Well, I spent 5 1/2 hours painting by myself this past Saturday. In a normal room, I could have prepped, painted the entire room plus the trim and cooked dinner in 5 1/2 hours! The bad part is, I still have to trim around the windows, the ceiling AND paint the trim. Since the walls are so big, I have to paint them in three sections: bottom, middle and then the top. I HATE climbing ladders. Not so much because I am scared of heights, but because I can’t ever remember that I am on a ten foot ladder and it is not three steps to the bottom…it is more like eight. I get busy painting and forget that I am several feet from the floor. The last time I painted the hall, it was really bad. I took about two steps down and put both feet out to touch the floor…the only problem was, I had about six more steps to go before my feet were anywhere close to the floor. I fell hard, on my behonkus, and hit my head. I blacked out for a second and then started laughing. My husband and brother saw it happen and if they ever thought I was crazy in the past, my newest escapade had confirmed it! Thus the reason I am not allowed to stay home alone with a ladder.
I am going tomorrow to buy paint for the trim. I kept going back and forth between ivory and dove white. I think I have made up my mind to go with dove white. I am going to strip the fireplace mantel back to its original wood and also strip the doors. I would strip the baseboards too, but, unfortunately somewhere down along the line someone tried to pry the baseboards off in two places, cracked the wood pretty bad and then slapped some type of compound (not wood putty) on them to cover it up. It is really bad! So, I can’t strip them down since the wood is so splintered in two large spots. I am sanding them down and wood puttying them.
I guess what they were trying to do was take off the baseboards so they could sheetrock the walls. To sheetrock behind the baseboards would be nearly impossible, but it could be done. You would have to take the doorjambs off first and all of the trim around the door and windows, then take off the baseboards. I guess they decided that was too much work because they sheetrocked all the way down close the baseboard and left a 1/4 of an inch to a 1/2 inch gap. Lovely….the good news is, I have caulked the gap in other rooms and painted it the trim color and it looks just fine, you can’t really tell where the sheetrock ends and the baseboard starts. The bad news is, every room in my house looks like this! The gap is about 1 to 1 1/2 inches in one room It is going take some serious work to hide that! I will probably have to pull the sheetrock off the wall and start over in that room. Now, why do people do things like that to an old house? More importantly, if you are going to do dumb stuff like that…DON’T. Hire a professional, or at least do yourself and the next homeowner a favor, order a subscription of This Old House.
I am disappointed that the paint color looks so “blue”. It was supposed to look more like a turquoise, blue green color. When I paint the trim Dove White, it should make the color look a little greener. I can’t wait to get the trim done so I can move the furniture in and do the fun part — decorating! The wood floor is in great condition and I think it will look really nice once I get it all together. Hopefully, that will be this coming weekend. We were supposed to get our furniture yesterday, but the man was not ready for us to come pick it up. He rescheduled us to pick it up this coming Sunday. So…when I am completely done with the room, I will post an after pic.
I hope everyone enjoys their holidays and cooks good food for Thanksgiving!
Andrea
Perpetual Renovator 