Sprayed and Neutered

Not really, but I have to admit I'm feeling a little outmatched by the bathroom wall. Here's how it all went down:

Looks like a scene from Dexter, doesn't it? After the issue with splatter last time, I wasn't risking anything.

It actually worked pretty well, too. I still haven't seen any stray splatter, so I think it was at least as much coverage as I needed.

Here's my first spray. Not too bad, really. The knocking down didn't work well, though. The pattern was a little too small and even. I should have taken off the tape and knocked down towards the outside to help mask the edges but I didn't want to tear everything down and have to put it back up again if it didn't work. This wasn't a good choice, since the plastic and all impeded my knife and may have contributed to the bad knockdown.

Another spray, another attempt. A bit better pattern here.

Knocked down, it doesn't look too bad. I still have the tape on there and that didn't help, but the spray pattern was much closer this time.

You can see a spot in the middle where I didn't knock down properly, but overall this isn't a bad effort. The hard lines around the edge are bad news, though.

Yeah, see that? Way too clean there, and way too tough to mask.

I tried softening the hard edge with a wet sponge and that was sort of okay, but ended up making the edge flat more than anything.

This is after painting. You can see the flat frame around the patch, so this obviously isn't going to cut it. There are some small areas of truly acceptable texture in here, though. Enough at least to give me hope that I can make this work. I'm going to have to sand/float this patch flat, then re-spray with a bit of a different taping technique. I'm going to hang my plastic first with a bit less bulk right near the patch so I can maneuver my knife more effectively, for one. I'm also going to tape onto the flat area at the edge instead of just outside it, and then use the knife to push the texture into that margin to hopefully blend the textures. Time will tell whether this will work.

Also, this:

We're taping again, this time to paint the woodwork. We've been needing to do this for some time, and it just felt right to get started. Like the front door, the smooth woodwork needs a little extra help to come out looking smooth. We'll be using a lot of foam brushes and thinned paint to get this looking good, but a nice coat of bright white on here will help make the whole place pop.

We're also painting the edge around the family room right now. This will be cool and should help this room look a lot more finished.

I also hauled up the wood flooring that we're using on the family room. We figured out that we can do the floor in here without disrupting any of our other plans, which then opens up a few other large projects for us, so that's very cool.

Here's some of the wood. See how pretty it is? That's going to look amazing in this room, and really warm the place up a lot, I think.

So there you have it, the products of a semi-productive weekend. Thanks for reading!