Paint preserving trick!

My least favorite thing about painting is the clean-up process. My friend Steve was lamenting that he had a lot of painting to do and it's difficult to find a chunk of time to do it all. [BTW - Happy Birthday Steve!] Who wants to spend an hour or two painting followed by 30 minutes of clean-up just to have more painting to do the next day? I recently filled him in on a tip I learned when I was doing a lot of the painting in my house. When I perused my blog posts on painting I didn't see it. I can't believe I haven't shared this yet!

This tip come from my friend Cori who was a huge help when I was painting my house! In addition to doing a lot of the painting (including ceilings which she does FAR superior to me), she showed me that you can wrap rollers and paint brushes with plastic wrap to keep the paint wet if you need to do more painting the next day! 

Steve can attest that it works. In fact, here's an email I got from him the other day:
"I finished painting a bedroom yesterday.  Your plastic wrap suggestion worked like a charm.  Thanks for the advice."

Spackle, paint, glue, and... glitter?

Those are all things that covered my hands at some point today. And I broke a nail. Before you get scared, the glitter wasn't for a house project. I decided to multitask today. I spackled the nail holes in the door frames to prepare them for painting. I began painting the baseboards and did a first coat on one of the doors I just installed. See the difference!!!

The glue and glitter were for my new Christmas wreath. I started putting this wreath together in January using after-Christmas sale ornaments and a clothes hanger. The ornaments still needed to be glued or the balls would fall off. I must admit, the superglue didn't really cover my hands or I'd be in big trouble right now (nor would I be typing this blog), but I did have a few short moments of fingers being a little stuck together. The glitter on my hands came from the sparkly purple and red ornaments. I plan to get more silver ribbon so I can make a fuller bow, but this one works for now.

My broken fingernail happened when I was removing a screw from a drywall screw that I needed to reinstall for my curtain rod. What happened to my curtain rod, you ask? Well, my dog gets a little carried away when the mail carrier comes to my door and one day I came home to the rod, curtain, and one of the rod mounts on the ground. It would have been a good dog shaming post because he was super guilty-looking when I got home, but I didn't take a picture that time. Anyway, I spackled the hole, which had been stripped and let it dry/cure for a while. I finally got around to bringing my power drill upstairs to drill a new hole and my curtain is back up!

More Christmas decorating today and more painting tomorrow!

Tight spaces (temporarily) removed...

I decided to tackle my bathroom walls during my unexpected stay-cation. I had to do a painting frenzy because I had to scrape the old yellow paint, prime, and paint behind the toilet tank all in one fell swoop. This is the only bathroom worth using in my house and I didn't want to have to take the toilet tank off and on more than once. 

The tank is secured with 3 bolts/nuts, with heavy duty rubber washers. The online instructions for how to remove a toilet tank are pretty thorough, but the main tip I have is for after putting the tank back on. Keep some newspaper on hand to place underneath the tank after tightening the nuts in order to find any drips. I found that I had to tighten one of them that way.

New storage for Nintendo games (eventually to swap with my cookbooks)

Most of the time my Nintendo (yes... old school, original Nintendo) has lived in my basement. The Nintendo itself doesn't take up much space and could stay upstairs but there was not really any space for the ridiculous number of games my brothers and I (well... mostly my brothers) accumulated.

Yesterday, I happened to be at a thrift store searching for some picture frames and goods for my upgraded bathroom (blog post coming soon) on the 25% off sale day and came across this cabinet for $7.50 after the discount. I got a new knob (about $2.50) and I already had the black paint.

I was able to paint it yesterday and touch-up my bathroom cabinet and light switch cover at the same time...so 3 tasks tackled at once!

I began painting it upside down in order to get to the bottom edges of the legs and that provided a nice stand for painting the door too. After that round dried, I flipped it over to paint the top and did a second coat on the sides. Finally, I painted a second coat on the top and the door to let it dry over night. This morning I assembled it with hinges and the new knob and stocked it with the games.

For now, I'll store the games in here, but it's still hard to go through the games to decide what to play. I'll still have to pull a lot of them out. Eventually I will install a shelf to store my cookbooks in there instead. Then, I'll put the games in a pull-out drawer in the TV stand where they should be easier to see.

Sometimes it's the little things...

I'm LONG overdue for blog posting. I've done quite a few smaller projects in the past month and a half, but haven't had time to post about them.

One weekend I decided I was going to paint my front door. I had new doors installed last December.They look nice, but were only primed. Well, the primer was fine for a while, but it didn't really match the white shutters or casing that frames the door from the outside. There were also nail holes that needed to be filled and painted over in the wood between the storm door and the front door.

