Put on some paints

Woo-hoo! We actually did something productive with the house this weekend! You know all those "small" jobs I keep talking about? Well we finally decided to tackle a few of them. It turns out that painting with flat paint in anything less than full, blinding, noon-time-on-a-sunny-day type light means you can't see whether the paint has fully gotten into the texture. Here's a hint: it hasn't. So all the painting I did around the family room ceiling had to be gone over again. Still, it wasn't too bad, and when I was done and pulled off the tape, everything looked really good. here are some pics for reference:

The project sat here (paint on the wall to about 3" from the ceiling) for weeks. maybe months. Probably months.

Now, we have actual paint on the walls all the way up to the ceiling. Woot! It looks a lot better. I wouldn't have thought that such a relatively small amount of unpainted wall would have such a big impact on how the room looks, but it really does.

Just in case you think I'm cheating and only painted one corner of the room and then took a picture of that and told you the whole thing is done, this is a picture of the back of the room. See? Totally not cheating. I did actual, real work this weekend.

The part where I only painted one corner of the room starts here:

I actually got up on the big ladder with a can and brush and painted the corner. My wife was holding the ladder for me and made terrified noises every time I moved, so we decided it would be better to let my dad hold the ladder for me at a later date. Still, I'm glad we got one corner done. Again, it has a much larger overall effect than you'd think it would. I didn't tape along the ceiling and I was making a bit of a mess. I'm debating whether to worry about it. Going up there and just painting has taken me months to get around to, going up and taping and then going up again to paint seems extra unlikely. We'll see. I may just paint and try to keep it as clean as I can and see how I feel about it afterward. Then, if necessary, I can get back up there and touch up the ceiling color with a small brush. I think I'm going to need to do that anyway to cover up the mistakes the previous owners made with their "Red Red Wine" paint and those that we made with our neutral.

Also, we primed the kitchen. That and the powder room are the only parts of the finished house (not including the basement) that hadn't been at least primed. We're going to prime the powder room tonight and paint the kitchen.

First, we had to finish the caulk bead around the sliding glass door.

Then we painted the edge of the tape for the family room with neutral, then primer to seal the edge and give us a nice, clean division.

Ugly kitchen color is going...

Going...

Gone! Well not really, but mostly. We still have to move the fridge out and prime behind it, but that's it. Everything else has been primed.

Look at this lovely wife. She's tiny enough to stand up on the counter and paint without having to crouch over. Super cute.

originally we were thinking of using the "Misty Surf" from the upstairs hall bath for the kitchen as well, but it just doesn't look right down there. Too gray and too green. The blue on the right is actually the Blue Cornflower from the colonial room upstairs and we like it a lot more. It looks good with black appliances, white woodwork, and the whole house neutral.

It even looks good with the oak cabinetry. Once we get the whole room painted, I may change my mind about the color of the cabinets.

So there you have it. An actual, real blog post about actual, real work we did. I'm really excited about it, and we're motivated enough to keep going for a while. I think having the kitchen and powder rooms painted will really help the main floor feel more finished, too. At that point it's really just larger projects like floors and countertops and the like. And since we have the plumber coming, we may soon be able to start working on those, too. I'll keep you posted, as always. Thanks for reading!