that brown house

First of all, the big exciting news: there is now some tile around the bathtub! I think it’s going to look great.

In our last episode, you may remember, we were preparing to do some more patching on the dining room wall that we had stripped all the wallpaper off of. I went over Thursday night and made a big mess of that, scooping on big blobs of spackle and then scraping almost all of it back off.

Saturday morning we were ready to give that another try. I went over to the hardware store and got a new jug of joint compound that did not make the quick-drying promises of the last stuff but fortunately was easier to work with. Steph fixed up the rough wall and patched up some seams in the painted-over wallpaper while I started masking the woodwork in the kitchen, and we both went around using more joint compound to fill in cracks where the woodwork didn’t quite meet up with the wall properly.

Then we were finally ready to do some painting in the kitchen. All the formerly-wallpapered walls and the wainscoting are now all nicely hidden behind primer and ready to repaint.

Sunday morning Steph had to get some stuff done at work so I went over to the house alone to sand down the patches in the dining room and clean up and mask the walls for painting.

The sanding all went fine, but things started going downhill with the cleanup, because the vacuum cleaner kept wanting to eat the plastic dropcloths. When the plastic dropcloths pulled off, it revealed that we shouldn’t have tried to fill the cracks after masking because we got masking tape trapped under the spackle, and digging the tape out opened the cracks back up. And then I discovered that there was no way to mask a clean line at the top of the wall because the previous paint and wallpaper slopped up onto the molding in a bunch of places, and not even by the same amount everywhere. We had done everything in the wrong order.

Steph came over to reassure me that it was all going to be OK, that we could refill the cracks that reopened, and that we could repaint the molding after we finished the walls to get a clean edge. She then discovered that more of the old wallpaper was pulling away above the fireplace, revealing cracks behind, and before long we had a big new area of wall stripped of some layers of wallpaper and needing to be patched up again.

Nevertheless the wall by the windows was still in a condition suitable for priming, so we got a layer of paint onto it and scraped down the wall over the fireplace to a point where we ought to be able to patch it back into shape.

Steph went back to work, and I made another quick trip to the hardware store to return the backup wall sconces we had bought for the bathoom before finding ones that we really wanted. And I think that’s about it for this weekend.