home Show again this year. We've got definite plans in mind for our home, and I'm betting that some of the more than 200 vendors at the show will be able to point us in the right direction for each project.