Redoing the Front Foyer

I have decided that my project this summer, other than trying to organize stuff, is to redo the front foyer. To say that the house is in bad shape is an understatement. The people that lived here before us were not the handy sort of people. Here is what I have found in the hallway just today:
1. Any and all patched areas were never sanded before being painted.
2. All patched areas were painted over with a gloss paint, very unlike the paint that was original.
3. These people have never even heard of caulk, let alone used it.

Apparently, when the house was built they didn't believe in using paint unless absolutely necessary. By this I mean that they came through with a sprayer on the highest water to paint ratio and barely sprayed a single coat over the wallboard. How do I know this you might ask? Because so far, every room we have redone had to have three coats of white paint OVER off-white to cover. This is because the paint just soaks into the wallboard on the first coat. They didn't believe in trim paint...to them paint was paint. Ugh. There are several spots that actually never got any paint, like on the underside of the trim. As I noticed today because I have eyes.

I spent a few hours organizing my painting and caulking supplies (so I had to find a few items and re-bin them and put labels on the bins...). I then began to caulk. I caulked the entire length of the ceiling/wall connection. I caulked all the places where settling had pulled the molding apart. I found a HUGE-MONGOUS gap behind the top of the door molding. I seriously used about half the tube of caulk just filling the hole. I am going to have to go back over it again tomorrow after the shrinkage occurs to fill the rest in. The picture is a little blurry (one of these days I will figure out how to do close-ups with this camera) but you can see the gap was as wide as the darn molding itself. Ugh. It was instantly cooler in the hall when I finished filling the hole!

I patched all the holes I could find, as well as indentions from various objects striking the wall. Next I sanded and sanded and sanded some more. Like I mentioned earlier, these people didn't bother to sand before they "painted" over the patches nor did they wipe anything down before they painted nor did they clean up any drips or spills nor did they pull any stray brush hairs (at least that is what I am telling myself...anything else would totally gross me out!) out of the paint before it dried. I have my work cut out for me. I am including some before pictures so I can beam about how great it looks when I am done. Yay me!