I taped off the semi-circle window in the door, grabbed a brush and my roller, and got to work. Well, I accidentally got a longer roller brush nap than I intended. Instead of the paint going on smoothly there ended up being a little texture... and I like it! However here's something I found on rules on roller brush nap length:

Use a 1/2 inch (1.2 cm) nap for flat paint on walls and ceilings, 3/4 inch (1.9 cm) nap for rough surfaces like textured ceilings, and 1/4 inch (.63 cm) nap for satin or semi-gloss paint.

Most people probably barely noticed that there were patch spots and even less so that the door was a different shade of white. I noticed though and the painting of the door is just one more thing that makes the house feel more complete..

Painting at the wall and ceiling

I previously mentioned a useful "edging tool" for painting where the walls and ceiling meet (see here). It has a flaw though... it leaves a slight gap at the very top of the wall. And when I say slight, I really do mean slight... as in, most people wouldn't be inspecting the walls for every possible flaw like the owner of the home would be and they wouldn't even notice. But I'm the owner of the home, so I noticed and for your benefit I'm blogging about it. Here's my tip:

Get a good angled 1-inch brush and paint to the top of the wall. It's better to get paint slightly on the ceiling than leaving the slight gap. A fairly steady hand will do a fine job. This tip should save you the trouble of "painting the wall, painting the ceiling, painting the wall" since you now know what looks better. And if you feel more comfortable using painters tape... then before you paint the top of the wall, put tape on the ceiling almost to (but not quite to) where the wall and ceiling meet because you don't want tape covering part of the wall.

Painting upstairs

I had a huge priming and painting party about a month ago. We primed my whole upstairs on the Saturday and put on the color the next day. I had at least 8 people to help me each day and I want to give a HUGE thanks to my friends who came out.

I've been gradually working on touch-ups. I needed to reassess the wall I decided needed to be teal. I absolutely love the color, but dark paint shows flaws easier. I ended up getting satin finish, which also shows the flaws b/c it picks up more light. Of course the wall that I painted teal was the most flawed wall in my room. I sanded it again and it has helped some, but that wall will remain flawed unless I mud the whole thing since there were so many patch jobs already done on it.
I repainted the wall and the satin finish still shows the flaws too much. Tip: Keep in mind how flawed the wall is when picking out your paint finish and color. Another tip: I primed everything white, but if I could go back I would have bought tinted primer for that wall since it needed the most repairs.
I'm going to do a light sand over the whole wall to remove the satin sheen, clean up the dust, and repaint the whole wall with a matte finish. That should help some.

I still need to do touch-ups with the other colors and repaint areas of the ceiling that got paint on them. I should have bought stock in 3M painter's tapes. Once I finish the teal, I'll need to tape the border so that I can finish painting with the tan color on the other walls. I'll also need to tape off the ceiling so that I can paint all the way to the crevice. That meticulousness will pay off in the long run, even though it's time consuming now. At least I tell myself that while my room is in disarray :)

Satisfying paint peeling

I wasn't intending to do any more house projects this evening after my shoulder started hurting (probably a combo of show shoveling, yoga, and drilling plaster walls), but out of curiosity I picked up a large putty knife and thought I'd see just how easy it would be to scrape more paint off of my bathroom walls. As I mentioned in my first shower rod post, the paint started to peel off when I took off the old shower rod. Before I knew it, I finished peeling the paint off of most of one wall in the bathroom. My belief is that previous owners had painted over wall paper, so what I was actually scraping off of the wall was painted wall paper. The wall currently looks horrible because the already-ugly green paint is discolored from having wall paper over it, but it's going to be a common theme that rooms look worse before they get better (I even created a new blog label for that theme). I don't even care though because peeling that wall made me feel like I made some decent progress on updating my bathroom. And my friend Jenn described it right when she said it was really satisfying to peel paint from walls (she learned this during the bubbling paint fiasco).

satisfaction looks like this

Slow remodel of the bathroom... first, new shower rod.

I still haven't decided if I'm going to completely redo the bathroom or just update it with some new tiles, a new sink, and different window. Since I haven't made the big decision about gutting the bathroom or not, I've decided that in the meantime I can at least install some new pieces that will transfer to the updated bathroom. Tonight, I installed a new shower rod. It's one of those stainless steel curved rods that a lot of the hotels have. It helps keep the shower curtain from flying into the shower even if they don't have weighted magnets in them. Those types of rods also provide more space in the shower. I was excited to find it at Marshalls for only $25 (and it included a heavy weight vinyl shower curtain and nice stainless steel rings too). They're upwards of $50 at other stores.

