Ted and I are finally finished with the contractor jobs we needed to update the interior of our house. We started in August 2022 and finished in November 2025. We never believed it would take this long, but life got in the way and we put things off until–in frustration–we just said, “Let’s get it finished!” And that was all it took. Sometimes, you just have to bite the bullet, or whatever.

Here are the 46-year-old pantry doors that came with our new house back in the 20th century. They’re “builder grade,” but held up well. Still, 46 years! It’s time for a change.

If you read my colorwashing story, you might remember that, when we finished colorwashing our new pantry doors, we set them up in the basement and marked them 1, 2, 3, and 4 with blue tape in the order we wanted them hung in the kitchen. We knew the doors were one inch too high for the pantry opening, so we painted the tops with the base color and left the bottoms bare because we knew they were going to be sawn off. In addition, I added a strip of blue tape with a message to “cut excess length from bottom.”

Sadly, good intentions can go awry. What’s wrong with this picture? I’ll give you a chance to look closely before you read on.

If you didn’t see the problems, look again and you’ll notice that (1) they are hung upside-down; and (2) the one on the left is hung backward with the plain side, rather than the colorwashed side, facing outward. I felt sick when I saw this.

Before speaking to Mike, the carpenter, about the problems, I went online and looked up all kinds of door images. Just as I thought, when there is trim on a door, the wider piece of the trim is always on the bottom. Confident I was right, I said to Mike, “You know they’re upside-down, right?” His response was a puzzled, “They are?” Then I mentioned that one was also backward, and he was equally mystified. To compound the error, he’d already cut off the extra inch in height at the tops of the doors, because he thought those were the bottoms.

The doors were shipped to us in pairs and were already hinged together. We removed the hinges to colorwash them. Mike must not have noticed the holes where the hinges could be re-attached, because he drilled new holes on the opposite side of each door to fasten them in this order. Now each door had three sets of hinge-holes (my term) on both sides. Since we’d had the doors standing as they should be installed, lots of nasty thoughts were running through my mind, but I managed to keep them to myself.

The problem was that Mike had only been working for Jimmy (the owner/contractor) for three months. Christopher, Mike’s more experienced mentor who was working on the laundry room cabinets, left for a short while to finish a different job, and instructed Mike to begin installing the pantry doors. Before Christopher left, he asked if Ted and I minded if they used our old door track (already installed) instead of the new one. I was puzzled, but figured, if it worked, it could be fine. Christopher went on his way and Mike kept working. Neither Ted nor I was feeling very positive at this point. In retrospect, I wonder if Christopher was trying to simplify the installation for Mike by not making him install a new track.

The installation was undone, the doors were turned to the right positions, the hinges were moved to where they belonged (at the original holes), and here’s Mike, drilling holes to attach the door pulls.

The final step (we thought) was to hang the door header. The edges on the lower edge were slightly rounded; the upper edges were cut square. At least Mike hung the header with the rounded edges at the bottom and didn’t have to re-do that too. (He apparently realized the value of my blue tape messages, so the arrows and words indicating “top” and “bottom” helped him this time.)

Unfortunately, the saga of errors continued.

(1) When the doors arrived at our house, all three hinges on one pair were bent. That package (a wooden crate) must have experienced trauma during the shipping process to shift the panels enough to bend the hinges. The guys couldn’t straighten the hinges, so they bought new ones. As it turned out, the replacement hinges were thicker than the original ones. When the doors were closed and the hinge plates on adjoining doors met, they made the doors too wide to function in the doorframe. The guys had to buy another set of thinner hinges. We were getting a lot of hinge-holes in our doors.

(2) The doors were not hung perfectly level, so when we opened and closed them, they rubbed against the outer walls of the opening and against each other in the center. Not only was this wrong; it was going to gradually wear down the wood and the walls at the contact points and scratch off our carefully applied colorwash on the center sides. Looking at the doors, it was easy to see a wider gap between the door and the wall at the top of one door and at the bottom of the other. It was also easy to see that one end was higher off the floor than the other.

(3) The new doors are much heavier than the old louvered ones. On the old track, the new doors opened too far and–the best I can describe it–backed up on themselves. They had to be pulled by hand from the wide-open position because the door pull had the wrong torque to do that. When they removed the old doors, the guys discarded the stoppers (spring-like things that fit inside the track). Without a stopper, the doors opened too far. The guys had also discarded the new hardware.

