Renovation Reality

by Carla Minosh

Unlike HGTV shows where home renovations are completed within thirty to sixty minutes, the Victorian house at the corner of Chestnut Place and Main Street in Danville has been under a transformation for nineteen years. This series explores the truth of home renewal from someone who has been there and done that. If you missed any of the articles, visit www. evincemagazine.com.

fter polychroming (applying multiple paint colors) and installing the interior A shutters in the music room, we proceeded to the Turkish bathroom on the first floor and tested color scheme after color scheme, ultimately finding every one falling short of this amazing marble bathroom. With the floors, walls, woodwork, and every other painted surface done in marble or faux-painted to look like marble, the shutters stood out like a sore thumb when painted in any particular color. They lacked the dazzling dance of the veining and color shifts in the surrounding marble. In the end, we gave in to the demands of the room and sent the shutters off to our faux-paint artist to fauxmarble them to match the five different species of marble in that room. The result is a set of marbleized, louvered, interior shutters that enhance the room and fulfill its design goals as a coherent whole, mimicking the theme.

Now we knew what to do in the double parlors where the paint scheme in those rooms was metallic gold with highlights of silver, pink, and blue metallics. We purchased the shutters for the double parlors and our house became a workshop cluttered with shutters in various stages of paint application. The front parlor has a three-window bay with huge ten-foot tall windows, making it the largest surface of glass to cover with shutters than any other room. Fortunately, husband Tom now had the fitting process down to about an hour per window, and Shuttercraft had a fresh set of knives for us to ensure that the finished product was as clean as possible. We wouldn’t have to spend too much time sanding. Metallic paints are unforgiving and need the smoothest of surfaces in order to really glow.

I could now look forward to many weeks of a kitchen full of loud music, paint drippings in the sink, lumpy drop cloths underfoot, and paint brushes everywhere. I couldn’t be more excited!

(to be continued)