Misadventures in Painting

My husband was out of town this past weekend, so I decided it would be a great opportunity to repaint his office and the attached sitting room.  This space used to be an apartment.  The second floor was expanded during the Depression to add on this space which, when you take out the bathroom (I showed its renovation last February), is a kind of funky L-shape.  The section that is now an office used to be a wee kitchen.

Right after the tenant moved out in 1996.  The door beside the sink leads to the tiny bathroom.

After the tenant moved out, we took out the kitchen, stripped some of the woodwork, changed the light fixtures, replaced the linoleum with cork flooring, and put in new (now old) carpet.  For some time, I've been wanting to replace the carpet again, but can't do that until after repainting.  Anyway, this seemed like the time.

Part of the trouble is there is way too much heavy furniture in that room -- a set of three wood lockers we use to store DVDs and tapes, three antique armchairs, two bookcases, a heavy oak desk, an oak filing cabinet, a TV, and a couple of small side tables.  Since I couldn't move all this by myself, especially through the narrow doorway into the hall, I dragged it all to the center and covered it with plastic.  That seemed like a clever idea until I found that there were areas along the perimeter that were too tight to set up a ladder, so I had to paint some parts of the ceiling perched on a ladder unsteadily propped against the wall.

Another way I was being clever was by using paint we already had.  I'm all about saving money when I can.  I had almost a gallon of ceiling paint, which I managed to eke out to cover the whole ceiling.  I thought.  Then Saturday evening as I was taping the woodwork in preparation for Sunday's wall painting, I noticed a good sized area I had missed.  So I scurried off to Lowe's to buy another gallon of the exact same Valspar ceiling paint.  I'll just touch up the missed area and some other "thin" areas, I thought.  The gosh darn ceiling paint isn't the same!  Can you see it in the picture below?  It depends on the light and the angle, but I can clearly see the areas I touched up.  Sigh.  So there is more ceiling painting to be done.

For the walls, well, I found an almost full gallon of Sherwin Williams paint in the basement clearly marked "office."  It looked a little different to me, but I figured it must dry a bit darker.  After seeing how the ceiling needed more than a gallon, I knew I'd need more paint, so on that trip to Lowe's, I also stopped at Sherwin Williams, paint in hand, to ask for another gallon of the same thing.  They no longer make the EverClean paint the young man said.  He was amazed that the paint was still good.  In fact, all three employees (it was dead in the store) came over to look at the paint and discuss the options.  I asked for a comparable paint in the same color.  No problem, and the paint was 40% off, my lucky day -- until he rang it up.  $44 dollars for one gallon of paint (at 40% off!) and an edger.  So Sunday, I cracked open my extremely valuable Dover White paint from Sherwin Williams and, after edging, realized it was the color from two paintings ago.  I'm thinking the paint was from 1996.  No wonder the guys had been amazed that it was still good; they were hardly more than toddlers when that paint was mixed.  So the paint is now not the warm, pale-butter-white I wanted, but a generic white-white.  Oh well, at least it will be clean and fresh.  If I ever get the room completed, I'll show the end result.

Works in Progress

With this awful hot weather and lack of rain I haven't had a lot of gardening to do lately, so I've been working on some things indoors.

My big, horrible project is painting the last room in the basement.  When I say "room," don't get the idea that we have some kind of lovely finished basement.  Not at all.  We have a basement that serves strictly as a laundry room, storage, and my old darkroom (that I haven't used in years).  A basement with 100-plus-year-old stone and brick walls.  The walls need to be coated occasionally to help prevent the mortar from crumbling.  I have finally, after eighteen years in this house, gotten up the motivation to finish the final section.

The first step was decluttering.  I took apart an entire home gym, hauled it to my car, and had both the Salvation Army and the junk shop reject it.  Luckily, the metal scavengers took it from the curb.  I also emptied the husband's computer accessory closet -- 20-year-old software boxes (many empty), manuals for printers that are long gone, textbooks for software that is several generations outdated.  Then on to the fun part.  


And by fun part, I mean drudgery.  This job involves a LOT of shop vac use, wire brushing, more shop vac, filling small cracks and holes, more shop vac, painting with thick, gunky, stinky waterproofing paint - which seems to be the best thing for solidifying the mortar - and, for good measure, another round with the shop vac.  It is a slow project, partly because I work on it for a day or two and then take a couple of days off, but also because it all has to be brushed on by hand in order to cover the rough, pitted stones.  I don't have the words to describe just how yucky this job is, but I think the brand name of the paint -- UGL -- kind of sums up how I feel about it.

This is what I'm dealing with.

Coming along -- s l o w l y.

To take my mind off the horrors of DryLok, I have also been crocheting more squares from 200 Crochet Blocks for Blankets, Throws and Afghans by Jan Eaton.  The three newest squares are  Victorian Lace (#92, two hook difficulty), Kingcup (#95, three hook), and Spinner (#89, two hook).  I'm really liking the brighter colors in the last two squares.