At this point, Jimmy brought in Tommy–a master carpenter–to see what could be done. Tommy did a better job of filling the extra hinge holes and he worked hard to level the doors. Unfortunately, to rotate the doors slightly to level them, he had to cut more off the top, which had already lost an inch that should have been removed from the bottom. Meanwhile, he was looking for something he could use that would provide a stopping point to keep the doors from opening too far, but he found nothing. Ted and I were becoming increasingly frustrated and unhappy. I was going to say, “Why don’t we just buy new hardware?” when Tommy said, “I think we should just buy new hardware.” He called Jimmy, who brought over some new hardware. Then Tommy rehung the doors, and made a few adjustments.

We thought the saga had ended, but the doors still didn’t work well. Jimmy came back to evaluate why they didn’t work as they should. After repeatedly opening and closing the doors using a variety of pulling/pushing touchpoints, he determined that moving the door pulls from the outer door panels to the inner panels would provide a different torque and would solve the problem. The downside: it would leave visible door pull installation holes on the outer door panels (more unnecessary holes on our doors!), but he thought he could fix that. He decided to try fixing one hole before drilling new ones. (Good idea.) Here he is, matching colors and applying them, blending them, smoothing them, etc.

In the photo below, he’s smoothing the lower hole. The upper hole is invisible, so he did a good job. It took him about an hour to get the right blend on the first hole; in another hour, he finished all three of the other holes. Twenty more minutes covered drilling new holes and re-installing the door pulls. Again, Jimmy is a good guy. He didn’t charge us for all those hours Tommy put in correcting and adjusting Mike’s errors, nor for the new door hardware. From what Tommy said (he was a talker), Christopher now knows that he should not leave a mentee alone on a job.

Everything works. The doors look nice. Ted and I are still disappointed with the process, but we accept the solutions. If you don’t know the saga (too late!), you won’t notice that anything was wrong. Ted and I have chosen to believe that, sometimes, things just go wrong, and this time it happened to us. Neither of us thinks it would be more fair if it had happened to someone else. Jimmy and Tommy did everything they could to make things right at the company’s expense, and it’s all good in the end. Don’t the new pantry doors look nice?

As long as we were going to have carpenters in the house, we added a little job to their list. Earlier this year, Ted and I shut off our landline telephone. The problem: the white phone plate was still attached to the wall and it covered the hole where the phone line came in from outside. Fortunately, we have extra tiles from our 2023 kitchen backsplash update. The guys chipped out 4 tiles and replaced them.

After the grout was applied, you’d never know we had a landline on that wall, except that, out of habit, when we come home, we still look at that corner to see if the answering machine light is blinking with a message.

Ted and I are old enough to remember having the first phone installed in our parents’ homes, party lines, crank phones, dial telephones, long distance charges that were cheaper after 7:00 p.m., collect calls, person-to-person calls, pay phones, princess-style phones, wall phones, phone cards to charge instead of putting change in a pay phone, finally being able to purchase a phone instead of paying “rent” to the phone company for it every month, having more than one phone in the house (we had six before dropping our land line), answering machines, car phones, cell phones, smart phones. . . . We must be really old!

When Ted and I updated our kitchen in 2023, we replaced all the cabinets, but we kept the original 46-year-old louvered pantry doors because we didn’t know what style of new doors we wanted. (The cabinet manufacturer did not make bifold doors.) If we could see the new cabinets in place, we thought it would help us decide what kind of doors would look nice with them. Unfortunately, that didn’t help at all. Searching websites for bifold doors didn’t help either. The doors we liked were not bifold, and sliding or swinging panel doors were not an option, given the space we have to access the pantry. As time went on, the old, louvered doors looked worse and worse to us and more out of place with the new cabinets, but we still hadn’t seen anything we liked.

One night, I was reading a book and descriptions of the house in the story kept mentioning shaker doors and shaker cabinets, etc. If “shaker” was going to come up so often in the story, I needed to know what kind of picture to put in my mind while I was reading, so I searched for images of shaker doors. When I saw them, I showed the images to Ted, and bingo! They were just what we needed to complement our cabinet doors. The problem: all the doors came primed, unfinished, or finished with a color we didn’t like. Before we could move ahead and order the doors, we needed to decide how to finish them. When we pictured a uniform coat of paint, it seemed like a huge, 4×8 blank, block-like look, and we didn’t want that.

