Updates

Getting sick couldn’t have come at a worse time. Since we found out the furniture was in and all we had to do was to call to set up the delivery, I have been scrambling to get our family room updated. This meant that I needed to get the walls painted this weekend. But that also meant that I had to finish all the other prep work that I had planned to do while I was sick finished before I could start painting.

Saturday began with sanding down all the spackled up cracks so they were flush and ready to be painted. After that was done, I had to tape around all of the crown molding, which is something I was really sort of toying with getting rid of anyway. But Kris wanted to keep it up, so I am just going to deal with it. After that was done, the question of the baseboard molding reared its ugly head. I hate that molding, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to have it all replaced right now. But if was going to be done, I suppose this would be the perfect time to take care of it. I also decided that now was the time to finally get rid of the 1950’s (or maybe they are 1960’s) furnace vents that are underneath the windows. It has always baffled me that we have a 14” wide duct opening, but a 42” wide register. I think that it all had to do with the way houses were heated in the 50’s and 60’s. The insulation was so crummy that they spread the heat coming out of the vents over the entire area of the window, so that the cold air that was coming in thru the single pane glass windows (and storm windows) was heated more uniformly. Anyway, we got some new register vents, so we’ll have to see how they work once the painting is complete.

All that messing around on Saturday meant that the painting didn’t actually start until about 2:30 in the afternoon. We were able to make some progress at least. Kris was able to get most of the large, outside wall done so that I just needed to go back and paint around the edges. But since we don’t have any floodlights, and the lighting was getting pretty dim, I stopped when we finished the first gallon of paint, which was between 7:30 and 8:00.

We started early on Sunday, but first hit the home improvement store to get all the moldings and new registers we’ll need. We were able to start painting by 10:00 AM, and I used a smaller, 4” roller rather than the 9” one to try and get better coverage. I noticed several thin spots where the old paint was coming thru that needed to be touched up, so not wanting to have to do that again during the week, when time would be tight, I just used the smaller roller. It worked well, but it also took forever. The good news is that all the walls and trim was finished and I was cleaned up and things put back into relative order by 9:30. All that is left to do is take down the tape and then get the molding ripped out and the new stuff installed. I guess I know what I’ll be doing next weekend.

Two things that I did notice though that will drive me crazy… First, the texturing sand. We put some texturing sand into the paint to obviously give the walls a little more texture. Our walls are more plaster-like, though I don’t know if it is actual plaster. But the texture we do have is not great, so I thought some sand would help, and also provide some camouflage to the cracks I had to chip away and spackle up. It did. But it also stuck to the roller in spots so there are several areas where the texture is very heavy, much more than the rest of the wall. I am not sure how to fix that. Second is that the floor around where the old vents were is totally unfinished. I am going to need to sand and stain those spots, and then try to possibly put a coat of some sort of a varnish on top. That is going to be tough to blend with the rest of the floor.