Category: July 2017

I’m still obsessing about stucco color. I’m just putting these photos up here for my own reference…LOL!

Santa Fe Capitol Building:

Albuquerque Hotel:

A neighbor’s house:

And while we’re going with the government agency theme, here’s a couple more. The freeway was blocked (completely, there was some sort of issue, not just high traffic), so I went the back way through Bernalillo, which is the Sandoval County seat (Albuquerque is the Bernalillo County seat, LOL!)

By the way, that’s pronounced Bern-a-lee-yo. With the accent on the “lee”, and a nice clear “yo” on the end.  In Spanish, a double “L” usually sounds like a “Y”. Armadillo has it wrong!! Those Texans.

Our stucco came out way too dark, so we’re going to repaint.  Now we’re trying to do our research so we’re sure what color we want this time. It’s actually a lot harder than one would think just to pick a shade of beige already!

Here we are, running around to different buildings with a set of paint chips I cut out of brochures, trying to figure out which wall color corresponds to which paint chip. We took dozens of these kinds of photos, but I don’t think we’re any closer to picking a color.

Here’s a colorful building! Not that we’re going to paint our house yellow or pink, but we thought it would be a good one to try to practice matching paint chips. It’s surprising how light the chips look compared to the buildings themselves.

Here’s a nice boring beige, but even this one looks very dark from certain angles.

Here’s a nice one.

Hmmm, not finding a match…plus this one seems really dark close up.

I wonder if everyone thought we were crazy, excitedly running up to sides of buildings and taking close-up pictures of the walls on a busy Saturday afternoon.

It’s amazing how the same stucco can look vastly different depending on the lighting. Believe it or not, these next two photos are the same wall, and the paint chips, “adobe” and “cafe” are nearly identical.

John said the lower stripe on the Albertson’s store looked like “mashed poo”. But I’m like, no, mashed poo has more color in it than that. I mean, what are you eating?

This one’s too pink.

Can’t find a match for this one.

Hmmm, is that yellow or beige? It’s “wheat”! Do we even have a paint chip called “wheat”? No, but we should.

Here is an example of the “territorial” style like our house, which includes white trim and brick coping (along the top edge of the roof). This is a common stucco color used with the territorial style. Anyone know how to pronounce “Ochre”?

Apparently I liked my orange and pink striped shirt so much, that I decided to orange-and-pink stripe my skin too.

This happened when putting in landscaping along both sides of one of the rentals today. I really don’t like bare block walls. These aren’t good photos because the light was poor (the new plants are in the shade and hard to see), but you get the idea.

On this side, we planted things that should get fairly big, in order to create some privacy for the windows, since there is that 2-story house right nearby. We’ve planted scrub oak (a small native tree that slowly spreads in patches), desert willow (also a small native tree), and two butterfly bushes, which are hardy and fast growing. I also plan to buy flagstones to make a path. I’ll just set them in the gravel.

We planted mostly smaller things on the other side, because it has a nice view that I didn’t want to block; there’s no house to the right. This first plant (I forgot what it’s called, I bought it in a rush when I was at check-out and realized if I bought one more I’d get 25% off) Anyway, I recognize it and know will grow to be a small tree. But it won’t block any of the view because that’s the garage on the left. Then further in are lilies, lavender, sage, and a yucca. Those will be visible from the office and the living room. (Obviously, that square bush was pre-existing). This picture’s so poor you can’t really even see the sage and lavender we planted near the gate to the backyard. They’re small, but they will grow well.

This is the second rental. I was advertising it briefly, but it wasn’t showing well. So I took the ad down and we’re doing more upgrades. We just had most of the interior painted, and we’re changing out the stove and refrigerator for nicer stainless steel ones. This is also the house with the low quality laminate, that I’d like to eventually replace with tile.

I am sooooo going to go get a real job when we’re done with this remodel. I am getting really tired of all this! Plus, we’re going to need another income to pay for all the mistakes and redo’s.

Remember the tile saga? We couldn’t decide on tile, but finally we found someone who carried our original tile, yay! We knew it would be a different dye lot, but we thought – hoped – it would be fairly close. We were planning to make a patterned threshold between the two dye lots, so they didn’t bump right up against each other.  But it turns out the new tile is significantly different from the old tile.

This is supposedly the same tile! Obviously, it’s not.

I thought the two different kinds of tile looked fine together, but John really didn’t like the new tile. You can’t see it in this photo, but the new tile has a yellowish cast that he doesn’t like. So we’re back to square one with tile. Looks like we need to pick out new tile, and maybe take up the original kitchen tile as well.

Here they are, taking back up the new tile before it hardens.

We think the unopened boxes of tile we’ve already purchased can be returned. If not, I have a rental with low quality laminate flooring that is separating at the seams, and I’ll just have them install the tile there.

Meanwhile, we decided to take out the half wall at the bottom of the staircase.

Here’s how it looks with the wall gone:

And with the bottom stairs expanded:

This was very simple to do, and it gives it a much more open feel. Here it is looking down the staircase.

But now we have a carpet problem. We didn’t like the carpet, but we were going to delay replacing it until later, because it’s all though the whole upstairs and will cost a lot. But now we need to replace it.

We’ve decided that since we have to replace the carpet anyway, we might as well spend a few more thousand and get hardwood instead of new carpet, and then we’ll never have to replace it again. (This type of thinking is how remodels run away with you). All we did was take out a little wall at the base of the stairs, and now we’re putting in hardwood in the entire upstairs.

Of course we’re going to have to pick out the kind and color of hardwood. I’m thinking John and I aren’t very good at picking out colors of things. As usual, he wants darker and more dramatic, and I want lighter and more basic. Wish us luck!

Speaking of colors, we have decided that we are going to repaint the exterior. I had wanted really light, he had wanted darker. We went with dark, but now we both think it’s too dark. So we’re going to try to find a color somewhere in between.