Sunday, January 2, 2011

Getting Going Again

Now that the holidays are over, I am determined to get going again on the many projects around the house.  I know I do have to balance time spent on them with time required to work on my animal sculptures.  I'm pleased that I already have two orders to do, a moose and a polar bear.  A  good start for 2011.

I finished the painting in the front hall after we got back from San Diego.  We have decided to wait to replace the woodwork until all of the painting is finished in all of the rooms that might also want to have new baseboards.  We will remove them, or not as we go.

You may wonder why we want to replace the woodwork. Simple, it is ugly and it is cheap!  When this house was built the trend was to use rough wood with a dark stain for trim.  Over the years we have replace it in the family room, the upper hall and kitchen with stained oak.  This house is already a hodgepodge of woods, so it probably won't matter if we don't replace all of it, but I think we would like to.

My next two areas to paint are this half wall on the stairs from the entry hall to the living room:






And one of the walls of the staircase going down to the studio and family room.

The other wall of this staircase is quite tall and will require using the extension ladder.

I'm going to skip it for now.













I spent a couple of hours on Saturday wrapping the railing in newspaper and poster board.  The slick advertisement sections are better than the newsprint pages. 





Today I painted the first coat behind the rail, but ran out of paint. I think I am going to change brands of paint.  I used a Gliddon outside and it was great.  I bought a BAER Premium for indoors and it seems very thin and needs two coats to look good. 

 I didn't mind doing two coats outside, but I think one coat should be enough for an off white, over white inside.  Since I only bought one gallon, and finished the hall with it,  I'm going to look at the Gliddon colors tomorrow. They can always mix a match to the Baer color card, and I think the Gliddon covers much better. There are a lot of walls and I hate to do it all twice.


I have also restarted jotting down several "to do" things in my book of lists each evening.  I found that very helpful last summer when I was working on the outside.

I have skipped walking for a few days, too busy, but I will get back to it tomorrow, or the next day!



9 comments:

  1. way to get back at it!!..good for you!!

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  2. You have an amazing amount of energy. Great idea with the paint. Painting one coat should be enough work!

    Congratulations on the sculpture orders!

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  3. all that taping, yikes! I try to avoid that at all cost; fortunately I have a pretty steady hand!

    since I started following your blog I haven't seen any photo's of your animal creations ~ I'd be interested to see them! how do you go about getting your orders? my d-i-l and I have tried various ways of selling crafts, but she has 3 babies now and we are RVing, so that's kind of come to an end.

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  4. Merikay, I am just exhausted after reading your post today!! I think you have a great work ethic. If it was me, I'd play sick and make Jonathan do all the work ;) JUST KIDDING!

    Nellie
    http://midlifecruiser.blogspot.com

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  5. Merikay, you are really making some great progress! :) Great discipline in keeping at it - I know how hard it is to keep working on the projects!!

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  6. Must have been painting weekend ;) I'm with the others, I hate the prep work, so I don't usually mask anything, but try to use a steady hand to avoid the mess. It *usually* works :)

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  7. Isn't it ironic how we spiff up our houses just before selling them? I remember doing the same thing exactly five years ago. It was worth it though, as the house sold in a month. :)

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  8. Nice looking job on the taping - that's the part of painting that I really dislike. That, and cleaning up. You are really motivated to get going so early in the new year - congrats!

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  9. I'm with you. It shouldn't take two coats of paint to cover white with white! The last interior paint we used was from Benjamin Moore. I covered a kind of dark texture (faux) paint with a light beige. ONE coat! All paint is not created equal and it's too hard to have to do it twice.

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