More Prep Work

Before we could start the priming and painting there were a few more things we wanted to fix in the family room.  Because we are ultimately going to paint the paneling we decided to paint the riser of the step going into the front hallway.  The vent was glued to the wood and goes nowhere.  If fact, it was covered with insulation at the bottom of the basement step, so it was most definitely not active.

Andy removed the small piece of duct work so we were left with a giant hole.

Here it is with the new riser installed.

The second prepwork project was to replace the corner moulding around the door leading into the kitchen with casing to match the other doors in the room.

It wasn't as simple as standard casing because we had to cover the transition between the drywall and paneling.

Andy measured and cut out the area at the top of the step to accommodate the larger trim.

With the new trim in place we are finally ready to prime and paint!

A Dirty Job

To get the family room ready for painting (which includes the brick fireplace and mantel) we decided to ditch the old fireplace doors and heatilator system.  The fireplace has a bit of a backdraft on windy days so we want doors that are more airtight and we wanted to get rid of the electric insert that no longer worked to circulate heat from the fireplace.

Andy removed the doors and used the shop-vac to remove as much of the remaining ashes and debris as possible.

With the fireplace relatively clean he was able to pull out the old insert and grate.

I thought it looked so much better without the brass doors but now that everything is finally painted it's hard to imagine that it actually looked like this for over 2 years. (Kodak photobombs again!)

Brass-tastic

For Christmas this year my parents bought us a new front door to replace the original wooden door.  The door looked more like a back door/barn door than a front door and was not very well sealed.

We decided to have someone come and install the door for us since having a gaping hole in the front of the house is not something we wanted to risk if something went wrong or we didn't have the right tools/materials. 

We love how the new door looks and it isn't even painted yet.   We'll wait until warmer weather in the spring when we can have to door open to paint it.  

It's a fiberglass door from Therma-Tru.  Fiberglass seems to be the most widely available and recommended material over wood and steel and we are very pleased with our new door.

Andy decided to splurge and go with an oil-rubbed bronze knob and handle from Baldwin brass.

We love the new hardware too and now all of the knobs and fixtures in the foyer match!

Walking the Plank

Painting the upstairs and downstairs hallways was a relatively boring but necessary task.  I couldn't settle on a color since it's visible from just about every room in the house so we went with the white color we have been using on the ceilings and trim (Sherwin Williams Creamy). The walls were ugly and marked up from the installation of the new heat pump when we moved in and we wanted to get them painted before the new carpet is installed.  We painted all of the trim when we worked on the bedroom so we taped off all of the trim and started painting the walls and ceilings.

Stairwells are the hardest.  Andy setup this plank propped up on a ladder...

And started painting...

I refilled the rollers on the other side of the knee wall so he didn't have to walk back and forth on the plank.

 So, here it is...in all of its clean brightness.  A bit boring, but so much better than dinged and marked up walls.  Once we get carpet we'll put something fun on the walls.

And a sneak peak of the new doors.  A painful and tedious job for Andy, but totally worth it. 

Reclaiming the Wall

With the new doorbell installed we decided to remove the louvered door between the hall and the kitchen (since we have never closed it in the two years we've lived here) and expose another wall.

The hallway feels so much larger and more open with the door gone, but that meant that we had some repair work to do to the door frame before we painted.

There was a very rough transition between the years of paint and the raw wood where the trim for the door was attached and we also had to do some repair work on the sections of the frame that were routed out for the hinges.

Andy glued in these makeshift shims so that we could sand everything flat and re-paint.

The areas were covered and clamped to ensure that the positioning was correct.

With all of the paint removed and the holes filled and sanded it was starting to look much better.

It looks even better now that it is primed and ready for paint. 

You can't even see where the old hinges used to be.

Ding Dong the Witch is Dead

With the drywall patched in the downstairs hall Andy wanted to get the new doorbell installed before we painted.

 

The new button matches the hardware on the new front door (I'll post about that soon) in oil-rubbed bronze.

(this could be the last photo of the old front door -- yippee!)

The wiring was a little tricky because Andy primed over all of the notes he wrote on the wall.  It's nice to have a regular doorbell.

And much better than the before shot.