All We Need Is A Camera Crew

Daniel and I are getting ready to live every HGTV show premise rolled into one:
We're redoing the common areas of our apartment building on a tight budget with the help of a band of DIYers (my parents) in only 4 days.

Not the catchiest tag line, but it will do.

I am panicked and excited at the same time. The apartment building is an old school house built in 1915-1916 that was closed in the 1963. Here is a picture of the building before its conversion to apartments, complete with faded, scanned-in look and an album corner (very nostalgic):











I would have loved to see pictures of the inside of the building when it was a school. So far my internet searches have yielded nada. But today, the inside still has some of that old school building charm, mixed with a little 1970s funk:


The carpet has served its time and is being retired. We decided to give the old wood paneling a break, too. The teal throughout the staircases - though I keep seeing shades of it as a hot color trend - is also going out with this new makeover. Having stared at these pictures for hours on end, I decided to call in a favor and ask my cousin Marika to help out with some color palettes. She has a degree in commercial interior design and therefore knows more about this from her 101 course than all my time dedicated to watching makeover shows on HGTV (I am sure of it). Within 24 hours, she had several palette options (she used Benjamin Moore colors). Decisions, decisions.


To me, option 1 was a knock-out. I loved it. Others also liked option 2. And then the purple in option 4 was intriguing. I would never have thought to do purple, but Harlan (Daniel's father, whom we inherited the building from) liked purple. A new direction was forming based on the palettes we had - a little mix of a purple here with a warm grey here...

So, I got to work rendering a few shots of what it would look like. Don't make fun of the quality, I don't do this professionally (clearly).


I should note all my TV watching hasn't been in vain - it introduced me to vinyl wood plank floors. Yeah, some genius figured out you take vinyl, cut it into a plank shape (rather than a square tile), plaster a fairly realistic wood print on it and you get a wood floor that has a 10 year commercial warranty. No, I don't sell the stuff.*

Alright, who's excited? If so, you should come and help out.

 *But give me a call if you want to give me some free vinyl plank in exchange for a little shill time. I'm talking to you, Lumber Liquidators.