Obviously I need to recover those chairs to make them match, and I also need more furniture for the other end of the room (it's a really big room), not to mention art for the walls, but it's basically done. I cannot believe that we finally tackled it. Three years of hating that 300 square feet of house, and now I just plain like it. Pictures of the rest of the progress are here.
More specifically, I like caulk's ability to make my rickety house look less bockety. What pushes me into the realm of gushy squishy disgusting love is this, my newest toy:
I bought him yesterday morning, and I'm in love. He's maybe the most instantly satisfying home improvement purchase I've ever made. I have weak hands and perpetually sore wrists, and installing the molding around the bottom of the baseboards just about killed me. So to be able to effortlessly lay a bead of painter's caulk around said trim in about twenty minutes is a true blessing.
Unfortunately, my little battery powered caulk gun just isn't strong enough for DAP "Better than the Nail" Moulding Adhesive. So today, when Mr. Deplume and I installed the crown molding, he had to work the old-fashioned caulk gun. Luckily, the man is strong as an ox, and had no trouble rising to the occasion. We ran out of the specialty adhesive 4/5 of the way through the project and found in a spectacular manner that liquid nails is just not a good idea. I'm sure it's fine for people hanging trim in a drywalled room equipped with an pneumatic nailer, but that is not the case here, and we had an 8-ft piece of trim fall on our heads, leaving an unsightly blob of brown liquid nails on the floor. oops.
So back to Menards I went, and came back with the right tools for the job. And some wine and crusty Italian bread (not from Menards, of course). By 4:30 PM, we had 72 linear feet of polystyrene crown molding hanging securely along the perimeter of our front room. If you are planning on diving into the dangerous world of compound miter cuts, I suggest this video. After each watching it, we only made one cut wrong, but it was actually fine for a different corner in the room. We don't have a saw like theirs, but the miter box and hand saw essentially does the same thing.
I promise pictures of the finished molding tomorrow afternoon, once I get done with the paint touch ups. (At least my plan is to finish the paint tomorrow-- you just never know how things will turn out, though, in the Deplume house.)
I also finished a 4th and started work on my 5th sock yesterday. The 4th sock I started was the first ever completed, and Number 5 is its mate. I'll post about that soon, too. This room project is stealing my knit time away.
Addendum: Mr. Deplume and I are not responsible for the ladder being that messy. It is a hand-me-down and looked like a paint store blew up on it before it came into our possession 10 years ago. It has served us well, regardless of outer appearances, bless its vertical heart.
The ceiling in the front room has turned into quite an affair, which is odd, as I really thought that it would be the easiest thing in the whole project. There was a large discolored spot in the center of the room, presumably from old water damage. I figured it wasn't too bad, so I skipped the primer step. That was mistake number one. So then I started a second coat (mistake number 2), and it was obvious that I was going to have to go back and prime the center of the room.
By this time, I was low on paint-- it's a 300 sqft. room, and the ceiling has that sand texture on it, so a gallon is just barely enough for one coat. I went to a basement and pulled out another can of ceiling paint. Same brand of paint, and this was supposedly "bright white" and the other "brilliant white", so I figured that if mixed them together, we'd have enough paint for the third pass at the center part of the ceiling (to cover the primer) and I could put this to bed.
Here's where mistake number four comes in: the basement paint had apparently been tinted off white. I don't know why it wasn't labeled. So now I have 3/4 of a ceiling that is off white, and a few patches of brillirant white around the edges.
I have now whined enough that Mr. Deplume will paint the ceiling with the brand new gallon of "casual white" paint that I bought at Ace today, while I continue cleaning and priming trim. I swear I'll get this done by Thanksgiving when a zillion people will be coming over for turkey and pie. If you are a religious sort, and have a spot on your prayin' schedule, would you mind throwing my front room on there for me?
Here are pictures of what I've managed so far (click on the picture to see the whole album):
