Our New Old House

All through this process I’ve been asking (admittedly, sometimes whining) “Is it time to paint yet?  Now?  How ’bout now?”

Yes, Kelli. NOW it is time to paint.

“Woo hoo!!”  *Kelli does a little happy dance*

I started with the Merlot paint for the bottom section of the room.

Ooh, this paint is thick!

First coat looks more like Kool-Aid than Merlot, but I’m gonna go with it.

I did the very first coat with a brush because the wall is so uneven and has so many imperfections. I wanted to make sure to get paint in all the little nooks and crannies before I started going over it with a roller.

I cut the corners in with the brush one more time so I could use the roller next and not get too close to the edges. With this second coat the color’s starting to come through nice and rich.

After the first pass with the roller. You can see that I’ve cut the corners in with the Bone White above too.

With the first coat of Merlot drying below, I tackled the first coat of Bone White. I left a little undone for this pic so you can see the contrast between the paint color and the primer.

Also, a quite note about the woodwork: I intend to strip all the woodwork to expose the original wood, but since that’s time consuming and I needed a project that would show me fast results, I just stripped the outer edges where I’d have to put masking tape. I did a couple of extra spots to expose the wood and show what it would look like later, so you can see the top corner of this window is done and the top corner of the attic door is also done. I’ll do the rest after I’m done painting.

Check back soon for Part 4 in which… I’m still painting. Guess which color.

At one time there was a chair rail in the dining room. It’s gone now but I liked the idea of having two paint colors in the dining room, so I put masking tape over where the chair rail was and plan to paint the top part Bone White and the bottom part Merlot. A wallpaper border will go where the chair rail used to be. For this I needed a lot of masking tape.

Check back soon for Part 3 where there will be actual paint!

You know how you’re supposed to caulk around woodwork and stuff to make a nice clean seal between the woodwork and the wall? Well, for once, the previous owners of this house did something right and they did apply a nice bead of caulk way back when. But that was like a bazillion years ago and with the house settling and stuff, a lot of that caulk has chipped and cracked away. I’d like to remove it anyway so I can get paint right up to the woodwork and then apply a new seal of caulk when I’m all done to tidy it all up. The caulk they used a bazillion years ago hardened into a stone-like substance and the only way I’ve found to get it out is to chip at it over and over and over and over again with the pointy edge of my scraping tool.

I’m not really expecting any better answer than “Nope, that’s what you gotta do,” but if I’m wrong and there’s a faster/easier/less painful on my knuckles (from scraping against the wall repeatedly) way to do this, I’d love to hear it.

And don’t say “Have your husband do it!”

To sweeten the deal, here’s some pictures:

I used the heat gun to strip the paint off the top of the baseboards first. Between the baseboard and the plaster wall is caulk. It’s brittle and breaks pretty easily when I chop it with the scraping tool.

Like so…

Sound effect for this picture: “chop.”

Also, just to remind myself that I’m still a girl, I painted my toenails. See? Yeah, I spent the whole afternoon chopping at caulk, barefoot with pretty red toenails. It’s the little things that keep me going.

I have big dreams for my dining room. I love the dining room. It’s one of my favorite rooms in the house and after living in a house for a while that didn’t have a dining room I remembered how much I love them when I saw the spacious one that came with this house. I want the dining room to have a slightly more formal feel than the cozy living room and the retro kitchen. To achieve this, I’ve picked out some classic warm colors (“Bone White” and “Merlot” with gold and bronze accents.) I’ll put a strip of arabesque wallpaper where there once was a chair rail and paint the top portion of the wall Bone White and the bottom portion Merlot.

The room has the original crown molding. Sometime in the 60s or 70s, the previous owners had the room paneled and the ceiling was sprayed with popcorn. Rather than having the crown molding covered and painted or something, they just popcorned right over the crown molding.  Yup, I cringed too.

Here are some “before” pictures of the dining room.  (And that’s not a bed in the middle of the dining room, it’s my piano and dining room table bunched together with an old polyester bedspread draped over them for protection.)

Here’s a closeup of the popcorn-stricken crown molding. You can see on the left I rubbed some off with my hand. I found out that it actually comes off really easily with water.

So I scrubbed…

And scrubbed…

And finally had it clean enough to paint.

I thought about stripping the paint off and restoring the original wood underneath but I already have too many wood stripping projects that are unfinished. I decided to spare myself this one and paint the crown molding with a layered metallic technique the paint guy at Menard’s told me about.

First I put up masking tape, of course.

Dutch Boy has combinations of base colors and metallic glazes. Here are the labels of the two colors I used so if you want, you can duplicate them.

I applied the first coat of the base color. “Keoki Coffee” is a rich chocolate brown. After a couple coats of this I’d go over it with a metallic glaze with little gold flecks in it and the result would be as subtle dark bronze.

It turned out pretty good! Here’s a picture with the masking tape still on:

Check back for Part 2: more prep work!

I looked at the back of the piece of wallboard I kicked out of the bookcase.  It was stamped with a brand and instructions and a 1918 copyright.  The year our house was built! Pretty cool, huh? (Click on each picture to get to a larger size if you care to read it.)