The End of the Office! (sort of)

 Since March I'd been working on the office. It became clear that working from home was going to be long-term, and I wanted a space to do it comfortably. Not one to do anything half measure, I started by moving my bedroom upstairs into one of the finished rooms, and starting to strip this one.
Stripping trim when it's old, crusty, chipping, 20+ coats of painted trim, is tedious, tiresome, and dirty. There's really no way around it. I tried all different methods - heat, infrared, and chemical. While I wanted to love the Speedheater (and it did do a fine job where I could reach easily) it just send paint chips everywhere when the paint cooled and got brittle. The unit, (built in truth to strip siding, which I'm sure it's very efficient at) was heavy and cumbersome to manipulate for me.

I eventually wound up using a method from the company Dumond called "PeelAway1". It's a two part stripper. You smoosh a liberal layer of paste onto the surface you want to strip, and then put the special paper over the top  and let it cook from anywhere from a couple of hours to overnight. Then you peel away the paper and the paste and a good bit of the paint comes with it if you persuade it with a metal putty knife. This system is their strongest commercially available - good for up to 30 coats. I usually had to do two coats with a little scraping and then a gentle sanding to even out the wood.

It took some getting used to, but at least there weren't paint chips flying everywhere. I had to be very liberal with the paste (.25" thick).  I couldn't do it in the blazing summer heat because not only would the sweat pour out of the rubber gloves and down my arms, the paste would start to run off the walls, stripping and discoloring everything in it's path.

I had tried to deal with it all summer, and just didn't get far. I finally took the days off before Thanksgiving, and that combined with this past weekend finally got it done except for some punch list things! But I have moved in my folding table and can work from here now. 

It began - working from home, pandemic-style, from the couch, with the cat firmly attached to my lap.

Before. That pealing paint was like that.
I cleared out the bedroom things and started. Infrared Speedheater heating in the foreground.
(It was nice to work with in the winter.)

Layers. It would chip, they would paint over it.
I found dark green, denim blue, yellow, mustard, off white and whites. Many layers.
The dark green and blue gave me the ideas for the color scheme it wound up being.

Window sill. When they slapped in the replacement windows, they just ripped therm out, and caulked the new ones into place.

Stripping.

Wainscotting over here is just grooved.

It also had things written on it under the paint. I never made it out.

My friend Misty painting during the Pandemic.
She made a print of her Plague Mouse for me.

Still at it with the Speedheater. Here I'd found where they'd filled in the gap between the top profiled trim and the bottom board trim with caulk. This was around April.

You can see where they'd just unloaded tubes of caulk in there.
I eventually filled the gap with backer rod and caulked just the edge.

You guessed it. Another gap due to caulk.

We were still working in here at that point.
I say "we" intentionally.
She loves a good Teams meeting.

Yup, done with the Speedheater. Got a sample pack to see what would work.
PeelAway1 was the clear winner.

This was around about July.

Hey, at least the windows were done.

Started throwing spackle on the walls too.
We all know how much I love spackle.

A short lesson in raking light and spackle:
Take a light source and go into the room you are dealing with in the dark. Place the light source (flashlight, cell phone) again the work surface so it rakes across. Note imperfections. In this case, a protruding drywall screw head.

Dimpled screw heads can mean iffy drywall. Here I've given it a friend for good luck.
Then you just spackle over the whole ball game.

You can use raking light to find other imperfections too, like tape lines and dings.

Here's PeelAway1 in action.

More spackle, more PeelAway.

I finally wised up and taped the plastic around the edge of the room, so that when the spent stripper inevitably slopped to the floor, I could just roll it up and toss it. It also stopped the stuff from creeping on to the wood floor.

All stripped, washed, and sanded! I didn't mess with the area around the outlet. I didn't want to provoke electricity in this project.

Drop cloths for paint!

Primer view A.

Primer view B

Ceiling and wall paint. Ceiling is Benjamin Moore "Muresco", the best dang ceiling paint ever, as far as I'm concerned. The walls are Benjamin Moore's Regal "Classic Gray" in a pearl finish.

AN IDEA! Because of course I have ideas in the middle of just wanting to get the darn project done.
Ian had made me some lovely wooden shelves years ago. Let's paint them to match, and get them a bead board back!

It's a box, right?
We're helping.

I chickened out.
I had intended to paint the trim in here "Van Dusen Blue", the same color as the master bedroom walls upstairs. But I talked myself out of it, thinking that much dark blue would be too much in this small room. I went with a lighter tone "Buxton Blue".
This isn't exactly the look I was going for - a little too Country Kitsch for me, but I'm in too deep ($) now.

Trim Paint view A. You can't tell the walls are gray unless you really look. In doing a little more research on this color, it's often used in situations where people want white walls that won't reflect surrounding colors.

