Day 24: House of the Finish Line

Well, that's it. We're not done with everything we thought we'd get accomplished, but the movers are showing up tomorrow morning. We still need to:

1. Put the last coat of paint on the baseboards in the foyer.


2. Put another coat on three interior doors.


3. Paint the living room windowsill (we completely forgot it was there.


4. Paint a second coat and 'drag' the top of the guest bathroom.


5. Put up shelves in the master closet.


6. Paint and tile the half-bath downstairs.


7. Tile the 'kitty room'.


8. Finish painting the fireplace

And that's just the stuff we'd thought we'd have time to do before moving in. There's also many more projects we'll take on in the future when we have money again. We have improved the house about 10,000%. Check out the special House of Blog Before-And-After

Kitchen
Before

After


Dining Room
Before

After


Living Room
Before

After


Guest Room
Before

After


Hobby Room
Before

After


Master Bedroom
Before

After


Basement
Before

After


The hardest thing this last week has been the overall feeling that for all our work we were getting nowhere. When we were painting the walls, there was definite visible progress to reassure us. This last week, we kept having to paint coat after coat after coat on the baseboards and doorframes and they always needed more paint. And we're still not through. AUGH!

Our first project this morning was to fix the lousy sheetrock and baseboard in the laundry room. Here's our jury-rigged solution:



Then we proceeded to take the remaining unpainted doors off their hinges so we could paint them outside without fear of getting anything on the floors. Lea did lots of clean-up while I was at work, then we started packing stuff up to bring over early. We know it's for real now that The Landlords Have Arrived

Toe

Zoe

Mercury

Tegan


A move never seems for real until the cats show up.

Well, that's all for the pre-move show. From here on I'll try to keep this blog up with weekly progress reports. And remember, if you want to show up and help, there's still plenty to do!!

Day 23: House of the Final Countdown

This is Jonathan.



Jonathan is young and full of energy. He also has not yet had his soul crushed by three weeks of continual home improvement. Jonathan and Mom did this:



If you remember from yesterday, we'd set down all those self-adhesive tiles in the middle of laundry room and left the edges for today. Jonathan and Mom did them for us, and did a much better job than we would have, actually paying attention and filling in every nook and cranny along the bottom of the wall. Thanks!!!

That just left mostly painting for us. We started off by painting the kitchen.



Then throughout the day Lea and I put paint on the baseboards and doorframes in the kitchen and the dining room.



When I die, Hell will be full of baseboards, handrails, and doorframes, and we will be made to paint them over and over and over and over.

Oh, and we've got about 34 hours before the movers show up. Tick tock.

Day 22: House of Flooring, Flooring, Flooring

This morning, completely out of the blue, three guys showed up and put new carpet in the bedrooms.



I had enough self-control to wait for them to leave before rolling around on it.



Oh. My. God. This carpet feels soooo good. Especially compared to the original crap that we're still stuck with in the hallway and living room. Take a look: the old stuff is on the left, the new stuff is on the right -->



To make the day even better, another guy came by and cleaned the carpet in the basement.



I did do a little actual work, such as putting a second coat on the baseboards in the living room and taping off the kitchen for its paint job. It was Mom's birthday today (Happy Birthday, Mom!) so we didn't work much this evening, but the roofing guy finally came out to work up an estimate on replacing the roof and adding a cover over our patio.

After we got back from dinner, we started putting down self-adhesive tile in the laundry room. We were frightened by how easy it was. The miracles of modern science!



We put down all the pieces we could without cutting any to fit. That will come tomorrow.

Just to prove that every silver lining has a cloud - one of the baseboards in the laundry room is messed up.



We were going to get another piece of baseboard to replace it with, but I think we might actually use some of the leftover chair rail from the hobby room. It doesn't match, but it'll be behind the washer and dryer anyway, so who cares?

Day 21: House of the Little Things

It's the little things that crush your soul. First, there's the coat of polyurethane on the chair rail that wasn't so bad, except for the fumes.



Then there's the window sills, that we probably should've gotten around to sooner. They're going to need another coat, but it'll have to wait until this weekend.



Then there's the dreaded Handrails of Horror. This was coat #2 on the handrails, and even as we started putting it on it became obvious that it was going to take a THIRD coat to get them completely white.



If I ever meet the person who painted this house before us, I will kill him. Slowly. With putty knives, spackle, blue tape, a funnel, and semi-gloss white paint. And I'll use three coats of it.

Day 20: House of The Whiteness

White ceilings.



White ceilings!!

The End Is Nigh

Day 19: House of The Sickness

Here's a lesson to be learned: when you're stressed out and have pushed your body almost to the point of human endurance (or at least the point of Lazy Fat American endurance), you've been skipping meals and are short on sleep, you've been rained on at least once while cleaning buckets and brushes and rollers, your immune system is probably out to lunch, and you decide late at night that you need to reward yourself, do not do so with extra-spicy chicken from Hooters. Furthermore, do not follow it down with a big slab of chocolate cake.

Needless to say, I called in sick to work this morning. Which is bad, since our deadline is looming and I was pretty much dead to the world. Lea was able to get a bit done this evening, such as cutting in some ceilings and painting part of the fireplace Chocolate Brown.



Mmmm.. Chocolate.

Tomorrow I pay for my sins by getting up at the butt-crack of dawn and painting ceilings until I absolutely have to get ready for work.

Oh, and the real lesson I've learned from all this? When you have a whole house to paint in three weeks, order the Hooters chicken first, hire some painters no matter the cost, and eat the chicken in your recliner while you watch the painters do all the work. That's the American way!