As I was looking around our kitchen one day, my eyes fell on the light parts of this wall sculpture we have, and a light bulb went off in my mind. I held the light pieces over our louvered doors and against the wall paint, then against one of the kitchen cabinets, and it looked good. Whitewash, I thought. That’s the finished look we needed! It would be more visually interesting than solid-color doors.

It wasn’t that easy. We took the sculpture with us to select paint samples that would look nice with a whitewash over them, but we didn’t like any of them. I contacted some painters for guidance–and perhaps a quote to do the job for us–but they didn’t seem to know what we were talking about. How tough is it to put on a decorative coat of paint? Did we really think we could do this?

Next, we went to an art studio for help, but they specialized in decorative glass and metal pieces, not walls or furniture. No one seemed to have any idea who else we could ask, and we didn’t want to order the doors until we knew how to finish them. Lacking in-person guidance, I went to YouTube to look for whitewashing videos, hoping for a clue. There were a lot of videos about whitewashing, but except for learning that the paints need to be diluted with water, I didn’t see any finishes that looked like what I had in mind.

While I was searching, however, I came across a video with “colorwashing” in the title, so I clicked on it. It was closer to what I was looking for, but the lady was painting walls, and that wasn’t the look we wanted. Still, that gave me a new word to search: colorwash. Whitewashing videos far outnumber colorwashing videos, but I came across two that were doing what I knew Ted and I wanted to do. I played them, took screen shots, and made notes. (Once a student, always a student.) Feeling confident we could handle this, Ted and I ordered bifold, unfinished shaker doors. We wanted to finish the doors at least two weeks before the carpenters arrived to start our laundry room update so that the paint would be completely dry and wouldn’t chip easily if it bumped against something during the installation process. We had to get going.

And then the stress began. The doors were pretty expensive, and neither Ted nor I come close to being described as “artistic.” I can draw stick people, line outlines of a small house, and trees like first-graders draw them–a brown stem with a green cloud-like top. Ted might not be even that good, so I started getting stressed about how the responsibility of artistically finishing the doors might fall on me and how I might ruin expensive doors. Then I remembered something my mom used to say: “The only things I don’t know how to do, I just haven’t learned yet.” That’s a good axiom. I decided take Mom’s advice and to give colorwashing a try.

The videos mentioned that practicing before doing the real thing is a good idea. I definitely agree, so we went to Home Depot and asked where we could find a flat, naked piece of wood smaller than a 4×8 sheet of plywood. The man walked us to the back corner of the store, pulled a sheet of wood about 18 inches by 4 feet out of a large trash can, and handed it to me. There were no tags to scan, so I asked him, “How much?” All the wood in the trash can was scrap lumber, so it was free. Great!

The first thing we had to do was select a color for the base paint and a color for the wash paint. We also bought the supplies the video told me we’d need: regular and feathering paint brushes, small containers to mix the paint and water, measuring cups/spoons to measure the proportion of water to paint so we could repeat it for the next batch, etc. We started with sample-size cans of paint in case we had chosen the wrong colors. (Remember, not artists.)

Spoiler alert: Step-by-step instructions of our mistakes and successes follow, just in case we forget how to do it another time in the future.

We started by putting two coats of the base color on our Home Depot practice board.

We tried different water-to-paint ratios and different brush strokes. Some on-line advice suggested a 3-to-1 ratio of paint to water, but that was too runny. After several tries, using a quarter-cup of base paint and gradually adding fractions of a teaspoon of water to the wash paint, we liked the look and the working viscosity of the paint with a wash ratio of 12 parts paint to 1 part water–a long way from 3-to-1!

When we thought we were close, we took the sample board to the kitchen to check the color match. Not good. It was far too yellow.

To get rid of the yellow cast, we decided to experiment with the extra-white ceiling paint left over from our 2022 house update. First, we brushed alternating columns of white over the dry base color.

That didn’t work because the wet paint couldn’t blend with the dry paint, so we got stripes instead of a faux wood-grain look.

Then we tried it again with a fresh coat of wet base paint.

