Painting progress

Quittin time for today! We put in some eight good hours of work today. The craft room walls are finished and the trim has a first coat. We are simultaneously working on the small guest bathroom as well. Of course we had no plans to paint it when we started this but...yesterday I happened to walk by it and think that the Celestia Blue would look great in there as well and we already had that paint on the rollers so why do clean up twice? So we dismantled that room and got started. I am always amazed and dismayed at the amount of prep work involved in painting a room. Switch plates and light fixtures come down. Doors come off and in this case get stripped of the old hardware (hinges, door knobs) which has been slopped with paint from previous owners and now looks really crappy. (It's amazing how much nicer and new door knob and clean hinges can make a door look!) We took the mirror down which was one of those typical things with no frame and being held up by little plastic clips. UGLY! I said it was so ugly I didn't even want to put it back up. Hubby had a bright idea and ran and got a mirror we had laying around (that is what it's like around here - a weird construction zone!) and said how about this? It looks great - nice old world style frame in a pretty pewter color. So then of course we had to fill and sand the holes left by the old ugly mirror. Then we took out the toilet paper holder which was recess mounted into the wall. I said I had no intention of putting that ugly thing back either so now we had to drywall patch that hole. At that point I started thinking well hell - now that we are ripping this whole thing apart why not take out the tile (grey ceramic - not bad condition but GREY!) and then if you are going to replace that you really should go ahead and get a new sink and cabinet as well and finish the whole thing off. Fortunately - exhaustion intervened and we went to bed.

Today, after some research that proved it would cost a bit much right now to get a good looking sink and cabinet, I decided that we would let sanity (and the budget) prevail and just paint the old one. So the bathroom is ready to be tackled. It is prepped, taped and has a coat of primer on the trim. I don't know for sure if we will get any farther on it this weekend though because we have to put a second coat on the craft room trim and as soon as that is dry we have to shove the mountain of unruly crafting supplies of all descriptions to the side so we have room to empty out the closet and paint it. We are going to put shelves in the closet! Hooray! I can not wait to get that place organized. Having no shelves was a serious handicap in that room. All of my stuff ended up in heaps on the floor which encouraged all kinds of homeless stuff from the rest of the house to migrate to the craft room and join the heaps until the heaps became mountains!

When we are finished with the room there will be two large sets of shelves, a desk/table for sewing and a daybed ostensibly for guests but really to display my quilts and needlework pillows and to provide a place to hang out & think about what project I want to do next. :) Of course the shelves are currently up in the bedroom loaded up with books. I have some actual library cabinets coming to take their place. Joy! No more dusty books! No more dogs deciding to devour some Thackeray or an early edition of Poe. I have quite a few really nice editions (that have survived!) and I will finally be able to take care of them properly. My wonderful hubs got me the Easton Press leatherbound editions of all of Jane Austen's books for Christmas and American and UK first editions of all of Jasper Fforde's books for my birthday. What a guy! The downside is that we will have to dismantle the shelves and carry them down to the craft room and put them back together again. I am NOT looking forward to that at all - those things are heavy! Not to mention all of my knitting, needlework and quilting books which we will have to carry downstairs..........ok I'm getting discouraged again and you are probably very bored reading about my home improvement. Why don't you go read some nice blog where they actually talk about knitting? Drop by again sometime. I can't promise anything but I will TRY to have some knitting content again someday. :)