Renovate Brooklyn! Tin-Ceilings: Moving Right Along... SLOOOWWWLLYY.

This is all too familiar. The demo starts! The demo ends! The plastering starts! Then the plastering continues! And continues. and continues. and continues....

So while John is engaged in this grueling, unending form of torture (finishing the ceiling) I thought I would distract myself with a couple of other little side projects.

The first dalliance: I've been on the hunt for a library ladder for the living room- so I can more easily reach the baskets of supplies that are above the closets... I tracked down a couple that really caught my eye:

                                          

 

This one might be a little overboard for my needs. And with a $15,000.00 price tag, I thank my lucky stars I'm not looking for something like this. 

Loving the curved rail on this guy, though it's not really what I need either... What this boils down to, basically, is that a library ladder is pretty flipping expensive, and since I'm only using it on the rare occasion that I need something from above the closets, it seems a little foolish to splash out to much in pursuit of this dream. Enter The Mother Figure! Always to the rescue... I off-handedly mentioned that I was looking for one such ladder, and she just happens to have a slightly woe-begone rattan-bamboo-lookin' ladder in need of a home. (I mean seriously!? It's like one-stop shopping with that lady sometimes.) So my loving father diligently brought it out with him on his latest visit to Fox Ridge, and now I'm going to take a crack at adding a little pizzazz to the ladder, making into an "architectural element", rather than just a big ass bamboo-lookin'-ladder sitting in my living room. 

Here's my before-shot. Currently it is in serious need of a good sanding and scraping to get the old lacquer paint off. (Whoever did the original paint job clearly didn't do it very carefully, as paint is peeling off this baby in sheets.) After the scrape down, I'm going to hit it with a coat of spray primer, and then spray it a lovely grey-ish navy that I picked up at Lowe's. I'm so stoked that Valspar now carries spray paint in more interesting, usable colors. It used to be that your only options were carnival red, royal blue, emerald green in the truest sense of the word Emerald (think Emerald City, for instance...), Caution! yellow, and then black or white. There was really very little room for imagination in that palette, so this is a big step forward. A special thanks to Martha Stewart for getting the big-box stores on the pastel-and-grey-eige-band-wagon. You really turned this ship around. 

ANY-WAY... I should have some progress to report tomorrow. Sorry for the tangent...