So, it's been a while since I've posted and A LOT has been accomplished on the house... not so much by us, but by the contractor. We didn't actually do anything last weekend, but check things out and take pictures.
 |
| Laundry room |
First off, we have WALLS!!! There are no more holes! They have finished off the laundry room walls and repaired the ceiling and wall in the dining room. The places in the ceiling where the plaster was coming down have been repaired as well. It's starting to look like a real house!
The contractor also went ahead and took out the tile to the downstairs bathroom, so we are down a bathroom again. There was an issues with the floor sagging, so it has to be fixed. The plus side is that the pink tile on the floor is gone... the downside is that the pink tile to the bathtub is still there :-/
 |
| Replacing tile floor in bath |
Probably the most exciting part is that the railing on the patio is up and looks fantastic! They did such a great job putting it up and not destroying the brickwork to the patio. Even though it's not original to the house and we're trying to keep so much of the character, we had to put it up to bring it up to code. I'm just really glad it looks so good.
 |
| Railing for the patio |
On to this week.....
Saturday, we got a very late start, so we just worked to wipe down the walls and trim in the kitchen and back stairwell from where we sanded everything down. We have found that damp paper towels work well for this. Sunday, we finished wiping everything down and then came the fun part....
 |
| Multitasking |
 |
| I do actually do some work :-) |
 |
| Painted partially up the stairs |
We finally got to start painting... well priming. Finally the robin's egg blue color would vanish from the walls! Sort of. It's harder to cover up than we anticipated. Hopefully, the coffee color that we picked for the walls will cover it up. I had forgotten what a pain in the butt using oil-based paint is. Since the blue is oil-based and the white, which mostly peeled off, is latex, the very knowledgeable guy at the paint store suggested we paint over the oil-based paint with oil-based primer and then we can top-coat with latex. That should prevent peeling in the future. So note- If you have oil-based painted walls, you can still paint with latex, just prime the walls with an oil-based primer first. Thankfully, we don't have to use the oil-based primer in the whole house, just where the latex peeled off and the oil-based paint is showing. So, back to the oil-based primer being awful to deal with. I'm not a neat painter. I never pretended to be and I always wear as much paint as I get on the walls. This time was no different. The difference with oil and latex- oil doesn't just wash off. NO, you have to basically bathe in mineral spirits to get it off. My hands were completely covered in primer and poor Fred had it all over his arms and face from when he painted the ceiling and it sprayed down. He's as neat of a painter as I am. The only one of who actually stayed clean was Fred's dad and I'm still not sure how he did it. I think I'll need to invest in mineral spirits if we have to do much more oil-based priming. But, we got the kitchen primed and part of the stairwell before we ran out of paint. We probably would have had enough if I hadn't been wearing most of it. :-/
 |
| Primed wall |
The next couple of weekends will be slammed full, trying to get as much done as possible. Our schedules are getting a bit hectic, so that should make this project even more interesting to maneuver. Our to-do list for next weekend: Finish scraping and sanding the trim in the Mater, 2nd bedroom, living room, and hopefully office, and them prime all of it. Can we get it all done? Gosh, I hope so :-)
No comments:
Post a Comment