The interior is pretty much done. Wallboard is up, paint is up, trim is up. The only remaining thing in what will soon be Eddie's bedroom is flooring.
Wallboard went in without a hitch. I've gotten pretty good at mudding and taping, actually, so it's going a lot smoother now.
Almost there!
I sanded and re-stained all of the trim and the doors while I had it all down. Sadly, my faithful Makita sander finally self-destructed after 20 years. The pad broke apart while I was sanding.
A quick trip to the hardware store and I was back in business. This time in Jim Rundall-approved DeWalt yellow.
While I never had any problems with my trusty old Makita, this one is actually a much nicer tool - it has far less vibration. My fingers didn't feel numb after using it for an extended period. It also has adjustable speeds, a built-in dust collection thing and it came with a jazzy tool bag to store it all.
The next thing to go in was sub-flooring. For reasons I've never been able to figure out, when we moved in, the laundry room floor was maybe 12 inches above the concrete, with a step down to the mudroom, then a step down to the floor of the playroom, and finally another step down to the floor of the hall and the downstairs bedrooms. Over the last few years, we've been establishing a single floor height in all of the downstairs rooms.
Once again, the Subee proved quite capable as a pickup truck - 8 sheets of subfloor fit nicely on the roof while 30 some-odd two by fours fit in the back.
Subfloor went in quickly with the help of my minions:
In the meantime, I was busy installing an overhead light. Because I'm so damn smart, I ran the wiring before I sealed up all of the various ceiling bits. Because I'm so damn dumb, I forgot to mark which set of joists I ran the wiring between, so I had to tear into the ceiling to find the wire. Happily, I got lucky and got it on the first try.
Tada!
Next, I set Eddie to repainting the radiator covers. He used to be fascinated with my respirator; I couldn't leave it laying around, cause he'd run off with it. It turns out that the only cure for temptation is to give into it - after several hours of wearing the respirator while spray painting, he's completely and utterly cured of his fascination with the thing.
Naomi, in the meantime, I set to reinstalling the hinges for the various doors I'd pulled off.
That's pretty much the end of this project, at least the interior. I even moved the cable modem back to its normal home after it's year-long dangle:
The only thing left in this room (aside from some cleanup) is flooring. That probably won't go in until after vacation, but it should be pretty quick. We're close to putting the wraps on a year-long project, and I'm looking forward to moving on to the outside of the house.
While we've been working on this project, the real estate market has gone down the tubes, and the interest rate is now very, very low. We've decided to refinance the house. This means that we'll have an appraisal sometime in the next 4 to 6 weeks, so we've ramped up a lot of the work to hopefully get this place looking more appealing to an appraiser. This means we're repainting a bunch of stuff, and generally trying to pick off a lot of low-hanging fruit. Steph took over painting in the kitchen, and I started in on the upstairs bathroom.
The kitchen just needed some masking:
Relocation of all of the little stuff, including the stuff needed to cook lunch:
And then it's time for paint:
Steph kicked ass on this project. Despite not having a lot of experience painting, she jumped on this project like white on rice, and got the kitchen painted pretty damn quick.
The bathroom, on the other hand, with its horrible 1970's popcorn ceiling, needed a little more love. A little bit of spraying, followed by a lot of scraping:
And all of it came right off. All over the floor.
And maybe a little in the bathtub:
On the plus side, cleanup isn't as bad as you might think. It cleans up easily enough with a dustpan and broom. On the down side, the ceiling is of course over the entire room. This means that everything in the room gets pretty damn dirty. And I can't leave this room torn apart for too long - it's the only shower in the house, so it has to be up and running for showers every day. Progress here might be a little slow.
We popped into Home Depot today to get some stuff, and I grabbed a sample can of a nice coral color that I really liked. I threw a little of it up on the wall to see how it might look:
My bride, always subtle, took a quick glance at it and immediately declared:
"I hate it. It looks like vomit."
Back to the drawing board.
In the next few days, there's a bit of wallboard work to be done in the bathroom, and lots of prep throughout the house for a painting party this weekend. Stay tuned!
