Area walls finally prepped...

All the prep work is finally done so I am set to start knocking the bumps off the walls and skim-coating with joint compound. Whew! Since the last post the following has occurred:

- construction-zone converted back into dining room for a lovely visit from my parents
- dining room converted back into construction zone, with plastic on floor, doorways, french doors, and windows.
- last coats of shellac and varnish applied to window frames
- walls finally de-glossed with TSP-substitute. (Ugh-- I didn't even get to the ceiling and I don't know if that will ever happen. The walls were hard enough!)
- last sanding/scrubbing old stain and remaining paint off oak beam and post surfaces where they meet the wall

Here's the dining room now:



And boy will I NOT miss this spot on the wall where I took off the giant 1970's motion detector. (LOL, I wish I had taken a picture before tearing it out).



There are 2 things I don't know how to address prior to slathering on the joint compound...

Around the windows and doors some of the plaster is flaking off. Should I start knocking off all the loose bits, or just hope I can anchor them in place with the joint compound?? I'm afraid that if I start knocking loose pieces off, there will be no wall left. How will I know when to stop???



Also, I am still uncertain how to deal with this area where the post and wall intersect. I'm hoping I finally have enough of the messy sanding/stripping done that I can just mask off the wood and do all the skim coating and painting of the walls, then mask off the walls and add the finish to the post and beams, without ruining the adjacent areas in the process.



(here's the same post a couple months ago before I finished scrubbing the one side).

Alright, well here's hoping that eventually redoing the walls is more satisfying than all the fussing that it took to get to this point!

springtime stuff

I'm catching up on posting some things from this past month. I'm so glad I finally dealt with most of the upstairs blinds. They were in bad shape when we got the house and every week of use mangled them further.




I trimmed off the shredding parts and I sewed in some battens, which seemed to do the trick! The neighbor's Callery pear across the street is in full bloom, so it's a nice view this time of year. :)



Which reminds me-- I saw my first ever one of these just over a week ago. I just wish I could have shared this photo with my grandmother before she left this world. *sends it into the ether to share with you all instead*


<3

aaaaand I'm still fussing with the door and window trim..

Well, the dining room walls are still lumpy. >_> Somehow after all this time I'm still stuck fussing with the trim and I haven't done the first thing to the walls. Here's hoping that a picture post will help snap me out of it!

I finally stripped the paint off the last dining room door casings, but unfortunately in addition to those requisite swirly scratches, I found one piece with a new sort of damage throughout that I can't sand out or repair. Basically, it looks like previous owners used it to chop firewood on:






The only solution I can think of (short of making new trim from scratch which I do not have the tools or $$ for) is that I'll have to flip all 3 of the boards over and try to finish the backs to look like the fronts. I don't know if the door is symmetrical enough for me to pull this off. *frets*

Another unexpected challenge I've had is getting the paint off the 1/4 inch reveals around the door and window frames. It has involved lots of thankless scraping and scrubbing with steel wool & alcohol above my head, and I can't imagine how the number of hours I've spent at it could possibly be worth it.

Here's a section where I've stripped the left half of the frame already, and the right half still has the white paint. (We're leaving the actual doors & windows white for now, since we can strip and refinish them at some later date without having the whole room dismantled). Dude, it looks like such an insubstantial amount of paint to remove!!! *shakes head in disbelief*




I think I'm finally nearing the end, though. I put 3 coats of garnet shellac on one of the windows, so it's looking a little better:


Today I got the first of a couple coats of polyurethane varnish on it as well, and I'm hoping to get the other windows to that point by sometime tomorrow.

(Then maybe I can tape up the windows and frames and get on to making a huge mess of the walls and ceiling!)