The wet-on-wet was better, but still turned out too stripe-y, so we tried dashes made by tapping the end of the paint brush on the wood.

That also looked too much like white stripes and was too white instead of evenly blended with the base color. While that paint was still wet, we dotted the white stripes with some of the base color and blended that in.

Not bad. That helped. The color looks better, but the stripes are still too visible and the finished look is too white. We went back to the practice board, re-painted it with the base color, and tried some other techniques. We soon lost count of how many coats of trial paint we applied to both sides of the practice board.

We’d been wondering if it would add visual interest to the doors if we painted the inside of the door trim edges dark brown. We found a can of brown paint left over from another project and tried it.

After days of experimenting with methods of how much to thin the paint, how much of each color to use, how to apply the wash color, and how to satisfactorily blend the two colors, we decided we were close enough to give colorwashing a go, but to be safe, we’d begin by working on the back side of one door. The only way to see the color on the back of the doors after they’re installed is to remove them and turn them around. If the colorwashing didn’t work, we could just paint over it with the base color again–our original plan for the back sides.

Good-bye, practice board. We went back to the basement and put two coats of the base color on both sides of the doors.

Working on the back side, we decided to try staggering, narrower streaks of white to avoid the striped look we’d been getting.

Staggered wet white on the wet base color is looking good. Keep blending.

There we go! Success! Just a little more blending is needed.

Our practice board pattern and color looked good when we compared it to the kitchen cabinet doors, and the back of this door matches it, Great!

We wanted to try the brown trim in a more realistic form than the practice board.

We only did the upper half of the door–again, because it was the back side and it was going to be re-painted in the base color anyway. We took it upstairs to see how the colorwash and the brown accent paint looked with the cabinets. The conclusion: the colorwash is satisfactory; the brown trim is a no-go.

We went back to the basement to paint over that back side and to start colorwashing the front sides of all the doors. We decided to do the long, narrow outer trim strips first because we thought they’d be the easiest.

The blue tape left nice clean lines to colorwash in a sideways direction next.

When we finished the front of one door, we pulled out one of the kitchen drawers to check our color match. Awesome!

With everything figured out and working well, we could really get moving. Here’s Ted painting the base color on the inner trim.

My job was to paint a skinny white line along that raised edge and then to blend it with Ted’s base color to colorwash the inside trim.

It took us about ten days to get from our first practice board trial to the last of the colorwash. Once we figured everything out, we averaged about an hour per door (front side only), including taping, painting, and colorwashing. We did the same thing on all four doors at once, then let the paint dry overnight so we could tape off the next section. It took three days to finish all four doors–vertical panels one day, horizontal panels the next, and inner flat surfaces last at just over an hour per day. After all the stress I suffered, what a breeze! Another thing my mom used to say was that anything you know how to do is easy. Right on, Mom!

The doors are finished. Here I am, colorwashing the header that conceals the tracks from which the doors are hung.

This is the finished header trim. The camera picks up every detail. It actually looks far less striped in person.

We did a (slightly) better job of colorwashing in some places than in others, so we arranged the doors in the order we wanted them hung and numbered them. That put the less-than-perfect areas in the shadow of the island and the best areas in the daylight. (Clever, huh?)

The door on the left is a back side with the base color. The door on the right is colorwashed.

We’re finished! It’s time to put away the sawbucks and the painting tools.

When everything was cleaned up, we celebrated by taking a walk along the riverfront in St. Charles and stopping for hot fudge sundaes at Kilwin’s. Mm-mm good!

As Mom said, anything you know how to do is easy. Now Ted and I know how to apply a colorwash. Need help with your project? Give us a call. 🙂

The laundry room was the last room to update in our house. We started in the usual way: empty the room and put everything in the dining room. When carpenters are working at our house, we always park our cars on the street so they can put their tool-filled trucks and their saws in the driveway. They store the supplies–and, this time, our washer and dryer–in the garage.

We wanted to extend our cabinets to the ceiling, so after removing the old cabinets, the first job was to remove the soffit. We were all surprised to see that the walls and the ceiling behind and above the soffit were already covered with drywall. That meant a discount on our cost. Yay! At the end of the first day, the carpenters, Christopher and Mike, brought one of the new cabinets indoors.

The next day, they brought in the remaining units and started installing them.

