New Coat Rack

A few weeks ago we absentmindedly set the diaper bag down on the floor when we got home from an outing. By the time we turned around, our dog had spread the contents of the entire bag all over the carpet and was eagerly trying to get into the bag containing the dirty diapers.

...

Today we have a coat rack by the garage to hang the diaper bag on.

I don't understand how IKEA designed this particular item. The hooks for hanging this coat rack were 29 inches apart, which doesn't match any US standard for framing houses that I'm aware of (although admittedly there is a hell of a lot about building houses of which I am unaware). I had to cut 4 inches of length off this rack to fit it on this wall anyway, so drilling a few holes to securely mount this thing on the wall didn't bother me, but still: 29 inches seems weird.

More Sunday Painting

After Brianna went to sleep, and was safely out of the Great Room for the night, I got to work on painting again. I did the second coat of paint on the ceiling, so that's done now. And I finished off the rest of the priming. There's just a little bit of primer left in the five-gallon bucket, so I think we estimated that pretty well!

It's coming. The arched wall and the second half of the blue wall will be painted blue, and the three tall walls will be an off-white (but not the same off-white as the ceiling. That would be too easy.)

I'm leaving some windows cracked open, with a fan in one, to air out the room. So the furnace will actually be in use tonight.

Sunday Painting

I spent a little over two hours painting the ceiling this afternoon. Brianna went to the basement and studied for the PE exam, away from the paint smells.

Man, the ceiling is a pain to paint. Between manipulating a roller on the end of a twenty foot pole, and moving my 35-pound ladder around, I was pretty tired at the end of two hours.

Great Room and Stairwell Painting

I'm frustrated.

In retrospect, I should have asked someone to help out this weekend, even if it was only being in the house to help me keep on task.

I'm feeling pretty burnt out on painting prep work and painting, and I really drug my feet on those tasks this weekend. And when I wasn't dragging my feet, there's so much dang square footage on that ceiling and those two-storey walls that it took forever to get results.

Well, most of the really tough stuff is done. I still have to get colored paint (well, off-white non-primer anyway) on the ceiling, and that will continue to be a huge pain. I'm using a fiberglass-and-aluminum painting rod (thanks for loaning it to me Patrick!) to do the ceiling, and it is pretty cumbersome to paint something that's over 10 feet above my head.

Anyway, I'm not done with even the priming yet, and Brianna is home. Even I can smell the primer fumes, so it must be hitting Brianna pretty hard, though she's not complaining about it to me.

I was hoping to get all the priming done, get two coats of color on the ceiling and at least one coat of wall-white on the appropriate walls this weekend.

I did the prep work and got two walls and the ceiling primed this weekend. It does not feel adequate.

Great Room and Stairwell Prep Work

Brianna is down in Colorado Springs for the weekend, so I can paint. Of course, since I've been procrastinating on doing prep work all week (partially to attend childbirth classes) I have to do that first.

Man alive, I hate prep work.

Just getting everything dusted (and man, the ceiling was filthy) took a couple hours. I had to use a swiffer duster taped to the end of a 20-foot pole to clean the ceiling. Not the easiest task I've done on this house.

More Switches

I installed another exhaust fan timer and a new, clean switch in the main floor bathroom when I got home from work today.

Still need to replace the outlet in here, but I learned today that the light and outlet in this room are not on the same circuit. I still haven't finished mapping out the electric circuits in this house.

Doors Are Done!

All the doors in the house are painted and operational, with new door knobs and hinges!

Well, actually, all INTERIOR doors in the house are painted and operational, with new door knobs and hinges!

...fine, fine: all interior doors ABOVE GROUND LEVEL in the house are painted and operational, with new door knobs and hinges!

Cough, ahem. Alright, in all honesty, all interior doors above ground level, THAT DON'T LEAD TO THE GARAGE, are painted and operational, with new door knobs and hinges!

You know what? Speaking as the guy who paints doors:

ALL THE DOORS ARE DONE!

Main Floor Bathroom

Well, I think I'm ready to declare the main floor bathroom the first room in the house to be (almost) done!

(actually, I would like to caulk the seam between the trim and the linoleum, but Brianna has claimed responsibility for caulking in the future).

Of course, we still need a couple of decorations in here - there's a lot of grey wall in there.

Other than that, the evening was mostly devoted to chores. Brianna cleaned up the kitchen and old mail, and I cleaned out the tortoise terrarium and the chicken coop, collected garbage from around the house, and did a load of laundry. It all seems to take time.

Main Floor Toilet

Well, I think this *#$&^ing thing is finally fixed.

If I had known it was going to be this much of a pain, I never would have taken the tank off to paint the wall in the first place.

Weekend Post-Mortem

Well, this weekend certainly didn't go according to plan.

I did manage to get most of the Great Room prepped for painting. However, the windows still need to be taped off, and I need to put plastic down over the carpet.

I did get some more blinds hung up:

Getting those three blinds on the right to hang up next to each other was tricky - they're designed to be hung independently with 2 anchors apiece. I used 4 anchors total to get the blinds nice and close to each other.

Throughout the weekend, I also managed to paint all the doors and trim upstairs (well, except for the trim in the Master Bedroom, which is still sitting in the garage):

I spent way too much time on the toilet in the main floor bathroom. Turns out it requires a custom seal - the universal version I bought at Home Depot just doesn't work.

