On Friday Marc and I drove to Lowe's to look at a paint color. Now a smart gal would goto a nearby home improvement store to look at paint chips. Unfortunately I'm a house blogger. I read in Kim's blog: "One Woman's Cottage Life" about repainting her Living Room with American Traditions color "Clarified Butter". This looks like a lovely warm yellow-ish color that might be exactly the one I need. The nearest Lowe's is 28 minutes away. The nearest Home Depot is 5-7 minutes away. Unfortunately, American Traditions seems to only be carried by Lowe's. Kim has already gone through the pain of choosing a yellow. Her pictures -look- lovely and warm without being overwhelming. So I decided to "stand on the shoulders of giants" and start with her paint chip. So off we went. An hour and a half later we had a sample of the color, a quart of the color, and a gallon of primer. Marc says he painted a sample of this on the walls today (Monday). I'll look at it tonight and we'll see if we're ready to paint.

On Saturday, since we'd put down the last coat of poly and the floor was (for-the-most-part) dry I went into the NE bedroom and attacked the mold. It turns out that "Scrubbing bubbles with mildew protection" does a great job at eliminating mold on plaster walls. Especially when combined with a soft bristled scrubbing brush.

I'm fairly certain that the mold is appearing because of our moisture problem (#7 in 5-7 year plan) and because (I think) the exterior walls have no insulation. I guess we're going to investigate adding blow-in insulation in these walls at some point. I have high hopes that the combination of the bathroom fan (installed last week) and venting the dryer to the exterior instead of to the crawl space (coming soon) will eliminate most of our condensation problems (cross your fingers for me).

Assuming we go ahead and paint the room "Clarified Butter" then we only need to repaint the ceiling (white), re-do the electrical outlets (grounded outlets are such an innovation), add a working phone outlet, update the lighting fixture (anything would be an update at this point), add curtains and move back into the room. Then I think this has the potential to be my new (first) favorite room.

At some point later we'll also need to replace both the windows (supposed to start Wednesday), retrim the entire room, remove the closet and add a free-standing armoire. But I think it can still be my favorite room during this work.