My first job in there will be texturing the ceiling because the finish that's up there now is concrete or perhaps thin-set, which is normally used for laying ceramic tiles. There's supposed to be a pattern to it but it actually looks as though someone just dragged a garden rake across it and it's quite ugly.
There's a water stain in one area that came right through so we're going to have to do a little research and find something that will lock it in before we paint.
Christina looked surprised at how huge the room looked once all the clutter was out. A good estimate would be 30'X14'. It feels like it was a lot bigger if I could judge it by the incredible pain in my right shoulder this morning.
Time for the heating pad. I still have to go over all of the walls and get all the imperfections out. There are dozens upon dozens of nail holes to be filled and the joints between the drywall sheets are crude and uneven. It appears that the room was once renovated as there is modern sheetrock on the North wall.
The truth of the matter is that this room will probably take weeks. You'll see. The really difficult stuff is yet to come. All of the moldings are going to be home made.
Words to live by and so very, very true. We'd put on two coats (three in some places) of red paint and the white wall underneath was still showing through but the Internet came to our rescue and solved the problem. We went to www.ask.com and wrote "painting with red" and it took our query to a website that explained the use of deep tinting base primer as opposed to regular primer. Who knew?
All we have to do now is roll the room with this pink primer and paint it two more times. Our color should be good after that.
Got another coat on today. It's really starting to shape up nicely but it's Superbowl Sunday and we plan to just take it easy this evening with lots of bad food and beer.
Go Eagles!
After note: The Eagles played a solid game but lost. So, what's new?
Something quite interesting happened here yesterday.
I was putting on the billionth coat of red paint and when I got to one
of the windows I was stopped when I happened to notice
something very odd. There are four windows across the front of the
room and one on the South end. On Friday we had left the
South window open to let the heat out while we were painting and then
forgotten about it. The next morning when Christina was getting
ready for her day she saw our cat, Nash sitting on the sill getting some
fresh air. It's a good 30-35 foot drop there so she told him to
get away and she shut the window.
I needed to let out some more heat on Saturday so I
opened a different window. The front porch is right below it so I
figured if one of the cats got adventurous they wouldn't break their
necks. Once again, I forgot to close the window and this led up to
two things.
First, I saw this below the window sill inside the
house:
I yelled for Beth and told her to bring Jasmine up
with her. Jasmine is stupid but she's a killer, too. I've
seen her in action and it isn't pretty.
Beth concurred with my first impression that a opossum
had been in the house during the night. We were utterly disgusted
and I looked over at Jasmine and said, "Sick 'em!" She
immediately went into her hunting routine but couldn't find anything
under the beds or even in the attic. What we think happened is a opossum
had come in during the night but smelled Jasmine (who was sleeping 12
feet away in the next room) and simply left. Jasmine is getting
really old and isn't nearly as sharp as she once was so she slept
through it.
The best part of all this was when I was later coming
up the stairs and Christina was standing at the top by her futon giving
me berth to get through with my rollers and such. When I was just
eye-level with the floor I stopped and calmly said, "Don't move.
There's a opossum under the futon right next to your leg." I
swear, I could almost see the tears welling up in her eyes as her
expression became a frozen plea for help.
I generally like to play tricks on people but know
when it's too much or going too far. I could see that she was
genuinely terrified and knew she was remembering the last time I
told her to stay still, which was when we were in the water at Key West
and a monster of a barracuda suddenly appeared behind her.
Naturally, my next words were:
"Don't move. Don't even breath."
Then I totally cracked up and she told me I was mean.
Who says you can't have a little fun while renovating a house?
Today went fairly well but the edging machine was pretty much a waste of time, fuel and money. The big drum sander is pretty effective, though. I finished sanding 2/3rds of the room using the 60 grit paper. (That's 60 particles per square inch for you novices out there. The higher the number, the smaller the particles, the finer the sand paper.)
Right now the floor is stained and curing for the next eight hours.
Right now my step-son, Mike is probably walking up to get his diploma at a ceremony in Florida.
Right now I have a screaming headache from breathing fumes for two hours.
It took me a total of 19 hours to get the floor ready for the staining process. Two hours of that time was spent running back and forth to my shop to fashion replacement boards for an area in the middle of the floor where some Einstein previously fixed a whole with old wood that had been painted white. That portion of the floor was tongue-and-groove so when I say I fashioned them, trust me, this wasn't just cutting a couple of boards down to size. I had to actually mill this stuff to exact specifications and then cut it large so that I could plane it down so it would be in synch with the rest of the floor.
I know....you're just hanging on the edge of your seat with excitement.
When I went in to check on the floor this morning there were thousands of tiny air bubbles in the finish that made the floor look terrible and felt like pins when walked upon. The solution was a simple one but a real pain in the neck. I had to break out my plane sander and use fine sanding sheets throughout the entire room. Then I carefully applied another coat and everything was back to normal.
Both Beth and Christina were very pleased with the results when they arrived home and Beth immediately started asking about what we could do in Christina's bedroom.
Christina is living in our parlor right now. There's no room for her to sleep in her own room thanks to the overflow of furniture stacked up in there.
The curtains are up and most of the outlet fixtures are attached. Saturday (2/19) we'll move all of our furniture into the room and Christina will continue sleeping in the parlor until we've finished her new floors.
The Southern exposure lighting is a welcome change after almost a year of occupying the darkest bedroom in the house.
At some point in the evening I couldn't resist telling Beth that the shade of scarlet we used was originally created by Robert E. Lee's brother, Francis (Frank, actually.) I told her I thought it was cool that we happened to choose it for a room overlooking Virginia.
In a roundabout conversation she basically asked why I cared that it was called 'Frank Lee Red' to which I shrugged and said, "Frank Lee Scarlet. I don't give a damn."
I still reign as the master of really terrible puns.
We were out buying supplies and as we were leaving the store I overheard a tired looking woman with her teenage daughter sigh, "Lordy, Lordy, Lordy!"
Too loudly, I asked Beth, "'Lordy?' Do you really think the Lord likes being called Lordy?"
I glanced back and saw that the woman had indeed overheard me and looked a little miffed so I added, "Does that mean as a kid he was growing up Goddy?"
One of my all-time favorite puns was made during a conversation with my father-in-law, Jack. For some reason we were discussing the Vietnamese name 'Nguyen'. He told me that the actual pronunciation of the name is 'win' and that he had a client whose first name was Nguen it can be used as either a first or a last name.
I pointed out that if a person used it as both, it would be a win-win situation.
So, why am I writing all of this? Really, it's just to show that after a 15 months on this project we haven't lost our senses of humor.