I also began working on the shawlette I am making with the Alpandina yarn I received from the yarn swap I wrote about in June.  I still have a little ways to go before I get into the lace portion, but I like it so far.  The yarn feels fabulously soft. I am going a bit slow on this because every once in a while my center line gets off by a stitch and it has to be unworked.  I don't notice the problem for a while, so this usually involves taking out one to two complete rows. Confession:  I lack the confidence to undo my knitting mistakes if it's more than a couple of stitches, so I have to wait for my daughter to come home for a visit.  I'm sure she thinks I am incompetent, but she kindly fixes things so that I can continue.

Looks a little like a stingray.

Adventures in Home Improvement

our house in 2010

We have done a lot to our house since we moved in seventeen years ago.  (Seventeen years?  I had to count them, and that just does not seem possible!  Where did that chunk of lifetime go?)  

Our house was built around 1902 and, as best as we can tell, we are only the third family to live in it.  The stability of long ownership prevented a lot of “muddling” over the years, but there have still been improvements and repairs needed.  Like a complete tear-off of five layers of roof – including the original wood shakes from the turn of the century; rewiring the attic; putting a darkroom in the basement (that was before widespread use of digital!); ripping out carpet; taking off wallpaper from every room of the house – including some scary, thorny pink roses the previous owner hung in our bedroom in the 1940s when she was a girl; adding central air conditioning; slightly reconfiguring the kitchen so that the refrigerator is actually in the kitchen; stripping woodwork; painting; etc.; and that’s just on the inside!  

new dining room light

We have slowed down in recent years, until lately.  Recently, we discovered a fabulous independent electrician, so we had him repair some wiring and replace two outside lights and three indoor fixtures.  Nothing fancy, just some nice fixtures from Lowe’s, but they are pretty, they work, and they provide good light.  None of the three fixtures we replaced could meet all of those criteria.  

In addition to lighting improvements, there’s the little bathroom.  There is a tiny, narrow bathroom in what used to be an apartment in our house.  We were told the room was added during the Depression to house a family member who was down and out.  When we bought the house, it came with a very nice young woman as a tenant in the apartment.  After about a year, she moved.  I think the change from a quiet, elderly landlady to a raucous family with two young children was too much for her.  She confessed that she had taken to using earplugs to sleep.  Anyway, when she moved, we reclaimed the apartment as an office and second family room.  The bathroom was always awkward, with a funky half-sized tub shower half under a window.  When the bathroom developed a leak, we decided to finally tackle the larger issue and reconfigure the whole thing.  I wrote back in August about this never-ending bathroom remodel (which is almost finished!) which necessitated the removal of the ceiling in the butler’s pantry.  

That poor ceiling.  When we moved into our house, the butler’s pantry ceiling had been lowered to about 7 ½ feet.  It rested on top of the cabinets.  Hmm, must be a reason, we thought.  Falling plaster, pipes, something.  Nope.  So we ripped it out and raised it about sixteen inches to match the height of the kitchen ceiling.  Now, with our bathroom remodel, the pipes extend below the floor above, so the ceiling had to be dropped again, but not as much as before.  Replacing the ceiling has not been on the top of the repair list, as the husband has focused his limited spare time on the bathroom itself.  Then two weeks before Christmas, the wonderful electrician introduced us to an equally wonderful independent carpenter, so voila!  In a matter of a few days, we had a new, albeit unfinished, ceiling in the butler’s pantry.  (It is amazing how much better and faster professionals can do this work!)  Unfortunately, he could not mud the corners where the ceiling meets the walls because we have wallpaper on the walls.  That has to be removed before mudding or it won’t be coming off.  (I’m really sad to lose the wallpaper; it’s a simple chicken wire pattern in taupe and cream.  Can’t find a match online.  Oh well.)  

But before removing wallpaper, we needed to prime the ceiling.  That’s where I come in.  Yesterday, I felt motivated.  With only one slight disaster, the ceiling got a coat of Kilz.  Yay!

(Here's evidence of the minor disaster.  I stepped down the wrong way off the stepstool, hit the edge of the paint pan, which flipped up and splashed paint on my leg and the cabinet.  This is oil-based paint, mind you, so I had to run down to the basement to get some paint thinner for a quick cabinet clean-up.  What a mess!)

cute Con-tact paper from Target

Then my daughter and I took everything out of the cabinets to clean out all the plaster bits, wood slivers and even a few nails that had fallen into the cabinets when the old ceiling was torn down.  We washed everything and replaced the shelf paper with a cute green and white print.  Gorgeous!  

Of course, when we remove the wallpaper and the final mudding is done, there will be some additional mess, but I hope to seal the cabinets off to prevent seepage of dust and paper bits.  We’ll see.  At least it looks great for now.

clean, organized, and a ceiling to boot!