Our New Old House

The paint’s all up and I’m working on stripping the paint off the woodwork in the dining room!

Pictures!

Oh yeah, and I accidentally touched the metal tip of the heat gun to my arm as I was reaching for the paint chip bucket. I burned my arm, but it will be fine.

More to come! Come back soon!

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!

My arms were really sore from my yoga class this week so I didn’t so a lot of “up high” work in the front bedroom, though I did heat gun off some more paint from the window frames.  They’re pretty much ready for a coat of Citri-Strip to take off the varnish that’s left.  I cleaned up the room a bit, swept out the window sills, swept the floor, organized my tools, and prepared for the next day’s work.  Every little bit helps, I keep telling myself.

[tags]woodwork, bedroom, windows[/tags]

I forgot to upload these photos yesterday. Here are some more pictures of my windows in the front bedroom as I’m removing them.

One thing I learned is that because I need to break the stops between the sashes to get them out, I need to access them from the side. Luckily, there are access holes to get to the weights and these allow me to access the sides of the stops too.

Here are the weights. Notice the unusual knot used to tie them on. Someone told me this knot was commonly used for window weights. I’ve seen it in two different houses so far.

Here are the window frames after I removed the sashes. It was very weird having gaping holes in the side of my house, so I took a lot of pictures of how that looked before I put the storm windows back on.

And I took a few at night so you could see the room itself and not just the light from outside.

So here’s my nice stack of windows ready to be refurbished.

Mark that task off my list!

[tags]bedroom, windows, photos, woodwork[/tags]