We took the term “Labor” way too literally and worked on the house throughout the 3-day weekend.
Saturday: We load up the car with everything we need to stay in the house for the long weekend. Set up an air mattress in the dining room.
Sleeping in the dining room
I check out the walls – Hugh was wrong about the texture, it did match the rest of the wall. Big relief! Hugh became so confident in his wall repair abilities that he decides that another 3 cracks in the wall that didn’t look so bad before really need to be fixed now. So the wall repair continues another day.
Not sure what we were thinking, but when we primed the wall in the guest room earlier in the week, we didn’t think to prime the crown molding too (amateurs). But then we noticed some peeling paint. That’s when our first WWMHD moment occured. So Saturday we decided to “do it right” and sand the crown molding, prime & paint it. But then the sanding turned into scraping the paint off in the sections near the bathroom & window where we were able to peel sections of it off ourselves. For extra coverage we did 2 coats of the primer in the scraped sections. It dried pretty fast so I was able to get both coats of paint on the crown molding pretty quickly.
That eventing we start to paint the guest room. Hope this looks good on the walls…Â
We find that we have very different painting techniques so you can totally tell where each of us painted – his sections are much darker than mine. And mine are a lot splotchier too, which is not the professional look I was going for. We do our best to even everything out. Hugh tries to make me feel better by telling me the 2nd coat will fix everything. I’m not so sure. Why did I think I could do this if I can’t even paint a room?
Sunday: We’re finally ready to start priming our bedroom – can’t wait to see how the repaired walls look once we paint them! I’m still traumatized from the first coat of paint in the other room so I let Hugh do the entire 2nd coat while I prime the other room. Hugh proudly comes in to tell me he’s done. It looks great!
This may be a bit dark for some people, but we really love how the color turned out. The plan is to balance the “Red Red Wine” (or as I often call it, “Bordello Red”) with the light wood flooring and furniture and white bedding, curtains, etc. Now I can’t wait to see what it will look like when we move everything in.
Meanwhile, I learned from our experience in the guest room to prime the crown molding at the same time as the wall since we now know we’ll end up painting the molding anyway. Makes things a lot faster so I finished priming one room while Hugh painting the other. I somehow manage to stay up late to finish a 2nd coat of paint on the crown molding so that we can tape it and start painting the color in our room the next day.
Monday: Not sure I can take another day of laboring but we press ahead. The crown molding is dry so I get back up on the ladder to tape it up. Our rooms seem to grow larger with each lap I drag that ladder around. Hugh gets the color up as I do the taping. I’m still traumatized from my first coat in the other bedroom and he did such a good job evening out the 2nd coat that I let him do most of the painting. But somehow I end up back on the ladder again doing the edging at the top. How did that happen? We step back & the 1st coat looks fantastic! Hugh’s way with a roller had something to do with it, but I think part of it was the paint. The strange thing is both of the rooms used Behr paint with an eggshell finish so you would think they would come out the same. Could the colors have had anything to do with the difference?
I’ll reveal the other paint color in the next post, but you can get a hint from what’s going on in the new utility sink we installed earlier in the week.
Putting the new sink to use. Even the old one is helping out.
Two sets of friends come over in the afternoon to see the house. We’re glad to have an excuse to stop working and show them around.
We have plans to paint the 2nd coat of color But my wonderful friend Julia not only brought us a carload of boxes for our move (guess we should get packing), she also brought over a 6 pack of beer too. So we decide to have just 1 each. And then Hugh decides to take a little nap. I plan to check email but then my eyes start to close too – maybe a quick rest will be good. Next thing we know 2 hours have passed. I’m trying to convince myself to get up and get back to work. But then Hugh brilliantly reasons that it will take us forever to paint another coat in our state of exhaustion so we should just call it a night and head back to San Francisco. We’ll come back to do it when we’re actually awake. I can’t argue with that logic.
I was actually glad to have to go back on work on Tuesday so that I could relax a little.
