We're Getting Closer All the Time...

It’s been awhile since we’ve posted & believe or not, we’ve been working on the house a bit!

We are “close” to finishing the stairway project, but I feel like I’ve been saying that for a long time. After Nick finished the last of the drywall sanding we vacuumed the walls and then primed the walls. While the primer was drying we painted the ceiling and the other walls white so they wouldn’t look awful next to the new paint. We didn’t realize how badly we needed to paint until the new primer was next to the old paint. By 9:00 p.m. Sunday night we had finished the first coat of paint for the walls. I was a bit nervous that the color was going to be too dark, but we both love the result! The brown color “Pepper Spice” (I asked Nick if that was the name of one of the Spice Girls: he said we would have to repaint if it was!) brings out the warm colors of the wood on the staircase.

I’d feel like we were almost done, but we have 6 pieces of trim that need one last sanding before they can be installed and painted. So it looks like it may be another weekend before we can say that we are “finished” with this project.

We had posted earlier about using the “Gripper” to prepare the walls for the topcoat. As Nick was painting the first wall we got a couple of blisters and then a small section of the topcoat came off and left a big gap/hole in the paint. Needless to say our hearts starting racing and we thought about the worst case scenario: if this happened on all the walls, we would still have a ton of work to do! So I guess the “Gripper” didn’t work perfectly. Nick said he also found out that it would have been better to use a topping compound that has gypsum in it instead of the plain topping compound that we used, which is pretty soft. We didn’t encounter that many more blisters, so hopefully it will all be okay and the paint won’t start coming off in big chunks! Here’s a picture of Nick doing the last tricky part of “cutting in” last night at 9:00 p.m.

We’ll be sure to post our final photos next weekend!