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My House
1970 home renovation

painted basement paneling

When I shared the basement last week, the wallpaper was primed and painted, and it was already looking worlds better!  I have learned that when I have momentum, it’s best to let that carry me into the next thing, which was priming and painting the paneling, trim, doors, and shelves.  The doors and shelves were going to be the biggest pain, so I decided to work on those over a couple of days, making the rest of the painting relatively easy. In the hopes I would only have to apply one coat of primer and one coat of paint, I had the primer tinted to the final color, Light Blue.  I used ProBlock primer by Sherwin-Williams for good adhesion to the smooth paneling and Farrow & Ball’s Light Blue in their Modern Eggshell finish.  Modern Eggshell has a bit of a gloss to it, I would say comparable to something

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July 7, 2025 27 Comments
1970 home renovation

removing english ivy two ways

There was a time when I thought English ivy was charming.  I mean, it is. When you see it growing up old brick homes, there is something beautiful about it.  Now that I have lived in a mid-century brick home that was half-eaten by English ivy, I no longer find it charming.  It stains the brick, it grows in windows and screens, it chokes out bushes and trees, and it’s incredibly hard to remove and control once it’s gone unchecked. A lot of ivy was removed from our home before it was put on the market.  We could see the remnants of it and have cleaned off the roots and staining as we’ve worked on the exterior of the home.  (You can read about how we removed ivy roots & stains HERE.)  And now we’re working on removing ivy from an overgrown bed on the left side of the house.

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June 30, 2025 6 Comments
1970 home renovation

painting wallpaper | 1970s basement makeover

Let’s talk about painting wallpaper.  In most cases, I am not in favor of it.  Painting wallpaper bonds the wallpaper to the drywall in a way that makes it almost impossible to remove down the road. Some wallpaper will bubble and crease when dampened by a fresh coat of paint.  It’s a shortcut that will almost always require more work at some point, such as replacing the drywall entirely or covering it with paneling.  But, there are times when the speed of painting over wallpaper outweighs all of the negatives. Such is the case with our basement.  For this basement to get a proper update, it really needs to be entirely redone.  New drywall, new ceiling, new lighting, and it would benefit from being reconfigured to allow some natural light.  When we bought the house, we thought we would renovate the basement, but after a couple of years of living

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June 30, 2025 16 Comments
All Things Home

painted garden obelisk

When I decided to make custom lattice for our DIY A/C surround, I measured and counted out how many 1 x 2s I thought we would need for the project.  I estimated that we would need 85 1 x 2s and figured I should round it up to 100 to have some extras in case some were warped or in bad condition.  I was confident in my math, so Jeff and I primed and painted all 100 pieces, even though he pointed out that we wouldn’t be able to return extras. Well, it turns out that math still isn’t my strong suit, and I dramatically overestimated how many 1 x 2s we would need.  Since I have a big pile of primed and painted, unreturnable 1 x 2s sitting on our newly-organized garage floor, I decided I should get building!  We’re going to make a surround for our propane tank,

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June 24, 2025 18 Comments
1970 home renovation

DIY custom A/C surround reveal

Jeff and I noticed a stretch of stifling days in the forecast, so that gave us the push we needed to get the DIY custom A/C surround installed and finished this weekend.  I shared the progress we made on building the surround a couple of weeks ago HERE. Since I had all of the pieces painted and two of the panels of the A/C surround built, it was pretty quick and easy to install.  We had a general plan of how to attach the pieces for stability and longevity, but we knew we might make some adjustments along the way since this is the first one we’ve built and installed.  It’s all finished and I am so excited with how it turned out! As a reminder, here is how the store-bought one we’ve been using for a couple of years looked… THIS is the one we had.  It worked pretty

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June 23, 2025 12 Comments
All Things Home

facebook marketplace find | vintage oak desk

If you followed my blog during our move to Maryland three years ago (can you believe it’s been that long?!), you probably remember that I sold a ton of stuff.  One of the pieces I sold was the vintage oak teacher’s desk I used in my studio.  Oak teacher’s desks turn up pretty regularly on the used furniture market and are generally not very expensive, so I figured I could find a replacement pretty quickly.  Three years later, I was still using a table as a makeshift desk!  Since I still hadn’t found a desk I liked after over a year of casually looking, I purchased the small drawer cabinet so I had a place to store my desk accessories.  It worked, but I continued to search Facebook Marketplace and at local antique stores for a vintage oak desk. I finally found one a few weeks ago and, after some

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June 18, 2025 20 Comments
All Things Home

tell me you’re doing home renovations…

…without telling me you’re doing home renovations.  Just look in their garage or any other storage spaces.  They will likely be a jumble of materials and tools used for projects looking something like this… Yes, those are still boxes that have not been unpacked since our move into this house almost three years ago.  Yes, this space is embarrassing.  Yes, I watermarked the photos. When we first moved in, Jeff built some simple garage shelves to provide some storage.  Before that, we had the foresight to prime and paint the walls behind the built-in shelves so it wouldn’t be an issue later.  Aside from those early efforts and a few feeble attempts at getting this beast under control, it’s been a disaster since we moved in.  It’s just been in varying degrees of disaster.  Just when it’s less of a disaster, we undertake another project, and it becomes a disaster

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June 11, 2025 16 Comments
1970 home renovation

power washing the front walk

We have done so much work on the front of our house over the last couple of years.  After all of the painting, planting, and updates, there was one glaring thing that needed to be addressed.  This front walk desperately needed to be cleaned. We bought a power washer a few years ago, so we just needed to get it out and put it to use!  (The pressure washer we purchased is no longer available, but it’s similar to THIS ONE.  We paid much less for ours, though!)  I imagined doing this long sidewalk, along with the patio and pool deck, inch by inch, so I looked into power washer attachments that cover a larger area with less effort.  I ended up purchasing THIS 15″ surface cleaner attachment by Karcher.  Jeff was highly skeptical and really didn’t even want to get it out of the box.  He kept saying things

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June 10, 2025 15 Comments

I’m Marian, a painter, writer, and lover of all things creative. From art and antiques to home projects and everyday life, I share my journey in hopes of inspiring you to embrace your own creativity and make beauty in the spaces you live.

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