The good and bad news is that Stephanie is now a week overdue.  While it’s been helpful to have all these extra weekends to work on the upstairs, enough is enough!  She is definitely ready for the baby to come out now.  Yesterday and today I worked on finish coats for the trim, paint edging and cleaning up.  While there are still a lot of areas that need further touch up, the rooms are looking REALLY good.  We had taken pictures earlier today but then retook them at night to really show how nice things are looking.  During the day, the mix of lighting is not as flattering and a lot of the details are lost in shadows.  At night the lighting is much more even, which I guess really means that we did a really good job planning out our lights (OK, really we were just lucky).

Getting all the paper out from under the base shoe was a real daytime nightmare.  I suppose there is some trick that professional painters use, but I sure don’t know what it is.  After 4-5 coats of primer and paint, the base shoe and paper had become one.  I ended up having to use a utility knife to score them apart, which sounds much easier and faster than it really was.  It probably took me at least two hours to remove all the paper.  And while I usually try to do everything by hand and without masking, there was no good way to get paint on the base shoe and not the floor.  I know that everyone’s thinking “well, why not paint the base shoe before installing it?”  And yes, that would’ve been a good idea, but I had so much other unpainted trim (sills, separator beads) that I just didn’t want to be bothered.  Sometimes you get on a roll and don’t want to be slowed down by such tings.  Of course, all I did was defer one lousy job for an even worse one.  Not only was the paper hard to remove, it was even harder to slide get it under the base shoe in the first place (I wasn’t going to settle for a sloppy masking tape line!).  This is how I do so many of my jobs…bounce back and forth between two methods that I don’t like, always thinking that the other one would’ve worked so much better.  There’s always next time.  Regardless of my construction inefficiencies, I’m really happy with the way it’s turning out.

Luckily the baby held out through another weekend, so I got two more days in on the upstairs. I finished up the caulking of all the trim, got it all primed and even got a first coat of gloss white on some of it. Our friend Jason of the Jasonian Institute even came over to pitch in a few hours of help. That was an unexpected surprise and helped push things forward today. Next Saturday is the baby’s due date, so our borrowed time will likely have to be repaid in full before you see any more updates from us…

After my past experience of working with my dad on painted trim, I find that it now takes me twice as long to get it done. The tradeoff, though, is that it looks at least twice as good. I never used to bother with caulk, and the result was gaps all over the place. Unlike stained trim, which camouflages gaps quite well, white trim appear to have all of these dark lines in it. It can really cheapen all the hard work you put into carefully cutting and installing the trim in the first place. While my dad potentially uses caulk to the point of overkill, working with him on our bathroom wainscoting showed me how good painted trim can look. Caulking ever single visible seam makes it look so much more professional and substantial. While I “wasted” at least an entire day’s worth of time caulking this trim (not to mention the day I spent with the spackle and wood filler), it looks really, really good.

In case you didn’t notice, we added a new page at the top, “BEFORE/AFTER,” which gives a quick highlight of the projects we’ve completed (or nearly completed, to be more truthful).

I took off Monday and Tuesday in order to have a nice, big five day weekend. I can say without hesitation that the most exciting accomplishment of those days was the fact that I cleaned up the rooms. It is such a great feeling to get out all the clutter and tools and see your creation. A funny story is that I didn’t tell Stephanie that I was going to be throwing all the wood scraps out the window (the only way a reasonable person would consider doing it), and she saw a piece of plywood plummet down while she was sitting at the dining room table. Her first thought was that it was me falling out of the window, which scared her to death. I guess it probably wasn’t very funny to her at the time, but I found it kind of amusing.

Anyway, we had decided a few weeks ago to cut our losses and stop any work on the baby’s room. Since our window of opportunity is rapidly shrinking (Steph’s due date is less than 3 weeks away), we realized that to have any hope of moving Chloe upstairs (and thereby staking a claim on her room (and more importantly, her closet, since ours is only about 2 1/2 x 2 1/2 feet!), we had to give up on our “nobody sets foot in the room until it’s 100% done” goal. Since we’ve never made that target in the past, what made us think we could do it this time? So, that means that much of the finish work, such as staining the doors and doing the trim in the baby’s room, will have to come after the fact. I did manage to get up most of the base shoe trim this week and have even started some of the filling and caulking. Unless the baby comes in the next couple of days, we should even see a bunch of painted trim this weekend!

Over the last couple of days, I started and pretty much finished Chloe’s built-in bed/windowseat. All such projects are inspired and/or degraded by my “seat of the pants” design method, which is further affected by issues such as sloping floors and non-square walls. I’ve never been good at having the patience to sketch out all the detail work ahead of time, although I know that it’s a great thing to do. Regardless, I’m pretty happy with the way it came out, and once a few more pieces of trim and a lot of white paint are added, it should look pretty decent. And even though it’s “made for a girl, it’s strong enough for a boy.” I made it super-sturdy, so any jumping around shouldn’t be a problem.