Success...I think

As foggy as I am with these allergies, I'm not sure I would know the difference between success and failure. I'm reduced to staring at small shiny objects and snuffling all the snot in my head.

So I won't do a lot of talky wordy business this morning. I will, however, show some pictures.

The main thing that got done this weekend was the porch ceiling. I stuffed the cracks with backer rod and caulked and painted, and we installed the new ceiling fan. It had some god-awful ugly "weathered oak" faux-wood faux-grained blades, so I also spray-painted those black. And we bought the crown for the kitchen and primed it, and bought oak to trim out the countertops.

We're on a roll. Here's some pictures of the finished porch ceiling. Some before shots can be found here and here. Now we just need to screen...




That business on the left isn't as bad as it looks here-- the wide-angle lens is distorting, and a fresh coat of paint behind it will do wonders. It's one of the many things we simply couldn't fix without tearing out a huge portion of ceiling, all for something cosmetic.

I need help

No really.

I didn't take any pictures of the problem, so I will describe for you, as best I can, the nature of this beast.

Umm...Some tape peeled the paint off my trim.

I think that sums it up pretty well.

What's happened is, during the course of taping off our kitchen to work on drywall, floor, etc, the masking tape-- and even blue painters' tape-- has peeled bits of paint off of the doorway trim. I blame part of this on a certain someone's reckless ripping off of the tape. But mostly, I think this might mean that some PO painted latex over oil without proper prep. Or that the oil is so old that its doing its whole crumble and FAIL routine.

It's not terrible, and it's only on a few pieces, but I'm trying to decide how best to alleviate this crap. I want to paint this trim soon. I will be using a low-VOC alkyd. It seems to last much longer than latex; I know that latex has come a long way, but I was sitting in my mother's house the other day when I realized that we painted her trim almost 20 years ago. A good scrub with a magic eraser, and it'll be like new. That shit's like a candy shell.

Anyway, I cannot take the trim off of the walls for a variety of reasons, namely due to the fact that the house was drywalled around the trim. I fear I would be opening the most giganticest can of worms ever.

I also considered priming with a serious business primer and succumbing to latex, but we've already painted the yet to be installed base shoe with oil.

So, I'm not sure how to proceed here. The trim is a variety of shades of white throughout the house-- so I think some is oil and some is latex (and the bathroom's is, whatever the base, FLAT FINISH. grrrr. That irritates me so much. It looks sooooo dirty. It IS so dirty). Considering the age of the house, and the many colors that we have see on the trim, I know that whatever's under the possibly-latex layer is oil.

My questions are these: If I prime with something like Kilz2 and paint with oil, am I, somewhere down the line, going to see a problem wherein the maybe-latex layer and surrounding oil/primer lose adhesion? Or will the oil, with its hard candy shell, be ok once it's cured?

Also, how should I handle the pieces with peeling paint-- should I use a stripper (heh.) to get the top layer or two off? Since we're not taking these pieces off the wall, they'll have to be stripped in situ, so I'd probably want to use something like a citrus or soy based remover. I'd prefer to sand as little as possible, due to the lead content.

Should I just wet scrape and prime-- then paint? I'm using a semi-gloss finish, so I don't want too much bumpiness...Scrape, "fill," sand, prime, paint?

Ugh.

I guess I'm leaning toward first trying to scrape. If that's bad, then chemically (or citrus-ally or soy-ally) stripping the face of the trim, then doing some serious priming and painting; and then simply priming and painting the un-peeled trim.

Suggestions?

A mighty, mighty breakthrough

So this is what I saw when I woke up this morning:


Pardon the blurs-- it was still dark out and he was sleeping soundly when I started taking this picture...Anyway, that right there is a dog sleeping on his Coolaroo raised outdoor bed. When he sleeps inside, he lays on a store-bought bed. He likes it. So then I bought him this bed that's raised off the ground for hot days, it's washable, it's sturdy, it's low to the ground for easy climbing in. It got great reviews. But outside, well...he likes the flowerbed. He'd jump on the coolaroo and sit when we went outside-- so he could get a treat, of course. He'd lie down on it-- while I was petting him. But never have I seen him, OF HIS OWN ACCORD, go to it and sleep. Without my presence. Without treats. I even brought it inside for a while, and still, never did I wander to the back room to find him curled up on it. Luckily, it wasn't, like, major award expensive, and the Sneaky kitty likes it, so I didn't exactly consider it a wasted purchase-- just not really being used for its intended purchase.

But last night, that all changed. It made me so happy. I just laid in bed and watched out the window for a while.

And then, what a lovely drive to work, eh?

And then there's the projects we started...

