Paint party...

So this weekend we painted the kitchen, the bathroom, the living room and the hall.  Saturday was fairly uneventful - the kitchen got painted fairly quickly, which was a good thing, because the other rooms were a much more involved project.

I'm pretty sure paint is made of magic.  It really transforms a room, having everything be a single relatively uniform color.  The walls in our house have seen a lot of abuse, and they're not perfect, but the change from before to after is hard to overstate.  It's pretty cool. 

Step 1: Move the living room into the kitchen.

Step 2: Invite your rockstar parents over to help with the painting.

Mom re-staining the window trim:

My sexy-ass wife covered in paint and cutting in the living room:

My painting buddy is cuter than your painting buddy...

I didn't just boss people around this weekend, I actually got up on a ladder and did some actual work, too.  I even managed to not fall off the ladder, though it was sketchy in this bit. 

Dad slingin' paint - these guys did a ton of work, and easily took several days off the project.  It's interesting how much more work can be done with an extra person or two.  Everything just goes so much faster.  We had to borrow a bunch of stuff to do this - I have plenty of tools for me, but I'm really only set up for me.  Thanks to Pete, Heather and Steve, and my parents, we ended up with enough stuff to keep things going smoothly all day.

Mom:  Stop pointing the camera at me!

There was obviously some kind of moisture problem in the past, as the ceiling was stained in a couple places.  I never did find any problems in the roof or the attic, so I'm guessing the problems were a long time ago, but the ceiling was a mess.  I primed it with Bin to cover up the stained bits.

Rolling the ceiling once the Bin dried:

I had to tear out the shower surround at the beginning of the project, so once I got every put back together, I had to glue up the shower surround again.  There's no good way to clamp a large, wobbly panel against a wall while the adhesive sets up, or if there is, I haven't figured it out yet.  I resorted to an unconventional solution to my clamping problem - put some butt cheeks on it!

The butt-cheek clamp in action.  Does Bessey make one of these?

Step 422: Start cleaning up the wreckage. 

Hey look!  A yellow bathroom! 

A side note about paint and light: In the store, under industrial lighting, the paint looked almost hay-colored.  Once we had it up, it turned out to be much brighter and much more obviously yellow.  In the pic above, on the left side, it's a traditional 4 foot fluorescent tube.  In the center, a pair of compact fluorescent bulbs.  On the right, in the shower is a halogen bulb.  What struck me was the wide variation in color - the area lit by the compact fluorescent bulbs is almost orange, and the other two areas are distinctly different shades of yellow.  

We still need to do some more painting; the stairwell isn't done, and the trim needs to be re-stained or replaced in a few places, but now the majority of the upstairs has been repainted in the last year.  If we ever manage to actually finish this project, I'm not really sure what I'm going to do with myself.