Wednesday, August 10, 2011

New Light Switch Plates!

I may have gone a little (extra) crazy this weekend. I have lived in my apartment for almost a year now, and I am tired of looking at the dirty light switch plates and holes in the wall that were supposed to be fixed before I moved in. So, on Sunday, I started taking matters into my own hands.

With the intent of buying Spackle and browsing around for everything else, I packed my mis-matched Sunday-afternoon self into my car, baseball hat and all, and drove over to the hardware store. There I found many wonderful things. It was hard not to look around and imagine really – really – fixing the place up. I saw light fixtures I would love to have hung up, as well as new blinds for the bedroom.

It kind of made me wish I owned my own house. And then for about 1 scary minute in the bathroom fixture aisle, I thought it would be a good idea for me to own a house. Then I realized that was silly. Still, the more I think about it, the more I am starting to believe that if I make it through next year, then plan on staying longer, I should consider buying a little one or two bedroom house. But my crazy is starting to digress from the original topic here.

I ended up buying a metal switch plate for the kitchen and a bunch of blank wooden switch plates and some paint for the other rooms. Then, I bought my spackle, my spackle-spreader-thing that I can’t remember the name of right now, but knew it by name to ask for it in the store, and picked up a bunch of paint samples.
Call me crazy (and some of you have), but I am thinking of repainting the living room kind of an orange color. Right now it is pale blue, and the color swatch taped to my wall that I keep looking at is called “orange toffee”. I really like it. As for the bedroom, I don’t really care for the shade of yellow in there right now, and after I patch the holes, I won’t care for the white blobs either, I am guessing. Perhaps the bedroom needs to be done in kind of that pale purple-blue color called “spa” or the brighter “green grapes”. The next step will obviously be buying small samples of the paints and painting them on the wall to stare at them for a while.

That’s the way adults do it, right? They decide to pick one small household project, then it snowballs into more and more complicated and large-scale endeavors. When painting, the first tape papers to the wall and stare at it for a week, then paint little patches and stare at that for a week. 

Below are pictures of the light switch plates I painted on Sunday. It took me all afternoon and most of the evening. I just finished the one for the office last night and haven’t had a chance to take a picture, so it is not in the mini gallery below. Just so you know, though, it is bright green with connected white, purple, blue, and yellow swirly and squiggly lines. It turned out alright, and considering it is my least favorite, it is fine by me that it is in the room least visited. The light switch outside the back door is orange and says "Welcome" as well as my last name in cursive. The switch plate for the kitchen is not pictured because I did not in any way artify it. It is a shiny metal switch plate that looks like it has tire treads, so that's cool.

Bedroom light switch before. Yuck!
 
 Gross black switch plate in living room. Don't worry. It is gone now.

 Now the switch plate in the bathroom perfectly matches the rug and the ribbon on the curtain!

 This is much more interesting, although more feminine than I would usually go. Still, I'm kind of proud of it.

 A closer look at the bedroom switch plate.

 Whoa! The living room switch plate is WAY more exciting now, right? 
Too bad I couldn't really paint the straight lines!

 Now the hallway is all musical. Between the fuzzy music notes hanging 
from the light fixture and this, guests are going to start thinking I like music!

 Side view

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