Summer renovation season!

So, for those who don't know Meg and i live in some old ghetto apartments (cause they're the only ones that allow dogs) and each year we celebrate lease renewal by painting a wall. as is apparent by previous posts our color palette tends toward the "lively" (yeah, we'll go with that). this year we decided to do the kitchen, by "we decided" i mean i asked meg which wall and what color (if i disagree i reserve the right to argue) she said "kitchen" and "lime green". i said "cool".

i like painting. maybe its just the fumes, but i do enjoy it. especially masking, i don't really know why. since we only do one wall, it is usually pretty easy to get the whole thing done in one day, from getting everything moved away from it, to putting everything back. which is nice, since i have learned that meg generally likes the things i do around here, the process freaks her out. like taking everything out of the kitchen and putting it on the dining room floor so that only a small trail of a walkway exists. but it works out that i can start when she's at work and finish before she gets home (and in this case, have to make dinner).

once all this was done, i added some bars for hanging storage, and while i was at ikea picking those up i thought of my unused can of paint, and decided to surprise meg by redoing the bathroom as well, later in the week. a year or so ago there was a leak from above that lead to a hole in the ceiling, the apartments fixed the hole, and plastered it, but never came back to paint it. so we had a big ugly section of not just ceiling, but wall that stared at me while i took a bath. so i couldn't just paint one wall, i had to paint everything. so i bought a can of white paint and painted the 3 walls and the ceiling. the remaining wall, the one that the door is on, i painted bright lime green. i also took down all the horrible cheap apartment wall fixtures that were in awkward and freqently unusable locations, puttied and plastered the holes, and put in NEW cheap ikea towel hooks, and toilet paper hanger, a magazine rack, and a small shelf. the cost of all this was around $50 including paint.

the only remaining alteration is the light, which at this moment is a bare bulb. i took the plastic cover off the existing light fixture and the room looked 300% less dingy (and this was before the painting) so i refuse to put the old cover back on. i found a light today, that is $30. kinda pricey for an apartment, but when i consider that i will likely be here for another 3 years it seems worth the ten bucks a year not to hate the bathroom.