We're Getting Closer All the Time...
It’s been awhile since we’ve posted & believe or not, we’ve been working on the house a bit!
We are “close” to finishing the stairway project, but I feel like I’ve
been saying that for a long time. After Nick finished the last of
the drywall sanding we vacuumed the walls and then primed the walls.
While the primer was drying we painted the ceiling and the other walls
white so they wouldn’t look awful next to the new paint. We
didn’t realize how badly we needed to paint until the new primer was
next to the old paint. By 9:00 p.m. Sunday night we had finished the
first coat of paint for the walls. I was a bit nervous that the color
was going to be too dark, but we both love the result! The brown color
“Pepper Spice” (I asked Nick if that was the name of one of the Spice
Girls: he said we would have to repaint if it was!) brings out the warm
colors of the wood on the staircase.
I’d feel like we were almost done, but we have 6 pieces of trim that
need one last sanding before they can be installed and painted.
So it looks like it may be another weekend before we can say that we
are “finished” with this project.
We had posted earlier about using the “Gripper” to prepare the walls
for the topcoat. As Nick was painting the first wall we got a
couple of blisters and then a small section of the topcoat came off and
left a big gap/hole in the paint. Needless to say our hearts
starting racing and we thought about the worst case scenario: if this
happened on all the walls, we would still have a ton of work to
do! So I guess the “Gripper” didn’t work perfectly.
Nick said he also found out that it would have been better to use a
topping compound that has gypsum in it instead of the plain topping
compound that we used, which is pretty soft. We didn’t encounter
that many more blisters, so hopefully it will all be okay and the paint
won’t start coming off in big chunks! Here’s a picture of Nick doing
the last tricky part of “cutting in” last night at 9:00 p.m.
We’ll be sure to post our final photos next weekend!