Wainscoting - 2nd Coat

Karina finished the second coat of paint on the wainscoting this weekend. She really enjoyed it and is looking at becoming a professional wainscoting painter.

Sun room - glue removal

Here's sun room as it looked when we purchased the house.

The sun room was added onto the living room in the 1940s by the second owner and the previous owner didn't think this room had hard wood floors. I even pulled up a corner of the carpet and thought there was only sub-floor under the carpet, so it was a nice surprise when we found hard wood under the carpet and linoleum.

Here's the floor with the remaining linoleum glue.

Wallpaper steamer was used to soften the glue for scraping. This room went fast only about 2.5 hours.

The finished product.

This room will eventually be wall papered, but we will have to strip and paint the wood work and book case before that will happen.

These pipes are clean!

Our house is finally looking like more of a house and less of a construction zone. The electrician has rewired the upstairs, main floor, and the majority of the basement.

Since our house was already a diaster zone and the shower barely drained we decided to bite the bullet and get the upstairs plumbing replaced. Parts of the kitchen and dining room ceiling had to be opened up to expose the pipes and it took about 3 days of mess for the pipes to be replaced and about two weeks to fix the holes.

Here's the kitchen

Dining room

Old plugged cast iron drain.

New PVC drain

Wainscoting Painted

Two weekends ago Greg came here to visit us, so we put him to work. Karina, Greg, and Jeremy sanded and painted the wainscoting in the entryway and stairs.

Karina still has to put the final coat on but it already looks a lot better.








Sometime in the near future I will start to strip the paint off the banister, door, and window frames.

Painting - Entry and Stairs

We finally got the entryway, stairs, and upstairs hallway painted last weekend. This area took forever, last September we started removing the wallpaper in the entryway and for the last month I have been removing wallpaper and fixing the plaster.

The wainscoting will eventually be painted white and the paint striped from the windows and doors.

You can see our interior designer in a couple of the pictures.

Christmas '09

This 800' of Christmast lights says our neighbors will only have a chance at wining runner-up in next years Christmast lights display competetion.

More Wallpaper

As much fun as removing wallpaper is, removing painted wallpaper is even more thrilling. The stairwell and upstairs hallway all had painted wallpaper that had to be removed so that we could patch the plaster and paint...and get rid of the stupid looking wallpaper seams.

Here's the before.

Here's the paint scraped off exposing the wallpaper backing

Here's the backing scraped off exposing the plaster. The walls all have a faux texture finish.

The finished product....right now the 'after pictures' looks worse until the walls are painted.

Lesson learned: don't paint over wallpaper.