This post is long overdue because it’s been a couple of years now since we completed this project. Moving the noisy air conditioner condenser had been something we wanted to do since moving in back in 2013. The noisy unit, located right outside the back sliding door and next to the patio, made it impossible to entertain or carry on a conversation with guests. Often on summer evenings, Sara and I would find ourselves shouting back and forth in our adirondack chairs until one of us got around to turning off the A/C.

Out with the old and in with the new!

The installers made a difficult job look easy!

We moved the air conditioner from the west side of the property to the south side (an area out of sight and where noise would not be an issue).

The installers ran the piping/wires through our shed, which is beneath the 4-season porch. We appreciated the extra attention to detail they took to make sure the pipes would not get in the way of any future storage needs.

With the condenser unit out of the way, all I needed to do was add a few more pavers from an earlier project and we could finally enjoy our backyard the way we always wanted.

Thanks for reading!
-Mike

This story all starts because we had an out-of-date front entry light that was gifted to us by Sara’s parents when we first moved into this house. The ceiling lamp served its purpose for many years, but it was beginning to look dated and the small bulbs did not provide enough light for the space.

We found a new lamp at Menards. During the installation, we quickly realized that the mount of the lamp did not cover as much of the ceiling as the previous lamp, exposing discolored parts of the ceiling. My first thought was to simply paint the ceiling so it would have a uniform appearance. However, the paint caused yet another issue – as soon as I began to roll on the white ceiling paint, the popcorn began to peel off onto the roller! Fully aware that I had now unleashed a pandora’s box of a project, I accepted the burden ahead of me and got to work scraping off the popcorn.

After scraping the ceiling completely, I spent some of my free-time over the next week mudding rough spots – sanding and repeating before priming and ultimately painting the ceiling. This step always seems to take the longest, perhaps because I’m still not terribly great at mudding.

We did end up swapping out the 100 watt bulbs seen in the photo above with slightly less overpowering 60 watt bulbs. The ceiling painted and new lamp secured in place, the next step was to prime and paint the brown walls.

Sara had it in her head that she wanted to cover the dark brown. She had expressed that it wasn’t her favorite color that we picked out originally, but we still wanted to use these tall walls for an accent color. Through simple Googling we looked up the most popular paint colors and found a list of many options. Already leaning towards a green, we both agreed that we liked the 2022 color of the year: Evergreen Fog by Sherwin Williams. We sampled the color up against a couple of other gray/greens and after seeing it across several times of day, decided to get a gallon (by the way, a gallon of this stuff set us back $79 at Ace. Yikes!) Here are some of the after pics showing the paint color both at night and with daylight coming into the house:

We painted the walls in the front entry Behr’s “Irish Mist” color from Home Depot, which we have used elsewhere in the house. Also, we want to note that we still prefer Behr paint. We had never worked with Sherwin Williams paint before and while we were not surprised that the color required two coats, the product was more tedious to work with in comparison to Behr.

Here is a picture of how the front entry looks now, new ceiling lamp and all:

Thanks for reading!
-Mike