Anyway, that's more or less the work I did this weekend. I spent a significant part of Saturday just vegging out in the cool basement. I have pretty mixed feelings about that - I really wanted to get the painting done this holiday weekend, but I hit a wall Saturday morning and needed a break. On balance, I'm pleased to have had the opportunity to recharge after hitting my limits.

Trim and Window Sills

The trim and window sills in the Great Room are painted!

The window sills definitely look like they're twenty years old, though. I did a manual sanding job before priming, but I would have had to take off an eighth of an inch of material to get all the dings and scratches out out. Hmm - I suppose wood filler might have helped, actually (if I had thought of that before priming). Oh, well, right now I feel like having dinged up window sills is a small price to pay for being ready to paint this weekend. I guess we'll see how I feel about that decision in a year or two.

For entertainment value: I really didn't have any other place to put this bed frame while I painted the trim -

Trim and Prep

I painted the trim on two sides of the Great Room this evening, and moved more stuff out the the room. I should be able to access the rest of the trim and get the window sills primed tomorrow.

I'm loving the freshly-painted doors!

Hallway and Bathroom

I got that blue wall done, and painted the trim on the left side of the hallway and inside the bathroom. I also got the bathroom door painted and hung, as well as the linen closet door

Plan for the rest of the week is to paint the rest of the trim in the Great Room and prep it for painting, and then start priming on Friday.

Painting

After painting the chicken coop this morning, I kept going and put some color under the stairs and got one side of the bathroom door:

Quiet Night

Didn't have much energy tonight. I did pull the tape off the stairway trim, did the dishes and ran a load of laundry. I also got a towel rack installed in the main floor bathroom. It is from IKEA, but as a change of pace, I paid full price (GASP).

Main Floor Bathroom - Getting There

Brianna did the caulking on the bathroom counter this evening, before she did her pregnant-mama energy-crash at 8pm. She did it carefully and cleanly, and it looks a lot better than any of the caulking I've done around the house.

I pulled off the tape and did a little touch-up on the gray paint. Then I installed the mirror and toilet tank. Currently the toilet tank is half-full with the water shut off. There's also a towel across the doorway. Hopefully none of those precautions are necessary.

Assuming there's no leak, we just need to paint the trim and rehang the door, and this bathroom will be useable again!

Painting

I put the last coat of color on the upstairs hallway.

That means that the upstairs is completely painted except for the two walls and ceiling that extend into the great room. Well, except for the linen closet. If Brianna wants the linen closet painted, she knows where the paint is :-P

I also finished the main floor bathroom:

I decided it was too late at night and I was too tired to tackle re-assembling the toilet. Once the countertop has been caulked, I'll reinstall the mirror. And then this bathroom will be finished and useable!

Weekend Update

I finally managed to get the toilet tank off so I could paint behind it. I had to cut the bolt - it was completely rusted in place. By Sunday afternoon, I had touched up the primer coat and gotten the first coat of color in place.

I also finally got some shelves installed in the closet of the master bedroom. The top level used to be wire racks, anchored into the drywall. We pulled those out when we painted the bedroom, and this weekend I finally got around to installing these wooden ones. Certainly not a top-notch carpentry job, but it's a lot more solid than the wire racks were.

After Brianna and I both went through and picked up all the visible debris from chicken coop construction, I went through the grass with a magnet bar and found this:

I got the evaporative cooler working! And the fan blasted a ton of dust and grit in my face the first time I turned it on. In fact, the fan spewed so much grit that I had to vacuum the room once I was reasonably confident I had blown out all the dirt. It works pretty well, though, and I believe Sunday was the first day in Colorado I experienced humidity greater than 40% when it wasn't raining.

And finally, we primed and painted the trim (but not the siding, yet) of the chicken coop, so I was able to fasten down the last of the wire mesh. Still have to weave the ceiling mesh strips together, though:

Priming Drywall and Painting Trim

Got a late start this evening, but still managed to put up the second coat of primer in the upstairs hallway and the first coat of primer on the triangular section of wall below the staircase.

While I was doing that, Brianna worked on peeling tape away from trim in the family room and kitchen.

After dinner I put a third coat of trim color around the frames to the laundry room and basement - I'm kinda regretting not priming those when I primed the rest of the room, but at the time I didn't want to take the doors down to properly get the trim. 

Once the paint supplies were cleaned up, I sliced and peeled the tape Brianna hadn't gotten to. At this point, the only tape left in the room is around the two door frames I painted tonight. We still need to clean up little scrapes of tape that didn't peel properly, and vacuum. And then, hopefully some point this weekend, we can move furniture back in and use these rooms again!

Main Floor Hallway Trim

Earlier in the afternoon I taped off the carpeted stairs above the hallway wall:

After I put Brianna to bed, I painted that trim as well.

It's almost impossible to see in the pictures, but painting over the stains and scrapes really makes the trim pop. And now that the trim is painted, that section of wall can be primed (as soon as we get more primer) and painted. Brianna is currently thinking of doing a blue there.

Since I still had trim paint in my tray, I put up the second coat on the two door frames that needed it.

Things are moving along!