NYC in 10: Trim, Trim, Trim.

First, before the trim talk, last night I started working on the kitchen tile. Ugh.

It was a pretty straightforward job: peel off old tiles, lay down new tiles. Not too hard, right? No, not utill Nate decides to start doing things the right way. I already had a good part of the kitchen re-tiled but then, behind the fridge, I realized that the sheet vinyl underneath was coming up from the floor. "I should really peel that up first" I thought. Big mistake. I spent the next two hours redoing the work I had already done. Peel off the new tile, chip away at old sheet vinyl, replace tile. After about a third of the kitchen the sheet vinyl stopped coming off, so I had to use my scraper to kind of taper the edge off to the wood floor. Then I could transition from vinyl tile over wood to vinyl tile over sheet vinyl. Here's a photo of that transition.

By the way, check out how amazing that sheet vinyl was. I want to meet the person who decided that was the best option for their kitchen. Seriously.
Here's a photo of the part of the floor that is done. The rest has to wait until the subfloor dries out from the leaky shower. Yeah, that's on my to-do list too. Just imagine white cabinets and window trim. The hardware we picked up today was the wrong size, so we'll have to exchange that. Yeah, I forgot to measure it and just took a guess. Of course I was wrong.But, back to the main topic of the post: TRIM!!!

Yesterday Mom and Dad came up and helped me get started with the trim replacement. After a trip to the Depot to get lumber, Dad and I started cutting trim while Mom primed the boards. We replaced all of the missing baseboards and quarter-round trim on the first floor. Photos:

Today they came up again with my brother and sisters. After another trip to the Depot, we started with the crown moulding. After about a hundred bad cuts, we finally got it up. We've got some filling to do at the corners and seams, but it's good enough. Yeah, I don't think we have a future as a father & son crown moulding company. Next came the cap moulding over the window and door trim. Check it out!

After we finished, we moved upstairs and Mom primed all of the wood. We need a little paint yet, but we're on the home stretch.

Upstairs, Dad and I hung the trim around the North West bedroom door (inside and outside trim) Next we hung up the door to the linen closet. It went up really easily, much to our surprise. It only took, like, 20 minuets to hang an 80 year old door in a new frame in an 80 year old house. Everything just lined up level on the first try. After we put the trim up around that door, the family took off for home. It feels so good to have this much progress happen in two days. I'm feeling a little less stressed out. Next step? Finishing the baseboards and quarter round trim on the second floor, priming, then a couple coats of paint. Then big old before and after pictures. I love nothing more than some good before and afters!

Dining Room Woodwork = Primed.

I stayed up and primed the woodwork. Photos:
Enjoy.

Dining Room: Trim Prep 2

Tonight I sanded down the woodwork in the dining room to get it ready to be primed. I filled the nail holes (which hadn't been filled for 23 years) with joint compound. Yeah, wood putty would have been better, but the Depot is really far away and I'm just painting the wood anyways. Go ahead and call me lazy... I am.
I'm leaving tomorrow at noon for a executive retreat for NDSU's Inter-fraternity Council where we'll be trying to figure out how to make that organization better. I was just appointed to the vice president position and I know we're going to need to put a lot of work in this weekend to get a head start on the semester.

The retreat is in a cabin in the woods. Yeah, that'd be one of my regular hangouts. NOT! Although I'm really not that enthused about hanging out in the wilderness for a weekend, I am excited to get out of Fargo for a couple days.

Classes start Tuesday. I'm ready to be done with this holiday break. Overall, it's fallen pretty short of my hopes, so It'll be good to get back into my regular routine.

Downer of a post, huh? At least the dining room will be done-ish soon.

Dining Room: Trim Prep

Happy 2008! First post of the new year; excited?? ...not really that cool of a post. sorry.

Tonight I started the prep work for painting the trim in the dining room. The main boards of the trim are going to be saved, but the moulding that rides along the edge of those boards is too small and needs to be removed. You know I like breaking things, so I had fun with that. Here's a photo of the old trim, and a photo that shows the size of the moulding that should be wrapping around the large boards.
Old trim piece left, new -correctly sized- trim piece right:
All I'll need to do now is give the wood a light sanding and I can get a coat of primer on there. Then paint. I'll put on the new trim pieces later, once the larger boards are all done. I just don't think I'll have time to get to bustin' out the miter saw during break. The same goes for the crown moulding. It's so frustrating that I'm not getting done what I wanted to get done.

