family home projects work in progress

More Painting, Plus Electrical

Work on the house to get ready to sell feels like it is speeding up. During the last blog post, I left off with the red kitchen ceiling being primed by Erik. It did, indeed, need 3 coats of primer to cover that very deep red. We chose a new yellow for the walls. It’s a bright yellow that reminds me of lemons. The original yellow we used for the walls looks almost peach in…

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family home projects work in progress

My Husband Is a Painting God

The dining room we tore apart to renovate finally looks like a room again. After finishing the mudding and taping of sheetrock, which I discussed in last week’s post, we moved right on to priming and painting the room. We used a Wagner paint sprayer to apply the primer to the ceiling and walls. And by “we,” I mean mostly my husband Erik. I read the detailed instructions to him while he monkeyed with the…

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family home projects work in progress

The Right Tool for the Job Makes All the Difference

From hanging the sheetrock, to taping and mudding it, we are making excellent progress on the dining room. And when I say “we,” I really mean Erik. Aside from helping hold up a couple of sheets of drywall so he could get the screws started and cutting a few pieces, I didn’t do much in the four days it took him to hang it all. When it comes to taping and mudding, I know better…

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family home projects work in progress

The Old & New Inside the Walls

Work continues on our dining room renovation project. Since my last post on the topic, we have taken out all the plaster and lath. In fact, that dirty job ended up being a bit bigger than we expected. Some of the lath along the south wall went behind the front wall of the closet. As Erik attempted to remove it, plaster inside the closet fell off the wall. We didn’t intend to redo the closet,…

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family home pragmatic historian projects work in progress

The Ceiling Plaster Is Down

Posting a little late today. That’s because I spent the entire day taking plaster off the ceiling in our dining room. Whew, what a dirty job! I did not take a “before” picture (just imagine an expanse of white plaster), but here are some “after” photos. While tearing plaster off the walls was messy, it wasn’t as messy as we expected. The ceiling was another thing altogether. The dirt and debris sifting down through the…

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