Things keep moving…
Week 23, Day 158.
Greetings. Tinkerbelle, Anne, and I continue to live through the renovation that feels like it just won’t end. But as the subject line says, things keep moving.
This week has been all about paint. And more finishing work to enable paint application.
It turns out that drywall work is tough. I have experienced this firsthand. You apply drywall compound (aka “mud”) to someplace and smooth it out as best you can. Then you wait for it to dry, and you sand it smooth. It looks great.
The next step is to apply a coat of drywall sealer or primer. And when you do that, suddenly your patch looks awful. Many kinds of flaws can become obvious only once paint is applied: scratches, bubbles (or fish eyes), dents and dings, etc. The problem is that the drywall dust produced with sanding can hide all those issues. A coat of sealer or primer removes or compresses the dust, and then every last problem becomes obvious.
The next step becomes patching everything that showed up with the paint and then sealing the patches. And as you might imagine, it’s possible to repeat that process again and again if you’re not good at it.
And that is what has been going on this week. On Monday everything was masked off to allow the paint sprayer to work easily and without any problems. Then the rest of the week has been patching, resanding, resealing, and topcoating everything possible, with a particular focus on the kitchen, laundry room, and bathroom.
Why those rooms? Because all our cabinets get installed next week, and the paint in those places needs to be done before that can happen. In truth there is a reasonable chance that everything will be fully painted today, but I have learned not to count on things until they actually happen.
Tuesday saw the cabinet guy deliver the very first cabinet, which we put into our garage because it was out of the way. Then, of course, about two hours later, the radiators from Belgium arrived, and this happened:
That’s all the new radiators (there are nine of them) stacked on and around a kitchen corner base cabinet. And the garage is now pretty much unusable for anything else.
On Thursday, most of the cabinets were delivered:
They are covered in plastic to avoid having them hit with paint spray.
As expected, the bathroom is also getting painted, so most of the stuff that was piled up in there is out of the way now, allowing for this photo:
I suspect this weekend I will be cleaning (vacuuming dust, mostly) and moving the radiators, trying to make things easier on Monday when cabinet installation starts.
I think that’s all the news on the house.
The monthly community email went out yesterday, so that is off my plate. At least until the next one ramps up in the middle of May.
Tink goes to the vet this afternoon for yet another round of bloodwork. She seems fine on that front, but her back left leg has been giving her problems for the last week. It doesn’t seem to be fully under control. We suspect it’s old nerve damage from the cryptococcus infection all those years ago, but we’ll have the vet take a look. The ramp is getting harder for her to manage, and all I can do is hope we can move back downstairs before it becomes impossible. She really wants to be a downstairs dog.
May all your drywall be smooth!