But we were foiled.

I wanted to take care of this over the weekend:

Ok, yeah, that's how we iron around here. Anyway, that's an old door into the kitchen. It's located behind the stove and cabinets along that wall. Judging by this:


we think perhaps the ghost door once led to a butler's pantry or thereabouts. The doorway on the left of the photo still goes to the kitchen; we wondered if that crazy ceiling beam once belonged to a wall separating the pantry form the entryway for the backdoor. Who knows.

That's beside the point, though. We reframed it in when we sheetrocked the kitchen-- a little more solidly than our POs had done before. So now we have to deal with this side. Since we don't want to deal with sheetrocking this entire room yet, we're just going to put the trim back up, as it was when we moved in, and put the piece of paneling back over the hole, again, as it was when we moved in.

Problem now is that we framed it in so that the door jambs aren't going to just slide in. It's going to take some sawing and shimming and rigging. But that's ok. I still sort of like the idea of a ghost door there. It's a nice nod whatever originally went on in that space.

Anywho, we discovered that the panel was too warped to work with right now. It's going to sit like this for the week until it's flat enough to deal with.


And then, I get to paint. Look what I found on the $5 mistint shelf at Lowe's!
If it suxks, I'm only out five dollars and little labor. Can't go wrong!

Slowly, slowly

Slowly, but surely, things are getting done around here. It's not major steps-- the weather's been too beautiful; on the other hand, we bitch and moan when it's bad and CAN'T work, so...there you have it.

Anyway, the porch ceiling got a little attention. Remember, it looked like this:


I primed the ceiling and we got the crown installed:


You can see I misjudged how far the primer needed to go along the edge, and there's a lot of caulking that needs doing before we finally paint. And boy is it dirty up there!

Still, it's a step closer.

Breaking our promise

I think we have a good excuse. We really had planned to get a ton of stuff done. We promised. We were committed. We were motivated.

And then we were hurt.

Actually, Adam was hurt. He threw his back out at work on Friday. And then we were wet. On that front we were very lucky. I think Ike hit Arkansas as a tropical storm and quickly became a tropical depression. The winds were 50 mph or so, but no trees or limbs lost and no other damage that we could see. Our outside kitties ducked out Saturday morning. Sneaky was in hiding by 10am, and our new recruit, little Bella, ran off after her early morning visit with the vet. (Clean bill of health, btw. She's about 3 and has some scars and broken teeth from life on the streets, but otherwise ok, it seems.) They both came out yesterday evening when the coast was clear.

At any rate, I dedicated Saturday morning to bathing the dog, filling in all the backyard holes and tying down anything that might fly away.

The rain didn't come until later in the afternoon, and it was gone by Sunday morning. I got all the supplies to paint the porch ceiling and install the crown, but we decided to wait until everything was totally dry. So I focused my efforts elsewhere.

Sunday's beautiful, breezy, fresh and clean air meant we could turn off the a/c and open the windows. I mopped and finally unpacked boxes of pictures and trinkets.

I was hesitant to put holes in the walls, but I got over it. Yes, we have lived here 6 months and only just now are we getting around to hanging things on the walls. I also bought a new runner for the kitchen.

Doesn't it look lived in now?
My mother just bought the same rug, so she let us give it a test run before I bought it. And my favorite poster-- a watercolor that my mother did when I was little-- finally got a frame. Oh yeah; the sad little laundry room also got a burst of, er, neutral with some curtains.
That little tragedy of a room is going to have to get painted very, very soon. One day, it will have slate floor tiles. At the moment, though, our washing machine dances out into the middle of the room whenever it has a slightly less than full load. I know part of this will be fixed with better leveling, but I'm pretty sure the washer is on its way out. I'm shopping the scratch and dent stores. Until then, the room will remain the tragic mutant of this house. No love.

Sisyphus and the Bunny: A Revelation

I spent a large portion of the weekend cleaning, as I always do, but my area of special focus this week was the floors. And that's where I had my epiphany.

As I swept all the little dust bunnies (read: "clumps of cat hair covered in dust"), I knew, with a tiny hint of exasperation, that the little kitty hair tumbleweeds would be there in the morning-- no! by evening, even! And it occurred to me that the great analogy of home ownership is Sisyphus and his rock. However, in my house it's the bunnies. We roll that stone all the way to the top, only to have it roll right back over us on its way back down.

In fact, there's not much in this house-- or in life, for that matter-- that's done once and finished. Everything begets other projects, problems and perturbations.

I suppose it makes me feel better that I am at least able to anticipate the repetition. Can you imagine how much more disappointing it would be if we were shocked every single time the rock rolled back downhill?