This is what our old utility cabinets looked like. One side provided storage for brooms, mops, etc.; the other side had eight drawers, most of which were filled with DVDs. We made it clear during the design process that we wanted the same design in the new cabinets, but . . .

. . . this is what we discovered when we opened the new cabinet doors. We expected two tall cabinets topped by two short cabinets. Instead, we saw four identical cabinets stacked and fastened together with an installed shelf (the wide horizontal bar) between the two units. The installed shelf made it impossible to simply remove shelves to make mop and broom space or to add additional drawers. Even if we could have done that, the doors wouldn’t align with the taller spaces in the lower units.

The left cabinet was 6-8 inches too short for brooms. (The broom is standing on the floor, not inside the cabinet.) Then we were told that manufacturers are moving away from customized cabinets. Really? It wasn’t a problem ordering our 1999 kitchen and laundry cabinets to size, nor was it a problem to order our 2023 kitchen cabinets to size within a 3-inch range (30, 33, 36 inches, etc.). Could it be that this particular manufacturer did not build custom-sized cabinets?

What to do? Jimmy, the owner/contractor sells high-quality merchandise, and we’ve always been pleased with what we’ve had him install–until now. We told Christopher and Mike that these cabinets were not what we made clear we wanted and thought we had ordered. They were useless to us because the mops and brooms wouldn’t fit, and there weren’t enough drawers for our DVDs. Without that storage space, we didn’t need these cabinets.

Christopher and Mike didn’t want to start installing cabinets if they’d just have to take them out later, so they called Jimmy, the owner/contractor. He came to the house soon after that with his master carpenter (34 years of experience), Tommy, to see what could be done to customize the unsatisfactory cabinets. The two of them talked for about 20 minutes and decided they could make us happy. We didn’t understand all the technical jargon, but the idea seemed feasible, so we gave them the go-ahead and the other carpenters went to work.

The next problem appeared when I started thinking about how I’d arrange our stuff in the cabinets with the extra room at the soffit-free ceiling. I noticed then that the cabinets only had one set of holes for shelf adjustments in the lower cabinet and only three sets of holes in the taller cabinets. Each set consisted of three holes drilled three inches apart (six-inch total distance). That meant I couldn’t store my laundry basket in the lower cabinet, where it’s always been, because the shelf adjustment holes were only in the centers of the side panels.

Ted and I don’t place our shelves evenly in our cabinets; we adjust the shelves according to what we store on each one. One or three sets of holes per cabinet was not good. Fortunately, the guys had a template they could use to drill holes any size and any distance apart, as desired, for shelf brackets. Go for it, guys! Now my laundry basket fits in the cabinet. Problem solved. If you zoom in, you can see the set of three holes inside at the right front of the cabinet and the strip of closer holes behind them. Note: the second plastic box from the left on the upper shelf is my “essential” toolbox.

The upper cabinets are installed. Note: This was the day of the ICE raid. Christopher, working on the upper cabinets, looked out the window and saw the law enforcement vehicles parking across the street.

Next step: install the trim at the tops of the cabinets.

Door handles and trim: installed.

And now, the challenge. First, wait for the three additional drawers that needed to be ordered. When the drawers arrived, Tommy, the master carpenter worked to customize these so-called “utility” cabinets. The process sounds simple, but doing the job well to make it as attractive as possible took time.

Tommy started by cutting out the horizontal shelving between the upper and lower cabinets. You can see the grooves in the side panels where the installed shelves used to be and the now-flush vertical scar in front of the left groove between the installed door hinges. That’s where he cut out the wide board that anchored the shelf in place and stabilized the joints between the upper and lower cabinets. Then he had to do some work to re-stabilize the cabinets. I wasn’t “snooper-vising” him, but I heard pounding.

Next, he had to uninstall the top three drawers and remove the drawer slides. The bottom drawer was already as low as it could be to operate smoothly. Ted and I had previously figured out how far apart the drawers had to be placed so that our DVDs would fit in them without wasting space between drawers (see the blue tapes). To accommodate our measurements, Tommy re-installed those three drawer slides lower and then the three additional slides above them.

When that was finished, he used matching wood–from a shelf that was removed from the lower left cabinet that we knew we’d never use–to fasten the upper and lower doors together and to cover the empty space between them. The down side of this solution is that the upper and lower doors now open and close as a single unit.

