Painting and other tedious tasks

Shortly after this photo was taken, my father-in-law came out of the closet. 

Our plan is to get three rooms in finished condition before we move into our new home. Those rooms are the Living Room, Dining, Room, and our "Master" Bedroom. Luckily, these three rooms probably require the least amount of work, but all needed to be completely re-painted. Painting is something I do well enough, and Cindy has never attempted, so the bulk of this task has fallen on me, with the tremendous help from father-in-law Gene. He has taken on the unenviable task of painting the closets in the vestibule, all three bedrooms, and the linen closet in the upstairs hallway. Painting closets is a real pain, especially for a bigger guy like me, because there is so little room to move and you constantly have to worry about bumping into a freshly painted wall, Something Gene did several times according to his pants and sweatshirt.

Various sample colors on the wall. More were added later. 

We had a hard time deciding which colors to chose for the dining room and living room, eventually going through several color samples, about ten I think. However, first things first and whenever you are painting a room, the ceiling comes first. I prefer the Glidden paint that goes on pink and dries white. Very useful when painting white on white, especially with a second coat and you can't tell where the hell you already painted. Unfortunately, after three coats in the bedroom, I realized I had a problem. Water stains from an old leak in the roof continued to bleed through my paint. Several people recommended Kilz but when I asked the paint expert Home Depot, he recommended Bin. The stuff is very watery, dries quickly, and will ruin any brush you use with it. When painting the ceiling, it runs down your hand and arm, and drips everywhere. It's NOT a water based latex and is damn near impossible to get off your skin. BUT, it works! Three coats of ceiling paint left stains, one light coat of this stuff covered it right up. According to the label, it will cover anything! I believe it.

Finished paint Living Room

Good news is that the dining room and living room are done. I bought the Behr Marquee paint for the LR  which was guaranteed to cover in one coat and indeed it did so. They couldn't mix the color we wanted for  DR in the Marquee so we ended up with Behr Ultra Premium which did not live up to it's name and required two coats.

Finished paint Dining Room (LR in background)

Looking at the two photos it doesn't look like there is much difference in the two rooms, when there actually is. The DR is much brighter and in the second (bottom) photo you can more easily see the difference.

The Master Bedroom is still a work in progress. The final coat of ceiling paint is on after the Bin primer, but we still haven't decided on a color for the walls. Other problem upstairs in the sacrilegious painting of the woodwork. I HATE it when people do this. it never looks good and now requires tedious repainting of all wood trim (baseboards, windows, doorways). No going back now though and it has to be done.

Cindy remains very busy. She's been unpacking kitchen and pantry items and organizing draws and shelves. We both have taken time to put down shelf paper and liner, which is another rather tedious task. Also, she has scrubbed clean both bathrooms and the kitchen. While remodeling all three is likely somewhere down the road, they need to be ready the way they are and both were beyond dirty (remember, there were college students in this place most recently). Brother-in-law Randy lent us his pickup truck and Cindy and I used it to move most of our basement stuff to the new house including my tools and most of Cindy's cleaning chemicals (Yikes! - should have had HAZMAT labels for that).

Coming up soon, reports on plumbing issues, upstairs floor resurfacing, and on the crown molding installation. AAiiiiiEEEE!!!!!