View A - all cleaned up!

View B - Done!

 

I moved in my little folding table, all my computer crap, and my big rolling chair to discover that the floor is slightly pitched and now I spend much of my day trying not to roll away from my "desk". Good times. It's really nice to have a room to leave when work is done, (and now my living room looks huge!)

There's still punch list things to do for this space -
• Put a proper port in the floor where I had to drill a hole for the ethernet cable.
• refinish both doors
• Put up curtains and hardware
• Replace floor grates with something less rusty
• refinish the floor (someday. not for a while.)
• Get a real desk with a file folder drawer
• Get a floor lamp
• Hang some art

Next project - The hallway between the office and the living room.

And the water goes down the drain!

See, that part? The part about the water leaving? It has sort of been an issue for me. The tub always drained slow, but that was in part because it was pitched improperly. I could live with it, mostly. Lately it had become a real issue - I snaked it and sent gallons of boiling water and Draino down the trap, but it just refused to do more than a slow trickle of a drain.
Back when I added a washing machine to the mix in early June, everything that had been in delicate balance went right out the window. The system wasn't designed for it - the venting situation was just all wrong, and for most of the summer I wound up running a drain line out the back door so the washing machine could drain onto my parched lawn.
This wasn't going to work into the months where things freeze, (and when I don't want the back door cracked open.) I called in the pros to deal with it.
Once again, I forgot to pause and take a good before picture before I started tearrng things apart.
Demo really is my favorite part. That, and the final results.

This wall here where the vanity backs up shares the wall in the mudroom that contains all the mechanicals that supports both rooms (plumbing and electrical). There's a big mucking beam right under this wall.

OMG, SO GROSS. CLEAN IT! CLEAN IT NOOOOW!

Ok, that's better. What we're looking at there, from left to right -
1) the outside water feed with shut off.
2) Combo sink and washing machine drain with water risers over old weird 1" tile-look laminate tiles.
I'm guessing this is the 4th or 5th sink situation in this bathroom's life. The last one certainly wasn't original.
3) toilet water feed/toilet

At the end of day 1 - the cast iron is down and detached, all kinds of new drain lines are up.
As you can see, there's only about 40" of working room in this area. Felt sort of bad for the guy stuffed in the hole all day, but he was paid well for it.

The only cast iron left is the toilet (top center) and the trunk it all feeds into.

New tub drain!

The end result of Day 1 - separate drain lines for the sink and the washing machine.

After a comedy of errors, I got a vanity home that would work.
It was very heavy. The carpet made sliding it over the cardboard easier.

My friend Jessie came over and we managed to get it in the house without anyone getting hurt.
Then I took a nice socially distanced walk in the woods with his family.

The plumbers came back a week later and hooked the whole thing back up!
I'm so very happy to be able to brush my teeth in the bathroom again!
Someday soon I'm going to paint that upper tongue and groove either white or a very light grey.
That would get rid of one more shade of green in the bathroom.

Next up for the bathroom - getting a quote to deal with the tub area.
Exciting times, I tell you what.

Into the Fall

 Here we are, at the end of October, and I have a bunch of windows open. It's a beautiful day outside. Last weekend, I did a bunch of exterior work to start winterizing, and that included removing most of the screens. I had a suspicion that this might happen though, so I left a few strategically placed screens alone. 

This time of year, it's not so much to keep the bugs out (though the stink bugs and ladybugs have been out in full force) it's just to keep the cat in.

I have no idea why, but she's started drinking from her fountain like this.

I've been doing a bunch of little things.

Replaced the mirror in the bathroom.
Replaced that towel ring too, now that I think about it, but that must have been later.

Replaced the old almond colored broken outlet with a new white one.

Made an absolute mess of my parent's wall trying to hang a new phone.
I'm going to attempt to fix it this weekend with the right parts.

Replaced the old Victorian slide catch with a new round turn buckle latch that will more closely match some from the original hardware. (But it's still obviously new).

All the paint is done, now I'm just waiting on the new rail to finish this stairwell.

The blue is a little more "beach cottage" than I would prefer, but it is relentlessly cheerful.

Oh, but right! The air vent hole thing. I made a fancy cover for that!

This fancy cover thing. But the hole is way over there, in the stair well. My arms are not 8' long.
I'm not sure how this is going to get applied.
With screws, sure, but how to get over there is a mystery still.

Washed out the garbage bins and the vacuum parts.

Took off the screens and scrubbed them before storing them in the shed for the winter.

Started painting the shed windows. They had never been done, and were covered in mildew.
Sanded them down, hit them with a coat of oil based primer and a top coat of interior/exterior floor paint (that I used for the indoor stairs). I figure in this case, white paint is white paint.

Painted windows, ready for action.

 

You can't really tell, but painted windows in action.