I'll be gone all weekend for leadership retreats for two different student organizations, so anything that's getting done over break is getting done before Friday. aka: dining room is it. No living room, no stairwell.

Paint! The Dining Room has Paint!

There's nothing more satisfying than rolling some clean, new paint onto an old wall.

I started with the ceiling, like you're supposed to, rolling on the white paint with my roller attached to a broom handle. It was going really well until the roller pad started to shift off of the roller. I thought I'd push the pad against the ceiling to get it back onto the roller. *SNAP* Broke the broom handle. Roller hits the floor. Good stuff huh? Clean up on aisle 4!
After I finished painting the ceiling (and floor!) I started on the walls. I picked out this khaki/tan color for the living/dining areas and even though I was concerned it would be too dark, I'm actually really happy with it.

Progress pic:
Finished product (just imagine crisp white trim, chair and crown moulding):
If you've read previous posts, you'll know my problem with the trim. It was all replaced in this room back when it was converted to a duplex. The wood is inferior in quality and I wanted to make sure it wouldn't look too bad if it was painted. I painted a little swatch with ceiling paint to see how the wall color would look with white trim.
I'll have to take a sander to the trim's varnish first to make a surface the paint will adhere to. I like the wood with the khaki, but it'll be more cost effective to just paint it rather than replace with good quality wood. The living room retains its original fir woodwork, so I'll be able to have the nice wood with the khaki there. Compromise, right?

There are a couple areas on the walls that need another coat of paint, but after that I'll be able to attack the trim and finish up. I'm thinking that room will become the living room while I redo the real living room next.

I'm almost at the end of winter break and I'm nowhere near as far as I had hoped to be. I guess that's just an old house for you. It eats your life!

Painting Prep: Living & Dining Rooms

Well, I finally got around to starting the work that needs to be done in the dining room.

I, like most American 22 year old male college students, spent my Saturday night scraping loose paint off of a dining room ceiling. Oh, what an adventurous life I lead!
Look at that mess!
Check out how big that pile of paint chips is! (note feet for scale) (fyi, size 10) I also finished scraping off the residual joint compound from the walls and ceilings where I removed the extra walls. Here's a photo of the living room ceiling, ripe for sanding. The job got a lot easier once I started spraying water on the walls and ceilings before I started scraping. The joint compound became much softer and easier to scrape off.

Step 1: Spray water onto unwanted joint compound.Step 2: Scrape your heart out.Step 3: Repeat.

Woah, tangent! OK, back to the dining room. Today, after one of those five hour Sunday afternoon naps, I made a trip to 'the Depot' for some more joint compound. I patched up the holes in the ceiling left from the paint that chipped away. Now all I need to do is sand, re-mud where necessary, sand, texture, prime, then paint. Is this considered the home stretch yet? I filled all of the nail holes in the walls, but I still need to repair two big cracks. I just want to paint already! I've had the dang paint for months, gah!

I'm kind of up in the air about what to do with the trim in the dining room. The trim was all replaced (poorly) sometime before I got here. The wood is stained, but it is of an inferior quality. You can see stain on the oak flooring in all of the dining room pictures from when the p.o. stained the inferior wood. Yet another reason to thank the p.o.! The windows were painted at some point, but I can tell the wood was originally stained like the living room. So what do I do? Should I (a.) paint the inferior wood white like the rest of the house, or, (b.) use the inferior wood elsewhere in the house and replace it with better wood stained to match the living room. This option would require me to strip the windows.

Either way, the picture rail needs to be replaced. I've already removed it all from the walls. This piece shows the original stain color. There were a couple chunks of it missing from where walls went in during the duplex-ing process. I'm planning on using the old stuff I removed somewhere else in the house, but I'm not sure that I want to use the same picture rail back in the dining room. What if I was to switch it out for some crown molding? Would that be a bad idea? I just think that the crown molding might look more finished than the picture rail. The picture rail was about a quarter inch down from the ceiling which I didn't think looked very good. That little quarter inch gap lead my roommate to say that I should 'replace that crappy crown molding'. If I was to put the picture rail back up I think I'd pull it down a half inch so you can tell it isn't just 'crappy crown'.

Decisions, decisions. Let me know, loyal reader, if you have any opinions. I'll have plenty of time to think about it all while I'm mindlessly sanding ceilings and walls. Good times.