Result: We have utility cabinets with room for brooms and mops, and drawers for DVD storage. The door arrangement is unusual, but it works.

Jimmy is a good guy. We’ve never had problems with his products or service before, so we had a private talk with him about how disappointed we felt. He apologized and told us it’s hard to find skilled carpenters, so he made the decision to hire younger carpenters and pair them with his more experienced carpenters, hoping the younger ones will continue working for him. He didn’t charge us for any of the extra customizing labor.

Here are photos of the c. 2000 laundry room and the 2025 laundry room. We definitely like the lighter, brighter new look.

The cabinets are new, but we still have our 30-yer-old Maytag washer and dryer. They just won’t quit working!

The laundry room and pantry door stories should come first, but the carpenters–who were doing all three jobs–finished the basement first, so that’s where I’m starting.

First, the basement bathroom. The sink in the next two pictures doesn’t look too bad but, in person, it had yellowed greatly and looked awful with the white tile floor, the white toilet, and the white shower. It was time for a new vanity top.

Our old sink was Corian; this time we chose quartz. While I was talking with the sales lady about the quartz top, she mentioned that the quartz used for countertops is not actually made of rock because quartz is not a rock. I tactfully did not correct her that quartz is, indeed, a real rock and that “quartz” countertops are fabricated to look like actual quartz rock. Here’s the not-real-quartz pattern we chose. It gives the bathroom a nice, fresh look.

Back in 2023, when we updated our kitchen, we had some of the old kitchen cabinets installed in our basement workshop. There weren’t enough kitchen cabinets in the sizes we wanted to finish the job, so we planned to add old cabinets from the laundry when we updated that room. These are the last of the original cabinets that came with our new house 46 years ago.

Now, those three (antique?) cabinets have been replaced with four (relatively) “new” 27-year-old overhead cabinets and a utility cabinet, plus another utility cabinet around the corner of this wall. The laundry room cabinets live on!

I didn’t like the seeing the three unfinished sides of the cabinets (they were originally against other cabinets or walls), so having learned how to colorwash (story coming up), I decided to colorwash the unfinished sides. Note: The crew replaced the missing ceiling tiles a few days later.

I got out my practice painting board, Ted and I selected paint colors that seemed to match the colors in the wood of the cabinets, and I went to work, trying a variety of styles and colors to choose which looked best. They were mostly awful!

A closer look at the top right sample on my practice board showed a possibility. The base color paint showed through the colorwash paint, creating a wood grain appearance. The idea seemed so simple after what we went through with the pantry doors (yes, coming up). Just put on two coats of the base color and paint over them with a single coat of the wash color? How easy is that?!

I had to remove a cabinet door to paint the upper strip on the utility cabinet. Then I taped all the edges and started painting.

Here you can see the start of the first coat of the base color. The second coat looked far more uniform, as second coats usually do.

Here’s the faux wood grain look of the wash color. I used a feathering brush to smooth out the streaks a bit.

And here’s the result.

The strip between the two cabinet doors in the photo below is colorwashed. I think I achieved a pretty good color match.

We like the finished look much better than those unfinished panels.

Now that the hardwood floor in the kitchen looks so nice, I decided we needed new coverings for the blind headers on the windows. Ted and I went shopping for fabric and found a piece with a design and colors that were perfect for our kitchen. There was just one problem: it was upholstery fabric, not drapery fabric. That means it was thicker, had an applied backing, and frayed more easily than drapery fabric. I’m an excellent seamstress, so I took on the challenge. I didn’t know it would turn out to be a bigger challenge than I’d expected.

Even though I only wanted to wrap the fabric around the blind headers, there were problems to solve. With drapery fabric, I’d cut a long rectangle, fold it in half lengthwise, sew that long seam together, turn over each end to sew hems, and slide the tube I’d made over the header. Upholstery fabric is a different story. One problem is that upholstery fabric is thicker so it can take the wear and tear of furniture use, where draperies and curtains simply hang against the wall–or window–and get dusty. My “wrap” (as I call it) also had to turn two corners from the front of the header onto the returns that attach the front piece to the window frame. The thicker fabric bunched up heavily at the corners and, if it fit the header, it was too tight to slide over the returns. My solution was to make the wrap slightly wider from the corners to the window frames to make it fit around the corners and the return pieces.