Day 18: House of Bright White Baseboards

Take that!!



and That!!!



AND THAT!!!!!



Hallway & bedroom baseboards and doorframes.. DONE! We've decided not to attempt the baseboards in the rooms with hardwood floors - we'll get someone who knows what they're doing to tackle those. All that leaves is the baseboards in the living room, which'll be a piece of cake.

Tonight also saw the return to the good old days of... blue tape!



Ahh, the memories. Tomorrow, barring illness or injury - the ceilings. Don't look if you're squeamish.

Day 17: House of Invisible Progress

Did a lot today, but nothing to take a picture of. We finished:

1st coat on the hallway baseboards & doorframes.

1st coat on the guest room b&d.

2nd coat on the hobby room b&d.

2nd coat on the master bedroom b&d.

Which means we're one coat of paint away from meeting our Friday deadline of having the three upstairs bedrooms completely finished so the carpet can be installed. Of course we also have to:

1. Paint the ceilings in the bedrooms (this should really be done before the carpet installation, since 'popcorn' ceilings drip a bit when you paint them).

2. Cut in the unpainted parts of the hallway, living room, and kitchen/dining room ceilings.

3. Paint baseboards in living room, foyer, kitchen, dining room, and laundry room.

4. Put down new flooring in laundry room.

That sounds like a week's work, hunh? In addition to having the carpet installed, we're having a guy come out to look at the roof and give us an estimate on replacing it (so we know how many years we have to wait to do it) and on framing out and extending the roof over the deck, so we can screen it in. We're also having someone come out and look at the A/C.

Speaking of which... We were late starting today, because we got to the house and found the garage floor once again full of water. It seems that when we finally managed to clean the gunk out of the drain pipes, we simply moved the gunk into the pump intake that sends the condensation down the tube that leads to the back yard. The pump had apparently run all night and not pumped a bit of water out, and was now overflowing. Fixing this involved pouring more bleach into the system, reaching into the pump and scraping out caked layers of algae and other crud (the water, when it finally came out, was brown) and clearing the intake by putting the end of the drain hose in my mouth so I could BLOW real hard, creating a clear enough passage for the pump to SUCK the water out and send it back through.

Lea's sentiment, which I agree with, is that it would be better if the a/c would just die so we could use our home warranty to get it replaced.

Mom came by today and gave us a hand. There was candlewax stuck to the mantle on the fireplace, so the plan was to have her iron it off. She discovered, though, that the top layer of ugly brown paint just peeled right off, and she spent the rest of the day scraping it off the mantle so we have a nice, off-white layer to paint over instead. Thanks, Mom!!

One last thing.. I found an unpainted stretch of one of the doorframes. The moulding in the house? It was originally white. Someone chose to paint them brown. They did it to us on purpose.

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Day 16: House of Time Dilation

One of the implications of Einstein's theory of relativity is that time and space are not constant, and can be compressed in certain special circumstances - such as when one is travelling close to the speed of light, or very near a deep gravity well (such as a black hole), or - we have now established - when painting baseboards.

It started last night, but we didn't consciously notice it. We started by doing some normal painting: in this case, the guest bathroom.



Then moved down to the basement to tackle the baseboards and door frames.



When we got through with that, it turned out that it was a lot later in the evening than it had seemed. Still, we pressed forward and took on the Handrails of Horror.



By the time we were through, it was almost midnight!! We thought 'Wow, that took a while to do,' but we still did not think to attribute the compression of time to relativistic effects. What was going on would, however, soon become clear.

Saturday morning somehow slipped by as we applied a second coat to the basement baseboards. We also did some regular painting, such as putting a second coat in the master bath and painting the pantry and priming the area above the stove where the microwave used to be.





To fight off the grinding monotony, today we powered up the world's clunkiest MP3 player.



Then there was no more avoiding it... we started the baseboards and doors on the main floor. No sooner had we begun, though, when the time dilation effects of working so close to baseboards became obvious. After painting for what seemed half an hour, it was almost 2:00 PM. Then, after doing what seemed like 15 minutes more work - with very little progress - it was 3:00!! The baseboards were fighting us, crushing time and space in an attempt to crush our spirits.

Time is not the only thing that was shortened. Relativistic effects also compress an object's size. For example, here is the carpet in the master bedroom after being warped by the space-twisting power of the baseboards:



Here are the baseboards' effects on our equipment. On the left of each picture is a normal-sized painting tool, and on the right are the ones used in proximity to the baseboards:







Even organic matter is affected. Here, you can see that my normal 6'0" has been shrunk by the power of the Baseboards of Despair to a mere 4'3".



Why go through all this? Why not just leave the baseboards as they are? Why not bow to their will? Why not just say 'F**K IT' and get on with our lives? Here's why - these pictures include an element we've painted white, and a bit of the original molding color.





And those whites aren't pure white yet - they still need a second (and in some spots a third) coat of paint.

Let me close tonight's entry by stating that if you are a homeowner, and you paint your baseboards and moulding some dark non-white color, then you are a bad, bad person.

Good night.

P.S. Lea wants to say something:


This morning bright and early I was having a pleasant conversation with my friend Emily, with whom I do not get to speak often. And during this conversation, what do I see but water coming in through a crack in the basement!!



As a geologist, I understand how and why this sort of thing happens. This does not, however, improve my mood about water seeping in through a crack in the basement of my house. I with now, more than ever, we could have teleported our nice, brand new house in Mobile to a flat 2 acre lot in Birmingham. It would have saved us a lot of time, money, and irritation.