vacationing and the remodeler

Why is it I can't seem to escape paint? We just returned from our camping trip. We went to Idaho and made a day stop in Yellowstone. We spent a large part of the day driving, as one is wont to do in Yellowstone, being grumpily caught in several traffic jams caused by people in SUVs gawking at, say, a moose, on the side of the road.

You ain't never seen a bunch of fools until you've seen grown men climbing through underbrush at the side of the road to videotape a moose standing in mud.





Nevertheless, Yellowstone is not Disneyland, and even with the crowds, there is indeed a reason why it was our nation's first national park. Most of the park is inside a caldera of an old volcano, and the ground is unstable, shooting up steam and geysers, pooling boiling-hot water in springs all over the park. One can see waterfalls caused by lava flows and their damage to underlying rock, the earth stripped bare and cut apart into layers, and impossible lakes and plains and flowers in the middle of it all.

But back to remodeling. Nature has some pretty fantastic color combinations. Check 'em out. Blues and oranges, whodathunk it?

hell's kitchen

OK, compared to some other kitchens I've seen, it's not really hell's kitchen, but it has been a bummer because of the poor finish work that needed to be addressed before I painted the whole thing. It's come a long way (see last picture with the horrible apple wallpaper border), but there's still miles to go before I sleep.

I had been really dragging my heels. My mom came to visit and lit the proverbial fire under me. I'm amazed by her energy. She not only spent hours digging caulk out of the crack between the counter and the wall (which had clearly been applied with a rusty spoon), she TSPd the ceiling, mudded holes and messed-up parts of the walls, and recaulked the new(ish) kitchen sink, which the plumber had done with clear caulk over a dirty counter (UGH!).

You can see her powerful cleaning action in the picture of the sponge in motion. She can tackle soy sauce explosions and grease on the ceiling like it's no one's business.

The paint colors I'm using in the kitchen are -- as they are in the rest of the house -- Woolskein and Dover White, in Bath Paint (for scrubbitude) by Sherwin Williams.

We still need to work on painting the rest of the room, and doing something with the frustrating window sitch, like ripping the whole damn thing out. Behind that weird panel just above the sink is wooden ventilation slats (louvers? I have no idea how to spell that) which were covered oh-so-elegantly with a piece of plywood.

Isn't that just the prettiest sink caulking job in the whole world? If you remember, we replaced the utilitarian stainless steel sink with uber-heavy enameled cast iron one the plumber "found" for us, via a client who upgraded to who-knows-what because of her new granite counters.

THANKS, MOM!

mellow yellow

We're going to paint the horribly dull beige exterior of Raccoon Tree Acres buttery yellow, with unsalted butter trim. OK, those aren't the real color names (which are Jonquil and Morning Sun), but that's what I'm thinking. We've been very happy with the Sherman Williams line (with which we get a substantial discount thanks to a friend), so I tried to match the color to the warmest, friendliest house we found. I called the professional painters who did the house pictured with a white picket fence, and they were kind enough to give me the name of their paint (a custom blend with IGI), but unless a larger swath of the yellow I have tested in the first picture turns out too yellow, I'm going to go with SW.

Just for reference, the last picture is the ugly current color, in the ugliest part of my house next to the driveway, under the now chopped off branches of the ugliest birch tree in the world. With the birch, whose fall foliage is yellow, we also have a Douglas maple with dark yellow fall foliage and the Siberian elm, with yellow fall foliage, too. I think it will look spectacular in the autumn, a rich little yellow cottage glowing in the sun. It will also look nice in the spring, with the masses of yellow and white daffodils, and the red camellias and salmon quince flowers. And in the summer, if you put our house under your chin, it will tell you if you are in love.

Now who wants to come over and paint?

I'm starting to paint the kitchen nook this weekend. The kitchen needs quite a bit of work, since it's the one room the previous owners remodeled in their special way. I decided that to do the whole kitchen at once is just too overwhelming, so I'm doing it in small pieces.

The big problem is that the drywall on the ceiling of the nook is cracked down the seams and along the edges. Does this mean they didn't nail it properly? How do I locate the nails? And when I repair it with joint compound, should I use the paper tape or the mesh tape? I'd really appreciate some perspectives on this issue. Our (former) contractor just said to caulk the little cracks and "float" the larger ones without tape. We already know he takes many shortcuts, and we don't trust his opinion.

I tried to take some good enhanced photos so the cracks can be seen. In the second photo, you can see the sheetrock cracking all along the seams on top and in the middle where the sheetrock meets the edge of the nook.

And for reference, here is a shot of the kitchen before we moved in. Since the light is so nice in the back of the house, you can't really see the soy sauce explosion, the cracks and staining from a roof leak on the wall, the grease on the ceiling, or the various other problems. You can see, however, the kountry kute apple wallpaper border which was the very first thing to go bye-bye when we took possession of the house. I was, in fact, surreptitiously peeling it off even before we moved in. There are some indignities one shouldn't suffer. The curtains went to Goodwill. The hanging light is currently in our dining room until we can get one we like. It replaced a filthy, giant paper globe. *shudder*
From the cracks, I see that the sheetrock is two panels wide, and it is about 3/4" thick, on top of what I think must be plywood that is 2" thick.

Any help would be very much appreciated.

painting conundrum

We are painting our living room. We put it off for weeks, while our living room furniture languished in the back room. We had to have the floors redone, the chimney cleaned, the ceiling patched, the picture window sill stripped, the walls scrubbed of soot and grime, the peeling paint removed, the holes mudded, the grape juice stains bleached, the crayon removed, the dings patched, and several parts of the damaged plaster on the arches bolstered. We're finally done with the prep work and in the middle of painting.

We use Glidden ceiling paint. It's pink! It has a coloring agent in the white paint that allows you to see what you're painting so you don't miss spots. It dries white. We learned the hard way, however, that it's not the best choice for a small bathroom. When the surface gets wet, the pink re-activates, and you end up with temporary pink spots on the ceiling. I suppose this would change over time, but we decided not to chance it and repainted with a mildew-resistant semi-gloss.

Here's the conundrum. Our living room has a small fireplace that was painted white for some reason, and because the flue is located near the front of the fireplace (the chimney sweep sez this is a design flaw common to this neighborhood), it is marred with soot. The wall that holds the fireplace has (I assume added) wood paneling that we don't particularly like. It also has one strip of ceiling molding (to hide top of panels?), and the rest of the room has none. Worst of all, it has corner molding that only goes to about 2 inches from the ceiling molding. I'm assuming we need all the molding (or some replacement) for the paneling. How does one disguise this crappy job? Is it possible?

Also, what should be done about the soot problem? We citrus-stripped on part of the brick, and it's a nice red color brick underneath the paint. I'm not too excited about stripping the brick, having been really dissuaded by the goopy, icky job of just stripping the wood trim on one part of one window. But if we paint the brick again in white, and paint the mantel in white, it will soon be sooty. If we strip the mantel and stain it (it appears to be maple), it will look nicer, but maybe odd in a room that has all white-painted wood trim.

We're going to paint it in the trim color for now, but I think a stripping project is in our future. I have no ripping clue what to do about the molding, though.