The wrap at the bay window was longer than the width of the fabric, so I had to match the fabric pattern at a seam. That seam was bulky where it folded over the top and bottom of the header. My solution? I notched it at the folds to allow it to bend more easily with less bulk.

Folding over a hem at each end was tricky too. I usually double-fold the ends, but that was far too thick with upholstery fabric, so I zigzagged the edges to prevent future fraying and settled for a single fold-over. The double layer of fabric at the hemlines made the wrap even tighter over the returns. That’s where my solution to make the wrap a little wider in that area really helped. My finished pieces weren’t simple rectangles; they were long rectangles with flared ends.

It didn’t surprise me that I triumphed over the challenges. I’d have given up if Ted and I hadn’t liked the fabric color and the pattern so much, and if we hadn’t agreed that a runner-up piece of drapery fabric would always be second-best. Still, making everything work was more frustrating than fun, so in the future, I’ve decided to avoid buying upholstery fabric for window hangings! That is, unless it’s this perfect for the look we want.

Here are before and after photos of the new wraps–old, then new.

We like the colors of the new wraps with the new cabinets. They look warmer and less “washed out.”

See how well that pattern matches our new light (part of the 2022 update) and the colors in the wall sculpture? I couldn’t say “no” and I’m glad it worked out.

Ted and I started updating the interior of our house in 2022. We made electrical changes (halo lights in the ceilings, a light wall in the family room, etc.), we had all the walls painted, and we replaced all the carpeting. In 2023, we updated the kitchen. After that, the only remaining jobs were to refinish the hardwood floor, update the laundry room, and get some new pantry doors. Our current pantry doors were in the house when we bought it new 46 years ago. They held up well, but their age was showing.

We started by going to our favorite contractor to start planning the laundry room update. Of course, working with his designer, making choices from samples, selecting the cabinet style we wanted, etc. all takes time. Then the stuff has to be ordered and the contractor has to find a place in his schedule to do the job for us. Meanwhile, we decided to get started on refinishing the hardwood floors, which would take less time. In fact, they did the job a week after I called and finished it in four days. Wow!

We started by emptying the pantry and the closets so the team could work on those floors.

We knew everything would get dusty from sanding the floor so, as long as we were taking down the blinds, we decided to wash them. There was lots of floor space to do it.

Everything got piled in the dining room, where it would be out of our way during the project.

We moved the kitchen table to the family room and took out the leaves to make it smaller. That gave us a window view while we ate meals during the work time.

Then the team of two arrived to start working. They spent a block of time protecting as much as possible from the dust they were going to create. They wrapped the refrigerator doors separately to allow us access to the refrigerator. We could also use the microwave.

The stove was moved to the family room.

They covered the doorways with plastic and wrapped one vertical edge of the plastic at each doorway around a spring tension rod. That allowed us to use other rooms–we just had to move the rod aside far enough to squeeze through, then put it back against the door frame.

Then the mess began. “Dusty” isn’t a strong enough word, although the plastic coverings helped a lot. After the entire job was finished, Ted and I cleaned the entire house, including wiping down the walls.

This is a view of the bottom of the sander. The large disk on the floor spins and each of the six smaller disks on it also spins. All that action prevents sanding strokes from showing on our herringbone floor pattern.

The edges and corners needed to have the old stain and varnish scraped off and sanded by hand. You can see some of the scrapings on the floor in the center right of the photo below.

When everything was sanded, it looked so light and clean that we hated to put a colored stain on it. It felt really smooth too, compared to our 27-year-old pre-refinished floor.

From an array of stain colors, we were allowed to choose four to be applied to the floor to help us select the one we wanted. From our four choices, we went for “natural,” the lightest one.

For the finish coat, we chose a low-sheen finish, rather than a gloss.

When the guys finished the job, they left a little gift for us–wood floor cleaner and a Bono mop.

The following are before and after pictures of the floor. We can’t believe how much depth and color are revealed with the lighter stain! It’s even better than the clean, sanded look.

This floor extends to every exterior door and to every first floor room, as well as to the stairways for access to the basement and to the second floor. On the day the finish coat was applied, we needed to leave the house for a few hours to let the finish dry enough to walk on it with socks, so we went out to dinner.

On our way home, we saw a rainbow–a good sign for a successful, beautiful project.