a day on your knees

That is how I would describe the act of scraping. Not long ago, we took what will first be our office and later be the girls' room (if we have girls---hoping!) and made it into the junk room. Not true junk. Just the stuff we use and can't quite place. Here's how it looked before we cleared things out, and this is key: we found/created "places" for the things we moved, rather than merely relocating junk to other junky places thus making our place junky.

And then, of course, there is the Case of the Travelling Doors. Said doors have mysteriously moved everywhere about the house but doorways. Here they are before they were recently captured and placed in their prisons, which give us new privacy!

We left those items we know will remain in the room and put all our scraping, sanding equipment below the desk for accessibility. 

The rest of the photos are not done well (the lighting was low), but you can see what the trim looked like pre-work:

First, I used a 60-ct. piece of sandpaper. Mom Hawk and I realized rather quickly that we needed this level of coarseness to get through years of lumped paint.

Scraping along existing lines:

The mess it leaves behind (ugh):

This next one expresses it all. It was getting dark outside, I'd been doing this for hours, and felt I was moving into a dark abyss of the-never-ending:

Then, the sun broke out after many days of overcast almost-winter weather!

Here's a bit of what the trim looked like after the primary sanding was completed (this photos are just exhilarating, eh?)

After coarse scraping, I went over every inch with a 150 ct. foam sandpaper, ensuring that the trim was smooth prior to priming:

As I write, our PlasterMan is upstairs cutting holes in our ceiling so as to best patch them. Therefore, we've not added work to the above list in a couple weeks. But after Christmas we hope to finish the trim in the final two bedrooms and begin painting them. This will leave us with only the bathroom.

Another celebratory housewarming... hmmmm?

icj,

~j

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drips that open doors

When we first received the "accepted offer" notice (about 3 hours after we put in the offer), we knew we wanted to take time with the house before putting too much change into it.  After all, the sellers kept it in great shape--we could tell they cared about their home.  So when we discussed what we would do first to make it "our" house, the most we were willing to go for was a quick and easy paint job in the main floor rooms.


Well, that changed quickly.  We learned that we didn't want to "slap" paint on the walls.  While our sellers took good care of the home, we could tell that previous owners were a little less conscientious.  On all the trim and most of the walls, not to mention the ceilings, we found decades and layers of thick paint.  Remember Jurassic Park and the amber?

Well, we found little snippets of time saved in a similar way--paint drips.  Too bad we can't use their contents to start a really great theme park.


So we had a choice to make.  We could continue the trend and just paint over the painted-over, or we could sand and strip and start anew.  We chose the latter.  Thus, every inch of trim was attended to, every window treatment was removed, and every door was unhinged. Here stands my lonely closet door newly stripped and sanded:

And here is a close-up, so you can see the decades of rainbow brite trickling through like a sunny time-machine:

What began with a few drips has made our little house quite the "open-concept."  Hawk and I run from room to room shutting lights off for privacy as we prepare for the day, ducking behind furniture so we don't frighten the neighbors...


So here was our big choice to make: Stick with what has worked for years (and hey, we didn't notice it when we did our first walk-through) or put in the manual labor and create a better now quality.  Choosing the latter has certainly made our lives more difficult, but we're really happy we chose to go for quality over ease.  We believe those small details make the home.  


{the devoted detail}: Could the same be said of our marriage?  Taking the time to attend to and work out the little things as they arise rather than choosing to brush over them to make them look good at a glance?  We received great advice from a dear friend along these lines.  She said, "Everything that comes up, no matter how small, every word--deal with it right away.  Talk it out.  Never smooth over it and expect it to go away.  It will just grow in size, and thus, grow between you.  And then, 10 years down the road, you'll have a monster to deal with."


These paint drips were becoming monsters, let me tell you!  Hawk and his mom spent over a dozen hours on just a few doors.  Imagine what we would have had to deal with with another decade of paint (ugh).


I'll leave you with the following image--a bright set of doors!  Lest we ever take them for granted!

photo credits:
amber photo sarka door photo

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