The Foyer...It's Only Mostly Done

Well...the foyer is done...for now. I finished all I can do before I go back to work. I really hoped to have the whole thing finished. But as I am slowly realizing, I am not as young as I used to be. As I have progressed in age some weird things happen to me. I hurt every day. I can't understand why after two weeks of working I haven't built up even just an iota of stamina. I am just as sore today as I was weeks ago at the end of the day. Anyway, I digress.

So I finished the walls. They have been caulked and primed and now have two beautiful coats of egg-shell finish white paint. Man do they look good! I am very proud of the work I have done. I changed out the switches and the outlet that were in the hall. The three-way switch was little more difficult to do than the others but I did it! Randy helped put up the lights on the ceiling and installed the new doorbell. We have two doorbells, one at the front and one at the back. The way the old one worked we could never tell which one had been rung...one ding for the back door and two dings for the front...apparently I can't count. If I could, wouldn't I be able to tell the difference? So now the new one plays the Westminster bells for the front and one tone for the back, woohoo! Hopefully now I won't have to go running back and forth trying to figure out which door to answer. I know the image is making ME laugh just thinking about it. I spent a few hours cleaning and arranging. I put up several pictures (using Math!). I cleaned up the guest room so now my mother-in-law can walk around in it. Wink wink. If anyone has ever seen that room in its normal condition...let's just say it is a marked improvement. If only we had a basement we could stop storing junk in it. Oh well.

The trim will have to be done at some other point...say Thanksgiving or Winter break. If I get industrious I might work on it over a couple of weekends. We'll see how the school year goes!


In this picture you can see the pretty new light fixtures and the new doorbell on the left side. I am overwhelmed by how bright the hall is now with the new lights...and we used the compact fluorescent lights (there are two 60 watts in each fixture). Dude is it bright!

I had to make a decision on stopping point for my foyer. Why? Because the foyer actually extends up the stairs and into the upstairs hallway. I do not look forward to the day that I have to paint the facing wall of the stairs...it is really high up. So here was my not-so-clever solution. It probably looks pretty tacky...but what real choice did I have?

Foyer Update

Ugh.

I spent 4-5 long hours working on the front hall today. I took down the fixtures (2 lights and the smoke alarm) along with all the plates for the switches and outlets. Surprise! Look what I found when I took the intake vent off the wall:


Can you say Gross!?!
I immediately had to stop what I was doing to grab the vacuum. Oh and the camera. I didn't think anyone would believe it unless I took a picture to document it. Just think how healthy we would all be if the whole duct system looks like this! Hooray. Once I got the vent vacuumed out I could see just how huge the gaping holes were around the vent. If I tell you that I used a tube and a half of caulk on this one area, would you believe me? I think I am single-handedly keeping Dap in business right now.


The gap between the vent and the wallboard was at least as wide as my finger! Gee and we wonder where all our cool air goes in the summer time? Once I finished caulking the intake vent I still had the air vent area to do and all of the switches and outlets. Someone must have been drunk when they did the double outlet because the hole is wide enough for two to fit in there. Sheez. I didn't finish all of the caulking because in order to totally fill all the holes I would have to caulk the switches into place or take them out. I was not ready to do that yet, but I will replace them all towards the end of the project. My goal is to have every room done using as much caulk as I can! Just kidding...though I will seal as many of the holes in this house as I can if it is the last thing I do. Today's total: 2 1/2 tubes of caulk.

Once I finished caulking, I started cutting in on the ceiling. I went ahead and bought a primer/sealer to help ease the amount of paint I was going to have to use; good paint is expensive to say the least! Our ceiling has the funky designs in stucco(?), so I have to use a special roller with a big nap on it. It took me almost three hours to do the cutting in and the coat of primer on the ceiling. And it is not even that large of an area. The worst part of it is making sure you get the paint into all the little creases and crevices. Good grief! In the picture you can see the design in the ceiling and the actual color of the walls. It almost seems mustard-like in color compared to the white primer. Yuck! It's so dreary and dismal...I really like white because it is bright and fun. Anyway, hopefully the painting will go easier with the primer on and I get the ceiling done on Wednesday.



I only have two more weeks before I go back to school. I can't believe how fast the times flies, even if you're not having fun necessarily. I have to go to work tomorrow and try to get my office in some sort of order. My office-mate will be in so we can sort out space and set up. I hope I find all my stuff tomorrow. Last time I spent an hour scouring the building looking for my chair...never did find it. Fun, fun.

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!