The Old Man and the Street

After work today, I put the fourth and final coat on the breakfast room. I don’t care what it looks like when it dries, it’s the last coat I’m putting on.

While waiting for M. to come over I went down into the basement and spent some time ripping nails out of the quarter-round shoe that I pulled out before having the floors redone. The plan is to pull all the nails, sand the back of the shoe, lightly sand the molding in each room, and tack the shoe back into place until we get around to stripping and refinishing the molding. That’s likely to take a few years.

So I gathered up my can of deep tint primer and my can of “Autumn Red” and toddled off to Home Depot to, hopefully, find out why three coats of paint plus a coat of primer still isn’t covering the walls.

I talk to “Richie” at Home Depot, and he shakes his head, saying,

“Awww, red is always a difficult color to paint… when you bought it last week, didn’t they tell you that it would take anywhere from two to SEVEN coats?”

“Hell no! If they had told me that, I would have bought a different f*cking color!”

Anyway, I manage to diffuse my rage (there’s never any point at yelling at someone who works at a Big Company, because it’s Not Their Fault in the first place), and he gives me another gallon of paint for a dollar. What a bargain! Good thing that my time is worth nothing. Ugh.

So I went home and put the third coat of paint on the kitchen. I’ll be putting a fourth coat on there and the breakfast room later. *sigh*

We put the second coat on the bathroom today and it looks great. 1 coat of primer, 2 coats of paint, and done.

The kitchen and breakfast room are another story: after putting a second coat of paint, I can still see the primer color and the yellow right through it–it’s almost like we’re painting with Kool-aid.

We took a break to drop D. off at his mom’s, came back and put a third coat on the breakfast room, and it still didn’t cover completely! I’m just about ready to head over to Home Depot and strangle the people in the paint department, but I suspect that I’ll do much better if I get a good night’s sleep and head over there tomorrow morning.

Off to an early start this morning, we gave the bathroom it’s first coat of paint: Behr “Neptune Blue”. It’s already looking very nice.

We primed the kitchen and breakfast room with a Ralph Lauren “Deep Tint Primer” that looks reddish-pink.

After letting that dry, we put the first coat of Behr “Autumn Maple” on the Breakfast Room and then the kitchen, but it doesn’t seem to be covering as well as the blue in the bathroom.

J. has a lot of tools, and he brought a few over to help me out a little.

We started off using his Sawzall to cut the uprights on 5 sets of shelves that I got for the basement. The uprights are 7’4″ tall, and while they would fit in the main part of the basement (which is 7′ to the bottoms of the rafters and 7’9″ to the ceiling), the storage room under the front porch is only about 6’8″ high, so I was aiming to cut them to about 6’5″.

With a hand hacksaw, it probably would have taken me a couple of hours. With the Sawzall, it took about 7 minutes. Yay Sawzall. Remind me to get one of those when my hands stop shaking from using this one.

Since I have to replace all the quarter-round that I ripped out, J. brought along his pneumatic nailer to show me just how easy it can be. I pulled the nails out of a piece of the quarter-round from the front foyer, sanded the junk off the back and bottom, and we headed upstairs to tack it into place with a few brads. Needless to say, using the nailer was a) easy, and b) a helluvalot of fun. Only downside: the nailer and tank cost $300 bucks. Remind me to win the lottery some day.

The plan for this weekend is to prime and paint the kitchen, breakfast room, and the half-bath off the breakfast room.

After work today, we got everything taped and tarped. I encountered a bit of a problem when I tried to take he bathroom door off the hinges–someone put the bottom hinge on upside down, so the only way to get the door off was to remove the hinge from the door frame.

*sigh*

D. came up for the weekend to help paint, and we primed the bathroom (including the ceiling, which was the same lemon meringue yellow as the rest of what we’re painting) before heading off for dinner.

We’re going to paint the kitchen, breakfast room, and powder room this weekend, so I went over to the house and gave the walls in these rooms a light sanding and a good spackling. M. picked up the paint this afternoon. She found a really deep red for the kitchen, called “Autumn Maple”, that provides a nice contrast to the very light maple cabinets and natural oak trim (which of course doesn’t match the rest of the house). The powder room is going to be a nice shade of blue–dark, but not too dark.

John and his father showed up right at 8:00AM this morning for another day of fun with the drum sander. The floors are still in a rough state, but everything’s been rough sanded now except for the edges and the steps. The smell is just amazing, and the entire house looks like it’s been sprinkled with a creamy-colored baby powder.

Here’s a look at the dining room floor in its sanded state. Check out how dark the old finish looks around the edges (and for inconsistency, compare that to the “before” picture of the master bedroom).

Tonight we have to narrow our stain choices down to 4 or so, and they’ll put samples on the floor for us to compare. No pressure or anything… I mean, after all, if we don’t like our choice, we’ll only have to live with it for the next 20 years or so.