Paintingpaintingpaintingpaintingpainting.

To prepare for moving in, we're painting the house first.  It occured to us that the house felt like it had no personality for some reason and it finally dawned on us that it was because all of the walls of the house were white.  Further investigation revealed that the walls were originally blue or pink upstairs, and bright red in the basement.  I can't imagine what the other rooms were.  Fortunately the white paint offered good coverage for our paint project.


Dori's parents, Grammy and Steve were kind enough to come by to help out with the initial painting on Thursday and Friday.  Steve's being in town was also so that he could drive Grammy home for her surprise (while she spent the last week and a half at Cliff and Doris', Steve and JD had ripped out the linoneum in her kitchen and replaced it with some nice ceramic tile).  She's going to have quite the surprise when she gets home!


In the last few days, I've discovered the following:


1) I hate painting ceilings;
2) I hate masking;
3) I especially hate painting stairways;
4) Paint is bloody expensive.


We did discover that our paint of choice is Valspar.  It's about $32 a gallon but we're getting a $5 rebate per can, which is great since I think we've bought 10 gallons of various colors so far.  As of writing, the front door is done, the formal room, main hallway, stairwell and guest room are done; the master bedroom is partially done (base color is complete but we still need to mask for the stripes), and the rest has yet to be started.  The basement will be left alone as the flat  white paint and flourescent light is a great combination for airbrushing.


We've also starting replacing the faux gold hardware throughout the house, such as the locks and the kitchen light.  The dining area chandelier is being replaced too, though we haven't installed that yet.  The old dining room, which will be converted into a library, will have that faux gold chandelier replaced with a Tiffany lamp, which would go great with the color we've picked and the built-in bookshelves that we've convinced Cliff to build for us.


So we've pretty much been at the house at one point or another ever since we took possession of the house, and four days since we really started working on it.  Today was the "lightest" of the work days, with most of the day spent at Lowe's picking up the last of the paint, combing Craigslist for a lawn mower, spending some chill time watching football with Jen and Kevin, and 2 hours getting the stairway done.  It's starting to feel like some progress is done as I'll be done with this color tomorrow, and I'll be able to start on the library Tuesday, and the den on Wednesday.


Alright, it's 1:15am, I'm exhausted, and I need to get some sleep.  Hopefully all of that stuff I typed made sense.


-Tom