I'm sure you're wondering, "how did installing the new rod go???" Well, luckily the pieces that mount to the wall and actually hold the rod had the same spacing for screws as the one that I removed. Oh and while I'm on the topic of the old rod, here's a glimpse of what was there:

It was a decently strong metal rod, but noticeably tarnished and covered with a plastic that was once painted white, but much of that paint has scraped off to show the original sky blue color. On top of that, the mounts had been painted over yellow when the walls were painted. Not only were the mounts painted, but so where the screws holding them onto the wall. **What were they thinking?**

Back to the installation... I had to chip off the paint in order to get to the screws and to pry off the mount. I ended up peeling off the paint around the mounts and grabbed my bucket of primer and a paint brush so that the wall would have some protection and consistency around the new wall mount. Installing the mounts would have been easier had I ensured that my drill battery were charged, but I just used my biceps instead to put the mounts into the screw holes that were already there. If the holes hadn't been there I would have had to drill holes after making sure I had everything level. I did make it more difficult for myself to put the rod up because I didn't feel like switching the curtain rings on my curtains or trying to pull the current ones over the new rod after it was installed. I ended up putting the curtain on the rod before setting it onto the mounts. The unique piece about installing a curved rod (as opposed to a straight rod) is that there are additional bolts to attach the rod to the mounts so that the curved part is parallel to the floor and arching away from the shower. It took me a while to thread the bolts through, but if you haven't already put the curtain on the rod and are not working with an injured right thumb (which I had recently cut on my mini food processor blade), then lining up the rod with the holes on the mount would not be as difficult. The finished product is NOT silver, white, and blue... it IS a big improvement to a slowly improving bathroom.

The Living Room is livable!

Had to publish this picture so I could show off my floors again...

Once again my friends were a HUGE help! I was able to get the dining room and living room painted and organized. My friends even made it extra happy with a smiley face on the door (which will be replaced next Monday).
One friend and I were able to put one coat of paint on the two rooms in a little over an hour, thanks to a handy edging tool I got from Sherwin Williams and my friend's fast handy work with the roller. However, when we were done with the first coat, I decided it was too dark, so I took another trip to Sherwin Williams to get a small can of base white paint to lighten the paint for a 2nd coat. It's important to make sure you measure the same way each time you mix paint... which is just what I did and my 2 batches turned out just right (Goldilocks would approve).

After letting the 2nd coat dry for a little while, we ended up removing the paper/drop clothes from the floors and cleaning up the dust that had accumulated from all of the touch-up sanding jobs. By the end of the night we had placed the area rug in the living room, which took a lot of furniture maneuvering and measuring/cutting of the carpet pad to get it right. Once that was done we arranged the furniture and were exhausted, but extremely happy to have a comfortable place to relax. My friends were determined to make my living room livable... and I think it's appropriate that the orange paint on the walls is called "Determined Orange." It sets the mood for this whole fixer-upper project.

SLIDESHOW - - What a coat of paint can do...

Paint Progression of dining room and living room
primed dining room painted dining room painted dining room with orange wall McDuplex living room scraped living room wall painted living room with smiley door

Bye McDuplex

It’s time to say goodbye to the McDuplex and paint over the red paint. In order to paint over such a dark color, we (some friends and I), first, had to prime the walls. A coat of pure white made such a difference. The whole room opened up and looked much more inhabitable. We hit a couple of snags in the priming process though. First of all we noticed some bubbling of the paint after putting the primer on it. I decided to start scraping those areas and the paint just kept peeling. We weren’t able to finish the priming because once the paint was scraped it needed to be sanded and smoothed with wallboard/joint compound before being primed. The pictures show what the walls looked like with the red paint and after being primed and scraped. Another snag was that someone had made some marks with a blue marker that refused to be primed over. It’s best not to write on walls at all… but if you are going to, please don’t use marker! It will either require sanding off or multiple coats of primer letting each coat dry fully (which takes at least an hour).

I wasn’t planning to do anything more than prime the walls this weekend, but my friends who were helping me were also willing to paint the ceilings. By the time they were done with that, I realized that the walls that I wanted to be my accent walls were done drying and could be painted my non-neutral color. Some people will baulk at such a bold color, but after initial apprehension we applied the orange paint, it dried slightly darker than it was in the paint can, and really does look good. It actually really makes me happy. We even painted a lot of the kitchen, which needed some sort of pick-me-up. Moral of this story, don’t be afraid of color. After all, it’s just paint. Unfortunately the yellow is still around and the horrid red door so my main level now looks like the warm half of the color wheel.

Windows are in and priming commences!

It only took the contractors a day to install the windows and they look MUCH better than the previous ones and they work really well. Hopefully they'll decrease utility costs too. Nonetheless, they increase the value of the house. The metal casing is gone and is replaced with primed wood, and the windows are vinyl and don't have mildew residue on them. Amazing!

My most recent project is getting the red rooms ready to prime. I've scraped, sanded, and spackled the walls and I've removed the baseboards. I'll write soon about the priming party I'm having on Saturday.